Links, Sunday 27th April

What's really scary about this is that the police and NGO workers who have so much power over sex workers' lives have no idea what those lives are actually like - they just repeat the same bullshit stereotypes they see on TV.

"What they found was that the narrative of commercial sexual exploitation of children (or CSEC) they had been sold by local activists—one where knife-wielding pimps lure girls into prostitution then brutalize them into compliance—existed in only rare cases and didn’t describe most people’s experiences." Slate

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"So why don't airlines use the best methods?

A great question. These methods are all unquestionably faster than the standard method, so would speed up the turnaround times, theoretically saving airlines money. But almost none of them use it.

One possible answer is that the current system actually makes them more than they'd save by switching. As Businessweek pointed out, airlines often allow some passengers to pay extra to board early and skip the general unpleasantness. If the entire boarding process was faster to begin with, many people might not pay extra to skip it." Vox

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"Wages for Housework understood how much damage a refusal to do unwaged labor could inflict on a capitalist system. In her 1970 pamphlet “Women and the Subversion of the Community,” Dalla Costa wrote, “women are of service not only because they carry out domestic labor without a wage and without going on strike, but also because they always receive back into the home all those who are periodically expelled from their jobs by economic crisis. The family, this maternal cradle . . . has been in fact the best guarantee that the unemployed do not immediately become a horde of disruptive outsiders.”"

"Young people in the West who have spent their formative years in the workforce as freelancers, part-timers, adjuncts, unwaged workers, and interns are beginning to feel — granted, later than most of the world — that they’re not compensated for the work that they do. Not “not paid enough,” but not paid at all, since the ballooning service, communications, and private-care industries increasingly demand the kind of work that people are expected to do out of love. Under these circumstances, the longstanding critique of the exploitation of mothers, wives, grandmothers is felt with new force, among a much younger and much wider population of women and men, with children and without.

It’s an improvement, if a somewhat discouraging one. The belatedness with which mainstream culture has come to recognize the value of unwaged work seems to confirm that women’s issues only become relevant once they’re successfully recast as “general” issues that pertain to men. (“Patriarchy hurts boys,” we’re told. It does — but does it have to in order for us to care?)"

n+1 magazine

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I'm currently reading Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith. It's set in a world where a virus has killed all human males, and rendered females capable of reproducing asexually. So we have a stable society that is comprised entirely of "women". (I use scare quotes to distance myself from the essentialist notion that all people with lady-parts are "women", or that the concept of "women" would even exist in a society with no gender binary.) Anyway, taking on the board the assumption that *every* character in the book is a woman, I'm finding it interesting how frequently I start thinking of a new character as a man and have to catch myself. It's also interesting for *which* characters this happens. For instance, when I'm introduced to children playing in the street, my immediate instinct was to think of them as boys.

Anyway, I'd recommend the book!

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More on gender-neutral public toilets.

"She said university representatives during open negotiations seemed particularly swayed by testimony from students and other witnesses describing harassment in gender-specific bathrooms. One student even described going to the bathroom in the woods surrounding campus to avoid such restrooms, she said. Others go to unhealthy lengths to avoid relieving themselves at all while on campus. Another witness, an administrator of an LGBTQ-friendly program on another campus, framed the issue historically, saying that when she was a graduate student some years ago, there were no women’s restrooms in the chemistry department." Slate

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Interesting discussion of how Facebook is attempting to increase the "quality" of links that bubble up in our newsfeeds.

"At the same time, Facebook has begun more carefully differentiating between the likes that a post gets before users click on it and the ones it gets after they’ve clicked. A lot of people might be quick to hit the like button on a post based solely on a headline or teaser that panders to their political sensibilities. But if very few of them go on to like or share the article after they’ve read it, that might indicate to Facebook that the story didn’t deliver." Slate

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A criticism of the current practice of students evaluating teachers (at university level). Thoughts?

"Bias in evaluations is widely accepted, so much so that some who use evals as assessment tools already control for it:

@pankisseskafka we discuss those things (compare women to average among women, not pure averages, for example). 1/2" Slate

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"I think that one big problem we have on the left is we don’t really have a strong critique of bureaucracy. It’s not because we like bureaucracy very much; it’s just that the right has developed a critique. I don’t think it’s a very good critique, but at least it’s there. I think this is a perfect left critique of bureaucracy: Who are all these people — and this goes for private bureaucracies as well as public ones — sitting around watching you, telling you what your work is worth, what you’re worth, basically employing thousands of people to make us feel bad about ourselves. Just get rid of those people; just give everybody some money, and I think everyone will be much better off." PBS

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"In these campaigns, the masculine mystique is still very present, albeit a kinder, gentler version. By flattering men’s strength and asking them to use it to protect women, we once again place men in the driver’s seat of culture, asking for them to renounce violence and be less vile guardians." sherights

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This was trending a few days ago, but I think it's a rather silly article. The basic issue is a disagreement with DA policies, which is totally valid, but it's utterly ridiculous to fault Maimane for attempting to promote them through charismatic sloganeering. That is the whole game of politics, and the politicians whose policies you happen to agree with do it too. Africa is a Country

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Some background to the breakdown in US-Russia relations that contributed to the current Ukraine crisis. Reuters

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Trouble at Crossrail. 

"The culture at the site of the east-west rail link is "almost entirely counterproductive" to delivering the project safely, on time and on budget, according to a damning internal analysis seen by the Observer. It adds that injured workers are "afraid to report due to the likelihood of being laid off"." The Observer

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I don't think this is perfect, but it's a useful example of how fear of sexual violence is used to police women's access to public spaces and meeting strangers (when, of course, they're far more at risk in private spaces, from people they know). Home is where the internet is (which is a great blog title, incidentally)

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A financial assessment of the state of the platinum mining industry in SA, claiming that it would be possible to pay miners' the wage they are demanding, R12.5k a month. As ever, how the surplus of production is divided depends on the balance of power between capital and labour. Daily Maverick

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"Here’s the secret truth of poly: it allows you to successfully date people you could never marry.  You see the pressures of the Great Monogamous Victory crushing otherwise-happy relationships: I think we all know a couple who got along just fine as long as they had separate apartments and just had fun going to movies , but the moment they moved in together they devoured each other.  But that monogamy train, man, it keeps on moving; if you’ve been dating casually for a while, well, eventually you gotta Get Serious." The Ferrett

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I'd like to hear thoughts on this, as I'm deeply a priori sceptical of claims that woman-on-man sexual violence is anywhere near the magnitude of man-on-woman violence. Of course there are going to be cases, and the article is useful insofar as it outlines how expectations about masculine sexuality can disempower victims. But I worry that these shocking statistical claims depend on very inclusive definitions of "violence".

"In a largely overlooked study focusing exclusively on college males, 51.2 percent of participants reported experiencing a least one incident of sexual victimization, including unwanted sexual contact (21.7 percent), sexual coercion (12.4 percent) and rape (17.1 percent)." Vocativ

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A good, honest account by a journalist of the pitfalls of interviewing sex workers, and some guidelines on how to get things right. Chooniverse

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On the other hand, this article criticising the DA is rather good, focusing largely on its authoritarian internal culture and how this impacts on the relationship between government and the public. Sacsis

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A case for online pseudonyms, as opposed to real identities on the one hand, and complete anonymity on the other. 

