Wired summarizes the study, found in the December Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Lead author and research Sapna Cheryan had an interesting question - if people can base their perceptions of another person on the items found in their bedroom, would the same type of reasoning apply in a classroom setting? Cheryan and her team quickly set up an experiment:

Cheryan and colleagues tested this idea by alternately decorating a computer science classroom with objects that earlier surveys pegged as stereotypically geeky-Star Trek posters, videogames and comic books - or with objects that the surveys found to be neutral- coffee mugs, plants and art posters. Thirty-nine college students spent a few minutes in the room, then filled out a questionnaire on their attitudes toward computer science.

Women who spent time in the geeky room reported less interest in computer science than women who saw the neutral room. For male students, however, the room's décor made no difference.

In follow-up tests, a total of 215 students were asked to imagine they were joining either a geekily decorated or a neutrally decorated company after graduation. For every possible scenario, women preferred the non-geeky space.

"It's a consistent effect," Cheryan says. "The environment can communicate a sense of belonging, but it also communicates a sense of exclusion, or a sense that this is not a place where I would fit in."

Cheryan and co-researchers believe that by creating more neutral appearing spaces will help combat stereotypes and improve diversity in the computer science field.

Cheryan is correct in thinking perception matters in how people place themselves in different roles. But as a geeky girl gamer, I think that focusing on the internal motivations for why women avoid stereotypical or gendered areas (i.e., "I just don't think I belong") obscures the nature of societal norms to influence women away from engaging in the maths and sciences, especially as they are considered male dominated spaces.

Some of the most fascinating explorations of this dynamic are found in Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming. The collection of research findings and games theory, published in 2008, reveal a lot more than barriers to entry for women who want to play games or work in the industry - it reveals how gender norms often influence how "permitted" women are to access certain spaces, and how those limitations function to maintain the low numbers of women entering fields like computer science or game design.

Some of the research upholds Cheryan's ideas. In "Becoming a Player," T.L. Taylor uses the marketing strategies and environments of gaming stores to illustrate the belonging dynamic:

Part of the work of any leisure activity is coming to understand - practically and symbolically - that this is something you can do, that it is not at odds with your sense of self or your social world. The game industry (and, I would argue, the larger game community) knows this at some level and is constantly working to give players information about new games, where to get them, why they are fun, and how to play them. Just as powerfully, it is always mirroring back to boys and men that "this is your and your friends' play space" and "you belong here. Rarely are women gamers given this kind of attention. (p. 55)

Two other studies explain how the idea that some people "belong" and some do not take shape and manifest themselves in physical space. "Getting Girls into the Game," a joint study by Tracy Fullerton, Janine Fron, Celia Pearce, and Jacki Morie, explored a variety of reasons why more women don't pursue careers in gaming. After concluding that early experiences with video games impact how girls perceive the space, they note:

These early experiences pave the way to an interest in game development, but male-dominated environments can limit girls' involvement. In fact, computer labs in schools or clubhouses are often dominated by boys, who tend to elbow out the girls and take control of the equipment. (p. 168)

In "Gender Identity, Play Style, and the Design of Games for Classroom Learning," researchers Carrie Heeter and Brian Winn also talk about some of the gendered norms that come into play when there are limitations on availability of equipment:

When boys play games (or use computers), when there are fewer machines than people, girls step aside. It is difficult to determine whether it is the girls' "stepping aside" from their opportunity… or the boys "crowding out" the girls…. Nonetheless, this chemistry seems to exist between males and females pervasively when it comes to using gaming machines. (p.282)

The most comprehensive (and damning) research comes from Holin Lin, who invested countless hours into her research in Taiwan. Seeking answers to women's exclusion from the larger gaming world, Lin decides to look into home life, societal messaging, school and peer groups in her groundbreaking study "Body, Space, and Gendered Gaming Experiences: A Cultural Geography of Homes, Cybercafés and Dormitories." I devoted a substantial portion of my review of Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat to Lin's research, because the connections drawn are mindblowing:

Deftly weaving connections between the threat of violence, gendered socialization, and the internalized expectations of the women themselves, Lin paints a scenario familiar to any woman who moves into a heavily gendered space. Taiwanese youth frequent cybercafés to increase their skills, use upgraded machines, and hang out with their friends. However, women gamers looking to participate in the fun have to contend with real-world harassment:

The layouts of some cybercafés serve as gender barriers: girls must pass through a room full of pool tables to access the back spaces that are reserved for computers. Most girls are not willing to subject themselves to the scrutiny of and comments made by the pool players, and therefore only enter when accompanied by male friends.

This parallels one of Lin's observations of cybercafés in Taiwan… most girls are unwilling to enter a cybercafé unless accompanied by a male friend. Together, these stories imply that physical and social barriers to entry for women become misinterpreted as a lack of desire to play video games.

Despite the limits of online, virtual communities, however, they are often more appealing to female gamers than actual, physical cybercafés, as Lin points out:

Women's fear and perceptions of risk are deeply rooted in their bodies, and avoiding dangerous places is a common practice for managing the fear of male violence. In contrast, no threat of physical harm exists for players wearing either female or male avatar bodies.

Outside of the dynamics of the cybercafe scene, Lin also looks at women at home, from growing up with their parents to their play dynamics in college dormitories. Lin notes that college-aged male gamers tend to see gaming as a way to bond, while female gamers are often ostracized and made into a minority. In addition, family pressures tend to place pressure on girls to do more help with household tasks, as well as to work on social relationships. Males, however, were often left to their own devices when it came to interacting with technology. This functions to increase discomfort with technologies as women are socialized to spend less time understanding and getting familiar with these types of systems. Over time, this casual discouragement on so many fronts presents girls with a disincentive to continue working with or playing with game systems - and this dynamic is also evident with most other technologies, including computers.

Lin concludes that "[c]ultural constructions of gender are ubiquitous and therefore hard to remove from any analytical interpretation of gender issues in computer gaming." And indeed, while Cheryan has the right idea with looking at how spaces can be perceived as hospitable and inhospitable, solving the issue of gender gaps in technology will require looking at encouragement to get into the maths and sciences plays strongly into societal idea of what girls are "supposed" to do and where they "belong." And I'm afraid it will be a bit more complex than redesigning classrooms.

Star Trek Stops Women From Becoming Computer Scientists [Wired]
Beyond Barbie® and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming (Hardcover) [Amazon]

Related: Gamer Girls Rising [Women's Review of Books]

According to CNN's Ivan Watson, Palestinian cousins Nadir Mohammed Saleh and Ahmed Fayiz Abed Rabo suffer from male pseudohermaphrodism, meaning they appeared outwardly female from birth to puberty but actually had malformed male sex organs in their abdomens. At puberty, they began to look more like boys, making social life difficult. Nadir's father says, "They used to travel by car to girls' school and back. Because of their facial hair, it was difficult for them to go out into the street. Psychologically they were distressed." So both decided to begin living as boys.

Male pseudohermaphrodism is so common on the Gaza Strip — perhaps due to widespread cousin marriage — that their family already had a name for the process: "the transfer." Now they want sex change operations so they can have male sex organs, which they need in order to change their Palestinian identity card to "male" and gain access to higher education opportunities. Of course, the fact that said opportunities are (apparently) restricted to men with male sex organs speaks to an idea of gender division — and gender hierarchy — that makes little sense when we understand how complicated human sex and gender really are. And if Caster Semenya's ordeal is any indication, the rest of the world is no better at this than Palestine.

But new research might further this understanding somewhat. Scientists have found that switching off just a single gene in adult female mice causes their ovary cells to change into testosterone-producing cells like those in male testes. The cells couldn't produce sperm, but researcher Robin Lovell-Badge says, "If it is possible to make these changes in adult humans, it may eventually remove the need for surgery in gender-reassignment treatment." He notes that, "If this does become possible, it's likely that while treated individuals would make the right hormones for their new sex, fertility would be lost."

The study also has implications for how we think about human sex, since the gene in question is present in all mammals. Steve Connor of the Independent writes,

One of the great dogmas of biology is that gender is fixed from birth, determined by the inheritance of certain genes on the X and Y sex chromosomes. [...] The findings suggest that being male or female is not a permanently fixed state but something that has to be continually maintained in the adult body by the constant interaction of genes to keep the status quo – and the gender war – from slipping in favour of the opposite sex.

As Rebecca Boyle of PopSci points out, scientists don't yet have a corresponding way to transform female cells into male cells. And the research is too nascent to materially help Nadir and Ahmed, who are appealing to the international community for help obtaining the sex change surgery that's not available in Gaza. But advances in sex research may help demolish the notion that human sex is a simple either-or matter (it may even be environmentally influenced: stressed pregnant women are more likely to spontaneously miscarry male fetuses). And this might make the lives of people like Nadir and Ahmed — and Caster Semenya — a lot less distressing.

Rare Gender Identity Defect Hits Gaza Families [CNN]
From Minnie To Mickey (And All They Did Was Turn Off A Gene) [Independent]
Switching A Gene In Adult Mice Easily Transforms Females Into Males [PopSci]
Girls On Top [The Economist]

The 5% tax was inserted into the health care bill by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who believes that the additional fees will help to raise at least $5.8 billion to offset the costs of health care reform.

