Douthat abortion fail

Aside from the other critiques around the blogosphere today of Ross Douthat's head-bangingly frustrating column, I also found some glaring inconsistencies, and rather problematic themes he’s got going on. I appreciated his arguably (and rather surprisingly) compassionate response to the MTV special, but he goes on to discuss issues that are either wholly unrelated to a woman’s decision to have an abortion, or off-base in terms of quality of analysis. For example,

In every era, there’s been a tragic contrast between the burden of unwanted pregnancies and the burden of infertility. But this gap used to be bridged by adoption far more frequently than it is today. Prior to 1973, 20 percent of births to white, unmarried women (and 9 percent of unwed births over all) led to an adoption. Today, just 1 percent of babies born to unwed mothers are adopted, and would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason.

Some of this shift reflects the growing acceptance of single parenting. But some of it reflects the impact of Roe v. Wade. Since 1973, countless lives that might have been welcomed into families like Thernstrom’s — which looked into adoption, and gave it up as hopeless — have been cut short in utero instead.

Leaving aside for now the point that it’s no woman’s responsibility to provide children for infertile couples, he’s forgetting that giving up a baby for adoption — after the birth mother spent at least 9 months gestating it, feeling it move, kick, bond with it, etc. — is no easy feat.

He’s also neglecting the reality that “acceptance of single parenting” is hardly a celebration of it. What else should we do to single parents? Abuse them? Deny their existence? Blame them for their situation? Also forgetting that many single parents — primarily women — who are blamed for not giving their children an ideal household are not doing so by their own choice. Their husbands can abandon the family, die, or even just leave the vast majority of involved parenting up to the other parent, without their say. Or vice versa. It’s not always about a casual decision to get married and have kids, or an equally as casual decision to not make that work out as planned.

Supporting single parents and maintaining his stance that a dual-parent household is ideal for raising and nurturing a child don’t have to be mutually exclusive. He has shown time and time again that he believes the best way to discourage behaviors that are contrary to the common idea (or his idea) of what is ideal, like two-parent households, preventing unplanned pregnancies, "traditional" marriage, and now abortion, is to alienate, criminalize, or just outright ignore the existence of the people who are engaging in, or directly affected by these issues. Clearly, the state, or society at large, acting in this manner in the past caused such joys as women dying of botched illegal abortions, forced pregnancy, poverty, marginalization... I can go on.

There is a reason why people continue to fight ideologues like Douthat. It's not because we're hostile to the ideals they set forth, but because we want to avoid the consequences of forcing such ideals on unwilling -- or unable -- participants.

(...Nearly the entirety of this blog post was originally a comment over at The Innocent Smith Journal. InnocentSmith has also responded to Jill and Amanda's critiques here.)

Trend Piece Tuesday: The Paleo Diet

Heard of the Paleo Diet yet? It's a diet that's been around, well, forever, technically, but is gaining a larger following in recent years. From Wikipedia's page on the Paleolithic Diet:

The modern dietary regimen known as the Paleolithic diet (abbreviated paleo diet or paleodiet) [...] is a nutritional plan based on the presumed ancient diet of wild plants and animals that various human species habitually consumed during the Paleolithic—a period of about 2.5 million years duration that ended around 10,000 years ago with the development of agriculture. In common usage, such terms as the "Paleolithic diet" also refer to the actual ancestral human diet. Centered on commonly available modern foods, the "contemporary" Paleolithic diet consists mainly of meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, roots, and nuts; and excludes grains, legumes, dairy products, salt, refined sugar, and processed oils.

That's the real gist of it; you eat what can be hunted or picked, excluding anything that requires processing in order to safely ingest it.