Many thriving communities allow pseudonymous participation, using various ways of making history and reputation visible. On Twitter, you can see users’ past tweets and number of followers just by clicking on their name. Disqus provides the commenting interface for millions of sites and allows people to choose whether they want to be anonymous, fully identified or pseudonymous. Their assessment? “Pseudonyms are the most valuable contributors to communities because they contribute the highest quantity and quality of comments.” Wired

Links, Wednesday 23rd April

An interesting history of the "chat war" between the AOL and Microsoft messenger services. Also some interesting insights into Microsoft corporate culture generally.

"Thus the burgeoning NetDocs, which was intended to be an internet-based document-editing suite, gobbled up a number of small groups in the late ’90s. But NetDocs got eaten by Office, which then proceeded to kill it, thus leaving the door open for Google to debut Google Docs in the mid-2000s. And on it went. Multiyear projects with hundreds of engineers died without the public ever hearing a word. It continues." n+1 magazine

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I'm not sure whether this is pure hypocrisy or the result of classifying some people as the "right kind of foreigner". It'd really be helpful to voters if UKIP were more publicly explicit about the precise targets of their racism and xenophobia... BBC

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I take it that the Guardian would not feel to frame the discussion as a "debate" if it was the rights of garment workers, for instance, at stake. But it is in any case heartening that the comments appear to oppose criminalisation overwhelmingly. The Guardian

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"Peter and Mbadu say that they are innocent of all charges and played no part in du Preez’s death. They maintain that they are being maliciously prosecuted and framed because they exposed a corrupt South African Police Service (SAPS) officer.

Both work at the Social Justice Coalition (SJC) and are long-standing activists in their communities. For years Peter was the public face of the SJC’s criminal justice campaign and in particular the O’Regan/Pikoli Commission of Inquiry into Policing in Khayelitsha. Peter monitored criminal cases and assisted victims and families dealing with the police and the courts in Khayelitsha and Mfuleni." GroundUp

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"The prevalence of extra-marital partnerships among women was 6.2% within a reference time of six months. Factors that were independently associated with increased likelihood of extra-marital partnerships were domestic violence, women reporting being denied a preferred sex position and spouse longer erect penis . Conversely, women's age – more than 24 years and women's increased sexual satisfaction were associated with reduced likelihood of extra-marital partnerships." Plos One (via Michael Meadon)

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" But it's worse than that: it doesn't even matter where you live.

Moving to a higher-income neighborhood – one where market and regulatory forces have already pushed out the low-income – means you're helping to sustain the high cost of living there, and therefore helping to keep the area segregated. You're also forcing lower-income college graduates to move to more economically marginal areas, where they in turn will push out people with even less purchasing power. You can't escape the role you play in displacement any more than a white person can escape their whiteness, because those are both subject to systemic processes that have created your relevant status and assigned its consequences. Among the classes, there is no division between "gentrifiers" and "non-gentrifiers." If you live in a city, you don't get to opt out" Atlantic Cities

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I take this as a sign the the PLO has officially given up on extracting any concessions from the Netanyahu government for now. We'll see how it goes, anyway...

"Mahmoud Abbas's Palestine Liberation Organisation and Hamas on Wednesday agreed to implement a unity pact, with the aim of forming a government within five weeks. The move, announced at a joint news conference by both sides, includes the intention to hold national elections six months after a vote of confidence by the Palestinian parliament." The Guardian

Links, Tuesday 22nd April

Sure, I'll just post everything Peter Frase writes, why not?

"The sex work “abolitionist” position makes about as much sense to me as reacting to Foxconn by calling on China to ban factory work. But perhaps it’s the troublesome “remoralizing” of work that Weeks identifies which is at the root of the uneasiness that pro-sex worker positions provoke in some Leftists. A lot of left-wing critiques of sex work, particularly in private conversations, strike me as the bad conscience of reflexively upholding the work ethic, rather than a coherent account of sex work in particular." Jacobin

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Everyone, I've found my cause. http://www.eyebeam.org/projects/wages-for-facebook

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"The problem that crops up in all discussions of this kind, however, is the ambiguity of the term “work,” particularly in a capitalist society. It has at least three distinct meanings that are relevant. One, it can mean activity that is necessary for the continuation of human civilization, what Engels called “the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life.” Two, it can mean the activity that people undertake in exchange for money, in order to secure the means of continued existence. Three, it can mean what Gourevitch is talking about, an activity that requires some kind of discipline and deferred gratification in pursuit of an eventual goal." Jacobin

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The success of a universal basic income scheme in Namibia.

"A few weeks ago, Dirk Haarmann published his annual report, which he sent to politicians, the United Nations and even a few presidents. According to the report, economic activity in the village has grown by 10 percent, more people are paying tuition and doctors' fees, health is improving and the crime rate is down.

The report also stated that the basic income could be funded through the tax system by increasing the value-added tax or income tax by a few percent. Only 3 percent of the gross domestic product, or €115 million, would be enough to provide a basic income for all Namibians." Spiegel (starts printing automatically)

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"As Bernard Harcourt examines in The Illusion of Order, broken windows policing is predicated on separating neighborhoods into regular, ordered insiders and disordered strangers. Wilson’s view is that regular insiders are the “decent folks” who need to be protected from the disorder generated by strangers. The police, rather than upholding laws and the rights of citizens, uphold order by regulating the behaviors of disorderly insiders and excluding the disorderly outsiders. Criminals lose their insider status in this telling, and excluding them from the community becomes a goal of law. The approach is based on a privileging of order over law, for a lack of order is what attracts criminal behavior, always waiting in the wings to descend." Jacobin

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Oh for the love of mercy. This article can't even get basic facts straight. Sex work is NOT treated like "any other job" in Germany etc - it is strictly regulated, often with an inconsistent patchwork of local regulations. These regulations often exclude and effectively criminalise the most vulnerable workers. Sex workers overwhelmingly demand DECRIMINALISATION, along the lines of the New Zealand model (a legal regime that the Guardian doesn't even see fit to mention here), not LEGALISATION along the lines of Germany. The Guardian

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Startling to hear China described in these terms, but I suppose it's all relative.