The opposition to the bill comes from an interesting crew. Over the past few weeks, plastic surgeons and the makers of products like Botox have rushed to protest - but so have feminist organizations like NOW.

Opponents contend the tax will unfairly target middle-income women, threaten the confidentiality of patient reports, and lead to a surge in people traveling to other countries for wrinkle-zapping procedures. [...]

Why the surgery surge among working-class folks? "We're seeing a lot of patients concerned about the competition [for employment] and if they don't look young enough or vigorous enough, that could be an issue in getting a job," says Dr. Michael McGuire, president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. [...]

There's a gender issue too, as roughly 86% of people seeking cosmetic enhancements are women, ASPS data shows. The National Organization for Women, NOW, even spoke out against it. As Terry O'Neill, NOW's president, told the New York Times, "[Women] are going for Botox or going for eye work because we live in a society that punishes women for getting older."

From that angle, the protests on a Botox tax don't seem so shallow. Outside of the entertainment industry, I doubt anyone can claim their tri-monthly injection as a business expense. However, research studies have demonstrated that the perception of attractiveness does translate into tangible gains in the workplace:

After variables like education and experience are factored out, Fed researchers said the "beauty premium" exists across all occupations, and that jobs requiring more interpersonal contact have higher percentages of above-average-looking employees.

For example, the study found there was a higher beauty premium among private sector lawyers than their government-supported counterparts since private attorneys need to attract and keep clients.

If that weren't enough, the Fed also discovered a "plainness penalty," punishing below-average-looks with earnings of 9 percent less an hour.

Clearly, there are income disparities in the workplace based on looks. However, there also people who undergo plastic surgery to raise their perceived social capital, and others who do so to ease their own insecurities. In light of this, I'm not sure that there's a strong enough argument that a tax on optional body modifications amounts to discrimination.

Time also notes that Reid's office has emphatically claimed the bill's taxation policy is equal opportunity:

Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senator Reid, dismisses suggestions women are being targeted and notes that senators are looking everywhere for ways to fund the bill. "There was a point a few weeks ago when Senator Reid needed some additional revenue for this bill - the goal was to keep all the financing within the health-care arena, and in the end, he decided to include this provision in the bill," says Manley

.

Proposed 'Botox Tax' Draws Wide Array of Opponents [Time]

Related: Surprise! Pretty People Earn More [CNN]

Since this whole situation seems to rest on assumptions and flimsy premises, let's try to jump along with the timeline of events.

Leap One: The Correct Course of Action is to Blame a Politician's Wife For His Actions In the Senate

Firedoglake has an action item up asking readers to petition the Susan G. Korman For the Cure Foundation, and associated celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres, to ask Hadassah Lieberman to step down from her paid position as a Global Ambassador. Conservative sites are crying foul, pointing out that she is nothing more than the wife of Lieberman. Her job should not be at risk because of his actions. And most rational people are inclined to agree.

While it is true that political spouses can and do influence matters of policy, a direct action by Joe Lieberman should lead to a direct action against Joe Lieberman. If Hadassah Lieberman was up on Capitol Hill last week railing against health care reform, I could understand - but at this point, her beliefs and actions as they relate to Lieberman's vote withdrawal are not known. So this is bad form.

However, this brings us to issue number two.

Leap Two: Who Made This About Pulling Women Out of the Workforce?

Kathleen Parker's article starts out with a debunking of the connections between Hadassah Lieberman and big healthcare, and points out that her position with Komen is unpaid. However, the logic train quickly derails (emphasis mine):

Whether one agrees with Sen. Lieberman's opposition to certain elements of the Senate health-care bill is a matter of legitimate debate. Democrats are understandably furious with the Senator Formerly Known as a Democrat, now an independent and sometimes a Republican sympathizer. Thanks largely to Lieberman, progressives have had to watch as their single-payer dream became a public option and, now, something closer to a nightmare.

But again, what has any of this to do with his wife's work for a nonprofit organization that has raised breast cancer awareness and saved countless lives around the world? There is no conflict of interest unless you think that a wife should stay home and be her husband's silent partner.

Huh?

In that light, the attack on Hadassah Lieberman has been fantastically anti-feminist. In what American century is a wife's job in jeopardy because of her husband's politics?

Hamsher's call to action against Lieberman was not based in some reactionary idea that women should stay in the home. Her action was because she believed Hadassah Lieberman played some kind of a role in Joe Lieberman's vote, which would constitute a conflict of interest given her position. These are tenuous connections, but easily traceable. But Parker isn't finished just yet.

Leap Three: Blame One Person's Actions on All of New Media

Parker, after halfway making her last point launches into the real reason for her two page crusade:

Ultimately, this may prove much ado about nada. But there is a larger issue embedded herein concerning the damaging effects of viral warfare on individual reputations, not to mention democracy.

Hadassah Lieberman is but the most recent victim of new media that owe no allegiance to facts or to the goal of an informed citizenry. In such an environment, anyone's reputation is subject to the whim of any other person armed with an agenda and a random selection of disputable facts, and unencumbered by standards.

Firedoglake is one blog. And influential blog, but one blog out of millions. And to slander all of new media as a group of individuals who don't believe in facts discounts why much of new media got popular in the first place. Some blogs and organizations play hard and loose with factual information. So do outlets like Fox News. So do mainstream media outlets, who often have to print retractions and corrections, and often propagate rumors or fail to report on important information.

Bonus WTF: Are All Confrontations Between Women Catfights?

Note to the Reliable Source: Two professional women beefing does not equal a cat fight. Two women should be allowed to disagree with each other publicly and not have that dismissive and gendered term apply.

When Bloggers Attack: Jane Hamsher Has Some Choice Words For Hadassah Leiberman [Reliable Source]
The Anti-Feminist Attack On Hadassah Lieberman [Washington Post]
Tell Susan G. Komen For The Cure To Remove Hadassah Lieberman [FDL Action]

James — she's still going by the pseudonym, hasn't revealed her real name, and that's not her in the pic — says she started blogging to help support her kids during a tough financial time. She began using a male pen name one day simply to distance a project from her still-struggling business, and, she writes, "jobs became easier to get." She continues,

Taking a man's name opened up a new world. It helped me earn double and triple the income of my true name, with the same work and service.

No hassles. Higher acceptance. And gratifying respect for my talents and round-the-clock work ethic.

Business opportunities fell into my lap. People asked for my advice, and they thanked me for it, too.

Did I quit promoting my own name? Hell yeah.

Under her male name, James made enough money to buy a small house and give her kids a comfortable life. She's only coming out now because "someone I trusted got mad and decided to out me" (a motivation with echoes of Belle de Jour). Interestingly, the copywriting and web design blog she owns (whose About Us section reads, "Owner James Chartrand is the pen name of a female thirty-something copywriter, problogger and online entrepreneur from Quebec, Canada") has a very stereotypically male aesthetic, with a bullet ripping through its title, Men with Pens. The About Us section even describes another female blogger as "the team's rogue woman who wowed us until our desire for her talents exceeded our desire for a good ol' boys club." Chartrand's disguise was, it seems, rather thick.

The success of BlogHer and the mommy blogger movement have led some to hail the blogosphere as a place of gender equality. While some mommy bloggers snag Wal-Mart endorsements, the world of business blogging — Men with Pens advertises its "business sense, branding expertise, and savvy sales and marketing smarts" may still be more of a Mad Men type of place. It's impossible to tell whether the bullets-and-bricks aesthetic of Men with Pens was a calculated decision, but it's possible that a male name and a stereotypically male persona are favored in the web marketing industry. Are mom-bloggers seen as fundamentally amateur, even if they shill for big companies, while men get the real professional gigs (even if those "men" are actually moms themselves)?

At this point, James seems to have built a brand, and it's unlikely that she'll suffer too much from her outing. But a post she wrote last year now seems eerily apt. In "Would You Become Someone Else To Achieve Your Dreams?," James writes, "Think about how you would react if someone told you that who you are is holding you back – and you knew they were right. This person tells you that if you were someone else, you could live your dream." She adds,

If you had the chance to be someone else, would you do it? Would you take on a role that makes opportunity possible, makes life easier, and makes your dreams become reality? More importantly… who would you be?

For James, it appears the answer was yes — and it's easy to understand why. Still, it's pretty sad that the "role that makes opportunity possible, makes life easier, and makes your dreams become reality" still has to be that of a man.

Why James Chartrand Wears Women's Underpants [Copyblogger]
Would You Become Someone Else To Achieve Your Dreams? [Men With Pens]
About Us [Men With Pens]

The LA Times summarizes the report by saying "Young Latinos seem to face a tougher future - Those between the ages of 16 and 25 are more likely than other young people to have a child before 19, drop out of school and live in poverty, a study finds."

One of the major challenges facing young Latinas is the issue of teen pregnancy. The study is clear about the scope of the problem:

Hispanics start having children at much younger ages than non-Hispanics. More than one-fourth (26%) of Hispanic females are mothers by the time they reach age 19, compared with 22% of blacks, 11% of whites and 6% of Asians. Among Hispanics, teen parenthood is most widespread in the immigrant generation. Some 26% of foreign-born females ages 18 and 19 have children, compared with 16% of the same age cohort of second-generation Hispanic females and 21% of third- generation Hispanic females.