This eating trend is alive in well here in my neck of the woods. While I only know one person who is officially on the Paleo diet, many people I know tend toward a similar way of eating that consists primarily of whole foods, while avoiding foods that are overly-processed. We do this because it's healthier, and feels more natural to eat things that are minimally or unprocessed. More and more people I know are cutting dairy and all refined sugar out of their diets and spending the money saved on more vegetables, CSA boxes, and high-quality, organic produce. It's produced a trend of posting pictures of everything everyone cooks on Facebook, which is both fun and a little annoyingly self-righteous. Contrary to most popular diets, though, the reasoning behind the Paleo diet isn't necessarily weight loss so much as achieving optimal health in the most natural-seeming way possible.

The New York Times has caught on to the Paleo "lifestyle" and interviewed a group of 20-something New Yorkers who are avid Paleo dieters-- or, as they like to call themselves, "cavemen."

Like many New York bachelors, John Durant tries to keep his apartment presentable — just in case he should ever bring home a future Mrs. Durant. He shares the fifth-floor walk-up with three of his buddies, but the place is tidy and he never forgets to water the plants.

The one thing that Mr. Durant worries might spook a female guest is his most recent purchase: a three-foot-tall refrigerated meat locker that sits in a corner of his living room. That is where he keeps his organ meat and deer ribs.

Mr. Durant, 26, who works in online advertising, is part of a small New York subculture whose members seek good health through a selective return to the habits of their Paleolithic ancestors.

Or as he and some of his friends describe themselves, they are cavemen.

The caveman lifestyle, in Mr. Durant’s interpretation, involves eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors faced between hunts. Vegetables and fruit are fine, but he avoids foods like bread that were unavailable before the invention of agriculture. Mr. Durant believes the human body evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and his goal is to wean himself off what he sees as many millenniums of bad habits.

Interestingly, the Paleo diet is immediately described as something masculine and manly, or at least, not womanly. A woman might be afraid to see a large freezer in the apartment of a potential mate (whose last name the writer assumes she will be taking upon marriage). "Ahh! Meat frightening!"

These urban cavemen also choose exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon.

In a city crowded with vegetarian restaurants and yoga studios, the cavemen defy other people’s ideas of healthy living. There is an indisputable macho component to the lifestyle.

“I didn’t want to do some faddish diet that my sister would do,” Mr. Durant said.

No, because in the store of diets, where you wake up one day and think, Gee, I think I'd like to go on a diet today, which one should I pick? faddish diets are for girls.

Only, if we may consult the Almighty Wikipedia,

Belief in fad diets by adherents is often irrational. Many individuals who adhere to fad diets will not consider recommendations made by nutritionists and dietitians.

There are three categories of food fads. Some food fads incorporate a combination of categories:

1. The virtue of a particular food or food group is exaggerated and purported to cure specific diseases, and is therefore incorporated as a primary constituent of an individual’s diet.
2. Foods are eliminated from an individual’s diet because they are viewed as harmful.
3. An emphasis is placed on eating certain foods to express a particular lifestyle.

Extreme faddist diets often lack the energy, suitable protein, fat-soluble vitamins, and some minerals that are essential for growing children. Parents forcing children to adhere to fad diets to the point of severe nutritional disorders is considered a form of child abuse.

Programs often considered fad diets:
Cabbage soup diet
Grapefruit diet
Fit for life
Fruitarianism
Israeli Army diet
Macrobiotic diet
Nutrisystem
Paleolithic diet
South Beach Diet
Gerson therapy

The Paleo diet is easily described by each of those categories. But, to be fair, so are really reasonable, medically-recommended dietary changes, like moderate exercise and a low-fat diet.

What makes most fad diets fail are the strict, unnatural regimens. The Atkins diet eliminated, or at least sharply reduced, a huge number of counter-intuitive food from what was to be considered healthy. Some people may rejoice at the thought that eating pounds of bacon and saying no to broccoli can help you lose weight, but everyone I know whose been on it lasted about a month, and craved bread so bad they were going crazy. There's also the "negative calorie soup" diet, in which you eat nothing but soup made from vegetables that are supposedly so low in calories, that you burn more calories eating it than the vegetable itself contains (which isn't actually true). That diet is intended for short-term weight-loss goals, but according to the above site, is rarely finished to completion due to the lack of variety in flavors, and poor physical health due to the lack of nutrients.