"China has one of the world’s most extensive and sophisticated censorship systems. It regularly jails activists and dissidents. But you can use the internet; you can watch foreign movies. You can wear what you like, or travel abroad. You can grumble to neighbours about officials without looking over your shoulder. “The biggest difference is that here they respect human rights. You can sell whatever you want and go to foreign countries and do whatever you want; everything is free here. There is no control,” Chae said." The Guardian

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"But in defense of white people, we're not actually selfish assholes [debatable, but whatever] -- we've just gotten so used to having everything be about us that when we see a movie directed by a black man, starring a black man, telling a personal story about experiencing slavery, we just assume that it's still about us, but indirectly. Like it's trying to send us a message about how we should feel about ourselves. Who else could the movie be for?" Cracked

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A good long interview with Trevor Manuel. I won't try to select out the most important bit, just read it all. Daily Maverick

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"Mmusi himself is forever rehearsing the roles our great-grandchildren will play if this place doesn’t slide into the abyss. He doesn’t have it anywhere near as easy as Julius Malema, because Juju doesn’t have to flit between classes, between races, between universes. Juju doesn’t have to marry striations of self with layers of policy jingo and Kumbaya catch phrases. Mmusi, however, is constantly shape-shifting. He’s a man and a politician trying to justify his choices and his outlook to a country carved up by the narrow ruts of race, and in turn sell those justifications to an electorate too battered to look for subtleties." Daily Maverick

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Very detailed, and I wouldn't recommend reading it all, but this is great for it's sheer evidence-based contrarian-ness. The piece essentially argues that nicotine (note: NOT cigarette smoke) is relatively cheap, harmless and gives substantial boosts to cognitive performance. Gwern

Links, Monday 21st April

"Before we start talking about genetic differences, you gotta come up with a system where there's equal opportunity. *Then* we can have that conversation." Upworthy

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More on the subject of intellectual property:

"the publisher doesn’t like to use public domain images. Why not? What could be better than free? The problem is that the bundlers insulate a publisher from lawsuits but when we use a public domain image the publisher is open to lawsuit if a mistake has been made and that makes them fearful. The general lesson is that strong IP shrinks the public domain not just because it keeps things out of the public domain but also because it makes the public domain appear to be uncertain and dangerous." Marginal Revolution

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"One of the decisive factors in any bail decision is whether the accused will endanger the safety of the public or any particular person. It is interesting in this respect that trigger-happy Pistorius was awarded bail so swiftly, while, for example, Victor Nkomo, who was charged with aiding a casino robbery in 2005, and who never handled a gun, has been denied bail repeatedly.

Researchers of the Open Society Foundation for South Africa concluded in 2008 that bail was granted to only 3% of accused on first appearance before a judge in Johannesburg and Mitchell’s Plain. According to Legal Aid South Africa, there are approximately 10,000 people languishing in South African jails who have been awarded bail but were unable to pay the often small amount." Daily Maverick

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Ow, my brain. 

"On Sunday, the City Press reported that the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the Democratic Alliance (DA) had had informal discussions about the possibility of a post-election coalition government in Gauteng should neither party win an outright majority." Mail & Guardian

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It's easy to get sentimental about "mom and pop" spaza shops, but the reality is that supermarkets often provide better products at lower prices. And often offer higher wages to employees as well. Mail & Guardian

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More about the police:

"So-called crowd psychology has provided substantial insights into these sometimes very subtle but potentially highly consequential dynamics, described here from an ethnographic perspective. It shows how police intervention is absolutely crucial to what happens at a gathering; how police in fact have the possibility to either give people the sense that movement is possible or rather that a horizon is closed; and how police are mainly responsible themselves in creating an escalating hostility." WISER

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A piece about the imposition of (Christian) religion in South African public schools. Mail & Guardian

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"The largest strike in China’s history has entered the sixth day, defying state attempts to repress workers struggling against economic and social injustice. Police arrested several organizers of the strikers at the Yue Yuen factory, which produces shoes for Nike and Adidas." Revolution News

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[TW: sexual violence; also spoilers up to current GoT]

"It’s hard to shake the idea that Game Of Thrones, the show, doesn’t see a problem with pushing a scene from complicated, consensual sex to outright rape. It would be easier to accept that idea if it were clear what the show was trying to do with those changes. Rape is a tricky thing to use as character development, for either the victim or the rapist; doing it twice raises a lot of red flags. It assumes that rape between characters doesn’t fundamentally change the rest of their story—and it assumes that the difference between consent and rape is, to use the parlance, a “blurred line.”" AV Club

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Tyler Cowen's review of the Piketty book. I'm not sure I agree on all fronts (having not yet read the book, in any case), but some interesting points. Foreign Affair

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A good rebuttal of some of the (many, many) problems with the Pollitt piece on sex work. 

"... the nature of a product is irrelevant to how we should theorize, legislate, or organize the labor involved in producing it. Workers are not socially accountable for whatever may come from their work. To accept otherwise encourages the over-identification with work that management finds so efficient in getting us to do more for less. It allows capital to extract not only time, but also ethical responsibility from workers. It sets the labor movement up for just the sort of hierarchy of workers Pollitt advocates." Jacobin

Links, Sunday 20th April

I'm just loving everything this dude writes. I'd recommend browsing through his blog.

" What, then, should the left support, if not more jobs? Shortening the work week disappeared from labor’s agenda after World War II, and we need to bring it back. We should also make unemployment benefits more generous in order to ease the pain of joblessness. Ultimately, though, we need to get more radical than that, and move away from tightly linking jobs and income. To reiterate, the real problem of the unemployed isn’t their lack of jobs, it’s their lack of money. That’s why some on the left are coming around to the idea of just giving people money: a guaranteed minimum income, which everyone would be entitled to independent of work." Peter Frase: The case against jobs

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Obviously something of a limited perspective, but some interesting coming-out stories from porn performers.

"Stoya: Okay, I’ve got to tell you another thing.
Grandma: Okay.
Stoya: Well, I’m using your name.
Grandma: Oooh. Vera? That’s not very sexy.
Stoya: Well actually, if I was going for pin-up, that would actually be a fantastic name, but I’m using "Stoya."
Grandma: Ooooh no.
And I’m like, "Fuck, we were going so well!"
Stoya: What’s wrong?
Grandma: I hope that no one at the nursing home gets us confused and tries to put my feet behind my head, because I don’t bend that way anymore." Vox


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Instead of setting a ceiling on agricultural subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy... how about we just eliminate the whole thing? And then curse its memory for all generations? BBC

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Walmart, also doing some good stuff...

"...back in 2007, Walmart tried to go even further and get a full banking license. Community banks didn't like that idea and regulators and politicians balked at it. But allowing a large national retailer that specializes in downmarket consumers get a banking license would likely be an effective to serve some of the unbanked population and inject more competition into consumer banking. Other options exist (postal banking, for example) that could serve similar purposes. But thus far the impact of Walmart dipping its toes into financial services has been beneficial and it seems likely that it'd be good for consumers for them to go further." Vox

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[TW for sexual harassment]

Not that surprising, but good that people are doing systematic research on this.

"An academic study published last month reports that sexual aggressors' invasiveness is not related to their own intoxication, but rather the intoxication of their targets." The Guardian

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"I'm pretty sure Park simply feels that there are certain no-no words, bad words that can never be used to prove any point or be justified by any context." Cracked

Yeah, but don't we *all* think there are words that white comedians shouldn't use, whatever their satirical intent? If Colbert had used the N-word, I assume we'd all be solidly on-board the "dude, you can't say that!" bandwagon...

