Fat Enough to Rip the Mic

Whatever god it is that rules over synchronicity is throwing a literal ton of fat singers at me these days. It started a few days ago when Recon and another old friend entirely independently posted some old Fat Boys videos. In case you missed out on the 80s, the Fat Boys rocked the house. The human beat box alone should have an entire wing in the hip hop hall of fame to himself and don't get me started on "Disorderlies."

Then, this came up and has been making the rounds on the feminist blogs. The singer Amanda Palmer got into a bit of a tiff with her record label because they wanted to digitally alter her image and she refused. They wanted to make her look less fat. Oh, and by less fat, I mean that they wanted to move her from the normal human look to the grossly underweight look. If the music industry wasn't so consistently incompetent, I might think the whole thing was a publicity stunt to stir up some buzz amongst online feminists.

Those of you who read my blog should know by now that I have a history of complaining about the music industry and the Amanda Palmer incident seems more of the same. Palmer is the real deal. In that vein, I thought that I would mention a certain woman named Etta James.

Plenty of people have great voices but few people can actually sing. Mariah Carey and Christina Aguilera both have astonishing vocal skill and wail on some classic jazz numbers but to what end? I know people who love these singers but when I listen to them I hear the ability and it doesn't do much for me otherwise. Here are links to "At Last" as sung by Christina Aguilera and by Etta James. Take a listen and see what you think.

FYI this is what Etta James looked like as a young singer:



Another great photo and yet I shudder to think what a music industry exec would have to say about the girl in it if she was trying to break into the business today. Luckily, we'll all avoid such showbiz cruelty since the new movie about Etta's life will star Beyoncé and I doubt that she'll be putting on weight for the role.


Update!
Pandagon has a post on the new movie "Cadillac Records." It includes a this video of James singing "Something's Got a Hold on Me."

To be a Man

I've been promising Vanessa that I'd put up this movie for a long time. It runs almost an hour but is full of insight into modern masculinity.

I stumbled onto some of these concepts early on in college as I was first exposed to feminist analysis. I remember making a clumsy and somewhat unconvincing argument that men are oppressed by the concept of masculine dominance as women are of feminine submission. Katz makes this point by examining the connection between a dominant masculinity, race, and poor urban populations.

Asking about Aurat

Mother's Day

A hundred years ago, there were two versions of Mother's Day in practice in the US. One was the child of Julia Ward Howe and was celebrated on June 2nd. The other was brought into being by Anna Jarvis and the May 9th holiday eventually morphed into the second May Sunday holiday that is currently known and loved. What fascinates me about these holiday precursors was that they were originally designed not to sell cards, candy and flowers but to promote social and political activism by advocating for progressive issues such as health care, sanitation, anti-war sentiments, and worker's safety.

So, in the spirit of the original Mother's Day and my own mother, I present to you the Mother's Day Proclamation by Julia Ward Howe:

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Hello Ladies

That's an old advert for some postage machine has the special feature of making males angry enough to contemplate homicide. Hilarious. Were would our civilization be without some good old fashion desire to kill? Nowhere that's where!

It's one of several images of the past from The Daily Mail in a post about what neatorama calls sexist advertising. But, isn't the term sexist advertising redundant? Most of us save ourselves the time and just say advertising or if we're really in a hurry "ads".

UPDATE:
I just saw a hilarious video from the onion on the same theme.

Football and the Other

I got to see the US soccer team trash New Zealand 6-1 on ESPN the other day.

No not the men's team, the woman's team of course. US woman's soccer is consistently among the best in the world and hopefully we'll get to see them do well at the up coming The Woman World Cup in September. I'm hoping to catch some of it myself.

News Anyone?

Here's a recent article on sexual differences and wages. Every year, a study like this one comes out and every year the results are reported as if it's news. Or rather as if it's new. new news. whatever.


Yes. Women make less money than men. Even when they have the same experience and do the same job. The dismal science, economics, says that this is impossible outside of blatent discrimination which should only be temporary in a true market economy as wages are set by productivity which blah blah blah.

I hate economics. Turning instead to my everpresent compangion, anthropology, we learn that a major factor in setting wages is the perceived social standing of the job and the people who tend to do it. Women as a group have a lower social standing than men in this country so they will get paid less even if they're doing the same thing. In general, you get paid what you're worth in a social sense as much as you do in an economic sense. You can copy and paste that idea to apply to race and age.

I'm not saying it's right. Just don't expect it to change when people refuse to admit that it even exists. For example, Fark.com tagged this news as unlikely.

Backtracking a bit, I wouldn't put too much stock in the study sited in Reuters article alone since it comes from a private organization that hasn't published it's findings in a journal of any kind and direct access to the study is not freely available. But, there's plenty of other sources that have gotten the same results. The best compliation of theory, evidence, and discussion can be found at echidne of the snakes. This should be required reading for anyone with a high school education.

(The Picture is by Ann Rosener via American Memory. The caption with the photo reads: Women in war. Machine gun production. With swift, deft movements, this young worker, one of 2,000 women employed in a Midwest war plant, assembles barrel carriers of machine guns. It's a job requiring constant attention, speed and judgement; a job for which women have proven themselves better fitted than men. Site: a Midwest plant.)