What makes the Paleo diet (and even the South Beach Diet, to some extent) different from these others are two things. One, our ancestors actually used to live on this diet. Two, eliminated are foods that are already known to be bad for you, and as you still have meat, fruits, and most vegetables, the dieter is less likely to "cheat" due to lack of variety. But the thing is, any pattern of eating is a "diet." Changing the way one eats with the goal of weight loss isn't the first, second, or even third entry in Merriam Webster.

But no, the Paleo diet isn't a "diet," because diets are for girls. The Paleo is a lifestyle. In fact,

Mr. Le Corre, 38, who once made soap for a living, promotes what he calls “mouvement naturel” at exercise retreats in West Virginia and elsewhere. His workouts include scooting around the underbrush on all fours, leaping between boulders, playing catch with stones, and other activities at which he believes early man excelled. These are the “primal, essential skills that I believe everyone should have,” he said in an interview.
[...]
Instead of eating three square meals a day, many of New York’s cavemen fast intermittently, up to 36 hours at a stretch. Fasting is a topic of banter at the Union Square West apartment where Matthew Sanocki and his brother, Andrew, live and run design-related e-commerce Web sites.

How very tough of them. Durant's Paleo group does have one female member, though. Her name is Melissa McEwan. She gets about two sentences' worth of coverage.

Besides my annoyance with the framing of diet as prohibitively "manly," I'm not convinced that women aren't into the diet as much as men. And since, as Jill so aptly describes the authors of these trend pieces in a recent post on Feministe,

Clearly, most of their contributors are just writing about their own friends in small-ish New York media circles that revolve around the Upper West Side, the Village and Brownstone Brooklyn, where chicken coops and pet choices are breaking news,

I guess makes me qualified to say that I think that lots of hipster-ish, late-twenties and early-thirties folks in the city with design and media jobs, and also psychology students and nomadic landscapers, as well as bored bank employees, and disgruntled liquor store clerks, and scores of other people who like to stay on top of how to be cooler than everyone else, are taking the "green" trend to its next, natural level and changing their diets and exercise habits.

Fascinating.

Pappa's Got a Brand New Stash

Sexy

by Warren

One of the often misperceived "perils" of being an active member of today's online social media is that we're letting loose to the world our personal details and in turn may be subjected to their emotional feelings about a wide range of topics <GASP>.  I actually find this interaction a good thing and yes, I'm talking about facebook.  The true reality? We often find ourselves perusing the pictures of a high school friend's new baby, or maybe learning too much about why your friend's nostril whistles when asked to answer questions in front of large groups of people or simply to witness the fun that can be had by adding your own clever way of saying "Happy Birthday",  for the 200th entry that day, on someone else's wall.

As you may already know, comments on facebook, forums or social media sites that boast an active community of people might occasionally get a little absurd, but in reality it's often the converse (i.e. the banal "I'm brushing my teeth" updates) that happens most. Yet I was hoping that it could be here where I'd find a unique story, one that would pertain to "men's health", a topic I felt to be an apt perspective to share via Ethecofem and one that is generally underrepresented in the media today.  Certainly the attention paid to breast cancer and all other women's cancer issues are justified, all I'm stating is that not nearly the same effort has historically been put into fundraising for the men's cancer concerns.  Just this week, The Washington Post put it rather starkly:

About 32,000 men will die of prostate cancer in 2010, according to estimates by the American Cancer Society. That's not far behind the nearly 40,000 women who will die of breast cancer this year.

This is where the month of Movember has changed things.

