My mom told me a while back that her feelings about childbirth changed a lot after watching our cat Tod¹ give birth. Tod gave birth in a box in our closet, and she was purring the whole time. My mom said it was kind of a revelation: that birth isn’t a medical emergency, it is a normal thing that women are naturally equipped for.

Update: Thinking back, I think I misrepresented my Mom a little bit. I don’t think she said anything about medical emergencies or normalness or naturalness. I think she just said that she realized it doesn’t have to be a terrifyingly painful thing. That it can be calm, and manageable. I should ask her what she really said though.

I didn’t know where to start, but I watched the clip again, and now I know exactly where to begin:

Mika Brzezinski? She is my new hero. I am not the only one. Several hundred other bloggers feel the same way.

And Joe Scarborough and the other guy? Douchebags. They are continually talking over Brzezinski, interrupting her by compelling the producer to roll footage while she is speaking, physically removing items from her possession, and generally treating her like an inferior, an overemotional woman who was given a little too much power and now needs to be controlled.

The truth is, Brzezinski has bigger balls than either of those two guys will ever even fantasize about. They’re clearly uncomfortable with it, and the only solution they can think of is to try and be cute. You know, they put on their cute face, fire up their little misogynistic humor circuit, and then ha ha ha treat a woman as a plaything, and aren’t they so cute?

No, boys, you are not cute. You are obnoxious children.

Found on Just Dreadful.

This is accompanied by a significant increase in the girl/boy ratio in applicants. Far more girls are applying to college, and yet roughly equal numbers of boys and girls are getting accepted. The major reason cited in the article is a desire in admissions committees to keep the gender ratio close to 50/50. That smells pretty fishy to me, so I started writing some emails.

The first email I wrote was to Marilyn Hesser, Senior Associate Director of Admission at the University of Richmond, who is quoted several times in the article. Here’s the first chunk of my message:

“Today I read an article in USA Today called “Admittedly Unequal” which quoted you saying that the University of Richmond has a policy of rejecting better qualified female applicants over slightly lesser qualified male applicants in the name of maintaining an equal proportion of both kinds of students. I am certain that you and your colleagues have thought this decision over very carefully, and do not take it lightly, but I would like to urge you to please reconsider this policy.”

In retrospect, that was an unfair characterization on my part. If I were to write the letter again, I’d assume that I was wrong about my understanding of the policy, and ask if it really was what I thought it was. Hesser responded almost immediately, very politely asking where in the article she described such a policy, offering to try to address my specific concerns.

I went back and looked carefully at the article, and realized that it was this quote from her that concerned me:

“The board of trustees has said that the admissions office can go as far as 55-45 [women to men].”

That kind of policy suggested to me that if 60 percent of the top candidates are women, some of those women would have to be rejected in favor of less qualified men. Hesser responded again very quickly, saying:

“I can understand how you might have misinterpreted the quote ‘The board of trustees has said that the admissions office can go as far as 55-45 [women to men].’ This happens when words are excerpted from a larger context. The day of the interview, I went on to explain that the reason the board of trustees had set the 55-45% female to male ratio was because this was the range at which we were able to admit both men and women of comparable academic promise.”

Which puts aside some of my fears, at least for the incoming class of 2007. But I still wonder: why do they need to set a ratio at all? Why can’t they just admit the best applicants, male, female, black, white, hispanic, queer, straight, differently abled, etc.? I’m guessing the board of trustees doesn’t issue decisions stating that only, say, 10-20 percent of admits can be Hispanic.

And it still troubles me that admissions committees are concerned about the ratio and what kind of ratio students want. I don’t care if students prefer a 50/50 ratio, I think schools should admit the candidates who will contribute the most to the campus, be it through academic performance, social contributions, or diversity of thought and practice.

I don’t like it, but I have to mention the concerns about the dating scene. You know, the “but our girls won’t have enough boys to date!” concerns. I could raise red flags about the heteronormativity of those concerns, and I could point out that women are more likely to practice fluid sexuality[1] than men are, which would mitigate the difficulties with having a smaller pool of heterosexual men. I could do those things but I won’t. *cough*

The real problem with admission committee deciding what the dating pool should be like for women is that it takes the decision away from the applicants in question. If your school is 60% women, and women are still applying in droves, it means they don’t care. Either they’re queer or they just don’t care about having a huge pool of guys available for dating. Women who don’t need a man to complete their lives. What a concept!