Not only do Latinos have children at younger ages than non-Latinos, they also marry at younger ages. Some 15% of Latinos ages 16 to 25 are married, compared with 9% of non-Latinos in that age group. The higher marriage rate for Latinos is driven primarily by immigrant youths, 22% of whom are married. Marriage rates among native-born Latinos-10% for the second generation and 11% for the third generation-don't differ markedly from the rate for non-Latinos.

Despite their relatively high rate of teen parenthood, most Latino youths do not look favorably upon having children prior to age 20. Three-fourths (75%) say that the prevalence of teens having babies is not good for society, an opinion shared by 90% of the overall youth population in the U.S.
Nearly seven-in-ten Latino youths (69%) say that teen parenthood hinders the ability to achieve one's life goals. However, Latino youths are more inclined than other youths to favor parenthood at a relatively young age. Latinos say that the ideal age for a woman to have a child is 24, and for a man it is 25. Among all youths, these figures are 26 for a woman and 28 for a man.

Among young Latinos, there is only a small difference in the likelihood of having had sexual intercourse prior to age 20 by nativity. Nor does the likelihood of having engaged in teen sex differ between Latino youths and their older counterparts. However, Latino youths are far more likely than older Latinos to report that they engaged in sex prior to the age of 16.

When it comes to attitudes about teen sex (as distinct from behaviors), once again there are no significant differences by generation among young Latinos, but there are differences between younger and older Latinos. Latino youths are more tolerant of teen sex within a serious relationship or of teen sex that involves using protection; Latinos older than 25 are markedly less accepting of teen sexual activity no matter what the context.

So what is causing this gap? One of the things that always frustrates me reading through reports about the issues facing teenagers, minorities, women, or any combination of those is the lack of specifics as well as the divorcing of certain issues from larger societal influences. Pew goes beyond most other projects by looking at attitudes about teen sex, and having a child early. But if most of these youths understand how difficult it is to have a child and still work toward their own personal goals, and many understand the need to use protection, what is causing the disconnect?

Are there correlations between the geographic area and pregnancy rates? Are many of these girls growing up in areas where they cannot access contraception? Are they being subjected to abstinence only education? Does religion play a role in this? What are they telling these boys? Are these even boys, or is there a disparity between the age of the mother and the age of the father? Is it peer pressure? Is there not enough mentoring and outreach? What is it?

And more complicated is the rhythm of these types of problems:

The picture becomes even more murky when comparisons are made among youths who are first generation (immigrants themselves), second generation (U.S.-born children of immigrants) and third and higher generation (U.S.-born grandchildren or more far-removed descendants of immigrants).[1]

For example, teen parenthood rates and high school drop-out rates are much lower among the second generation than the first, but they appear higher among the third generation than the second. The same is true for poverty rates.

It is good to identify problems - it's the first step toward finding a solution. However, I hope that this issue receives more attention.

These children (and teens) are literally our future.

Young Latinos seem to face a tougher future [LA Times]
Between Two Worlds: How Young Latinos Come of Age in America [Pew Hispanic Center]

Goldstein bases a large portion of her piece around the argument of women's rights activists who explain that leaving Afghan women is not part of the deal. Using Obama's Afghanistan strategy speech as a springboard, organizations like the Feminist Majority Foundation are raising their voices in support for continued engagement in the country for the benefit of women. Not everyone is an enthusiastic about our prospects. Goldstein explains:

Other progressives, though, say the women's rights activists are naïve, and have failed to grapple with the fact that feminism was never more than a rhetorical ploy in debates about the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, whose real goal has always been to root out al Qaeda. They also point to the occupation's high cost in dollar terms, as well as the American public's limited tolerance for foreign wars. A recent Pew poll found that isolationist sentiment is at a four-decade high.

Even if the administration was willing to commit to a nation-building project in Afghanistan, it would be with an Afghan partner whose own record on women's issues is mixed at best. Though President Hamid Karzai recently signed the new Law on Elimination of Violence Against Women-which ups the penalties for rape, domestic violence, and child marriage-he also supported, earlier this year, the Shia Family Law, which subjected women in the Shia minority group to a number of discriminatory laws, including rules regarding when they can and cannot leave home unaccompanied by a man. Karzai has also made political alliances with warlords who hold regressive opinions on women's rights.

There is good reason to be worried about women. According to the Human Rights Watch:

Eight years after the Taliban were ousted from power, rapists are often protected from prosecution, women can still be arrested for running away from home, and girls have far less access to schools than boys, the report says.

With the insurgency strengthening in the south and making inroads into the north, the few gains made for women's rights since the US-led invasion of 2001 could be further eroded if Hamid Karzai's government and the international community push for peace talks with factions of the fundamentalist movement.

Elenor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority Foundation, and Helen Cho, a board member for the Feminist Majority foundation, co-penned a piece in the Huffington Post, arguing that securing women's rights would call for a lot more investment in the region.

[M]ake no mistake. Afghanistan is in terrible shape. The Taliban have gradually returned. Nothing is as it should be, which is why we are asking for no less than a Marshall Plan to rebuild Afghanistan, the same way we did for Germany and Japan after World War II. Afghanistan's water, sewage, electrical, and their once proud hospital systems have been all but destroyed by 30 years of war. We bombed it. We have an obligation to rebuild it.

Though we'd prefer that all U.S. funding be spent on development aid, we cannot in good conscience advocate the immediate military pullout that some are suggesting. The 2009 UN Humanitarian Action Plan noted that in 2008, "Approximately 40% of the country, including much of the South, remains inaccessible for most humanitarian organizations." Last year, 92 aid workers were abducted and 36 were killed, double the number from 2007. In recent public opinion polls, Afghans put security in their top three concerns right after food. Without stabilizing the country, there can be no significant redevelopment effort.

In March, President Obama announced a significant change in the Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy. He shifted the focus from Iraq to this troubled region not a moment too soon. The Taliban had taken over the Swat Valley in Pakistan and were within 100 miles of its capital. In case anyone was wondering if the Taliban had changed its ways, they promptly closed girls' schools, began flogging young women publicly, and committed other atrocities. In Afghanistan, the Taliban nailed a 70-year-old woman to a tree for allegedly talking with the enemy.

The new administration's strategy recognizes the need for development and reconstruction. The military appears to be changing its priorities, announcing that protection of civilians is their first priority. Virtually everyone knows that a military solution alone won't work. Yet, we cannot ignore that security and the Taliban are among Afghans' top concerns.

Linda Bereystein, investigative journalist, points to a different perspective on her blog.

Westerners usually frame the debate over U.S./NATO policy in Afghanistan is usually framed as a choice between handing the country back to the Taliban or propping up the Karzai regime. The latter is assumed to be a dramatically better option for women's rights.

Karzai pays lip service to women's rights, but jettisons them whenever they need to make a compromise to stay in power. It should be noted that the Karzai government was responsible for the infamous Shia Family Law which legalized marital rape within Shia marriages.

Last month, Malalai Joya, a former member of the Afghan parliament, told Michelle Goldberg of the Daily Beast that the situation for Afghan women is every bit as bad under Karzai as it was under the Taliban. Joya is also concerned that civilian casualties are fueling popular support for the Taliban.

RAWA and its grassroots allies think that pro-democracy forces could transform the country on their own without U.S. military occupation. That's a point of view we seldom hear in U.S. media.

I don't know how realistic it is to think that pro-democracy forces could prevail against warlords and the Taliban, but the question hasn't gotten nearly as much attention as the issue of whether the U.S. could force reform at gunpoint. Maybe RAWA and its allies would have a better shot at power if the occupation wasn't shoveling billions of dollars to the most reactionary elements in society.

Over on GritTV, a woman known as Zoya, representing RAWA, outlines many of the issues with our current strategy in Afghanistan. After 30 years of war, Zoya discusses how the US occupation is still undermining Afghanistan, by propping up some terrorist groups to pursue others. After regretfully admitting the most realistic options for many women if Afghanistan were either leaving the country or suicide, Zoya explains why she was motivated to join RAWA and describes how Afghanistan needs a resolution.

Zoya:

These videos that your are showing about the rape and domestic violence against women, [is happening] under the domination of the United States. It's a time when thousands of troops are present. It's a time that [troops and groups from] more than 40 foreign countries are inside the country. [...]These things are [still] happening daily. This is the proof that America cannot do anything. The only solution - that RAWA was always saying - is that domestic violence [always depends] on political situations. It very much depends and relates to that. So as long as we don't have a democratic government, who cares for women's rights, how can we expect rights and the liberation of women?

Zoya explains that there are other alternatives to occupation, like helping to disarm the various factions that are fighting for dominance. She challenges Americans to rise up and tell the government to stop supporting warlords and criminals. She believes this is the best way to help, saying:

If you cannot to help us, leave us. But if you want to help us, the first help is to take all these fundamentalist, these viruses that the United States government created for Afghanistan.

