Kathleen Parker and the War on Women

Kathleen Parker is one of those people who appears to have an amazing ability not to blush, at least on paper. Take for her example her screed about "The silly, selective ‘war on women’":

Let’s be clear. The war on women is based on just one thing — abortion rights. While it is true that access to abortion has been restricted in several states owing to Republican efforts, it is not true that women as a whole care only or mostly about abortion.

Well, no. The Republican war on women is about women's reproductive rights in general, and notably includes sex education, access to birth control and insurance coverage for birth control. More than that, it includes no small amount of "slut shaming", and a huffy dismissal of the notion that women haven't achieved wage equality with men. If you don't believe me, take a look at this column by a person named "Kathleen Parker" in which she admits that the "war on women" includes insurance coverage for birth control. Parker makes a fascinating argument,

The alleged war on women was based essentially on the notion that people who think abortion is a bad idea — or who don’t think the government should mandate insurance coverage for birth-control coverage — are anti-woman. Democrats point mainly to new state laws that have limited access to abortion, not to mention the unforgettable observations of a few Republican men about “legitimate” rape and so on.

Whatever one’s own position, Republicans could be characterized as waging a war on women only if no women agreed with the premises mentioned above.

That sort of illogical and narrow thinking is mirrored by those who defend the practice of female genital mutilation by arguing that the arrangements for mutilation are made by mothers, for their daughters, and the procedure is performed by women. If even one woman is involved in the practice, under Parker's logic, the practice cannot be deemed oppressive toward women. Would Parker argue that slavery in the U.S. cannot be said to be oppressive to the slaves because there were black slave owners? I would hope not, but that argument would be completely consistent with her logic.

Next take a look at this column also by somebody named "Kathleen Parker" in which she whines that evil liberals want small children to have access to the "morning after pill". Parker's concern is, of course, not about safety or whether one over-the-counter medication should be treated differently than others based on objective concerns -- her concern is that a minor might be able to go into a pharmacy and purchase a medication that is safer than a lot of the other OTC drugs the same minor is free to purchase, without having to tell an adult that she's sexually active.

Fundamentally, though, she's making a "What about the children" argument in order to distract us from the fact that she's defending people who want to keep certain forms of birth control (and in some cases, all forms of birth control) out of the hands of women of any age. But even if we ignore that fact, contrary to Parker's pretense, the issue is not one about the role of government in relation to the family. It's about the relationship of parents and their daughters, and whether the government should stick itself into the middle of that relationship by imposing nanny state rules to keep certain OTC medications out of the hands of minors. Parker also pretends that she has safety concerns about the morning-after pill, never mind that pregnancy and childbirth are vastly more dangerous to young women than the pill she hopes to keep out of their hands.

Next take a look at this column, also... wow... by somebody named Kathleen Parker,

With each generation, the question becomes more declarative and querulous. Recent demographic shifts show women gaining supremacy across a spectrum of quantitative measures, including education and employment. Women outnumber men in college and in most graduate fields. Increasingly, owing in part to the recession and job loss in historically male-dominated fields, they are surpassing men as wage-earners, though women still lag behind at the highest income and executive levels.

So you see, women are doing just fine, thank you very much, and what you really need to focus on is how terribly men are doing -- "If we continue to impose low expectations and negative messaging on men and boys, future women won’t have much to choose from." Except it's implicit in Parker's argument that, at least outside of college enrollment numbers, men are doing as well as or better than women.

For more evidence of my point, you need only read further into Parker's column about the "silly" war on women,

Yet Sandra Fluke, whose appeal for insurance coverage of birth control prompted Limbaugh to call her a “slut,” was elevated to martyr status and perhaps a political career.

I suspect that most people had forgotten about Sandra Fluke before Parker brought her up, but she's a great example of how Republicans engage in anti-birth control rhetoric and slut shaming.

After telling us that her column is not about abortion, then proceeding with what I guess she expects her audience to view as some sort of ironic humor by writing a paragraph-long screed against abortion rights, Parker gets to her real target: The fact that on occasion she can identify a Democrat who says stupid or sexist things about women. As if we needed to be told? Needless to say, though, she's nutpicking -- selecting isolated examples of people saying silly things -- and conflating them with her party's problem, the fact that its politicians have established a clear pattern of making sexist comments -- one that makes columnists like, you know, Kathleen Parker regret that Republicans have not yet learned to talk to women.

Parker reminds us in her column that Bill Maher, a left-leaning comedian who is not a Democrat but is presently supporting the Democratic Party, is a sexist.

