- The Pencilsword: On a plate – The Wireless Excellent cartoon by Aussie cartoonist Toby Morris, about how our birth (or, rather, who we’re born to) determines our life chances.
- Lawsplainer: What the Supreme Court Didn’t Decide About True Threats in Elonis | Popehat
- What would a reasonable religious freedom law look like? | Kelly Thinks Too Much
- I’ve been gently arguing with some Sad Puppies about Ms Marvel (the hugo-nominated superhero graphic novel about a Mulsim teen who gains superpowers) on TL Knighton’s blog.
- My daughter dressed like Elsa from “Frozen” for 23 days — and it was amazing – Salon.com
- The Columbia rape denialists are straight up conspiracy theorists And, a related link: I Am Not a ‘Pretty Little Liar’
- Sorry, evolutionary psychology buffs. A new paper suggests that our caveman ancestors were egalitarian. The title is an exaggeration, but there’s still stuff of interest here.
- Tim Minchin – If I Didn’t Have You – Full Uncut Version – YouTube I wish I were married to Sarah Minchin.
- The Bristol Board : Photo I love this Pogo strip from 1959. I pretty much love it anytime a great cartoonist plays with word balloons.
- My Cartoons At A May Day Festival In Israel!
- Against Being Against Manspreading The mostly feminist campaign against “manspreading” has led to fat-shaming and to giving police another excuse to harass minority men.
- “States with the highest number of abortion restrictions have the poorest health outcomes and least supportive policies for women and children….” | Center for Reproductive Rights
- Birth Control That Works Too Well | The Nation “A Colorado program to give low-income teens long-acting contraception dropped the teen abortion rate dramatically. But conservatives refuse to fund it.”
- Families don’t balance their budgets, and neither should the federal government – Vox
- Snowden and the NSA – The Atlantic
- All (hopefully) of the bad arguments about rape on Game of Thrones debunked, and Another major character is raped on Game of Thrones. This time, it works for the story., both written by Amanda Marcotte. I’m sort of late on posting this, because I only just watched it, but I agree with most of Amanda’s take.
- The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of “jaywalking” – Vox
- I will have fedoras and never apologise to anyone | anthropolatry From the title, I was expecting this post to be a defense of wearing fedoras – and yes, I realize that the hats people call fedoras are often actually trilbys – and a pushback against the practice of fashion-sneering at people who wear fedoras/trilbys, and I clicked on it for that reason, because I loath fashion-sneering. But it’s actually about something else – arguing that people on all sides should be willing to give other people a break when they say something terrible in an angry rant – but I thought that was interesting, too.
- Study: Each new immigrant creates 1.2 new jobs – Vox
- Paid Leave Goes from Progressive Pipe Dream to Political Reality | The New Republic
- Hook-up culture vs. rape culture: The conversation we’re not having
- 4 Reasons Why Feminism Is for Men — Medium
I both do and do not agree with the Marcotte pieces on GoT.
I agree that, having decided to take that plotline the way it’s going in the show, the fact that the rape happened was narratively necessary and would have felt like a cop-out otherwise. I think some of the disagreement with the scene is actually a disagreement with the plotline in general, and how it changes the character arc of that particular character; certainly that’s where most of my ire is coming from (as the character in question is one of my favorites in the books, and I think this takes them sort of outside the narrative momentum and character arc they have there).
I disagree that the scene needed to be shown the way it was. In the very next episode, rather early on, the character in question gives like a two-sentence summary of everything that’s happened since then to the other major character involved. They could have stopped the scene quite a bit earlier than they did, added one more sentence to that future scene, and gotten everything of importance across, without having to show as much as they did. I’m not sure what showing it, rather than leaving it told, does for the show, except (cynically) to give them a punchy closing moment for an episode.
I think I would feel differently if the show didn’t have a history of showing scenes like this. Since it does, it starts to feel to me as though it’s intended to be titillating, and it bothers me; it’s a lot harder to justify “this is intended to shock you & tell you something about the character” when it’s more or less background brutality in lots of other scenes.
Too late. The Blackhawks put them down in 7.
Wow I am really flattered that you linked to my post!
“I’ve been gently arguing with some Sad Puppies about Ms Marvel”
You were far too kind. Their entire argument amounts to “Muslims should never be portrayed in a positive light,” they’re just too cowardly to say that in so many words.
It was a good post!
“It was a good post!”