Problems with Gender in the Military

Helen Benedict is writing a book on woman in the US military based on her interviews with 20 some female veterans. I've never been in the military myself but what these woman had to say is a bit disturbing. Benedict describes her findings in an article in Salon this week. Read it here. Here are some quotes:

"the Defense Department put up a Web site in 2005 designed to clarify that sexual assault is illegal "

"A 2003 survey of female veterans from Vietnam through the first Gulf War found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military."

"I was sexually assaulted by a superior officer when I was 19, but I didn't know where to turn, so I never reported it."

"you can't fit in if you make waves about it. You rat somebody out, you're screwed. You're gonna be a loner until they eventually push you out."

I'm just wondering how the military can protect Iraqi woman if it is having a hard time protecting female soldiers. Again, not having been in the military myself, or having done any of the research myself I can't say that this represents the majority of woman in the military but even a minority with this kind of experience is more than enough.

One particularly insidious aspect of how the culture of the military can deal with these situations is that woman are isolated and pressured if they report an incident while the perpetrators are better protected. There is no problem if it's not reported.

I would certainly doubt that this is a universal experience but unfortunately, there is plenty of evidence to support Benedict and her interviewees statements that it is a widespread problem. I believe the strongest source is a study by AG Sadler and others of female veterans. That is the study mentioned in the first quote about 30% of female veterans having experienced sexual assault. Not available online but citation is at the bottom of this post...

Second, the Department of Defense Task Force Report on Care for Victims of Sexual Assault from April 2004 does not paint a pretty picture either. You can download the pdf here. It is a fairly detailed document which supports, describes, and validates many of the findings of other studies. I also find few motivations for Department of Defense to exaggerate this problem as opposed to sweeping it under the rug of doubt. It is interesting to compare this Report on Care with the DoD's Sexual Harassment Survey of 2002 (again pdf). In light of the later Task Force Report, the Harassment Survey seems too weak because it ignores problems with under reporting.

I'm trying not to bore with a list of studies but here's another available online. And then there's the Denver Post articles.

Sadler, A.G., B.M. Booth, B.L. Cook, and B.N. Doebbeling. 2003. Factors Associated with Women’s Risk of Rape in the Military Environment. American Journal of Industrial Medicine 43:262–273.

Add em Up

Hooray! Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House! It truly is a grand old flag!

Anyway, I'm a little tired of hearing about the first woman Speaker of the House as if this proves something about the power of women in this country. It should make us all realize that the fact that no female has risen to even this middling level position proves instead how slow progress has been. Pelosi can now claim these glorious powers of the Speaker of the House for womanhood:

1. The ability to sit behind the president and blink during the state of the union address

2. The power to become the president if both the president and vice president die in rapid succession.

Past speakers of the house include such notable politicians as pretty much nobody. I think most people wouldn't even know Dennis Hastert's name is it wasn't for the congressional page scandal.

Just to see how great it is to be a man at the top levels of the US Federal Government, check out these statistics:

Percent Male Representation

Congress - 84%
Senate - 84%
House - 84%
Executive - 100%
Cabinet level and above - 77%
Judicial - 89%

Apologies to James Polk and Henry Clay. You guys were grand and notable speakers.

A Question?

Here's a little self-test question you might want to answer for yourself:

Imagine you're looking to rent a room in your house and a friend of a friend comes buy to check it out. You know next to nothing about him and when he shows up you see that he's white. Do you think that that fact that he's white could have any effect on your decision to rent a room to him?

I was thinking about this question the other day mainly because there it seems awkward and even silly. But, here is a variation on the question:

when she shows up you see that she's black. Do you think that that fact that she's black could have any effect on your decision to rent a room to her?

If you replace the term white in the question with some other descriptor like black, female, gay, hispanic, handicapped, etc, the question undergoes a wonderful transformation from awkward to meaningfully appropriate. Default or "normal" characteristics (white, male, straight, adult) are tacitly assumed and not "interesting" to question while other characteristics outside the default settings bear attention. It is always important to mention when someone can be described in a way that is outside what is considered mainstream. This allows us to distinguish this person in our minds but in the act of making them an individual do we also isolate them in an unintended way?

Example:

Hootie and the Blowfish was billed by the media as a multi-racial band because it had a single black man in it.

This observation is almost too obvious to discuss but you'd be amazed how often it slips by unnoticed.

The concept of normative quality even more confused when it comes to gender because the normal quality of being male doesn't even apply to a majority of people. From the perspective of pure statistics it is more normal to be female than male. Yet, the same attention to the female as a unique non-normal state applies though. Look at the United States government for example. The government is thought to lack women instead having an overabundance of men. Ah, now, we're starting to make subtle distintions instead of this in your face "friend at the door" prejudice.

When talking about gender and gender differences the emphasis is placed on women and women's roles just like a serious discussion of race always include a section on blackness while whiteness and the qualities of white people are only discussed by comedians. Returning to gender and the government, we find that recent comments by Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg are brought up by the media as the fact that there is only one woman on the Supreme court but too many men might be a better way to phrase the situation. That female representation in congress is growing could also be replaced with the comment that males have always dominated the legislature. Female colleges students are now in the majority instead of males being minority and so on.