Sarah Palin, whose potential vice presidency I politely opposed for legitimate reasons that are now widely embraced, has been outrageously abused in the vilest terms — by Maher among others — and left to twist in the wind.

Twist in the wind? Try "laugh all the way to the bank." So why bring Bill Maher, a man she sees as inclined to make vile, sexist remarks, into the column at all? Because he offers a useful distraction from domestic concerns:

On the latter’s offense, and the silliness of the so-called war in general, I defer to Bill Maher, who recently chastised liberals for their selective outrage regarding women’s rights.

“We hear a lot about the Republican ‘war on women.’ It’s not cool Rush Limbaugh called somebody a slut. Okay,” said Maher. “But Saudi women can’t vote, or drive, or hold a job or leave the house without a man. Overwhelming majorities in every Muslim country say a wife is always obliged to obey her husband. That all seems like a bigger issue than evangelical Christian bakeries refusing to make gay wedding cakes.”

One could easily turn that around -- why is Parker obsessing over whether the Republicans are fairly being accused of a war on women, when so-called honor killings occur in parts of the world, and where rape victims can even be killed in the name of protecting the honor of their families? If Parker were better at logical thinking, she might realize that it is possible to be opposed to discrimination against women at home and abroad. If she were a better thinker she might realize that U.S. voters have a better chance of effecting policy change in this country than they do of convincing Saudi Arabia to grant women full equality. On an international scale, the mistreatment of women in many other nations is a larger issue than the mistreatment of women in the U.S., but when you live in the U.S. you actually are allowed to comment upon and even prioritize domestic policy concerns, as well as those issues that you could actually affect through your speech and votes.

Parker then moves on to her penultimate attack -- the statement of a single Democratic politician about his female opponent,

A more recent example of a war-on-women event occurred in Virginia’s closely watched congressional race between Democrat John Foust and Republican Barbara Comstock. This time it was a Democratic male attacking a Republican female in, shall we say, the most clueless of terms. Lacking facts or finesse, Foust mused to an audience that Comstock hadn’t ever held a “real job.”

Meaning, what, that she’s just a mom?

Probably not. It sounds like an echo of Republican attacks on President Obama during his first campaign. I don't recall that Kathleen Parker leapt to Obama's defense, "How dare my party suggest that being a father isn't a 'real job'" -- recall the column linked above where Parker claimed deep concern over the marginalization of fathers. I'm not sure that Parker mouthed those exact words about Obama, but she certainly embraced the sentiment:

The faith of the American people may not have been misplaced in Obama. But the young senator from Illinois became a president overnight, before he had time to gain the confidence and wisdom one earns through trials and errors.

Parker then whines,

Even if this were so, and it is not, why should Foust get a pass for such an ignorant, sexist remark? Is any Democratic male — even one who manages to insult while pandering — better than any Republican female? In my experience, a woman who can manage a household and juggle the needs of three children while obtaining a law degree from Georgetown University, as Comstock did, can run a corporation or a nation.

Foust is getting "a pass"? Then Kathleen Parker's criticism of him in a column published in one of the nation's leading newspapers and syndicated across the country must be a figment of my imagination.

Never mind Parker's criticism of Obama's lack of experience -- or, for that matter, her disdain for Sarah Palin, mother of five. When Parker is not pretending to be offended, and not pretending to be a sudden believer in the power of motherhood, she is actually willing to acknowledge that knowledge of foreign policy and economics are important, even in a vice president. Parker's able to recognize that it's possible for somebody to be a mother and to have held conventional employment or elected office on top of it, yet be woefully unprepared for a position of responsibility. Parker is simply playing the game of gotcha politics -- her concern is not actually the sentiment that the Republican candidate is unprepared -- a type of criticism she, herself, has made in different words -- it's that the Democrat used the wrong words and made himself a convenient target, whatever he in fact meant.

Parker takes a momentary step back from her feigned outrage to inform us,

[Comstock's] résumé includes such non-cookie­baking activities as serving as a senior aide to Rep. Frank Wolf, whose congressional seat she is pursuing. She currently is serving her third term in the Virginia House of Delegates, where she has advanced legislation to thwart human trafficking and supported several conservative positions related to health-care and tax reform.