Why Feminists Love the Surge [The Daily Beast]
Plight of Afghan women may worsen as war effort is stepped up, warns report [The Guardian]
Why Is the Feminist Majority Foundation Refusing to Abandon the Women and Girls of Afghanistan? [Huffington Post]
Not all feminists love escalation in Afghanistan [Majikethise]
GRITtv: A Voice from RAWA: Zoya on Afghanistan [Free Speech TV]

Earlier: Obama's Speech On Afghanistan Measured, Expected

According to U.S. News & World Report, two new studies show that people associate anger with male faces and happiness with female ones. When subjects were shown androgynous faces that looked angry, they were more likely to identify them as male. But if the faces looked happy or fearful, people were more likely to label them as female. And in another experiment, subjects were slower to identify faces as female if the faces looked pissed off. Says psychologist Ursula Hess, "The present research shows that the association between anger and men and happiness and women is so strong that it can influence the decisions about the gender of another person when that person is viewed briefly."

In another study, researchers gave women testosterone pills and studied how they played a cooperation-based game. The game involved giving one woman $10 and instructing her to choose an amount to offer her partner. If the partner turned down the offer, neither got money. Women who received testosterone were no less generous than their peers — unless they were told they'd gotten the hormone. Those who knew they'd gotten testosterone "stood out with their conspicuously unfair offers," wrote the study authors. Lead author Ernst Fehr says that when asked about how they thought testosterone would affect them, the subjects said things like, "Oh, testosterone would make me more egotistic, more risk-taking and more aggressive." In other words, they thought testosterone would make them drive a harder bargain, and so they did just that, even though the testosterone alone might have had no effect.

What's interesting about these studies is that they show how deeply ingrained our perceptions of masculinity and femininity are — and, in the case of the bargaining study, how these perceptions may be even stronger than reality. Are women actually happier than men? Are men more angry? Probably not — but we may be socialized to express these emotions more freely, with the result that they become associated with gender. The result looks a lot like a feedback loop: girls are told it's not feminine to get mad, so they avoid making mad faces, and so people begin to think that anger is for men, and the cycle begins all over again. Similarly, if women learn that aggression is "male," they may not behave aggressively (except when hopped up on testosterone), further reinforcing this stereotype. The finding that this stereotype outstrips the actual effects of testosterone underscores the fact that gender differences are problematic, and that we shouldn't be too quick to assume that any difference in behavior has a biological basis. As Michael Naef, co-author of the testosterone study, says, "In a society where qualities and manners of behavior are increasingly traced to biological causes...this should make us sit up and take notice."

Are Angry Women More Like Men? [U.S. News & World Report]
Women On Testosterone Only Think They're Macho [New Scientist]
Testosterone "Prompts Fair Play, Not Aggression" [Reuters]

Yesterday afternoon, Jake Tapper of ABC News put White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on the spot about what it means to discuss women's rights as well as human rights:

TAPPER: And if I may, just one more. In his March — in his March speech President Obama mentioned that if the Taliban returns to controlling Afghanistan it would be bad for human rights. And he specifically singled out women and girls. He did not mention human rights in Afghanistan. He talked about human rights more broadly, but last night he didn't mentioned human rights in Afghanistan and he definitely didn't mention specifically women and girls.

GIBBS: Well, I believe in — I believe in the context of the three pillars that he saw, mentioning the basic recognition of human rights in Afghanistan is obviously important to what is happening there.

TAPPER: But he didn't mention women and girls, and is that...

GIBBS: Again, I think the umbrella of basic human rights was — was the same thing.

TAPPER: So even though he mentioned it in March and he didn't mention it last night, we're not supposed to read anything into that at all?

GIBBS: I wouldn't. I mean, I have not looked exactly at the word phrasing of each speech, but the umbrella of basic — recognizing the basic human rights of everybody in Afghanistan would include that, yes.

Gibbs' argument that women's rights are human rights is a good one, and one often used by feminists. However, its been shown before that if the rights of women are not specifically addressed,they can easily fall to the wayside. As Gayle Tzemach Lemmon explains in the Daily Beast, while war is hell for all involved, everyone in Afghanistan is not suffering equally:

A recent U.N. report said the country suffers from "a deeply entrenched culture of impunity" in which perpetrators of violence seldom face punishment and victims "risk further violence in the course of seeking justice."

But some women's rights groups, including Women for Afghan Women, the organization that oversees the shelter where Naseema lives, greeted President Obama's speech Tuesday night-and his vow to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan-with a modicum of hope, and a call for a long-term American commitment to the country.

"Without security, the Taliban will engulf the country and return women to the hell of rape, domestic captivity, denial of education and health care-to the erasure of their very humanity," the group's leaders said in a statement. [...]

Wenny Kusuma, who heads the United Nations Development Fund for Women in Afghanistan, calls violence against women the most urgent and immediate issue facing the nation's females-and one that has yet to be taken seriously by the Afghan government or its international backers. "Until politicians and the international community stop offering lip service to the rights of women and begin backing their words with some seriousness, [the violence] will continue to get worse," Kusuma says.

Over at Politico, Ben Smith talks to Ellie Smeal of the Feminist Majority Foundation, who could not believe such a critical security issue was left out:

"It is so naïve just to think [the Taliban] are just going to stay [in Afghanistan]," she said. "They have international backing, they have international funding, and they intend to take on all modern values and ways of life," she said. "They're establishing a totalitarian dictatorship that they want to spread."

Smeal also argued that Obama's policy would be an easier sell if he focused on Taliban human rights abuses.

"People don't like what they did to women," she said of the Taliban. "If the whole picture was revealed the American public would be more supportive."

Admirers of the White House approach, however, argue that America's Afghan allies also have horrendous human rights records, and that President Obama doesn't actually want to drum up support for engagement in a country he intends to leave.

Glenn Greenwald also thinks that Obama made the right choice in not emphasizing the rights of women:

While Obama's speech last night largely comported to what his aides spent days anonymously previewing, there was one (pleasantly) unexpected aspect: he commendably dispensed with the propagandistic pretext that we are fighting in Afghanistan in order to deliver freedom and democracy to that country and to improve the plight of Afghan women. Many Democrats (the self-proclaimed "liberal hawks") love to support American wars on the self-righteous ground that we're going to drop enough Freedom Bombs to liberate millions and invade other countries in order to re-make other peoples' cultures for their own good. In order to maximize support for his escalation, Obama — like Bush so often did — could easily have relied on that appeal to our national narcissism and exploited justifiable disgust for the Taliban in order to manipulate "liberal hawks" into supporting this war on human rights grounds. During the build-up to the speech, it was predicted by several influential Obama advisers that he would do exactly that. Indeed, when announcing his prior Afghanistan escalation in March, Obama played up the humanitarian rationale for this war.

But there was almost none of that in last night's speech. As Ben Smith correctly notes, Obama did not even mention — let alone hype — the issue of women's rights in Afghanistan. There were no grandiose claims that the justness of the war derives from our desire to defeat evil, tyrannical extremists and replace them with more humane and democratic leaders. To the contrary, he was commendably blunt that our true goal is not to improve the lives of Afghan citizens but rather: "Our overarching goal remains the same: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda." There were no promises to guarantee freedom and human rights to the Afghan people. To the contrary, he explicitly rejected a mission of broad nation-building "because it sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost and what we need to achieve to secure our interests"; he said he "refuse[d] to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests"; and even vowed to incorporate the convertible factions of the Taliban into the government.

Not only did he refrain from those manipulative appeals, he made explicitly clear that we are in Afghanistan to serve our own interests (as he perceives them), not to build a better nation for Afghans. Nation-building, he said, goes "beyond ... what we need to achieve to secure our interests" and "go beyond our responsibility." We're there to serve our interests and do nothing else. That should throw cold water on all on the preening fantasies of all but the blindest and most naive "liberal war supporters" that we're there to help the Afghan people.

Matt Yglesias cautiously agrees with the sentiments expressed by Greenwald but points out that the situation isn't clear cut, and while the Administration may have impure motives, it would be best to listen to women on the ground :

Well, look, it's hard to see how supporting a government with Karzai's record could support a substantial gain for women's rights until you consider that the most plausible alternative is . . . the Taliban. It's like how Ben Nelson is more progressive than Mike Johanns. "Better than the Taliban" is a low bar to cross and, consequently, the coalition we're backing in Afghanistan crosses it*. If you read what groups like the Feminist Majority Foundation or the Funders Network for Afghan Women or Human Rights Watch are saying, none of them are cheerleading for Obama's policies, but none of them are calling for the withdrawal of international military forces either. Instead, they're generally calling for a more ambitious approach.

Can Obama balance our national security initiatives with the realities of fighting an unpopular war? Perhaps. But there will be no easy answers.

Today's Qs for O's WH – 12/2/2009 [ABC News]
What the Surge Means for Women [The Daily Beast]
Feminists 'disappointed' by Afghanistan speech [Politico]
The commendably missing element from Obama's speech [Salon]
The Surge and Afghan Women [Think Progress]

After referring to the (relative) success of those in the gay-rights movement who directly link their political dollars to political action, Hirshman seethes over the fact that while Stupak passed,

we do not hear that Denise Abrams, Anne Abramson, Elizabeth Alter or Amy Stan — just to take the first names on the list — have threatened to withhold further $28,500 maximum contributions until the representatives stop the barefoot-and-pregnant campaign.