Yeah — but this one is goin’ in the quote file:
It was a great post.
I really like the idea of kindness being our polestar.
—-Myca
Do You Suffer From Blatter Problems? Suffer no more!
His parting gift is an attempt to exert more control over regional & national organizations. How could that possibly be a bad thing?
One of the links in the list is about the Supreme Court’s Elonis decision. Here’s another link, arguing that many progressives have misunderstood the decision:
You do realise that the link you posted is actually against ‘manspreading’?
“They didn’t have to be so explicit in showing the rape scene” some of the critics were saying. That’s like saying “They didn’t have to show so much of the mutilation and torture,” or “They didn’t have to show so much blood and guts in the Red Wedding.”
Well, yes. They did have to. Because doing it that way clearly had a major emotional impact on the audience and stuck in their memories. Which is the point.
Do you mean Veronica’s response? Yes, I do realize that. I thought it was more interesting to link to the post along with Veronica’s response, than it would have been to just link to the post.
@ 9:
I’ve lit bonfires with one match. I’ve lit them with torches. I’ve lit them with flares. I’ve lit them with magnifying glasses and I’ve lit them with flint and steel (I’m actually pretty good with that). I’ve lit them on sunny days, rainy nights and in the snow. I’ve lit them with a little help from Boy Scout Holy Water (which National strictly forbids …). But damned if I’ve ever been able to light one by using a bow drill (a.k.a. “rubbing two sticks together”).
And I remember reading that comic the day it was first published.
Hands down, the most scarily effective and insanely fun tool for fire lighting in the daytime is one of these.
Large (11″ square) Fresnel Lens
There is no “find tiny fluff and strive to ignite it” stuff involved. In bright sun the thing is like a freakin’ blowtorch (the spot is bright enough where it lands that it hurts your eyes without sunglasses) and you can light anything you want. Hell, you could probably weld with the thing. And since it’s relatively indestructible, lightweight, and flexible, it’s easy to slip into a pack.
If you haven’t tried it, get one! The “seconds” are only $7 each and even the ‘first quality” ones are only $40.
Whatever you do, however, DO NOT LET CHILDREN USE IT. If you hit yourself with the full spot you’d be in the hospital. You can light things (or yourself) very fast if you lose track of sun angle.
It’s super fun, but dangerous.
I lit a fire with a magnifying glass once. I was about eight. I saw it as a science experiment. My mother disagreed. (I also thought that I’d been totally safe about it — I’d put the dry leaves in the middle of a slate paving stone, so that the fire wouldn’t spread. And it didn’t. But I still got in trouble.)
Can we talk a bit about manspreading and carceral feminism?
In any movement that seeks to change the nature and behavior of society itself, the hated apparatuses of state oppression become useful tools in creating the new ideal society. This isn’t any different.
This isn’t to say that feminists are applauding these arrests, or that everyone who wears the label believes that this should be a criminal offense. But whenever you use the machinery of the state to bend society to your will, there are bound to be abuses.
A truly intersectional approach might involve criticizing the new subway etiquette campaign for adding another rule that can be used to harass (certain kinds of) people. It doesn’t take a huge leap to go from shaming in PSAs to arresting. The profligation of rules (Three Felonies a Day, etc.) will always have disparate impact.
I can talk about the science of Fresnel lenses later this evening, if anyone’s interested in them–they’re pretty cool. :) (And one of the only things I actually remember from my grad school optics class!) Conference today, though, so no time to write it up till later…
Neat! By the time I was reading comic strips, I think Pogo had stopped running. But fortunately, I had the reprint books to read and reread.
One thing I love about that link is that whoever scanned it left in Kelly’s blue lines, so we can see where Kelly changed his mind. The biggest one is in panel 2, where Kelly decided on a completely different post for Churchy LaFemme than he had first drawn.
@ LTL FTC @ 18:
It is worse than an arrest; think death.
In the wake of Eric Garner’s death, I read an editorial that focused on the issue of legislation and suggested that every legislator should look at whether it is worth someone’s death in order for ________ (people not to sell loosies on the street). Because, like you said, once you have the rule, the police are told to enforce it. You should expect that there will be the possibility that someone will die because you thought selling loose cigarettes should be banned, or because you thought manspreading was rude, etc.
-Jut
Here’s a Slate article providing a very detailed explanation of what the author perceives as error and bias in the film The Hunting Ground.
Do the Hugo ballots allow for write-ins?