Moving right along… The next letter I sent was to Henry Broaddus, Dean of Admission at The College of William and Mary. I lodged roughly the same complaint I sent to Hesser. He responded in no uncertain terms:

“… at no point in our admission process do we hold men,
or any other subset of the applicant pool, to a different set of
admission standards. The only demographic criterion to which the
College is beholden is the in-state/out-of-state ratio of 65/35 as
per its agreement with the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

And he went on to point out that the SAT scores for women admits are actually a little lower than the scores for men, and one of the reasons for the disproportion in admits is that there are far more women applicants. I responded, in part:

“I’m still troubled by the difference in admissions rates (according to the article 44% and 26% for men and women, respectively). There seem to be only two explanations for that difference:

1) The women applicants are on average less qualified, or
2) The admissions requirements are stricter for women.

Are you saying that the former is true?”

Broaddus responded, in full:

“Mr. Pukinskis, it’s not so much that the female applicants are less qualified as it is the case that there are simply more of them.

Yes, men are disproportionately represented in the admitted group relative to the applicant pool, but that’s in large part attributable to the highly self-selected group of men who apply.

Further complicating simple statistics based on gender alone is the fact that the disproportion of women relative to men is even greater among our out-of-state pool, which has an overall admit rate of 26% (for men and women). That depresses the numbers considerably.”

The point about the out-of-state pool is a good one, and certainly accounts for some of the gap. But the first bit, that there are simply more female applicants, doesn’t really address my question, which has to do with the admission rate, not the number of admits. And second point, really, is affirmation of my suggestion #1: the women applicants are on average less qualified. Because the men are a “highly self-selected group of men”.

So, apparently there are circumstances that are discouraging lesser male applicants from applying. I’m willing to accept that, but I’d sure like to know what those circumstances are.

But in the end, I don’t think the problem is as big as I thought it was. Really, my only remaining concern is that some of the admissions staff in the article seem to talk about 50/50 ratios as if they’re a good thing for universities. As far as I’m concerned the proper reaction to a 60/40 girl/boy admit ratio is “rock on! We’ve got more and more ladies kicking ass and taking names, and we’re more than happy to accept every one of them into our university family. A female majority is yet another way we can encourage a pro-feminist anti-patriarchy environment on our campus.”

Maybe When Feminists Rule The World.

[1] Baumeister, R.F. (2000). Gender differences in erotic plasticity: The female sex drive as socially flexible and responsive. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 347-374.

I reel myself in like this with some regularity, for several reasons. In this case, I felt that to comment was to imply that the conversation is incomplete without a man-born man’s perspective. In other cases, I’m pretty sure that whatever it is that I am thinking about the topic is shortsighted. It’s more likely that I have something to learn from continuing to ponder what’s already been said than it is that the women readers have something to learn from my perspective.

I sometimes won’t post because I know my opinion is likely to change radically in the coming months, and I don’t want my ignorance immortalized. Other times, I just don’t want to convert a woman-only space into a mixed space, because I know how valuable woman-only spaces can be. And many women bloggers prefer to have as strong a woman:man ratio as possible, and I want to respect that.

I’m pretty sure that there are a lot of men who lurk in the feminist blogosphere who have learned that their role, most of the time, is to shut up and listen. Unfortunately, those men become completely invisible and the remaining commenters are men who think that it’s their job to help women figure out their plight.

The appearance, then, it is that men just don’t get it. But the truth is, all the men who get it have figured out that they’re supposed to be largely invisible.  And new men who find the feminist blogosphere are left to figure out that their role models are unseen, which is a hard thing to figure out.
It’s a paradox.

“Being female was a major liability: a candidate would need to have 3 extra articles in Nature or Science (or 20 in decent specialist journals) just to counteract the disadvantages she faced for being a woman. There were two women in the pool so prolific that they won post-doc jobs this way, but for most good female scientists there was only one hope for getting a position: knowing someone on the review committee”

I can only think of three explanations. It’s possible that the hiring process has a sexist bias. It’s also possible that academia systematically oppresses women, making it more difficult for them to prepare themselves for post doctorate work. And it’s possible that our culture systematically fails to provide equal preparation to men and women for doctorate work. But it’s probably a combination of all three.