She continues:

Why won't women take a lesson from the bold voices of the gay movement? It cannot be that women think their contributions aren't large enough to pose a credible threat. Not only did women number heavily among the max givers to the DCCC, but they also accounted for 42 percent of the donations to the presidential campaign, a whopping $145 million. By contrast (although statistics for the heterosexuality of donors are not kept and strategic gay donors are clearly giving in ways that do not show up on surveys) we do know that during the primary, Barack Obama raised about $1.7 million, or about 3 percent of his contributions to date, from the gayest ZIP codes in the country. But that didn't stop the gay activists from raising the ante on him when they thought he was screwing them over.

Hirshman's piece reminds me an argument I hate when people who try to make a connection about other groups and organizing: no coalition is perfect, and it can take years of dedicated organizing (along with continued slights from the majority) to galvanize enough people to take action. There is an idea that I have heard pushed in feminist circles that "the blacks," "the gays" and other minority groups seem to have some inner organizing/hellraising gene that women do not possess. "This would never happen to black people!" they huff, "they wouldn't get away with it!"

But, like all notions of a movement from the outside, things are different from how they appear. There are breaks, protests, and counter-protests within any minority group, and it can take a long, long time to get enough people to agree there is even a problem that needs a solution. Linda Hirschman stumbles by using a blanket analysis - she rails at women voters, and assumes they all have the same goals. But which women is she talking about? Pro-life women who vote democratically? Women who are not feminists who vote dem? Women who, like many women columnists and pundits, feel that this hit is worth taking in order to get health care reform?

While I agree with the overall thrust of Hirshman's piece - that women joining a coalition need to constantly evaluate whether this coalition values them as participants or just happily pockets their money and votes - her cause and effect based analysis leaves me cold. To solve such issues, activists need to figure out why more people do not demand more of their political representatives in the first place, and what motivates donors and voters before assuming they'll automatically lean one way or another based on their gender.

Don't Just Swallow It [Salon]

Obama outlined the history of the conflict, and reminded Americans why we were involved in the first place. He then outlined his main policy items:

Our overarching goal remains the same: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future.

To meet that goal, we will pursue the following objectives within Afghanistan. We must deny al Qaeda a safe haven. We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's security forces and government so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan's future.

We will meet these objectives in three ways. First, we will pursue a military strategy that will break the Taliban's momentum and increase Afghanistan's capacity over the next 18 months. [...]

Second, we will work with our partners, the United Nations, and the Afghan people to pursue a more effective civilian strategy, so that the government can take advantage of improved security. [...]

Third, we will act with the full recognition that our success in Afghanistan is inextricably linked to our partnership with Pakistan.

He also directly addressed concerns and criticisms of our efforts thus far:

First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized, and we're better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. I believe this argument depends on a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action. Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency. And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan, and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border. To abandon this area now — and to rely only on efforts against al Qaeda from a distance — would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.

Second, there are those who acknowledge that we can't leave Afghanistan in its current state, but suggest that we go forward with the troops that we already have. But this would simply maintain a status quo in which we muddle through, and permit a slow deterioration of conditions there. It would ultimately prove more costly and prolong our stay in Afghanistan, because we would never be able to generate the conditions needed to train Afghan security forces and give them the space to take over.

Finally, there are those who oppose identifying a time frame for our transition to Afghan responsibility. Indeed, some call for a more dramatic and open-ended escalation of our war effort — one that would commit us to a nation-building project of up to a decade. I reject this course because it sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost, and what we need to achieve to secure our interests. Furthermore, the absence of a time frame for transition would deny us any sense of urgency in working with the Afghan government. It must be clear that Afghans will have to take responsibility for their security, and that America has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan.

After this point in the speech, it flips over to a rehash of all the things we heard during the Bush-Cheney years. Watching reactions to the speech on Twitter, I think my friend Nisha Chittal, blogging for Care2, came closest to summarizing the general feel of disappointment:

Obama is a master of words and rhetoric, but rhetoric cannot obscure the ugly truth here: we cannot afford the cost of this war, both in money and in human lives. And despite delivering a powerful speech, as Obama so often does, there are too many questions that still remain unanswered:

Will we really phase out troops by 2011? Will Afghani security forces really be secure enough by then? Or will this withdrawal timeline turn into another empty promise?

Where will we get the projected $30 billion needed for this troop surge when we are already in an economic crisis with no end in sight?

What will happen to Afghani women and girls? Their plight is terrible, but was barely even mentioned in tonight's speech. Are we going to continue to turn the other cheek to the human rights crisis faced by Afghani women on a daily basis?

Tonight, the President faced what will go down as one of the deciding moments of his administration. There is no longer any question: this has become Obama's war. He had the misfortune of inheriting two wars when he came into office. But instead of ending them, he has chosen to extend them. He rehashed the same explanations thrown at us by prior administrations over the past eight years.

Ben Smith, over at Politico, also noticed the lack of discussion about Afghan women and children:

"For the Afghan people, a return to Taliban rule would condemn their country to brutal governance, international isolation, a paralyzed economy, and the denial of basic human rights to the Afghan people - especially women and girls," Obama said in March.

Tonight's speech includes a passing, abstract reference to "human rights" — but not a single reference to Afghanistan's women and girls.

That, presumably, falls into the category of "nation building."

Also missing from the much of the post-speech analysis were the voices of people in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and those working on the ground. Al Jazeera reports:

The goal, Obama said in a televised address on Tuesday, is to esculate the battle against Taliban fighters, secure key population centres and train Afghan security forces and so clear the way for a US exit in 18 months time.

But Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai, a former prime minister of Afghanistan, expressed disappointment with Obama's speech and his strategy.

"Sending more troops is not the solution to the Afghan crisis," he said.

"I was expecting Obama to announce the withdrawal of 30,000 troops within two months but unfortunately, he did the opposite which will increase killings of both Americans and Afghans." [...]

Al Jazeera's James Bays, reporting from the Afghan capital, Kabul, said: "This wasn't a counter-insurgency speech; it was a counter-terrorism speech, a very different mission from the one General Stanley McCrystal has been preparing himself for.

"He only mentions the Taliban twice in the whole speech. He started talking about 9/11, he ended with talking about 9/11 and all the references in between were to al-Qaeda."

Bays added: "I think there will be some in the military here in the command centre of Kabul who will be having to rethink things rather urgently."

However, after Tuesday's speech, McChrystal said that Obama's decision "has provided me with a clear military mission and the resources to accomplish our task".

In a statement released after the speech, General Stanely McChrystal also said:

In the meantime, our Afghan partners need the support of Coalition forces while we grow and develop the capacity of the Afghan army and police. That will be the main focus of our campaign in the months ahead.

"The 42 other nations of the Coalition will benefit from a strengthened U.S. commitment, as success in Afghanistan must be an international, integrated civil-military effort – from our security and training capacity to the governance and economic development assistance that sustains long-term stability. The concerted commitment of the international community will prevail in bringing real change to Afghanistan - a secure and stable environment that allows for effective governance, improved economic opportunity and the freedom of every Afghan to choose how they live.

But will this kind of effort work with the current resources available to the United States? The Administration has created a timeline in which to hand control over to Afghan patrols and troops, but this investigation by Al Jazeera shows that we may be overestimating key aspects of the strategy - including the actual number of troops on the ground:

After the speech aired, I asked some national security people to give their take on what this means for the United States and its foreign policy. Patricia DeGennaro, expert on U.S. Foreign Policy, National Security, and former consultant to the Office of the President in Afghanistan, writes:

So overall, Obama gave a moving speech. He reminded the country about the reason for going to Afghanistan in the first place or "why we are fighting" – the September 11 attacks. He spoke directly to the people who will be shouldering the burden while address the Afghan people themselves informing them that there is no intent to occupy.

In my mind however there are major shortcomings in the speech. First and foremost, he still failed to identify a clear objective for US forces. "Disrupt, destroy and dismantle Al Qaeda" is not a a mission that solely rests on Afghanistan. It is a far reaching hope. One that will entail a worldwide initiative by intelligence and Interpol agencies, not a military. The international forces need a "job" in order to finish one and unfortunately none of us really knows what that is, which makes it very hard when you are trying to plan.

The President outlined the same objectives. First, a military strategy to combat Al Qaeda and the Taliban who are growing ever closer while training and arming an Afghan national army, police force, and a few random militias. The militia part we tried and are still combating. Many of the militia members trained are now leaders of the insurgency and Taliban. It seems Obama missed the most recent Mullah Omar (head of the Taliban) memo that stated, "Afghans will shoot the invaders before their own brothers." Perhaps it is not a good idea to give them M-16s.

Second, Obama promised a civilian surge. One that will assist in security, development and agricultural production. It is not clear however, where these people will come from since the US has all but succeeded in destroying its international civilian capacity. Of the civilians promised to the Embassy, the Administration has sent about one-third of the promised civil officers – they are short 300 people to date.