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-deep-the-rabbit-hole-goes/
Yes, in the nomination stage. Which won’t be for 8 or 9 months, for 2015 works, iirf. :-)
In link 11, I think the best point the OP makes is this:
I think I would call this type of thinking not lazy, but sloppy. I believe that taking up space IS a sign that the manspreader feels entitled to the space and has to do with the manspreader’s self-perceived place on the social hierarchy and the perceived place of others nearby who are forced to either accommodate him or get into a passive-aggressive or just plain aggressive shoving match. But I also believe that this behavior is usually unconscious, coming from the sort of unconscious bias that we all have and can try to correct for but cannot just decide not to have. It does seem to me that sloppy thinking in SJ circles sometimes leads to treating unconscious bias as conscious ideology and thus, rather than being treated as a human fallibility flaw, it’s treated as an egregious flaw.
However, because it is unconscious, yet also a behavior that people could change if they think about it, it seems especially amenable to being altered by PSAs and such.
That aside: I’m confused. There’s no mention of an actual ordinance or anything against manspreading. I assume that’s why the judge issued an “adjournment contemplating dismissal”. If it’s NOT a law or ordinance, what is the solution here, exactly? Never make PSAs about anything people do in public because cops looking for an excuse to arrest people they “don’t like the looks of” might use that as part of their excuse? Never complain about anything that isn’t at least as bad as police misconduct?
Indeed. And as my husband notes, it’s not just women who are annoyed at the [in his perception and mine, disproportionately male] people with their legs splayed out and bags everywhere when seats are at a premium.
This is a relatively minor point, but it really annoyed me:
–Men seem to be capable of sitting and not splaying their legs out, so I’m not sure what to make of the “we have balls” part, but that wasn’t the annoying part.
–In what universe do men have bigger legs on average than women? Is it the universe that Hollywood movies are set in, where the ideal man approaches bodybuilder proportions and the ideal woman approaches runway model proportions, where leading men are often in the “overweight” BMI range and leading ladies are a point or two above “underweight”?
(Even Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson look almost even on thigh width, although it’s hard to tell since he’s wearing looser pants.)
Even for most “normal” weight people, I’d predict that most women have wider thighs than most men, and about 2/3 of Americans have a BMI above 25. The strength (and muscle) differential between men and women is bigger for upper body strength than lower body strength, and women have a much greater tendency to accumulate fat on their thighs than men do… and on their hips. That’s another thing: we have bigger hips. If anything, WE should be the ones taking up more space to the sides of us. Men have LONGER legs than women on average, but that doesn’t make much difference for manSPREADING–if his legs are straight forward, they won’t spread out more at all, and if it’s a woman he’s sitting next to, the extent to which his legs spread out more due purely to length would not matter when the woman has shorter legs because her legs wouldn’t extend out far enough for it to matter, so therefore he wouldn’t be at risk of touching her legs with his extra-projecty knees.
I have to wonder if the cultural ideal that women are supposed to be small and men are supposed to be big is overriding basic perception of reality, because otherwise I just can’t explain how someone could believe something that it’s plain to see is not true.
I can believe that there was a lot of gross bodyshaming going on, and I condemn it, whether or not he was actually “manspreading”. OTOH, I’d have to see the picture have any confidence of whether he was or not, based on the description and my experience with my own body. My thighs are pretty big, but fat is squishy. With the outer edge of my legs making a straight line from my hips to the beginnings of my knees that’s perpendicular to the edge of the seat, and my thighs resting on a seat (rather than me sitting on the edge of the seat), my thighs touch. They also touch when I bring legs together up to where my knees start, which I am capable of doing, because fat is squishy.
As one of those critics, a few points:
1. This is not a general argument (“rape should never be shown”). It is a specific argument (“this rape, in this show, didn’t need to be shown”), based on the fact that GoT has a history of A) showing rape and sexual assaults as background info that clearly ISN’T supposed to have a big emotional impact, B) depicting rape scenes that the creators apparently weren’t aware were rape scenes, C) changing consensual sexual acts from the books into nonconsensual acts in the show without changing anything about the relationships of the characters afterwards, and D) just generally not knowing how to plot around the in-universe impact of rape and various sorts of sexual threats.
