politics

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

I’ve been watching the response to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Why Women Still Can’t Have It All roll out across the web.  Commentators are making excellent points, but E.J. Graff at The American Prospect sums it up nicely:

Being both a good parent and an all-out professional cannot be done the way we currently run our educational and work systems… Being a working parent in our society is structurally impossible. It can’t be done right… You’ll always be failing at something — as a spouse, as a parent, as a worker. Just get used to that feeling.

In other words, the cards are stacked against you and it’s gonna suck.

And it’s true, trust me, as someone who’s currently knee-deep in the literature on parenting and gender, I’m pleased to see the structural contradictions between work and parenting being discussed.

But I’m frustrated about an invisibility, an erasure, a taboo that goes unnamed.  It seems like it should at least get a nod in this discussion.  I’m talking about the one really excellent solution to the clusterf@ck that is parenting in America.

Don’t. Have. Kids.

No really — just don’t have them.

Think about it.  The idea that women will feel unfulfilled without children and die from regret is one of the most widely-endorsed beliefs in America.  It’s downright offensive to some that a woman would choose not to have children.  Accusations of “selfishness” abound.  It’s a given that women will have children, and many women will accept it as a given.

But we don’t have to.  The U.S. government fails to support our childrearing efforts with sufficient programs (framing it as a “choice” or “hobby”), the market is expensive (child care costs more than college in most states), and we’re crammed into nuclear family households (making it difficult to rely on extended kin, real or chosen).  And the results are clear: raising children changes the quality of your life.  In good ways, sure, but in bad ways too.

Here are findings from the epic data collection engine that is the World Values Survey, published in Population and Development Review. If you live in the U.S., look at the blue line representing “liberal” democracies (that’s what we are).  The top graph shows that, among 20-39 year olds, having one child is correlated with a decrease in happiness, having two a larger decreases, and so on up to four or more.  If you’re 40 or older, having one child is correlated with a decrease in happiness and having more children a smaller one.  But even the happiest people, with four or more children, are slightly less happy than those with none at all.

Don’t shoot the messenger.

Long before Slaughter wrote her article for The Atlantic, when she floated the idea of writing it to a female colleague, she was told that it would be a “terrible signal to younger generations of women.”  Presumably, this is because having children is compulsory, so it’s best not to demoralize them.  Well, I’ll take on that Black Badge of Dishonor.  I’m here to tell still-childless women (and men, too) that they can say NO if they want to.  They can reject a lifetime of feeling like they’re “always… failing at something.”

I wish it were different. I wish that men and women could choose children and know that the conditions under which they parent will be conducive to happiness.  But they’re not.  As individuals, there’s little we can do to change this, especially in the short term.  We can, however, try to wrest some autonomy from the relentless warnings that we’ll be pathetically-sad-forever-and-ever if we don’t have babies.  And, once we do that, we can make a more informed measurement of the costs and benefits.

Some of us will choose to spend our lives doing something else instead.  We’ll learn to play the guitar, dance the Flamenco (why not?), get more education, travel to far away places, write a book, or start a welcome tumblr.  We can help raise our nieces and nephews, easing the burden on our loved ones, or focus on nurturing our relationships with other adults.  We can live in the cool neighborhoods with bad school districts and pay less in rent because two bedrooms are plenty.  We can eat out, sleep in, and go running.  We can have extraordinary careers, beautiful relationships, healthy lives, and lovely homes.  My point is: there are lots of great things to do in life… having children is only one of them.

Just… think about it.  Maybe you can spend your extra time working to change the system for the better.  Goodness knows parents will be too tired to do it.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

This is the second part in a series about how girls and women can navigate a culture that treats them like sex objects (see also, part One). Cross-posted at Ms. and Caroline Heldman’s Blog.

The “sex wars”  of the 1980s pitted radical feminists, who claimed that female sexual objectification is dehumanizing, against feminists concerned about legal and social efforts to control and repress female sexuality.  Over a decade of research now shows that radical feminists were right to be highly concerned.

Getting back to the “sex wars” and how radical feminists were right, women who grow up in a culture with widespread sexual objectification tend to view themselves as objects of desire for others. This internalized sexual objectification has been linked to problems with mental health (e.g., clinical depression, “habitual body monitoring”), eating disorders, body shame, self-worth and life satisfaction, cognitive functioning, motor functioning, sexual dysfunction, access to leadership, and political efficacy.  Women of all ethnicities internalize objectification, as do men to a lesser extent.