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"In 1953, France was learning a lesson that America would also learn just a decade or two later: Vietnam is not an ideal place to fight a war. Desperate to turn the tide, General Henri Navarre came up with a cunning plan: He'd put his men in such an intensely vulnerable position that the Viet Minh wouldn't be able to stop themselves from attacking them. What could possibly go wrong?" Cracked

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We can attempt to graft the capitalist requirement for scarcity onto a world in which automation renders many goods non-scarce. The question is: why would we want to? Peter Frase

Abortion rights and sex worker's rights

This is a repost of some thoughts I posted on my facebook wall a while ago. Pasta tweeted about the similarities between anti-sex work and anti-abortion arguments some time ago, and the analogies certainly are striking. Even more so because some of the same self-declared feminists willing to die for abortion rights are making such obviously flawed arguments against rights for sex workers. Choice Joice has also discussed the connection here and here. Anyway, by way of developing the analogy further, I'm going to catalogue as systematically as I can some ways in which the arguments of those who would criminalise sex work would apply to abortion provision, with some rebuttals. Please do let me know if you can think of further analogies I'm missing!

1) "People don't *like* selling sex!"

Well, some do enjoy the work. But nothing depends on this. The point isn't whether a person enjoys it, but whether it's the best thing for her at a particular point in her life. And she is the authority on that. Being pro-sex workers' rights doesn't mean being "pro-sex work", any more than being pro-choice means being "pro-abortion". In a perfect world, contraception would be so reliable that abortion would never be necessary. You can also consistently believe that 1) sex work wouldn't exist (or would be very rare) in a perfect world; and 2) we should do everything within our power to make it safe and legal in THIS world. Trying to stamp out one particular outcome of a set of social problems, while leaving the underlying problems intact, is nothing short of a deep political confusion.

2) "Choosing to sell sex to avoid poverty isn't a REAL choice!"

Lots of women choose to have abortions because they don't feel they can bear the cost of a(nother) child. Does this make it an "unreal" choice? Women terminating pregnancies they otherwise want because of financial pressures is obviously not good, but the "solution", equally obviously, is not to ban abortions. Rather remove the financial pressures, through improved welfare arrangements or better job opportunities.

3) "Some women are forced into sex work!"

Indeed. Just as some women are pressured into having abortions by partners or family members. In fact, the same abusive relationship dynamics often apply. We should obviously do everything we can to eliminate these abuses, but driving activities underground is hardly the solution. An illegal abortion provider is less likely than a legal provider to give effective counselling that might detect coercion. Similarly, abuses are more easily detected in a decriminalised sex industry where sex workers are able to interact with each other, social services and the police more freely, and where clients are able to report suspicions of abuse without fear of arrest.

4) "But you get PENETRATED! Gross!"

"Full-service" sex workers often do, in fact, offer penetrative sex as a service. Notably, however, abortion usually also involves the introduction of hands and/or instruments into intimate bodily spaces. Apparently this may be uncomfortable or even painful, and many might feel it is undignified. Nevertheless, we think that women can and do meaningfully consent to having things introduced into their own bodies, even if it's not pleasant, if that serves their interests.

A possible rejoinder is that money changes hands in sex work. But, of course, abortion providers often also take payment. The proponent of sex work criminalisation must therefore offer some reason why it's less dignified to receive money than it is to pay money in a transaction involving penetration.

5) "We don't want to criminalise women, just clients!"

I hope we are not very convinced by the position: "We don't want to criminalise women who have abortions, just providers!". The point is the same - women may rely upon a particular institution for various reasons, and eliminating the institution is going to harm them, even if they aren't directly criminalised. When we criminalise abortion providers, service provision goes underground, becoming less available, more expensive and more dangerous. Similarly, when we drive sex work underground, there will be fewer clients, who are less law-abiding, offering less money, and demanding riskier sexual acts.

6) "We don't HATE sex workers, we just have problems with the institution!"

This claim is belied by the actions of your most vocal allies, including many of the people who are supposed to provide services. And you do NOTHING to prevent this! In the US, women accessing abortion services often have to face a gauntlet of anti-abortion protesters who shout personal abuse at them, invade their space and threaten them with violence. These are people who profess to "Love the sinner". Allegedly "moderate" anti-abortion activists do nothing to prevent this.

The same is true of sex work. Lots of self-declared "feminists" apparently have no problem addressing sex workers with dehumanising language (which I won't repeat here), calling them "traitors to women" and "pimps", actively blocking them from giving their perspective in the media and literally shouting them down. This is to say nothing of the behaviour of (mostly male) politicians who are trying to "fix the problem". In Sweden, which is supposedly "helping" sex workers by criminalising clients, a sex worker called Petite Jasmine had her children taken away from her on the grounds that her profession was a form of "self-harm". The state thought it better to grant custody to her abusive former partner, who went on to murder her when she visited her children. Why don't the people who are supposedly concerned about the welfare of sex workers address this disgraceful behaviour which is a) right under their noses; and b) perpetrated by their self-declared allies?

7) "You're not representative because you're rich/white/middle-class/etc!"

Opponents of sex workers' rights routinely present themselves as speaking for a "silent majority" who are deeply oppressed by sex work. Under this view, the "privileged" sex workers who support decriminalisation are just looking out for their own interests, at the expense of the less fortunate. The same slur is often directed at wealthier white supporters of abortion rights in the US, who are accused of attempting to perpetrate "genocide" against poor black people.

This slur, firstly, ignores the many, many organisations that support decriminalisation and represent sex workers who are decidedly NOT privileged, in terms of class, race, immigration status and the type of work they do. The South African organisations SWEAT and Sisonke are good examples. Secondly, while it's true that relatively well-off sex workers are disproportionately represented in public debates,it's worth thinking about why this is the case. Obviously, if you're better-off, you may have more time, money and energy to participate in advocacy. But, more importantly, "whore stigma", like abortion stigma, is EVERYWHERE. To come out in public as a sex worker, as someone who has terminated a pregnancy, or as someone who supports for these people is to risk ostracism, vicious personal attacks, physical assault and, in some places, criminal sanctions. A little bit of privilege goes a long way in insulating one from such attacks. If you want to hear from more "representative" voices, maybe you should stop attacking them when they try to speak up.

8) "The only good transactional sex is MY transactional sex!"

This post is one of the best things I've ever read. It relates the experiences of abortion providers who have performed abortions on vocal anti-choicers. Sometimes these are women who have protested outside the very same clinics where they have the procedure, and then return to protesting the following day. What's notable about these women is that they recognise why abortion might be necessary under their own particular circumstances, but fail to recognise that other women might make the same choice given their circumstances. 

The same goes for sex work. Possibly the worst offenders are ex-sex workers like Rachel Moran who, in her own words, sold sex "in order to survive", and now wishes to shut down the sex industry through criminalisation of clients. She wishes, in other words, to make the survival mechanism that she herself used unavailable to other vulnerable women. This is not to deny that she, and many others, had a terrible time in sex work, just to point out that she recognised it as the best option available when she was in a bad situation. 