2. I’ve been thinking lately about ellen_fremedon’s id vortex theory (discussed further at Making Light here). Basically, it says that certain emotionally charged subjects (sex, violence, certain interpersonal kinks) tend to warp your story dynamics–they often either drag your story off the rails or result in heaps of cliché. This is discussed in the context of fanfic. Due to communal suspension of shame about certain topics in fandom, fan authors may actually better than pro authors at handling certain kinds of topics, because of extensive experience reading and writing things that most published fiction stays away from. But when thinking about Game of Thrones, it makes me think of the fact that the show writers are very good at handling violence, and tend to be not so good at handling other kinds of emotional impacts–see how strangely paced and generally weird Theon’s storyline last season was, for example–a case where I do think the show would have been better for showing less “of the mutilation and torture”. (Was that just last season, actually?) It’s kind of a problem in the books, too, though not to the extent I thought it was a problem in the show. Because they’re just not good at writing that kind of thing. So my objection about the scene last week wasn’t just that they wrote yet another rape scene–it was that they wrote yet another rape scene when they’re so bad at writing rape scenes.
Just FYI the manspreading-arrest thing might be not quite true.
http://m.snopes.com/2015/06/02/manspreading-arrest/
Okay–in case anyone was curious: Fresnel lenses!
Imagine you have a lens which is just a glass sphere, cut in half. If you shine a lightbulb behind the flat part of the lens, the curvature of the front surface will turn it into a beam; if you shine a beam of light, you’ll get something you can focus into an image (or a point of light). Now, the light bending happens all at the interface between glass and air; it doesn’t actually matter how thick the glass is, except that with a thick half-sphere you can have the sharply angled bits of glass near the edge of the lens, which help capture the maximum amount of light from the lightbulb to turn into a beam, for example.
Now imagine you put the lens flat side down on a table, and you draw a set of (invisible) concentric circles moving out from the center of the lens, and then cut the glass into rings along those circles, straight up and down. Now flip the lens over; the rings will fall down until the highest point hits the table, and you’ll be left with a tower of concentric rings, the tallest in the middle, the shortest at the outer edge. Finally, cut straight across the tower exactly even with the lowest ring, and then flip the whole thing back over. What does the lens look like now? It’s got a flat back, just like before; in the front, it’s got funny jagged steps, but between those steps it’s curved just exactly as it was before, and, as I said, all that matters is the curvature–not how thick the glass was. So, except for the ridges between the concentric rings, this lens should work just like your old half-sphere of glass, only with way less glass involved, so it’s cheaper and much, much lighter. This is the basic idea of a Fresnel lens. Practically speaking Fresnel lenses are milled into that shape from a single piece of glass, not made piecemeal like I just described. It’s not quite as good as the original lens, because of those discontinuities–as Wikipedia will tell you, this is why you don’t use Fresnel lenses for photography. But if all you want is to turn a lightbulb emitting in all directions into a beam of light, a Fresnel lens works great. And in fact that’s where they’re most famously used: to turn isotropic light sources like lightbulbs into the beam of a lighthouse.
Fresnel lenses always remind me of the zone plate, also developed by Fresnel. This is a glass plate with concentric dark rings imprinted on it in a specific pattern. It also focuses light like a lens would (through a different mechanism), except sometimes you get ring patterns around bright point sources. Here’s a flickr group of zone plate photos for the curious.
“It’s super fun, but dangerous.”
Those two things seem to have been tied together quite a lot in my life. And I’ve tried to do my share in introducing the young men of my community to the concept as well (e.g., taking the Troop rock climbing at Devil’s Lake State Park in Wisconsin last month). In fact, for the first time, we took 4 young women there as well. We’re hoping to start a Venture Crew.
“It’s super fun, but dangerous” is often followed by the most dangerous words in the English language: “Hold my beer and watch this.” (but not on a Scout outing).
If people are standing and you’re taking up more than one seat, you’re being rude regardless of your sex. But if there’s open seats, I see no issue with spreading out some.
Then let me tell you what it’s about. It’s a function of how big you’re built, how tight your pants are and whether or not your underwear fits right and is correctly positioned at the moment. I’ve had my moments where it was either sit there in actual pain, sit with my legs spread out, or stick my hand down my pants in public and make some adjustments.
Amp – it was a sad day for me when Pogo disappeared.
closetpuritan:
Tumblr’s Razor: Never attribute to any other cause that which can be shoehorned into whitcisheteropatriarchy.