Beyond the internal effects, sexually objectified women are dehumanized by others and seen as less competent and worthy of empathy by both men and women.  Furthermore, exposure to images of sexually objectified women causes male viewers to be more tolerant of sexual harassment and rape myths.  Add to this the countless hours that most girls/women spend primping and competing with one another to garner heterosexual male attention, and the erasure of middle-aged and elderly women who have little value in a society that places women’s primary value on their sexualized bodies.

Theorists have also contributed to understanding the harm of objectification culture by pointing out the difference between sexy and sexual.  If one thinks of the subject/object dichotomy that dominates thinking in Western culture, subjects act and objects are acted upon.  Subjects are sexual, while objects are sexy.

Pop culture sells women and girls a hurtful lie: that their value lies in how sexy they appear to others, and they learn at a very young age that their sexuality is for others.  At the same time, being sexual, is stigmatized in women but encouraged in men. We learn that men want and women want-to-be-wanted. The yard stick for women’s value (sexiness) automatically puts them in a subordinate societal position, regardless of how well they measure up.  Perfectly sexy women are perfectly subordinate.

The documentary Miss Representation has received considerable mainstream attention, one indicator that many are now recognizing the damaging effects of female sexual objectification.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gkIiV6konY]

To sum up, widespread sexual objectification in U.S. popular culture creates a toxic environment for girls and women.  The following posts in this series provide ideas for navigating new objectification culture in personally and politically meaningful ways.

Earlier this month, Louisiana’s legislature voted to expand its school voucher program to cover the entire state, allowing parents whose children attend low-rated schools to use government-funded vouchers to help pay the cost of tuition at one of about 125 schools on an approved list (assuming, of course, their child is accepted). Another law recently passed in the state will provide tax credits for private donations to voucher programs, a policy already implemented in some states, including Pennsylvania.

Critics have expressed concern about some of the schools approved for the program, including a lack of site visits in the approval process and the inclusion of schools that do not appear to have the facilities or staff for the large increases in enrollment that would result if all of their available vouchers were used.

The expansion of the voucher program has also brought renewed attention to the curricula used at schools receiving state funds through voucher systems. Some of the schools approved for the voucher program in Louisiana, as well as other states, use textbooks produced by several evangelical organizations, including A Beka Book and Bob Jones University. In the documentary School Choice: Taxpayer-Funded Creationism, Bigotry, and Bias, Rachel Tabachnick and Bruce Wilson discuss Pennsylvania’s voucher program. Here’s an 8-minute clip focusing on the contents of some textbooks published by A Beka Book and BJU:

Examples from A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press Curricula from Bruce Wilson on Vimeo.

Highlights:

• Humans and dinosaurs co-existed.
• God designed “checks and balances” to prevent environmental crises, so chill! After all, “Roses are red, violets are blue; they both grow better with more CO2.”
• “Rumors” of foreclosures, high unemployment, homelessness, and general misery during the Great Depression are just socialist propaganda.
• Unions just want to destroy the accomplishments of “hardworking Americans.”
• Mormons, Unitarians, and Catholics = bad.
• And then there’s the history of racial/ethnic relations: “God used the ‘Trail of Tears’ to bring many Indians to Christ” and “Through the Negro spiritual, slaves developed patience to wait on the Lord and discovered that the truest freedom is freedom from the bondage of sin.” No, seriously — I didn’t make those up.

You can read some additional examples in a recent post at Salon, including the following:

Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the `Loch Ness Monster’ in Scotland? `Nessie,’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.

Schools using these texts have been approved to receive government funds for education. It highlights one of critics’ concerns about voucher programs: that it is, in effect, often a way to provide taxpayer-funded education that is explicitly religious and may or may not conform to accepted standards of scientific inquiry.

Here’s the full-length documentary:

School Choice: Taxpayer-Funded Creationism, Bigotry, and Bias from Rachel Tabachnick on Vimeo.

Also see our earlier post on a Texas textbook standards advisor explaining that books should emphasize the positive, such as how minorities ought to be really grateful to Whites for giving them rights.

The Fourth Estate has found that the vast majority of people quoted in news coverage of the 2012 election are men.  The media research group collected a sample of election-related news stories from print newspapers and TV broadcasts, finding that 13% of print sources were women (79% were men and 8% were organizations) and 16% of TV sources were women (81% were men and 3% were organizations).