Over the past month I've watched as two fraternity (a historically literary fraternity) brothers of mine  have taken on the Movember challenge:  to grow, groom and photograph your mustache (examples of a "mo") for the entire month of November, all the while raising money for men's health concerns, including prostate and testicular cancer.  The idea was started in Melbourne Australia 7 years ago and has since grown into a world wide phenomenon.  Just this weekend the results of 2010's Movember campaign are being updated and world wide, this year's mo-vement saw over 500,000 participants (nearly double the 255 thousand in 2009) with over 60 million dollars raised (and counting) or $18 million more than in 2009.  The direct benefactors for the American arm of the Movember Foundation are the Prostate Cancer Foundation and LIVESTRONG, the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which portions it's funds out to Fertile Hope, My Planet, in addition to creating an educational video series with the Nurse Oncology Education Program.  And as any legitimate non-profit should, you can peep where their money goes via their annual reports page.

Also of note, since this phenomenon began in Australia, it's primary sources of fundraising have come almost exclusively from British Empire countries, with Canada ($20m), Australia ($19m) and England ($12m) leading the way.  So while the US has contributed nearly 7 million dollars this year, Movember's merits are only just beginning to dawn on the world's economic leader, which we can only hope to be an even larger contributor in years to come.  It only appears to be the natural course of events that such a continuation of growth, of both facial hair and interest, will continue on our shores because seriously, in time you will get bored of all those adorable baby pictures, extraordinary human foibles and random blog posts about facial hair, right?  For our sake, I hope that especially the latter isn't true...

The problem with makeup

Since my last day at my soul-sucking job two weeks ago at the morally bankrupt financial institution where I was employed for three years, I have yet to put on any makeup. I've written about the topic before, and gone into great detail about the more malicious and/or deceptive practices of marketers for cosmetic companies and why they piss me off, but I'd like to approach the topic from a slightly different angle this time around.

A blogger by the name of Rachel Rabbit White started what ended up being a pretty far-reaching movement called No Make-Up Week this past September. I thought about going along with it, but ended up forgetting or realizing I'd put on mascara or something and figured I'd sit it out, but it's a great idea, nonetheless. As Rachel says,

The philosophy is this. Make-up is great. It is a powerful tool, a way to express yourself, your mood and interior life. But, when you can’t go without something, it loses it’s spark.

A study online claims that 8 out of 10 women prefer their female colleagues to wear makeup and the same number of women said they would rather employ a woman who wore makeup than one who didn’t. Because of these expectations, I think it’s hard for any woman to have a good relationship to make-up.

Makeup and other cosmetics are great, fun ways to be creative with one's appearance. My problems with makeup are easily summed up in two ways:

1. Makeup is not marketed as a fun way to be creative with one's appearance; it's marketed as a necessity to cover, hide, or otherwise correct a woman's appearance. Implicit in this marketing is the assumption that there is always something wrong with the way that women look. This is perpetuated by douchey magazines like Cosmo and even teen rags like YM and others who give incessant "tips" about how to apply makeup to "problem areas" and from which cosmetic company to purchase them.

2. Makeup is only marketed to women. If makeup is to be used to cover "problem areas" or improve the appearance of the person wearing it, one would assume that men would also want these products, too, no? Apparently not; men are apparently believed to either have perfect appearances, or they're not expected to look attractive at all times. Either way you look at it, the assumptions are sexist in nature, and contribute not only to misogyny, but also to deliberately manipulative marketing schemes that are deceptive to the targeted audience and irresponsible to the environment and their customers' health.

Eliminating my use of makeup isn't a huge change for me, really; the only thing I need to eliminate from my daily makeup routine is mascara. Mascara is hard for me, though, because I feel like I look like a completely different person without it on. With foundation cream, undereye concealer, etc., I feel like the way I actually look isn't changed too drastically, but mascara lengthens and darkens eyelashes, which makes my eyes look like a different shape. Without mascara on, I feel like my eyes disappear into my face.