But even women who have never sold sex make a version of the same mistake. As I discuss in a previous post, just about everyone has sex that they didn't really desire out of lust, but because it fulfilled some other need. Many women have had sex they didn't especially desire in order to keep a partner happy, to have children, to "get rid of" their "virginity". They expect others to trust their ability to weigh up their own needs when they decide to have this kind of sex, yet refuse to attribute similar agency to those who decide to have sex specifically for money. 

Links, Friday 19th April

"A warrior who fought on horseback was truly screwed if the enemy knew what they were doing. In fact, English knights were well aware of this and regularly dismounted for battle. Cavalry was actually less of a battering ram and more like a sniping tool: Apart from intimidation tactics and chasing down fleeing enemies, they were best used to exploit the enemies' weaknesses, performing quick "run in, stab, run back sniggering" attacks on various gaps in formation and other tactical openings. But if some confident banner commander decided to try the old cavalry charge against an enemy formation, he was screwed." Cracked

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Some good stuff about the arbitrariness of gendered social conventions. Huffington Post

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A very long, but worthwhile, article about the housing situation in San Francisco. It really goes into the complexities of regularity, political and market failures that have led to the current crisis. Tech Crunch

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No doubt a controversial view. Thoughts?

"Passwords are obsolete because of email and SMS. Specifically, the ability to send an email or SMS to users reliably and quickly." Medium

Links, Thursday 17th April

"Why would crying at night delay the birth of a sibling? It's not because frustrated parents would be interrupted having sex. Instead, it's because mothers don't ovulate while they're nursing, so the longer they nurse for, the longer it'll be until they can have another baby. Nursing at night and on demand (rather than on a schedule) seems to be especially important for delaying the return of ovulation after a baby." Vox

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A worry about attempting to tax consumption as opposed to investment:

"... the economics profession generally believes that consumption should be taxed rather than income. This is because you want to create incentives for people to defer consumption, save, and invest in building up the country's stock of capital goods. Yet something Thomas Piketty points out in his celebrated new book on wealth inequality around the world is that at the high end the distinction between wealth and consumption tends to break down.

For a normal middle class person, the difference between spending $5,000 on a vacation and putting $5,000 into the stock market to save for retirement is obvious. But while buying a professional basketball team is technically a business investment, it's also the case that owning a pro sports team is pretty fun." Vox

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This seems like good news:

"The deal, clinched after a dramatic extended meeting in Geneva, calls for the disarming of all illegal groups. In the next few days they would have to vacate all the government buildings and public spaces they have occupied over the course of the crisis.

In return, the protesters in eastern Ukraine would be offered amnesty for all but capital crimes and the government in Kiev would immediately start a process of public consultation aimed at devolving constitutional powers to the provinces" The Guardian

Links, Wednesday 16th April

Important breaking news:

"Research conducted by the University of NSW finds that, when people are confronted by a succession of bearded men, clean-shaven men become more attractive to them.

This process also works in reverse, with men with heavy stubble and full, Ned Kelly-style beards judged more attractive when present in a sea of hairless visages." The Guardian

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Across the United States, many local governments are responding to skyrocketing levels of inequality and the now decades-long crisis of homelessness among the very poor ... by passing laws making it a crime to sleep in a parked car." The Guardian

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Clearly a step in the right direction.

"Germany’s third largest city, Munich, has legalised public nudity by introducing six designated nudist zones."

  

The Telegraph

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I think this campaign is an interesting intervention. Opinions?

"The ‘Vote No’ campaign does not assert electoral abstentionism as a principle. On the contrary the suggestion that votes are either spoilt or given to smaller parties is understood as a conjunctural and tactical intervention that is in part a holding operation until a credible electoral choice or choices emerge and in part an attempt to make it clear that there will be fertile ground for credible alternatives." Sacsis

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"You see this relationship between power and design throughout the history of the office: in the early clerical offices (think Bartleby, the Scrivener or Scrooge’s office in A Christmas Carol), the spaces were small, intimate; even though a vast distance in power separated a partner in a firm from his bookkeeper, the fact that they worked close together made both feel like they were in a father-son sort of relationship (the offices were all male at the time), and there was every expectation that a junior clerk would eventually rise and take over the firm.

Later, an increased division of labor and enormously expanded hierarchy led to the offices that we more or less recognize today: large floors, filled with desks, where lower level employees work; offices along the side of the building for middle management (each of these with slight gradations to indicate status or privilege: a nicer desk; carpet on the floor, etc.); and corner offices for executives, or even different floors with different bathrooms. In places like these, space almost directly reflects hierarchy.

As we approach the present, people began to recognize this: things like the open-plan office, invented in Germany in the 1950s (and called the Bürolandschaft, or “office landscape”), attempted to level hierarchies by making everyone work out on the open floor. But even in the earliest versions of the open-plan, small markers of status began to assert themselves: Managers would apportion more plants to themselves, or set up informal private spaces through creative use of more desks and partitions. So design at work often seems to say something about relations of power at work." Atlantic Cities

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I've had this problem in attempting describe what I *do* all day - people don't seem to have an intuitive grasp on philosophy as an activity. 

"There is an aesthetic crisis in writing, which is this: how do we write emotionally of scenes involving computers? How do we make concrete, or at least reconstructable in the minds of our readers, the terrible, true passions that cross telephony lines? Right now my field must tackle describing a world where falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms looks the same; it looks like typing." Quinn Norton

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So this is interesting. To what extent does our resentment of what Graeber calls "bullshit jobs" reproduce an older disdain for intellectual or clerical labour? Thought sparked by the following quote:

"19th century thinkers (Marx, especially) made a lot out of the fact that industrial objects appeared in stores or arrived in your hands without a trace of the impressive labor (or the hands of the laborers) that went into them.

But at least on the surface office work is seems to be even more “alienated,” if that’s the right term; it’s not clear what office workers actually “make.” For years, office workers just produced paper, and the paper they produced was often abstractly related to some kind of manual labor taking place elsewhere.

For this reason early American commentators, for whom office work was not a natural or dominant kind of work (the country was much more agrarian, and nascently industrial), viewed office work as “not real work”—not least because it seemed to require no physical effort." (Atlantic Cities)

See also the Economist's take on the issue

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"The Friday evening antics that led to the invention of graphene have become the stuff of scientific legend. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at Manchester University were playing around with Scotch tape and a lump of graphite when they found they could make sheets of carbon one atom thick." The Guardian

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Thoughts?

" To call working class politics a form of identity politics is not, however, to dismiss it. Indeed, all successful political movements rely on the construction of what historian Benedict Anderson refers to as an “imagined community.” " Jacobin

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Lots of problematic remarks in this article, but nevertheless an interesting picture of elite sex work in 18th century Paris and its relation to broader social norms.

"the police kept track of them as part of the effort to provide oversight to a group that naturally had none. Kept women were largely outside the concatenation of corporations that defined 18th-century France. Few were married and hence were not under the “governance” of husbands. Those living with families often dominated them, as heads of household and hence were not supervised by fathers, as was considered natural. They were free to leave their patrons and often did. They were not bound by the workshop and hence the master." Slate

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Gosh, this is contrary to standard dogma. 

