Afghan Student Gets 20 Years for Blasphemy on Women’s Rights

Virginia Rutter on October 22, 2008

A friend sent this post from Slashdot.

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes “Despite nationwide public support for his initial death sentence, a three-judge appeals court has reduced the sentence of Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh to 20 years in prison. Kambakhsh was charged with circulating an article on women’s rights that he found online. From the article: ‘Family members have said Kambakhsh was beaten and threatened with death until he signed a confession and that local journalists who expressed support for him were warned they would be arrested if they persisted.'”

Friend sez: Didn’t we invade Afghanistan, in part, to liberate the women there from the grip of the Taliban? Didn’t Laura Bush tell us how important this was? Will someone please ask Laura Bush to comment on this?

–Virginia Rutter

“Let them eat cake” (?)

Virginia Rutter on October 21, 2008

Fresh from the hypocrisy file: Now we know how Palin thinks government can help people solve work and family conflicts! Just bring ’em along and bill the government. It will be just great to get my travel with my stepkids covered by my employer as a way to help me manage my work/family conflicts. According to the Associated Press:

Gov. Sarah Palin charged the state for her children to travel with her, including to events where they were not invited, and later amended expense reports to specify that they were on official business.

Read all about it.

There’s more: “The Republican National Committee appears to have spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family since her surprise pick by John McCain in late August.” More at Politico. (Thanks talkingpointsmemo.)

-Virginia Rutter


Blog Action Day: The 411 on Child Poverty

Virginia Rutter on October 15, 2008

In the current issue of Demography, researchers report that U.S. child poverty rates declined in the 1990s by a bit more than 7 percent (“Child Poverty and Changes in Child Poverty“). Similar improvements occurred in the United Kingdom.

But here’s the bad news: While the UK’s decline was thanks to government programs, the US’s decline was due to economic expansion. In other words, the US economy did well in the 1990s, so child poverty declined. In fact, when researchers looked more closely, they found that US government support for children in poverty had actually declined. Without economic growth, there would have been more, not less, child poverty.

So where does that leave us today? Jobs are disappearing and the economy is worsening by the minute. In the absence of government programs, children will do worse in this downturn, too. Will we see some of that “equity injection” for children’s well being?

For the impact of the economic downturn on families, take a look at Stephanie Coontz and Valerie Adrian’s briefing report to the Council on Contemporary Families, “Family Stress=Economic Woes.” Warning: it’s depressing.

Virginia Rutter

Proposition 8: Vote No (but be entertained)

Virginia Rutter on October 14, 2008

Prop 8, currently called the Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry Act, is on the ballot in California this November.

If you’re looking for a chuckle, watch and share these great ads–a take off on the Mac/PC series–including one with Molly Ringwald.

And just to get into the spirit, listen to this great ode to California.

(Thanks to friends in SF.)

–Virginia Rutter
XY Files

Hey, XY Files: Masculinity…or something else?

Virginia Rutter on October 11, 2008
Debbie’s post on presidential masculinity in the XY Files got me thinking. My FSC colleague Lisa Eck studies hybridity and postcolonial literature: at the gym the other day, she noted that in our public discourse we don’t have much language to talk about “hybrid” status (some day it won’t be a buzz word: it means multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic). Obama=black candidate, McCain=white candidate is how it goes. We don’t know how to listen, observe, or theorize (eek!) about hybridity. So as I was thinking about what you, and Jackson, and Ellen Goodman, and others have been talking about, I thought, wow, Obama offers a kind of hybrid gender performance to go with his hybrid racial identity, and it is working damn well!

Obama isn’t hepped up on cartoon masculinity like McCain…and yet it doesn’t make sense to think of him as using “feminine” styles in any definitive or exclusive sense. (For cartoon femininity, see Palin, Sarah.) Finally, he certainly is not androgynous in that misfit, uncomfortable “Pat” sense (remember Pat on Saturday Night Live?) But his repertoire is wide, and he is using all sorts of masculine and feminine skills that are working well–and he is avoiding the ones that don’t.

Maybe with the rise of Obama (and other leaders like him?!?!?) we will have the opportunity to sharpen our ability to notice how the plot unfolds when we are observing a candidate who contains and is directly influenced by multiple statuses all at once. And that goes for race as well as gender.

One way that I think about Obama’s successful gender expression comes from social psychology. Research on masculinity and femininity shows that children who are androgynous–that is they use skills that are typically associated with being a boy and those associated with being a girl–have greater social intelligence. They are more effective socially, better liked, more accomplished, and more appealing as partners. When you think about the gender (or race) puzzles unfolding in front of us, remember that what you are seeing is not triumph of masculinity or femininity so much as the triumph of something new, something that works.
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