But see, not only is the idea that mascara changes the shape of my eyes probably not even true, but that is an insecurity that makeup causes. I didn't feel like I needed mascara until after I got into the habit of putting on mascara and other cosmetics every day, and as a result, wasn't used to the way my own face looked without it on. I also foolishly never washed it off until morning, just before I reapplied it, giving me even less time to see my actual face.

I don't think make-up needs to be a contentious issue, or something that a woman has to swear off in order to be a "good feminist." I'd like to see make-up sold as a creative tool, and marketed to both women and men. Unfortunately, exploiting women's socialized fear of being physically imperfect sells more products, and nothing short of a complete overhaul is likely to change this behavior.

With swearing off makeup, at least temporarily, I hope to be able to recognize my face again and not feel like it needs to be altered, which will allow me to see makeup exactly the way I want to, as an occasional way to be creative with my appearance.

Gender and Genitals

Wow its been a while I since I last posted here. With N bowing out I need to make sure April doesn't get discouraged. Here goes.

Okay in kind of in tune with my last post I want to talk about gender and violence but this time instead of rape I want to talk about genitals (as the title says).

I'm going to go straight to the point.

Why is it socially acceptable for a female* to hit a male* in the genitals regardless of the circumstances?

Now I want to start from the get go by saying that I'm not talking about the actual justifiable instances such as fending off an attacker.

I'm talking about how like in the Beverly Hillbillies movie when Ellie Mae Clampett in that wrestling match blatantly hit her opponent in the testicles. I've yet to hear of any high school wrestling association where intentional hits to the genitals were allowed.

I'm talking about all those movies and media where when a female is simply pissed off at a guy she responds by kicking him in the testicles. If he says something she doesn't like kick him in the testicles. If he does something that she doesn't like (but not including physical contact with her person) kick him in the testicles. If she does something as innocent as swing a bag the wrong way and hits him in the testicles she seems to be split between laughing and being concerned for him.

Now some will say that its acceptable because the violence that females commit against males is not taken seriously because of the belief that a female really can't hurt a male but I think there is more to it than that.

The reason I say there is more to it than that is because when a female attacks a male in this manner its often not simply just written off as not serious but said female is actively encouraged and praised for attacking in such a painful manner even when its not called for. (And allow me to assure you. As a person who carries a pair of testicles getting hit in them HURTS A LOT.) Like when Ellie Mae stomped on her opponents testicles during that match all you hear from the crowd is the "oooooo!" and then praise for her winning the match, despite using very dirty moves.

Now given how she performed in that match I think it was pretty clear that she was on par with him. So why is such an attacked allowed to go unquestioned?

Maybe it has something to do with being a "real man" (as The System says that those who carry testicles must be men but that's another story for another day) meaning not responding to pain so therefore if a male doubles over after such a hit its a sign of his weakness aka proof that he is not a man and thus the greenlight to ridicule him lights up. Ergo when Ellie Mae won that match, even with illegal moves, it was still passed off as a humiliation on his part.

Moving on from Ellie Mae look at how a hit to the testicles is often used as a comic device. Need a quick laugh? Hit someone below the belt. And beyond the whole thing about how females can't really hurt males this seems to be a way for a quick random laugh whether its done by a female, male, animal, or inanimate object (extra points if said male does something that causes a chain reaction that ends with a hit to their own genitals).

Are you by chance familiar with America's Funniest Home Videos? It was (or is I'm not sure if its still running) a weekly tv show in which people sent in funny clips in hopes of winning a $25,000 cash prize. You would not believe how many "guy gets hit in the nuts" videos aired on that show during the years. Whether by men, women, children, pets, or fault of their own can you really imagine videos of females getting hit in the genitals being up for cash prizes on prime time television?

So I suppose the question should be:
Why is it that a male* getting hit in the genitals is not just socially acceptable but seen as funny and is encouraged and praised, regardless of the circumstance?

Just wondering.