Third, what does it mean that we are acting with Pakistan? The Kerry-Lugar act is providing Pakistan with $1.5 billion a year for five years in non-military development aid. Will the Administration be providing more military funding or armaments as well? That seemed to be hinted in this statement. Although unclear, it is worrisome.

Finally, setting a timetable is dangerous. This is not Iraq. Allies would like to leave sooner and this gives them no incentive to stay, but it gives adversaries all they incentive they need to stand pat. The reality Is Obama made a strong speech for why there is a war, the shortcoming was in the direction and management of the effort. They have a saying in Afghanistan, it looks like the same donkey with a different saddle. This saddle is a bit more compromising, but the devil is still missing the lifesaving details threatening any hopes for something I've never heard of – a speedy war.

I would say that all the above things [I wrote] are understood. However, the larger picture is that the US has not defined a more applicable post cold-war strategy. This country is still in the mindset that all that matters are our ‘vital' interests and how we perceive things to be without considering or learning about who we are dealing with the the consequences they will face by our one-sided interventions. I heard nothing about how the Afghans would suffer, be protected or partnered with during the next 18 months. I think Obama [in his speech] was struggling with the way that US policy is always formulated and they way he would like to change the formulation of US foreign policy. Washington is like a trillion pound barge, it takes all the energy you have to move it a centimeter.

Malou Innocent, of the Cato Institute, had this to say:

Last night, President Barack Obama declared "our security is at stake" in Afghanistan. As I mention here, President George W. Bush was also adept at keeping the American public in an elevated state of panic. That tactic may be useful for advancing controversial policies, especially in Afghanistan, but it also forces us to overlook how our policies intensify the region's powerful jihadist insurgency and entangles us deeper into a costly and protracted guerrilla war.

As the president's national security adviser, General James Jones, noted in October, "the al Qaeda presence [in Afghanistan] is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies." We don't need 130,000 soldiers to chase down 100 al Qaeda fighters. But yet another disturbing aspect of the current debate over Afghanistan is an inadequate examination of the war's core assumption: the safe haven myth. As Paul Pillar, the National Intelligence Office for the Middle East between 2000 and 2005 notes, the preparations most important to the September 11, 2001 attacks "took place not in training camps in Afghanistan but, rather, in apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain and flight schools in the United States."

Our security is not at stake in Afghanistan. Not only is remaining in that country neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for keeping America safe, but prolonging our occupation is likely to tarnish America's reputation, undermine its security, and erode its economic well-being more than would a cost-effective policy limited to targeting al Qaeda.

In the coming days, Americans will know more about how the new strategy will be implemented. Today, Secretary of State Clinton, Defense Secretary Gates and Joint Cheifs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen are appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. C-Span notes that this will be followed later by a "House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing regarding Pres. Obama's new Afghanistan war strategy." Stay tuned.

Obama's Address on the War in Afghanistan [New York Times]
Afghanistan: We Cannot Afford More War [Care2]
Missing from the speech: Afghan women [Politico]
Afghans react to Obama troop plan [Al Jazeera]
Statement: McChrystal on Afghan Policy [Time]
Patricia DeGennaro [SheSource]
How a U.S. Aid Package to Pakistan Could Threaten Zardari [Time]
Malou Innocent [SheSource]

Earlier: No End In Sight: Obama Gears Up On Afghanistan
Why Is 35% Of Development Aid Being Routed Back To The U.S.?
On Women, War & The Elections In Afghanistan

Kristof begins by discussing how the problem of the 20th century was slavery and gender inequity is the major problem of the 21st. He and WuDunn then launched into a long-ranging discussion about their observations from global conflict zones. Celebrities like Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Ben Affleck, Demi Moore, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also did segments for the show.

While the effort was wonderful for consciousness raising, some issues felt as though they were glossed over. For one thing, images of suffering women were shown often - but where were those who inflicted the suffering? A warlord was featured at the beginning of the show, but perpetrators were conspicuously absent from this narrative. Where were the pimps? Former sex slave Long Pross was stabbed in the eye by a female pimp - but this was barely touched upon. In the clip above, Kristof also brings up how the owner for one of the brothels is also an employee of the local police force.

Watching the segment reminded me of the frustration many activists felt when reading The Woman's Crusade article in the Saving The World's Women issue in the NY Times magazine. As Melissa over at Shakesville wrote:

If I'm not mistaken, I just read seven pages that are the philosophical equivalent of "She got raped." Passive. Rape is something that happens to women. Something that gets done to them.

So, apparently, is worldwide institutional oppression.

I don't guess I need to say that I am all for giving women around the world every tool, every resource, every dollar and dinar, every bit of choice and opportunity and access, everything possible to lift themselves up and achieve everything they could want or imagine.

But how can we talk about lifting women up without a serious discussion of, no less without more than the merest passing reference to, who and what has been keeping them down?

The segment focused on women's oppression, but glossed over other complicating factors. For example, Kristof actually purchased two girls from sexual slavery and returned them to their villages. One girl remained in her village and wed - the other went back to the brothels, presumably in search of drugs. Kristof mentioned that this made him understand that "freeing" someone is "more than just opening a door" - but that type of analysis was lacking in the articles and segments that Kristof appeared on. Instead, the focus was on feel-good narratives and painful images of poverty and suffering.

On Oprah's website, she has a registry sub-site set up to help.

The various ways to assist (financial and awareness-based) are helpful, but is human intervention enough in the face of structural and societal problems of this magnitude?

George Clooney, Ben Affleck, Demi Moore And Hillary Clinton [Oprah]

Related: Half The Sky Movement [Official Site]

The Women's Crusade [NY Times]
Here's Your Big Chance To Ask: What About The Men? [Shakesville]

According to the study, no. British researchers looked at 17,000 adults, all born in the same week in 1958. Men who had attended single-sex schools as children were more likely to divorce or separate from a partner by their early 40s than those who went to coed institutions. And men educated in single-sex environments were more likely to suffer depression or "a sense of malaise." Girls, however, did not appear to feel these adverse effects. Mary Bousted of the UK's Association of Teachers and Lecturers responded thus:

All the research shows single-sex schools are good for girls but bad for boys – both in terms of academic performance and socialisation. Girls seem to learn what the nature of the beast is if they have been to single sex schools whereas boys taught on their own seem to find girls more puzzling. Boys learn better when they are with girls and they actually learn to get on better.

As Bousted's "nature of the beast" comment shows, it's easy to inject anecdotal evidence into the single-sex schooling debate, and such evidence can easily turn to gender stereotype. For my part, boys I've known who had close female friends growing up — in school or out — tend to be more feminist and generally more comfortable around women. But it's hard to assign causality here — boys who are naturally well-disposed towards girls probably tend to have more of them as friends. And while I can certainly buy that being socialized with girls from an early age helps boys with relationships later in life, I'm not sure that girls are naturally "puzzling" while boys are easy to figure out. I wonder if the kind of school students attended affected the results — some were educated privately, some publicly, and it's not clear if researchers controlled for this. I also wonder if girls reap benefits from co-ed schooling that were outside the scope of the study. Lucy Hodges, editor of the Independent's education supplement, thinks they do. She writes,

As someone who was educated in a single-sex boarding school I believe my schooling might have been improved if I had spent it in the company of boys as well as girls. It would certainly have provided some welcome distraction in lessons. Instead of reading Georgette Heyer all the way through Latin and maths, I could have been making eyes at a real-life hero a few yards away and even had some improving discussions with him about my algebra prep. As it was, I didn't really get to know a youth who wasn't in a book until I arrived at university at the tender age of 17-and-a-half.

The relationship-building implications of single-sex schooling for heterosexual girls aren't totally trivial, but it's kind of unfortunate that Hodges chooses to frame them in terms of their dubious educational benefit. She also says that her daughter "would have been better off, certainly at sixth-form, at a school with some boys – and a few more male teachers – to bring a bit of spice and interest to her life." The idea that girls need sexual excitement to perform well in school is kind of depressing — can't academic subjects add "spice and interest" to life?

I'm not convinced that the excitement of the opposite sex helps hetero kids learn math. But it does seem logical that, regardless of sexual orientation, children learn social lessons from opposite sex peers. Potential confounding variables aside, it is possible that boys learn more valuable lessons than girls, or at least different ones. They may learn that girls share their interests and goals, that they can be smart and funny and fast and cool, and — most importantly — that they are people worthy of attention and consideration. Girls probably learn the same things about boys, but they may also learn that some boys don't like it when they speak up, or that some teachers have different expectations of them because of their gender. These lessons may be damaging to girls, and single-sex education may shield them from this damage for a time. But if it's true that sex segregation hampers boys' ability to relate to girls and later to women, that's not good for either gender. Single-sex education has benefits for many people, but it's not a gender-relations panacea — if we want boys and girls to grow up free of prejudice, we may ultimately need to pay more attention to what we're teaching them than to whether we're teaching them together.