“It’s a function of how big you’re built, how tight your pants are and whether or not your underwear fits right and is correctly positioned at the moment. ”
Exactly. Even when none of those things are in play, I don’t see any reason to believe that male-specific entitlement is why guys take up too much space. I guess that might be the case for some dudes? But I don’t think it’s justified how feminists go “It’s male entitlement yup that’s all there is to it” because:
a) women also do it
b) plenty of men don’t do it*
c) men often have valid reasons for doing it
*Yes, I know the meme.
Thanks for that link, Scott.
Merzbot, saying “yes, I know the meme” isn’t an answer to what is a legitimate point. It’s not enough to acknowledge the existence of a counter-argument if you don’t explain why it doesn’t matter.
You can’t dismiss a concern by saying “plenty of _____ don’t do it.” That logic, if taken seriously, would mean that virtually all examples of bigotry, no matter how big or important, would be dismissed. Example: “Not all non-Jewish Germans in the 1930s and 1940s discriminated against Jews.” Yes, true, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a real problem.
I don’t think anyone who argues that male entitlement is a thing argues that it has to be something that 100% of men do in 100% of all situations.
A fascinating lengthy article on a recent-ish FAA change to its hiring practices. Is it good hiring? Bad hiring? AA at all?
Cathy Young’s latest post on Columbia / Sulkowicz / Nussenger
I continue to say:
In a criminal “reasonable doubt” trial, with a presumption of innocence and a host of procedural protections such as cross examination, sworn testimony, rules of evidence, discovery, and the like: a “not guilty” finding gives little information beyond “well, it’s probably less than 95% that the accused did it.”
In a title 9 hearing, with no formal presumption of innocence, no cross-examination, no sworn testimony, no real rules of evidence, no discovery, and merely a preponderance standard: a “not responsible” finding, time after time, should suggest that the accused didn’t do it. And, as a corollary, that the accusation was problematic in some material way–whether through inaccuracy, failure to describe a forbidden act, falsity, malice, or whatever.
Lots of people seem to think that an ACCUSATION is relevant evidence. I keep waiting for them to consider the actual FINDINGS. Sadly I am beginning to believe I am waiting in vain.
A petition to remove a leftist student from an elected position because she organized an event that excluded white cis men, and because one of her tweets included the #killallmen hashtag.
Petition · Expel Bahar Mustafa from Goldsmiths University for Criminal Misconduct: Bahar Mustafa should be removed from study at Goldsmiths University. · Change.org
It appears that the original title of the petition was “Bahar Mustafa should be arrested for hate speech and calls for murder using the Goldsmiths University name.” The petition has over 23,000 signatures at this time.
Commentary from Amanda Hess: Bahar Mustafa: At Goldsmiths University, ironic misandry claims its first victim.
That’s a weird article, g&w. It starts out as a scare piece about the dangers to summer vacationers (while later letting us know that these new hires won’t be on the job until 2 to 3 years from now) and then moves on to the actual reporting.
Assuming that the reporting is accurate…
As far as I can see, the BQ is an online assessment exam. We use those where I work, but that’s where the similarity ends. Online assessments are useful in weeding out potential problem employees, not in identifying which employees are most likely to succeed/be good employees. Online assessments don’t really have a pass/fail point – they have a no problems found/these problems found scale. If there are problems identified, there are follow up questions to ask the applicant in an interview. In my experience, every single applicant who had problems found never returned from being sent to a pre-employment drug test. In any case, the FAA is certainly not using the online assessment correctly or for its intended purpose.
As to the cheating… If the BQ is more than/not just an online assesment and if the NBCFAE is actually handing out the test with the correct answers, they should be penalized. If they’re teaching people how to answer questions on an assessment, generally, in a way to look good… well, that’s more like an SAT study guide or class.
If the NBCFAE is giving answers, it seems to me that the blame falls entirely on the NBCFAE (and it’s members who work HR for the FAA and are participating in this) and the FAA is not to at fault.
If the BQ is merely an online assessment, the FAA is badly misusing the test AND the NBCFAE (if handing out the answers) is cheating.
If, otoh, the BQ turns out not to be an online assessment, that throws the entire article into doubt for me.
This article confirms some of the facts reported in the original linked article without telling you to fear flying.
I haven’t, so far, found any reporting on the NBCFAE aspect of the article outside of restating or reporting the original linked article anywhere but on right wing sites.