It's interesting to me that Parker conveniently sidesteps the discussion of Comstock's actual job experience in order to pretend that her opponent's comment was intended to diminish motherhood, as opposed to being an echo of the refrain of the political right, that work in politics or as an elected official... or for a non-profit, or as a college professor, or for the government (other than the military)... doesn't count as a "real job". Parker could have pointed out the obvious -- that being a senior aid to a politician is a "real job", and that serving as an elected legislator is a "real job". But to acknowledge those facts would be to acknowledge the probability that the criticism of Comstock's résumé was an echo of the criticism directed at President Obama, not a commentary on motherhood.

Parker still isn't done....

When a Comstock ad recently called Foust’s comments “sexist, bizarre, insensitive, ignorant,” the 10th District’s Democratic Party tweeted, “If @barbaracomstock were a man, she’d be down 20 pts w women. Her record & policies are horrible for women.”

No, if Comstock were a man, she wouldn’t have to counter such slander.

Wait a second.... What's the "slander" here? If it's "slander" to suggest that a candidate who is a parent has never held a real job, the record is replete with that type of attack on President Obama. If it's that a candidate who has actually held real jobs has never held a real job, see also the résumé of President Obama. If it's that it's a slander to say that taking pro-life positions is bad for women, that's certainly not a criticism that has never been raised against a male candidate. What slander are we actually talking about?

Further, if we really want to get into scurrilous, unfair, gender- and implicitly race-based attacks on candidates, we need look no further than a columnist... whose name momentarily eludes me. No, wait, I remember now: Kathleen Parker, and her attacks on Obama as not being a full-blooded American, his being effeminate (or at least low on testosterone) for his supposed use of the passive voice, or of being a (pussy) cat.

At this point, surprisingly, Parker still finds room for another bad argument,

Virginia voters who oppose Comstock’s legislative record have a clear alternative. But if they cast their ballots for Foust, they’ll be electing a man whose disrespect toward women and the single job only women can do — mothering — is at least as offensive as Limbaugh’s name-calling.

Alas, those poor voters. They have no choice but to accept Parker's position that any suggestion that a candidate who happens to be a mother has never held a "real job" completely disqualifies her opponent from office, or they may as well be calling defenders of women's reproductive health "sluts". Don't bother looking for the logic -- it's not there.

The Divine Right of Boys in the Information Age

It occurs to me that in talking about a David Brooks column I had not originally intended to talk about, I failed to mention the passage that most caught my attention:

Some of the decline in male performance may be genetic.¹ The information age rewards people who mature early, who are verbally and socially sophisticated, who can control their impulses. Girls may, on average, do better at these things. After all, boys are falling behind not just in the U.S., but in all 35 member-nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

That is to say, by being pretty much the same as they ever were, schools around the world are suddenly failing to sufficiently engage boys and, while girls (being sugar, spice and everything nice, and predisposed to resist the temptation of a marshmallow) are "verbally and socially sophisticated" in a manner that is allowing them to succeed in college and to reap the rewards of the information age.

My first response is, where were the concern trolls when women, frail, wilting flowers that they are, were excluded from higher education? Brooks' allusion to genetics evokes the notion of past eras that women were biologically unsuited to higher education or to a competitive workplace. And let's not pretend that those biology/genetics arguments have vanished. Also, if the problem is genetic, why does Brooks believe school teachers will be able to "fix" it?

At least when it comes to math, Brooks appears intent on proving himself correct and folks like Larry Summers wrong:

Even so, men make up just over 40 percent of college students. Two million fewer men graduated from college over the past decade than women. The performance gap in graduate school is even higher.

I'm not seeing good numbers on college graduation rates (lots on enrollment, not so much on graduation), and I don't want to spend more time at the moment looking. So I'll use a ballpark figure I saw tossed out, that 1.5 million students graduate from undergraduate programs each year. 15 million over ten years. Using the 60:40 Brooks shared, based on enrollment you should see 9 million women graduate and only 6 million men. Brooks is telling us that the number is 2 million and that this means colleges aren't engaging male students? He didn't share a source for his data, but I'm having a difficult time seeing that as a problem for men. I would like him to elaborate on his data and conclusions.

Also, no offense David, but guys like you are well-suited for college. Even if K-12 schools reinvent themselves so that the most rambunctious young men are engaged in ways that don't involve reading books, what do you believe is going to happen when they reach college and are handed a two-inch-thick text book or parked at a Bunsen burner in a chemistry lab?

Meanwhile, we have more than a few years of the information age to look at. Let's compare how women are faring to how men are faring. If I were to look at a list of the founders of the most successful companies of the information age, or a broader list of their executives, what ratio of men to women should I expect to find? That is, once we move past the world of K-12 education, where can I find Brooks' hand-wringing translated into a real-world environment in which women have the advantage?