Male dominance was true in all outlets, though Meet the Press and Time Warner stand out as the least disproportionate:

This might be old (though still frustrating) news, except for the fact that the pattern held for issues traditionally considered “women’s”: abortion, birth control, Planned Parenthood, and women’s rights (blue is men, pink is women, grey is organizations):

This asymmetry is found across media.  See also our posts on gender and book reviewing, gender and top billing at Paramount pictures, gender and top creatives for family movies, and women as news subjects.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that our biggest economic challenge is runaway government spending. The reality is that government spending is contracting and pulling economic growth down with it.  And worse is yet to come.

Perhaps the best measure of active government intervention in the economy is something called “government consumption expenditure and gross investment.”  It includes total spending by all levels of government (federal, state, and local) on all activities except transfer payments (such as unemployment benefits, social security, and Medicare).  

The chart below shows the yearly percentage change in real government consumption expenditure and gross investment over the period 2000 to 2012 (first quarter).  As you can see, while the rate of growth in real spending began declining after the end of the recession, it took a nose dive beginning in 2011 and turned negative, which means that government spending (adjusted for inflation) is actually contracting.

The next chart, which shows the ratio of government consumption expenditure and gross investment to GDP, highlights the fact that government spending is also falling as a share of GDP.

Adding transfer payments, which have indeed grown substantially because of the weak economy, does little to change the picture.  As the chart below shows, total government spending in current dollars, which means unadjusted for inflation, has stopped growing.  If we take inflation into account, there can be no doubt that total real government spending, including spending on transfer payments, is also contracting. 

The same is true for the federal government, everyone’s favorite villain.  As the next chart shows, total federal spending, unadjusted for inflation, has also stopped growing.

Not surprisingly, this decline in government spending is having an effect on GDP. Real GDP in the 4^th Quarter of 2011 grew at an estimated 3 percent annual rate.  The advanced estimate for 1^st Quarter 2012 GDP growth was 2.2 percent.  A just released second estimate for this same quarter revised that figure down to 1.9 percent.  In other words, our economy is rapidly slowing.

What caused the downward revision? 

The answer, says Ed Dolan, is the ever deepening contraction in government spending:  

What is driving the apparent slowdown? It would be comforting to be able to blame a faltering world economy and a strengthening dollar, but judging by the GDP numbers that does not seem to be the case. The following table (see below) shows the contributions of each sector to real GDP growth according to the advance and second estimates from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Exports, which we would expect to show the effects of a slowing world economy, held up well in the first quarter. In fact, the second estimate showed them even stronger than did the advance estimate. The contribution of private investment also increased from the advance to the second estimate, although not by as much. Exports and investment, then, turn out to be the relatively good news, not the bad, in the latest GDP report.

Instead, the largest share of the decrease in estimated real GDP growth came from an accelerated shrinkage of the government sector. The negative .78 percentage point decrease of the government sector is the main indicator that we are already on the downward slope toward the fiscal cliff.

If current trends aren’t bad enough, we are rapidly approaching, as Ed Dolan noted, the “fiscal cliff.” That is what I was referring to above when I said that worse is yet to come. As Bloomberg Businessweek explains:  

Last summer, as part of its agreement to end the debt-ceiling debate (debacle?), Congress strapped a bomb to the economy and set the timer for January 2013. Into it they packed billions of dollars of mandatory discretionary spending cuts, timed to go off at exactly the same time a number of tax cuts [for example, the Bush tax cuts and the Obama payroll-tax holiday] were set to expire  

The congressional deficit supercommittee had a chance to disarm the bomb last fall, but of course it didn’t. And so the timer has kept ticking. The resulting double-whammy explosion of spending cuts and tax increases will likely send the economy careening off a $600 billion “fiscal cliff.”

The fiscal contraction will actually be even worse, since the extended unemployment benefits program is also scheduled to expire at the end of the year.  

So, what does all of this mean?  According to Bloomberg Businessweek:

If Congress does nothing, the U.S. will almost certainly go into recession early next year, as the combo of spending cuts and tax hikes will wipe out nearly 4 percentage points of economic growth in the first half of 2013, according to research by Goldman’s Alec Phillips, a political analyst and economist. Since most estimates project the economy will grow only about 3 percent next year, that puts the U.S. solidly in the red.