Why Single-Sex Schools Are Bad For Your Health (If You're A Boy) [Independent]
Lucy Hodges: The Perils Of Single-Sex Education [Independent]

About midway through watching New Moon with two friends, I realized I was having a lightbulb moment. I got it. Suddenly, in the theater, I realized why this series is so popular, why all the criticisms of Meyer's work slide off like it is made of teflon, how the story of a somewhat codependent teenager torn between two increasingly controlling objects of affection is enticing enough to spend weeks on best-seller lists and to break box office records. To condescend toward this type of fandom is a mistake (even if said snarking is both hilarious and on point). In order to unlock the saga's chokehold on teens, we must use its own conventions. In other words - we need to learn how to reach teens from Twilight.

This may seem like a strange admission to make. After all, feminists and fans of young adult literature alike have been warning against Stephanie Meyer's siren song for years now. Newser points out how many of the headlines surrounding the massive success of the franchise focus on the sexism inherent in the series. Grady Hendrix, writing for Slate, notes:

Just as America's young men are being given deeply erroneous ideas about sex by what they watch on the Web, so, too, are America's young women receiving troubling misinformation about the male of the species from Twilight. These women are going to be shocked when the sensitive, emotionally available, poetry-writing boys of their dreams expect a bit more from a sleepover than dew-eyed gazes and chaste hugs. The young man, having been schooled in love online, will be expecting extreme bondage and a lesbian three-way.

Even Ms. Magazine, which has remained somewhat indifferent to pop culture, gets in on the action, with Carmen D. Siering explaining:

Fans of the books, and now a movie version, often break into "teams," aligning them- selves with the swain they hope Bella will choose in the end: Team Edward or Team Jacob. But few young readers ask, "Why not Team Bella?" perhaps because the answer is quite clear: There can be no Team Bella. Even though Bella is ostensibly a hero, in truth she is merely an object in the Twilight world. Bella is a prize, not a person, someone to whom things happen, not an active participant in the unfolding story. [...]

Maybe it's difficult for Edward to see Bella as an equal because Bella has almost no personality. Meyer writes on her website that she "left out a detailed description of Bella in the book so that the reader could more easily step into her shoes." But Meyer fails to give Bella much of an interior life as well; Bella is a blank slate, with few thoughts or actions that don't center on Edward. Outside of him and occasional outings with werewolf Jacob, Bella doesn't do anything more than go to school, cook and clean for her dad, write to her mother, read and romanticize over Victorian literature and find fault with her clothing. She has no other interests, no goals, few friends: Bella does nothing that suggests she is a person in her own right. If Meyer hopes that readers see themselves as Bella, what is it she is suggesting to them about the significance of their own lives?

And indeed, there is much to hate about the series. Hell, I even put forth an analysis of racism within the series.

So how can I suddenly advocate to understand Twilight, instead of destroying it?

I speak not to disprove what others spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.

To be a teenager is a difficult thing. Desires war against common sense, ephemeral things (like boy bands) take on deep, long lasting meaning, and you are devoted to friends, peers, and lovers. Everyone seems to want to separate you from what you want. And, even with the best intentions, those of us who hate Twilight are just feeding the mania. We bludgeon them with reason and forget two key things:

• 1. Fandom doesn't run on logic, and
• 2. A large part of exploring the boundaries of growing up is choosing things for ourselves - whether we make the wrong decisions or somehow stumble upon the right ones.

Sitting in the dark space I shared with another 40 or so people to watch the film last night, it dawned on me. I listened to the cheers that went up when Jacob Black removes his shirt for the first time, the laughter that erupted when Bella cracks her head while trying to cliff dive her way to Edward, and the radio silence when Edward confesses his undying commitment to Bella. I realized that Twilight does not represent a failure of feminism, but rather a golden opportunity to evaluate where we can focus on outreach.

How often do we get a non-personal opportunity to talk about issues with obsessive relationships? Promoting the idea of passive femininity and promoting an idea of controlling and all-powerful masculinity. While we may wince at the portrayals of Bella, Edward, and Jacob in the context of their relationships, it would be foolish to pretend that Meyer isn't just tapping into societal ideas surrounding heterosexual relationships and power dynamics that already exist. The documentary Micky Mouse Monopoly explores the messages portrayed in Disney films:

By exploring these themes with teen and preteen girls in a questioning, not a confrontational tone, adults can help them to discover for themselves why the things that Edward and Jacob do in the name of "love" are not okay. Conversely, teenage and pre-teen boys are also paying attention to the cues they are learning from Twilight. I was shocked last year to learn that my younger brother, whose sole ambition at the age of 11 is to sag his pants as low as possible, and to be as cool as possible by knowing every popular rap lyric on the radio, pulled out a Twilight DVD when I came to visit and offered to put it on "because this is what girls like." Apparently, his "girlfriend" - a term he defines as a female who gives him her phone number - and most of the other girls he knows love Edward or Jacob.

What are young boys learning about how to behave in relationships when they are exposed to Twilight?

A very similar message as to what they learn through Disney:

Just as Jacob started out as a genuinely nice kid who switched over to being a Nice Guy, when he realized Edward's tactics of being forceful and controlling were working on Bella, there are potentially thousands of boys who could decide that the way to win a girl's admiration is by emulating Jacob and Edward's controlling behaviors.

Only by understanding and critically engaging with the Twilight saga can parents and other adults start looking at what aspects of this series appeal to teens and where else they can channel their attention.

After all, the Twilight mania won't rule the world forever. The teenagers now will get older, a new crop of teen idols will arise. What will endure from Twilight won't necessarily be the messages of sexism - those are reinforced in thousands of different ways every day, and Stephanie Meyer will not be the last author to tap into them. What adults and pop culture critics should pay attention to is how Twilight breaks with many different conventions that have come to be accepted as normal. As Neesha writes on Racialicious, how often do girls get a chance to explore their budding sexuality in a safe (fantasy) space? I'm sure many of the young women who watch Twilight will have also seen the Transformers franchise, featuring Megan Fox as hyper-sexualized eye candy. How often do they see a movie geared at teens and young adults that allows for the main heroine to wear double layer shirts and oversized jackets? And how often do studios discount budding adolescent desire, and fail to consider that perhaps, girls would also like to see attractive, shirtless men parade around on screen?

Indeed, the mania resulting from New Moon and other parts of Twilight saga allows more than just an easy feminist critique - it also allows the opportunity for adults to influence the great Twilight-after. Eventually, all of the books will be read, and all of the movies will be left. What could be next? Can they help to exert small variations in the narrative by encouraging teens to write their own fan fiction (and guide Bella in their own ways)? Can they recommend other books to fill the aching gap left by the end of the Twilight saga with similar content but more progressive leanings? (Try Kelley Armstrong's The Summoning, Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness quartet, The Silver Kiss and Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause, The Uglies Series, by Scott Westerfeld, and Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier, for starters.)

There is so much possibility within the world that Meyer has created to reach out to teens. And the way to do it isn't by dismissing their fandom, but engaging within their world, on their terms. As Nancy Gibbs writes in Time magazine, "Kids, like adults, resist force-feeding."

We can't force anyone to take their medicine. But what adults can do is allow teens the space to explore, grow, and come to their own conclusions on their own time. All they need to do is be ready, and willing.

O judgment! thou teens art fled to both brutish beasts (vamp and were),
And women have lost their reason. Bear with me;
Their hearts are in the coffin there with Edward (or in the forest, with Jacob),
And I must pause till they are ready to hear me.

New Moon' Breaks Midnight Record [Box Office Mojo]
LDS Sparkledammerung IS HERE! [Stoney321's LiveJournal]
New Moon Sexist, Say Critics [Newser]
Vampires Suck [Slate]
Talking Back to Twilight (Partial Article, Full in Print Only) [Ms.]
Running With the Wolves – A Racialicious Reading of the Twilight Saga [Racialicious]
Mickey Mouse Monopoly: Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power [Media Education Foundation]
Friends [XKCD]
Disney, Twilight and Bollywood: Reinforcing the Purity Myth or Fantasy of Safe Sexual Exploration for Young Girls (and Their Mothers)? [Racialicious]
The Gospel of Glee [Time]

As Hillary Clinton has assumed more and more of the spotlight due to her run for the Presidency and her subsequent appointment to Secretary of State, she has had to confront allegations and assumptions that somehow, Bill Clinton is still asserting power behind the scenes. However, because the Clintons are so closely aligned in many aspects of policy, creating a clear dividing line has started to get tricky:

Yet the real story is more complicated because, 10 months into her tenure, it is clear that their worlds and their interests cannot avoid intersecting. Hillary Clinton has put problems such as Northern Ireland, Haiti and Third World development near the top of the agenda at the State Department, and they are also part of the former president's charitable mission. Bill Clinton secretly helped push the administration's — and his wife's — agenda with North Korea on a trip officially called a humanitarian mission.

Relying on her husband's counsel could have long ranging implications for HRC:

The Clintons declined requests for interviews, but their aides emphasize that Secretary Clinton is carrying out the Obama administration's foreign policy and say that their shared priorities are a coincidence. Some lawmakers, however, are wary of potential conflicts. Bill Clinton's charitable foundation has received large contributions in recent years from governments such as Saudi Arabia's, as well as Indian tycoons and prominent supporters of Israel — presenting what Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) called a "multimillion-dollar minefield of conflicts of interest." In response, the former president agreed to release the foundation's donor list and allow ethics officials to review some foreign pledges; the first annual disclosure of contributions since Hillary Clinton was confirmed is weeks away.