I suspect that Brooks isn't actually talking about "boys" here - he's talking about boys being raised in low-SES households. Were his own son to struggle in school, I am skeptical that Brooks would be criticizing his son's teacher for requiring him to write book reports about "exquisitely sensitive Newbery award-winning novellas" (perhaps The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman). Brooks seems like the sort who would read the book with his son, try to engage his son in the literature and instill a love of reading and, if all else failed, hire a tutor to make sure that his son didn't fall behind the rest of the class. (He might even consider private school, assuming that wasn't his child's starting point.)

If Brooks were really talking about Henry V, he would be taking note that the new Henry IV benefits from the modern equivalent of the "divine right of kings" - a system that is set up to favor, privilege, preserve and expand his family's wealth, to the disadvantage of everybody else. Brooks can't argue that it's a zero sum game given his acknowledgment of the associated loss of middle class jobs and diminished opportunity for the non-wealthy Henry IV's. A modern Henry V doesn't need no education - he can and will fall back on daddy's name, money and connections, and a well-rigged tax code.

So let's not pretend that boy-centered K-12 education, whatever that would involve, would be a panacea. Let's not pretend that the modern Henry V's would be stifled in a traditional school while he would flourish in a rigid military academy. And most of all, let's not act as if the fact that the opening of doors, historically closed to women, is a bad thing, even if some men find that women outperform them in the ways that matter to the modern job market.²
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1. There is a sense in which men are genetically "inferior" to women - women get a full set of DNA building blocks, whereas men have lost a chunk of chromosomal material - hence XY instead of XX. That does translate into a set of Y-linked genetic traits, vulnerabilities, abnormalities and eccentricities, some of which can be beneficial and others of which can be catastrophic, with most falling somewhere in the middle. By way of example, see David Brooks' hairline - "male pattern baldness".

2. Brooks likes to talk about "human capital", and the optimization of its value. Brooks may well be able to fashion a K-12 program for kids who aren't college-oriented, and whose parents lack the wealth and resources to prevent that from mattering, such that their "human capital" is maximized. But who says that should be, could be, or is best accomplished through pushing them through college, whether or not they have academic focus, interest or aptitude? If Brooks accepts that his impoverished Henry and Henrietta V's aren't college material, why the lament about men struggling in college?

College Admission Essays are Unfair to Boys?

Via Joanne Jacobs, I read this prattle from Pajamas Media blogger "Doctor Helen". The author recounts an episode from a book in which a father describes how difficult it was for his son to write an essay that displayed any form of personal growth or development, finally settling on telling the story of completing a swimming test at camp that the other campers had failed.

But his father knew the truth: “which was the masculine truth. He didn’t remember the race because it proved the timeless value of persistence. He remembered the victory because it was a victory: he had competed against this classmates, friends and rivals alike, and beaten them soundly and undeniably, and earned the right to a sack dance in the end zone. He knew he couldn’t say this, though, and I knew he was right.”

So let me see if I understand this: The fact that a high school graduate cannot recall a single experience in his life that resulted in character growth, and the fact that his father says, "I can't think of one either, perhaps you should make something up," reflects a problem with the college?

The author's conclusion:

And that pretty much sums it up for the rest of college. Trying to please a bunch of people who care more about a PC stance than critically thinking with passion. It’s no wonder that boys and men are bypassing college.

Is there any evidence whatsoever that boys and men aren't going to college because they are put off by an occasional college demanding personal essays with applications for admission, or because they're afraid of the "PC" bogeyman? (But then, who cares about the facts when it's more fun to bang a drum, right?) I'm not going to read the book to find out, but I don't think for a second that the son's reaction to choosing to prevaricate on his admissions essay was, "Well, darn it then, I'm not going to college."

If you have experienced so little personal growth over the course of your life that your "personal essay" is a work of fiction, go ahead and submit your work of fiction. But if you later want to whine that it was unfair to request either an essay or to expect that over the course of a lifetime you would have had at least one experience you could truthfully recount, don't expect to cry on my shoulder.

What's the principal reason people don't attend college or drop out? Cost. What factors may play a role in why more young women attend college out of high school than young men? Young men are more likely to drop out of high school, join the military, or go to jail or prison. Also, as most academically oriented young men can attest and as the "swim test" example from above suggests, our society doesn't do much to encourage and reward academic achievement by high school males.