One can only wonder how it has come to pass that we think government spending is growing when it is not and that it is the cause of our problems when quite the opposite is true.  Painful lessons lie ahead — if only we are able to learn them.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, sex researcher Alfred Kinsey estimated that about 10% of the population was something other than straight (and then, as now, a much larger number have same sex experiences or attraction).  Today scholars believe that about 3.5% of the U.S. population identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual, a considerably lower number.  Yet, a telling poll by Gallup shows that Americans wildly — wildly — overestimate the number of people who identify as non-heterosexual:

The table shows that more than a third of Americans believe that more than one out of every four people identifies as gay or lesbian.  Only 4% of Americans answered “less than 5%,” the correct answer.

Estimates varied by demographics and political leaning. Liberals were more likely to overestimate, as were younger people, women, Southerners, and people with less education and income:

Interestingly, these numbers are higher than in 2008, when Gallup asked a similar questions. In that poll, only a quarter of the respondents choose “more than 25%” and more than twice as many said that they had “no opinion.”

Gallup concludes: “…it is clear that America’s gay population — no matter the size — is becoming a larger part of America’s mainstream consciousness.”

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Identifying as Republican is strongly associated with religiosity in the U.S., so much so that people often use the term “Republican” and “Religious Right” interchangeably. Indeed, religious people are more likely to be politically conservative overall, but a Gallup poll shows that this relationship is moderated by race.  The figure below cross-tabulates religiosity for four racial/ethnic groups with the likelihood of affiliating with the Democratic or Republican party or neither.  You can see that the typical relationship — religion/Republican and no religion/Democrat — holds for all groups, except for African Americans.

At Gallup, Frank Newport writes:

Asian and Hispanic Americans, regardless of religiousness, are more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans. But the Democratic advantage goes from 14 points among very religious Asians to 44 points among nonreligious Asians. The differences are less substantial among Hispanics; very religious Hispanics are more likely to identify themselves as a Democrats than Republicans by 20 points, while nonreligious Hispanics are more likely to identify themselves as Democrats by a larger 36-point margin.

Personal religiousness makes little difference among blacks, however, as the powerful partisan pull of Democratic identification among black Americans trumps any influence of religion.

The report is a great example of the importance of doing intersectional analyses.  When you pull groups apart (by, say, adding race when looking at the relationship between religion and politics), you often find that a more generalized examination is hiding interesting details.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

In recent Democratic primaries in Appalachian states, Obama lost 40% of the vote.  The anti-Obama Democrats voted for candidates like “uncommitted” (Kentucky), an unknown lawyer (Arkansas), and a man who is incarcerated in Texas (West Virginia).

Could it be that there’s racism at work in Appalachia?  Or is the anti-Obama vote based entirely on opposition to his policies?

The 2008 Presidential election — Obama v. McCain — offers some hints.  For those with short memories, the Bush legacy — an unpopular war and an economic catastrophe — may have hurt the GOP.  In that election, the country went Democratic.  The Democrats did better than they had in 2004, the Republicans worse.  But not everywhere.  The Times provides this map:

Still, it’s possible that those voters in Appalachia preferred the policies of candidate Kerry to those of candidate Obama.  As Chris Cilizza says in in a Washington Post blog (here), the idea that race had anything to do with this shift is…

…almost entirely unprovable because it relies on assuming knowledge about voter motivations that — without being a mindreader — no one can know.

Cilizza quotes Cornell Belcher, the head of a polling firm with the Monkish name Brilliant Corners:

One man’s racial differences is another man’s cultural differences.

Right.  The folks in Appalachia preferred John Kerry’s culture.

I’m generally cautious about attributing mental characteristics to people based on a single bit of behavior.  But David Weigel, in Slate, goes back to the 2008 Democratic primaries – Obama versus Hillary Clinton.  A CNN exit poll asked voters if race was an important factor in their vote. In West Virginia and Kentucky, about 20% of the voters in the Democratic primary said yes.  Were those admittedly race-conscious voters more anti-Obama than other Democrats?

As Weigel points out, this was before Obama took office, before voters really knew what policies he would propose.  Besides, there wasn’t all that much difference in his policies and those of Hillary Clinton.

Cilizza is right that we can’t read voters’ minds.  But to argue that there was no racial motivation, you have to discount what the voters said and what they did.