Which just confirms in my mind that all the women I know who are either in grad school (Wendy, Camille, Lauren, Chantel, Brynn and other ladies in my cohort, Erica, Andrea, Ally, Amanda, Allison, Julia, Marisa, Vasu, Anne, Kerry and Gina) have graduate degrees (my mom, Mel, Emily, Kynthia, Tiffanie, Jackie, Kristy, Schweta, Kaya, Amaya, Monal, Shaowen, Kim, Marisa, Erin, Carol, Jen, Christy, and all my other women colleagues), or are grad school bound (my sister, Lilly, Katt, Jen, Lucy)…

…are all even more badass in my mind than they were an hour ago.

(who did I forget?)

Avril Lavigne has a new video out. Give it a look. Especially the first 17 seconds.

In the beginning of the video, this hetero couple walks by Avril and the girl gives her a nasty look. They keep walking and Avril walks up behind them, and he playfully kicks the guy in the ass as the music starts and she starts dancing and singing/taunting him “hey. HEY. you. YOU. I don’t like your girlfriend!”

It’s actually a pretty thrilling way to kick open a video, but I have mixed feelings about the message.

On the one hand, the music, the body language, the attitude just rings “fucking awesome” to me. First of all, she’s just flat out saying what’s on her mind. No mincing of words or fretting about what people will think. It’s got that high energy dance-singing musical theater vibe going on. Breaking with convention is exciting.

And I like that she’s not sitting around looking pretty waiting for someone to come after her. That’s a gender role we need to destroy. Ladies hunting lovers… that’s hot. And sort of implicit in that message is the notion that she has better things to do with her time (recording music) than wait around for a man to drop into her lap.

And if we ignore for a moment the problems with the idea of implied consent, her playful violence seems hot too. In our culture all men have basically implicitly consented to any form of “playful” violence coming from women. It’s culturally sanctioned S&M play with strangers. Why not?

That said, it’s physical violence. And we can’t ignore the problems with implied consent. And it emphasizes the idea that men maintain a position of physical dominance, even when being attacked by a woman. Is that really the medium in which we want to showcase assertiveness and flirting and boundary bending? What about bending the boundaries of gender roles, or showcasing assertiveness by standing up to true assholes? What about women actually taking legitimate physical control over men who need to be brought in line?

And she’s being cruel to the “girlfriend”. The video is basically her attacking this girl to make herself look and feel better and that sucks. Especially given that this video is mostly targeted at teenagers and that’s the last kind of role model they need.

It sucks that Avril Lavigne could totally rock a feminist message that would make her far more of a legitimate badass, yet she stoops to this childish kind of faux-punk faux-assertiveness instead. She has the attitude, she just needs the ideology.

Oh, and can we ditch this whole “all women want/need is a boyfriend/husband” thing?

Now let’s imagine a woman, call her Jill, discovers 12 months after being hired that Jack, a man who is doing the same job as her and was hired at the same time as she was, is earning 10% more than she is. I know, it’s hard to imagine such a crazy scenario, since on average, women usually actually earn 15-40% less than men, depending mostly on their race and education level. But bear with me.

Jill decides to file a complaint, asking to be paid the difference between what Jack was paid and what she was paid, given that they both did the same work.

What say you, Supreme Court?

Justices with penises: We can’t put unreasonable demands on employers. She should’ve done her homework and filed a complaint within 180 days.

Justice with a vagina: How is a person supposed to figure out that she is being underpaid when salary information is unpublished, learn about her rights, navigate workplace politics, and file a complaint within 180 days, while under the stress of learning a new jo…

Justices with penises: Shut up, we’re the majority.

This harkens back to the recent decision in which the penis-wielding judges decided that the safety of a woman should not factor in a doctor’s decision to provide a woman with a late-term abortion. Again, Justice Bader-Ginsberg was the unheeded voice of reason:

“the Court’s opinion tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. For the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception protecting a woman’s health.”

We can thank George Bush for creating the most anti-woman court in modern history.

Correction: I originally wrote “Justices with vaginas” above, remembering a time when there were two women on the court. I forgot momentarily that there is only one such justice today. 12% of the court, 50% of the population. That’s because our president only appoints the most qualified folks for the job.

*vomit*

I didn’t realize this was happening until at least halfway through the meeting, and it was too late to change anything. The women all seemed either withdrawn or uninterested in speaking up. Making eye contact, which sometimes works to shift the tide of the conversation didn’t do a thing. I’m not sure what happened.

Maybe they just weren’t that interested in the talk. But there’s no doubt in my mind that the climate and rhythm of the discussion and past discussions played at least some role.