"... demand for highly skilled workers in the United States peaked around 2000 and then fell, even as their supply continued to grow. This pushed the highly educated down the ladder of skills in search of jobs, pushing less-educated workers further down." New York Times

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"... inheritances depend on the extent to which the elderly accumulate—which is greater the longer they live—and on the rate at which they die. These two forces yield a flow of inheritances that Piketty estimates to be about 15 percent of annual income presently in France—astonishingly high for a factor that gets no attention at all in newspapers or textbooks." Dissent

Should all public toilets be gender-neutral?

[Serious trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault]

I think there are good arguments both for and against making all public toilets gender-neutral public toilets. I find myself leaning to the "pro" camp, but I'd like to hear comments, especially from women.

The basic proposal is that all new public toilets be constructed along the following lines:

• A large room with toilet stalls and washing area; and 
• (optionally) a smaller room, adjoining this main room, containing urinals

To this basic plan, one might also add smaller private rooms for changing infants, disabled facilities, etc. The important feature, for present purposes, is that all facilities will be available to everyone, regardless of gender and anatomy. Older facilities might be retrofitted to this plan in various, by knocking down walls and installing new partitions, relabelling existing facilities as "bathroom with urinals" and "bathroom without urinals", etc. 

The case for:

1. Accommodation of people who don't comfortably fit into the gender binary

This includes trans*, intersex, agender, genderqueer people and so on. The motivation for this is that many such people do not identify with either gender and so will feel uncomfortable being forced into choosing one. Moreover, they often suffer harassment and even violence by other members of the public when they use the bathroom they do choose. (Some cases are discussed here, but there are many examples). Such harassment might, of course, continue. But it must be recognised that many people think they are "doing the right thing" when they attempt to prevent someone who they read as belonging to the "wrong" gender from using a given facility. This applies even more strongly in the case of facilities with security personal stationed at the toilets (e.g. clubs and bars), who have explicit powers to bar entry to person of the "wrong gender". Of course, people who do not fit the enforced gender binary are sadly likely to continue suffering harassment in various contexts for some time to come. But it is hoped that explicitly stating that everyone is entitled to use all facilities would eliminate at least one pretext and so diminish the overall amount of harassment. 

2. Accommodation of carers

Many people are taken care of by people of a gender different to their own. For instance, a young boy accompanied by his mother; a frail elderly woman accompanied by a male nurse. It seems clear that many such people would need to be accompanied by their carers into toilets, because they have mobility difficulties, need to be helped with hygiene, may get lost, and so on. There is already an implicit social convention in many places that young children may accompany parents into the toilet designated for the parent's gender. But there is no such convention for cases where both parties are adults. Even with children, there is often an uncomfortable "transition" during the time when the child starts to be "read" as possessing something like adult gender but cannot safely be left alone. 

3. Fairness

Women's toilets are often designed with much less capacity than men's, as anyone who has observed the queues outside a busy public toilet will have noticed. This is a defect in what is charmingly known as "potty parity", or fairness in provision. Public toilets are often designed in such a way that men's and women's facilities occupy equal floor space. However, since stalls take up more space than urinals, this means women's toilets actually have fewer facilities. Moreover, even if there are equal facilities, urinating at a stall takes considerably longer than urinating at a urinal. Fairness would require allocating considerably more facilities for women than for men. This whole issue can be avoiding, however, simply by creating gender neutral facilities. This is especially so where retrofitting is required - rather than trying to reallocate floor space in an existing building, and installing new facilities, the walls between men's and women's bathrooms can be knocked down (they're usually adjacent to each other) to create a larger space. 

4. Efficiency

This is a less important set of arguments, but I thought I'd throw it out there. The basic idea here is that there's going to be random "unevenness" in the number of men versus women demanding toilet facilities. This can result in a queue for the women's toilets while the men's toilets sit empty and (more rarely) vice versa. Resources are used more efficiently if any available facility can be used by anyone. 

Another argument is that, if it was made clear that urinals are available for anyone's use, more women might make use of them, possibly with the help of a shewee. Since using a urinal is much quicker than using a stall, this would also result in time savings for everyone. 

The case against:

The major argument against instituting gender-neutral toilets is one of safety, specifically in respect of sexual assault. The thought here is that, since the majority of sexual assaults are committed by men against women, it is a bad idea to allow men to enter enclosed private spaces where they might find a woman alone. Since most sexual assaults are committed by people known to the victim, the scenario of being assaulted by a stranger in a public toilet is relatively uncommon, but it definitely does happen (a random selection of news articles). 

There are a few responses we might give to this argument. Firstly, sexual predators are certainly not deterred from entering women-only bathrooms. Indeed, in many of the cases cited above, the assailant specifically followed his intended victim into the bathroom, correctly believing he would be able to corner her there. So the safety of such spaces is arguably somewhat illusory. But perhaps it is at least more difficult for an such a predator to do this with gender-segregated toilets, since anyone noticing him entering the women's bathroom would immediately raise the alarm. 

Another factor to consider is that a predator will tend to avoid potential witnesses, so generally the more people there are in a bathroom, the safer it will be, even if those bystanders are also men. However, the presence of men would only prevent attacks where the victim is specifically followed and isolated, buy may also facilitate opportunistic attacks. So it's important that we know which sort of cases tends to predominate. Additionally, while a male bystander might step in if someone is obviously being violently attacked, he might be more likely to join in on more minor harassment and abuse. 

Finally, there is something a little uncomfortable about the idea of segregating facilities as a response to bad behaviour by men. I think similar issues arise, for instance, in the introduction of women-only train cars specifically in response to pervasive sexual harassment . This solution seems like something of a cop-out, an unwillingness to deal with the underlying problem of male entitlement. That said, the bottom line is that it is for women themselves to decide how best to protect themselves, so a rather abstract argument like this shouldn't be given too much weight in the face of actual demands from women. 

Links, Tuesday 15th April

"Normal mammalian pregnancy is a well-ordered affair because the mother is a despot. Her offspring live or die at her will; she controls their nutrient supply, and she can expel or reabsorb them any time. Human pregnancy, on the other hand, is run by committee – and not just any committee, but one whose members often have very different, competing interests and share only partial information. It's a tug-of-war that not infrequently deteriorates to a tussle and, occasionally, to outright warfare. Many potentially lethal disorders, such as ectopic pregnancy, gestational diabetes, and pre-eclampsia can be traced to mis-steps in this intimate game." Quora

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"Large studies have repeatedly shown that, with the possible exception of vitamin D, antioxidant supplements have negligible positive effect on healthy people, at least in terms of important things such as preventing people getting cancer or dying prematurely. And some supplements – notably vitamins A, E and beta-carotene – even seem to slightly raise the risk of disease and early death." The Guardian

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Does anyone have a critical response to this? Giving township residents title deeds to their homes is what I consider a Very Good Idea and I'm glad the DA is pushing it.