* - I'm using male and female here instead of boy/man and girl/woman because I'm breaking this down by genitals we carry, not by the presentation that we go by. And for the most part those who carry testicles, those who are made fun of for getting hit there, are male

How close are you to your food?

Yesterday, I was feeling creative and decided to vegetize homemade macaroni. I bought pasta shells, 2 different varieties of "Italian blend" shredded cheese, a bag of shredded parmesan cheese, red and yellow peppers, fresh zucchini, and soy milk.

I went home, sauteed the vegetables in olive oil and ground pepper, boiled the noodles, added the milk and the cheese (and a little butter) to the noodles, and found that the cheese was clumpy and sticking to the spoon, and just not mixing well at all. I was used to the powdered kind, or the creamy "sauce packet" kind that came in the box.

Then is hit me: I had never, before only embarrassingly recently, considered cheese as a possibility for a pasta topping. Tomato sauce, alfredo sauce, beef sauce, sure. Cheese? Huh? That didn't even occur to me.

Even though I've been eating macaroni and cheese for my entire life.

My mom even made homemade macaroni and cheese. She used Velveeta, though, because it melted easily. It wasn't real cheese, and the easy meltability wasn't indicative of a "cheesiness," but rather a feature of the food product.

It only just now occurred to me that I can put cheese on pasta and that cheesy pasta isn't just some weird invention. And I've been eating macaroni and cheese my entire life. What does that say about our relationship with food today? (All right, I'm only talking about my relationship with food today, but I hardly think my experience is unique.) Macaroni and cheese didn't come from a blue and yellow box. It came from PASTA AND CHEESE. Kraft simply made a product out of the combination, and we allowed Kraft to redefine macaroni and cheese for us, to the point that cheese and pasta without the blue and yellow box stopped making sense.

Oh, if you're curious, the macaroni that I made was amazing:

Random Thoughts

I've been throwing around ideas for posts for a few days, but have had little motivation to complete a thorough post about any of these ideas in their potential entirety with all the holiday business (busyness? Huh?), so I thought I'd throw out some discussion-starters:

I've been thinking about the post I wrote about prostitution, and how I was so adamantly anti all sex-for-money actions. I realized that my anti position was contradictory to my pro-legalization position when I considered many women's opinion of abortion.

Many women say that they could never have an abortion, and therefore they are against it. But every woman's circumstances are different and women who have had abortions haven't done it for the same reason. It's okay to say you'll never have an abortion, but support other women's right to legal and safe access to abortion.

So, I realized that, ultimately, even though I don't see myself entering the sex industry, I support giving other women the legal option of doing so if they want or need to. And that's really all I needed to know to realize that I was supportive of sex-worker's rights, and that I didn't need to preface the argument or add a disclaimer.


I have been seeing many ways in which feminism and environmentalism et al mirror religions, namely the evangelical Christian movement. I allow the "tenants" of feminism and anti-oppression ideology to frame my behavior and filter my actions in many of the ways a person might make decisions within the framework of the teachings of Christ. This creeps me out quite a bit, but I don't really know what to think about that. Do all passions or schools of thought have the power to become evangelical? Is it inherently bad to be evangelical, or am I just feeling this way because of the associations with evangelicalism and anti-progressive legislation and rhetoric? I don't appreciate being evangelized at, so I'd hate to be associated with the same behavior. What does this say about claims that all humans naturally seek out an idea of a higher power or purpose? If we don't follow a mainstream belief system like Christianity or Judaism, do we replace it with something else, like astrology or feminism or yoga? Or is spiritual belief a learned trait?

I'm personally conflicted about the "tone argument." It's apparent that tone is important when attempting to educate people and pass legislation, but is one ever required to mind their tone when addressing or engaging with a group of people about the ways in which they suffer oppression? Is it ever appropriate to require "good manners" or the dreaded reasonable, logical approach when having a discussion with someone about (a) ways(s) in which they experience oppression, especially if you can identify with the oppressor in question (i.e. black woman discussing racism with white woman)?