However, to not rely on either Clinton's council would be foolish.

While the Clintons lead separate professional lives, they deal with some of the same leaders and issues. The William J. Clinton Foundation works in more than 40 countries on health, climate change and economic development, often collaborating with governments. The annual Clinton philanthropic powwow drew 33 presidents and prime ministers — from Colombia to Kenya to Turkey.

Mindful of concerns about impropriety, and eager to be judged on her own merits, Hillary Clinton has played down her husband's influence.

In a way, it's saddening how a match of equals has been turned into a potential liability for Hillary Clinton. Reading through descriptions of their obvious respect for each other's minds (even if Bill couldn't seem to extend that to other parts of their relationship) is actually quite touching. It's rare to hear of a couple on the save wavelength intellectually, as the Clinton's often are:

Friends say the Clintons talk and e-mail frequently and have always been deeply interested in each other's opinions and ideas. "A lot of the overlap in their interests and work you might see now are probably an outgrowth of having worked together on those issues when they were in the White House," said Doug Hattaway, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

That is true of Northern Ireland, where Bill Clinton helped broker the 1998 peace accords. The couple also has a long-standing interest in Haiti. They visited the poverty-stricken country as newlyweds in 1975, and their involvement intensified with the 1994 U.S. military intervention Bill Clinton ordered to dislodge a junta.

However, there are those who believe that outside of political manuvering, the Clinton's partnership will do far more good than harm in the world:

Haitian Ambassador Raymond Alcide Joseph said the Clinton double-whammy is powerful. "I think Haiti is just more than lucky at this time to have this great couple in various capacities poring over it and looking at it, helping it," he said.

Agreed.

The Clintons Aim To Keep Their Worlds From Colliding [Washington Post]

In what's to be the first of a series of posts on gender and travel on the New York Times Freakonomics blog, Eric A. Morris lists some differences between men's and women's driving habits. Men typically have longer commutes than women, and women tend to take shorter trips in general. Men also make up a large majority of truck drivers and chauffeurs. And perceptions of female drivers remain mired in stereotype. Morris writes,

What's more, the "woman driver" stereotype hasn't quite deserted us entirely; as Tom Vanderbilt reported in his book Traffic, men and woman are more likely to honk at woman drivers than male ones. And, perhaps surprisingly, University of Washington sociologist Pepper Schwartz reports that in 9 of 10 households that identify themselves as "feminist," the man does most of the driving when both partners are in the car.

This last statistic hits home with me, as a longtime feminist and driving-hater. Whenever I'm in a relationship, the dude does 99% of the driving. I once set out on a road trip with a boyfriend, in my car, and then pulled over after ten minutes so he could take the wheel. It's not that I'm into traditional gender roles on the road — I'm just deeply embarrassed to have anyone, especially someone I love, watching me drive. I'm not actually that bad a driver — I've never (knock wood) been in an accident, and I've only gotten one ticket (for going a blistering 41 mph). It's just that I've never really gotten comfortable behind the wheel, and I feel like driving actually destroys the traits in me that I associate with feminism. Ordinarily a confident and independent person, I become nervous, dithering, and indecisive, and I frankly don't want anyone to see me like that.

Of course, the reason I never learned to love the open road may be gendered as well. My parents were restrictive about my early driving in a way they weren't with my brother, forbidding the freeway and preferring that I got rides from friends rather than driving myself. Then again, I'm also the firstborn, and I was a manifestly shitty driver at the beginning, largely because I have no hand-eye coordination and I can't tell left from right. I'm not sure if I would have gotten over my distaste if I were male, and forced by social pressures into the driver's seat, but I do know it's just as unfair to expect men to be awesome drivers as it is to expect women to be terrible ones.

I go back and forth about whether my driving problems or a flaw in my feminism. On the one hand, it's not great that any boyfriend automatically becomes my DD. On the other, driving isn't particularly good for the planet, and in an ideal world, we'd all do it less. Since I moved to New York, I don't have a car anymore, and construction aside, I heartily enjoy letting the subway conductors do my driving for me. I still think the fact that men are the default drivers in feminist households is troubling, and it disturbs me that many still assume women will be worse drivers than men. The truth is, some of the calmest, most confident drivers I know are women — and for now, I'll yield the wheel to them.

Sex And The SUV: Men, Women, And Travel Behavior [NYT Freakonomics Blog]

The lyrics above are actually how Finding illustrates the somewhat cyclical nature of how our culture interprets and accepts sexual or domestic violence. The article opens with the song, explaining:

Back in 1962, the Crystals released a song called He Hit Me (And it Felt like a Kiss). "If he didn't care for me," warbled one of the most popular American "girl groups" of the day, "I could have never made him mad. But he hit me and I was glad."

Deborah Finding, from the gender institute at the London School of Economics, recites the line in a monotone before adding: "It sounds all the more chilling in the light of what we now know about their producer, Phil Spector. Not just about the murder of Lana Clarkson, but also his treatment of Ronnie Bennett of the Ronnettes." She was his wife at the time. She claims in her autobiography that he kept a gold coffin with a glass lid in the basement of their mansion and threatened to kill her if she left him.

Finding decided upon her interesting PhD title by combining two of her interests: music and narrative.

Finding's parents ran a disco. "The wardrobes at home were always cluttered with singles," she says. And she has an impressive collection of over 2,000 CDs at her home in west London. "I've always tuned into the lyrics," she says. This proved invaluable as she embarked on a project directly connected to the work with abused women she has been carrying out with various non-governmental organisations since leaving Cambridge in 2000. She has a degree in philosophy and theology and a masters in Jewish-Christian relations after the Holocaust. "I was always interested in the narratives people tell about their traumas and whether or not they are believed," she says.

"I knew that I wanted to do a PhD that would contribute something to the overall understanding of the way sexual and domestic violence was represented in our wider culture and how that influenced the way people think about the issues personally and politically."

Finding explains that part of the strength of the narratives came from the acceptance from society that this type of gender based violence was a social problem as well as an individual problem. She points out that artists like Tracy Chapman, Tori Amos (above), Suzanne Vega, Beautiful South, Sheryl Crowe, and Alanis Morrisette gave voice to all aspects of a woman's experience, from very explicit violence to hazier, more gray actions. However, Finding is beginning to see the cycle of acceptance shifting back into a narrative that accepts sexual violence:

We've gone full circle in the post-feminist era," Finding says. "Florence and the Machine, hotly tipped for this year's Mercury prize, recently came out with A Kiss With a Fist is Better Than None, equating violence with passion in a way that sounds depressingly familiar."

When asked about misogyny in hip-hop and rap lyrics, Finding provides an interesting response:

These are female artists for the most part. But what about the men? What about "gangsta" rap and hip-hop, and their alleged encouragement of aggressively misogynistic attitudes? "That's been written about elsewhere," she points out, "and it worries me that there's usually a racist element to these discussions. Black artists are condemned, while white bands like the Rolling Stones and the Stranglers get away with deeply unpleasant lyrics. I was more interested in analysing the way that women were narrating their own experience of sexual violence or how they imagined other women's experience."

Personally, I would love to see a visual representation of Finding's work mashed up with Sut Jhally's Dreamworlds 3. Ever since I watched Dreamworlds 3 one video in particular stood out. Limp Bizkit released a video for their song "Eat You Alive" which is the epitome of glorifying violence against women:

The lead woman's palpable fear fades away into lust and desire after Durst decides to paint a pretty picture of their future - after screaming in her face lyrics like this:

Hey you,
Miss. too-good-to-look-my-way
and that's cool you want nothing at all to do with me.
But I want you,
ain't nothing wrong with wanting you cause
I'm a man and I can think what the hell I want,
you got that straight?

No doubt now (no doubt),
I'd love to (id love)
sniff on them panties now.

I'll EAT YOU ALIVE!!!! i'll eat you alive.....
I'll EAT YOU ALIVE!!!! i'll eat you alive......

There is power in placing these images and words into context, a subversive power. Dreamworlds 3 was able to tap into this by juxtaposing image after image together so the viewer looks at one long pattern, instead of several distinct images. Another subversive adaptation of music and lyrics comes from Tori Amos, who decided to cover Eminem's "'97 Bonnie and Clyde":

Amos did not change any of the lyrics, just presented it in a different light, though a woman's voice. In one of her many responses as to why she chose that particular cover, she notes:

Eminem's fans hate her cover. "That's the greatest compliment I've received," she says, teeth gritted. "My version invades his space, and men aren't used to feeling invaded, it drives them mad. Empower the wife, give her a voice. That's how you are an activist, I think. Is the song pretty? No, but I never said it was." Her blue eyes blaze. "Singing it is not a tribute." — Tori; The Times (UK), Dec 18, 2001

Ultimately, Finding's work is amazing because it illuminates the role of narrative in healing from assault or abuse by speaking these stories into existence. And if they happen to live on in the popular consciousness because they were attached to a song lyric, then so much the better. As is stated in her piece, many of us use music "as a means of emotional support."

And Then He Hit Me [Guardian]
Eat You Alive Lyrics [ST Lyrics]
Tori Amos/Eminem [Here In My Head]