"The centrepiece of Maimane’s manifesto was that the DA would give the black people of Gauteng the homes they are living in and the title deeds certifying their legal ownership of their properties. The implications of this are potentially transformational for our society. Only a small percentage of the millions of the black population of this country own the properties they live in, and even fewer have title deeds. Which means the properties are of no capital value to them." Business Day

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"The image of early 19th century America has a relatively egalitarian landscape turns out to neglect something important: slavery. Millions of people of African ancestry were held in bondage, making the idea of hard work as the ticket to success a joke. And possession of their labor was extremely valuable. As this chart illustrates, slave wealth was slightly more valuable than all the agricultural land in the country put together. It was also more valuable than all the factories and railroads and canals combined. In a world of relatively abundant land and high wages, owning black people was the key to wealth. And the process of emancipation was possibly the single greatest expropriation of wealth in human history." Vox

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"Evictions are political; only those who are not loyal members of the ruling party are having their homes illegally destroyed without court orders. In Lamontville, residents of Madlala Village who went to the Constitutional court on 12 February 2014 were told by local party structures and their councillor that their shacks would be demolished if they brought any party other than the ANC to the settlement.

A day after the Constitutional Court heard their appeal, the eThekwini Land Invasion Unit were instructed to demolish all the shacks in Madlala Village. This was a form of punishment for taking government to Constitutional court." Daily Maverick

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"The migrant domestic worker support group, Kalayaan, published a briefing paper during the course of the week to mark the second anniversary of the coalition government's axing of a domestic worker visa which had allowed this group of migrants to change employers.

The system which replaced of visa ties the worker to the employer who had orginally sponsored her entry into the country.

... the report records that:

Tied workers are twice as likely to report having being physically abused as those who were not tied (16% and 8%)

·65% of those on the tied visa didn't have their own rooms, so had no privacy, often sleeping in the kitchen or lounge or sharing with the children, compared to 34% of those not tied

78% of tied workers had their passport kept from them, compared with 48% of those not tied

Kalayaan staff assessed more than double (69%) of those tied as trafficked, in contrast with 26% of those who were not tied." Migrants' Rights Network

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The spread of fungal disease among banana crops. Note that this problem is in large part due to the fact that most banana crops are grown by clonal propagation, which significantly reduces genetic diversity and thus disease resistance. 

"The fungal disease recently spread from Asia, where it’s already caused significant losses, to Africa and the Middle East, and the FAO believes Latin America could be next. That would ramp the crisis up considerably: About 70 percent of the world’s banana exports are grown in the region. And it would do more than remove the fruit from grocery store shelves: Bananas are a key source of food in many tropical countries." Salon

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Interesting analysis of the political situation in Ukraine. 

"A pro-European, pro-NATO government ruling a regionally divided country -- and one that is quite vulnerable to Russian military intervention -- is a recipe for instability, not for European integration. Simply pushing forward with EU association and NATO integration without pushing the government in Kiev to address its illegitimacy problems through means other than arrest is not much of a strategy. It’s not even much of a gamble, as it is almost certain to fail." Foreign Affairs

Links, Monday 14th April

Yep. The whole notion of "responsible" charitable giving presupposes that middle-class NGO-types are somehow better-placed to decide what's best for poor people than the poor people themselves.

"If I accept Give Responsibly’s assertion that Shaundre had chosen the unglamorous life of begging on the street instead of accessing the programmes offered by NGOs, then the microeconomic explanation for it is that the programmes are not as attractive an option as begging." City Press

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"A couple of weeks later, when faced with more opportunities to give and share, the children were much more generous after their character had been praised than after their actions had been. Praising their character helped them internalize it as part of their identities. The children learned who they were from observing their own actions: I am a helpful person." New York Times

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Violence in South Africa is horrendous, but getting better (and getting better faster for women, apparently). The Economist

Links, Sunday 13th April

Some good debunking of myths about drug users, from Cracked

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"In 1986, Irina Nistor, then an official translator for state-run TV, was tapped by underground pirates to translate Hollywood films that other people had smuggled into the country. But she didn't translate scripts and then hand them over to a varied cast of skilled voice actors -- what was this, Rollywood? Who had that kind of time or money? Certainly not Irina, so she just dubbed herself over every single English-speaking voice in every single movie. She was quite literally the voice of Romanian media. By the time communism fell and sitting down to enjoy The Breakfast Club wasn't punishable by death, she had translated and dubbed over 3,000 movies, all by her lonesome." Cracked

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An excellent discussion of the practical effects of criminalising sex workers' clients: 

"“I used to complain about having to come out here to work,” she says. “I had nothing to complain about compared to now.” And this is the statement that sticks with me, a statement so simple and yet so clear, a statement which demonstrates that, despite how Dana’s supposed advocates, her would-be protectors – anti-prostitution campaigners – characterise sex work and how she experiences it, Dana herself knows the difference between a bad situation and a worse one." Nine

Links, Thursday 10th/Friday 11th April

A tour of accents across the British Isles performed in a single, unedited take

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This is speculative with respect to Pistorius specifically, but makes a good general point. Time

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Thoughts on this? I would be inclined to disagree, partly on the grounds that the US has been one of very few industrialised nations to reduce measured CO2 emissions over the last decade, simply by replacement of goal with natural gas (though maybe this would be undercut if methane leaks were accounted for more rigorously). And if gas is going to be a feature of the energy market for any length of time, I'd much rather get my supplies from the US than from Russia. Naomi Klein in the Guardian

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"Senior Nato officials have warned that the buildup is already having a psychological, destabilising effect, helping stoke up the turmoil in eastern Ukraine. “These masked guys would not be taking over government buildings if there were not 40,000 soldiers just across the border,” said one official." Guardian

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"In a controversial bid to reduce the number of people living on Cape Town’s streets, the city council is considering the establishment of “community villages” outside the city centre. Those who refuse to go voluntarily will be picked up, tried for by-law infringements and forcibly removed – a detail that has outraged activists and street people."

Despite the fact of what their plan actual entails, politicians nevertheless try to spin it:

"Smith presented it as an alternative to a “law enforcement” approach, which sees street people being arrested for by-law infringements (sleeping on the street for example) and then “recycled”, via community courts and holding cells, back on to the street." Cape mulls ‘community villages’ for homeless. Also: Reports of CPT homeless 'work camps' alarming

Culture-bound syndromes, sexual "preference" and the prestige of biological causation

Note: This appeared previously on my old blog, which never really got anywhere. I've decided to repost it here so that everything is now in the same place

This post arises out out of some articles I recently posted on my facebook wall, and various comments that people made about them. Both articles discussed culture-bound syndromes (CBSs). According to wikipedia, a CBS is "is a combination of psychiatric and somatic symptoms that are considered to be a recognizable disease only within a specific society or culture.  There are no objective biochemical or structural alterations of body organs or functions, and the disease is not recognized in other cultures." The specific articles argued that PMS and mental illnesses more generally are much more conditioned by the specific influence of "Western" culture than is typically thought. Now, this may or may not be true. Disease causation is complicated, and we shouldn't pretend that we know more than we do. Especially in the case of psychiatric diseases, since we definitely don't know much about the mind works. There are clear cases of CBSs (like the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century epidemic of hysteria in the West) and clear cases of diseases that don't have any direct cultural causation (e.g. skin cancer). A lot of other things are probably somewhere in the middle. 

Interesting as it is, I'm putting the science to the side for the purposes of this discussion. What I'm concerned with is the outraged reaction that several people had to the suggestion that certain maladies are CBSs. This outrage, I think, stems from the imputed suggestion that CBSs aren't "real" diseases. That is, they are "all in the sufferer's head", they could just "snap out of it", they shouldn't receive medication or any other treatment, they shouldn't be able to get time off work, receive government disability benefits, and so on. And I think I know exactly why this imputation seems plausible - in our popular culture and, indeed, to a large extent in medicine, we have the notion that a "real" disease has an exclusively biological cause. 

Coincidentally, today I came across an article which tacitly applies a similar sort of dichotomy in a completely different context, namely sexual orientation. Here, the author excoriates the use of the term "sexual preference" because it implies choice. The major point he wants to convey is that this is just scientifically inaccurate - in fact "our brains were tuned to be gay or straight before we were born". You may also recall the controversy that ensued when actress Cynthia Nixon in effect declared that she is gay by choice.

Again, interesting as it is, I'm not going to comment on the science here. What is interesting is the way that biological causation is implicitly being used here as a strategy of legitimisation. It is argued that gay rights are defensible precisely because being gay is biologically innate, just as treatment for a disease is justifiable precisely because it has a specific biological cause. The point I really want to make in this post in that the use of biology in this context is totally bullshit from an ethical point of view, and that this whole strategy is therefore fundamentally misdirected. A particular way of living doesn't become more or less "acceptable" because it is caused biologically caused; and an illness doesn't deserve treatment only if it is caused purely by a biological abnormality. 

That said, I get where the outrage comes from in both contexts. The "biological cause only" understanding of disease is so prevalent that cultural explanations have been used to try to invalidate people's suffering and effectively deny them assistance. And LGBT people have long endured the sneer that their behaviour is "unnatural". So I sympathise with the reasons people have for resisting CBS and preference talk. But I think that the real enemy is the prestige assigned to biological causes as legitimating a person's needs and desires. 

What would a more sensible view look like? Well, in the LGBT case, it's pretty obvious. Civil rights, including gender-unrestricted marriage rights, are a good thing because they make a lot of people happy and don't significantly hurt anyone else. It doesn't matter why people are different in all kinds of ways, if you believe in ethical liberalism, you should try to accommodate this difference insofar as is possible without unduly harming anyone. Done. No reference to biology is required.  Similar, in the disease case, we need to think of why we treat people who have various conditions. The answer also seems obvious - because they're distressed and can't alleviate this distress without help. From an ethical position, this is a fully sufficient reason for helping, irrespective of the exact causal story underlying the distress. 

Links, Wednesday 9th April

"the conventional wisdom on oral-sex power dynamics has never made sense to me. When a man puts the most delicate part of his body (penis) between the sharpest parts of mine (teeth), he maintains the belief that he is dominant—even though I’m the one who could, with a few purposeful chomps, remove him from the gene pool. The heterosexual-male psyche is so self-entitling, I realized, that men can convince themselves they are in charge during absolutely any interaction with a woman. “Ha-ha, wow,” Greg said when I pointed this out. “I can’t decide if this makes ‘patriarchy’ seem pathetic or impressive. It’s like being so cool that you can do uncool things: ‘I’m so patriarchal, women can shit in my mouth.’ True masculinity is being a power bottom?”" NY Magazine (mostly about anal play)

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"Right to Buy thus created an astonishing leak of state money – taxpayers’ money, if you like to think of it that way – into the hands of a rentier class. First, the government sold people homes it owned at a huge discount. Then it allowed the original buyers to keep the profit when they sold those homes to a private landlord at market price. Then the government artificially raised market rents by choking off supply – by making it impossible for councils to replace the sold-off houses. Then it paid those artificially high rents to the same private landlords in the form of housing benefit – many times higher than the housing benefit it would have paid had the houses remained in council hands." London Review of Books

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A response to the Michael Lewis book about high frequency trading.

"If any high-frequency traders get prosecuted for insider trading, the message will be clear: The stock market is supposed to be fair, and if anybody is found to be taking advantage of information unavailable to the rest of us, even if it’s only for a millisecond, they’re going to risk a serious fine, or jail, or both. That’s not a good message to send, because the stock market is not fair, it never has been, and it never will be. And you’re doing nobody any favors by encouraging them to believe otherwise." Slate

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"Prof Cameron explained why those hired to kill will do so for what seems like little recompense. ‘They will do it for less money because of their attachment to the person,’ he told Metro. There is, of course, another factor at play to explain why the sums are lower than expected. ‘The obvious reason the sum would be in low in some cases is that the people don’t have very much money to pay the person,’ said Prof Cameron. ‘The money’s a token. It’s like somebody saying they’ll come round and help you plaster your house or renovate your basement. And you say, “Take something”, and they go, “Oh no, I can’t” and you say, “Here’s £500” – it’s that." Metro

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"Even in the US, the line between sex and garment work has always been thin, with census takers using "seamstress" as a euphemism for "prostitute" and listing, for example, 2500 seamstresses in Seattle in the 1890s. Writing about a slightly earlier time, Beth Harris writes that in the 1840s, "sewing was, in many ways, the ultimate sigh of femininity. It was sedentary and passive and it was traditionally done by women only for the care and maintenance of the family and home. Needlework performed by women for the marketplace, for strangers, she adds, was "not unlike prostitution". truthout

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"While her universally (and rightly) adored tomboy little sister Arya rolls her eyes at anything ladylike and takes up a sword — a masculine signifier of strength — Sansa conforms to the role of the obedient noblewoman she has been groomed for since birth. Despite the fact that her grace, manners and innate ability to play the part of a lady are what keep her alive at court, it is for this transgression that she is deemed "incredibly annoying," her mistakes not readily forgiven and her bravery overlooked." PolicyMic

This is related:

"Sociologists use the term “androcentrism” to refer to a new kind of sexism, one that replaces the favoring of men over women with the favoring of masculinity over femininity. According to the rules of androcentrism, men and women alike are rewarded, but only insofar as they are masculine (e.g., they play sports, drink whiskey, and are lawyers or surgeons w00t!). Meanwhile, men are punished for doing femininity and women… well, women are required to do femininity and simultaneously punished for it." Sociological Images

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"Ignore the people saying Londoners should talk to each other more to 'build a friendlier city'. Most of us moved here precisely to avoid having to chat to strangers" Guardian

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Brooke Magnanti (aka Belle du Jour) on sex work decriminalisation at the Oxford Union. Sexonomics

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"Nobody would ever say to you, ‘How could you ever take care of your own child-to-be because you used to sell your nannying.”I don’t know if you’re a fit mother because you used to charge for that. Clearly you must be broken!’

I’m ruined!

Your nanny hands have been soiled with money!" The Billfold

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"Basically ‘Jemble’ began when a guy who called himself Jemble messaged my friend on OkCupid, with a message full of jemble-level language such as signing off with ‘courtly bows’." us vs th3m