LTL FTC:
So, argument from incredulity + ad hominem [Tumblr people make that argument!], then. (BTW, you could just as easily fit the perceived-status thing into an evo-psych-style argument as a Tumblr-SJ argument, which is maybe a defense against the particular ad hominem but which doesn’t make me any more convinced that my argument is right.)
RonF: That might be why my husband can’t shed light on it–he almost always wears loose, BDU-style pants (and, I assume, wears underwear that fits).
LTL FTC:
Amp touched on the “plenty of men don’t do it”, but for both that and “women also do it”, the question isn’t whether ALL men do it and NO women do it, the question is how big the difference is between men and women doing it (if there is a difference), and whether that difference can be explained purely by men’s anatomy. But you probably wouldn’t be making that argument unless you thought that the difference was relatively small and could plausibly be explained by men’s anatomy. I’m not convinced that that’s true, and you’re not convinced that it’s untrue. We’re probably not going to make much progress from here in the absence of something better than anecdata.
Indeed:
I don’t think anyone who argues that Jewish rapaciousness is a thing argues that it has to be something that 100% of Jews do in 100% of all situations.
Someone should do study the frequency of manspreading in hipsters vs. jocks to check the tight pants effect size…
Police use of force issues:
This seems to have been a legitimate use of force. Also, people are using the legitimate anger around other incidents to try to make it sound like their relatives are innocent–the deceased’s brother claimed that his final words were “I can’t breathe”.
But here’s another ludicrous use of force by a police officer.
Someone get CP a grant!
The guys that I’ve seen sitting like that have usually been wearing baggy pants. But I think it’s a teenage thing — the sort of slouching to look cool that teenage boys do kind of requires having your legs spread really wide if you want to stay balanced on a subway seat.
@Ruchama–anecdotally, that’s what I associate it with more as well.
***
This is an interesting analysis of Avengers: AoU’s Black Widow stuff. I’m not sure if I’m convinced, but interesting.
In re manspreading…I remember an issues-for-women-in-science meeting I attended in grad school when a high-level visiting female speaker was in town. Mostly it was the female grad students who attended, but some of the men showed up as well. We were all sitting in a circle with plenty of room between the chairs; at one point, another grad student pointed out that all the women were sitting with their knees or ankles crossed, tucked in, while the men were sitting to take up more room. 100% correlation with gender, at that specific time in that group of ~20 people.
I think spreading out to take up the available room is probably the default state; the thing that makes manspreading, when it happens, so notable is that it has been so thoroughly trained out of women that we often won’t do it even when it wouldn’t harm anybody at all.
(I mean, personally, I don’t understand people who sit with their legs straight out in front of them, feet flat on the floor–I find that profoundly uncomfortable: weird pressure points, not enough muscle tension in my legs. But enough people do it that I presume it must be comfortable for somebody.)
***
g&w: but he was found responsible by one of those trials–verdict changed on appeal, but for procedural reasons (the victim was unavailable to repeat testimony), not because of the evidence presented.
Cathy’s article is, I’d say, 95% bullshit. Nearly all of it works out to one version or another of “this person didn’t act like Cathy Young imagines a perfect rape victim would act, therefore Cathy concludes that the rape probably never happened.”
I’m a fat woman and it’s uncomfortable for me to avoid “spreading” by crossing my legs or sitting with my knees together for long periods of time. I’ve developed a lot of techniques for doing things that keep my legs closed anyway, which just involves different positions, and liberal use of ankle crossing. I am massively self-conscious about it, guilty when I take up space, and fretful about the signals people get from me if I fail to make sure my legs are closed in public.
I would guess that significantly overweight men probably feel self-conscious too in a way thinner men don’t. While they don’t receive the “legs closed or you’re a slut” training, they are shamed for taking up more space than they have a “right” to.
In general, though, gender training on this point seems really different for men and women. I’ve seen trans men sit and spread and be like “oh, fuck yeah, I can finally sit comfortably” because legs open is no longer stigmatized for them.
I think people should be welcome to sit with legs spread or closed, regardless of gender or weight. On trains and other limited seating areas, it’s trickier. In those circumstances, it makes sense for everyone to take some discomfort, so that no ones pinned with all of it.
Fat people will still be perceived as taking up too much space, but it seems like a fat phobia issue more than a gender one, and exists regardless of spreading. I note that I am considered to take up too much space even when I force myself into proper knees together posture, and shrink my shoulders in so I’m folded up. It hurts my back if I do it for very long; I always do it on planes anyway if I’m flying without my husband. I still get the occasional dirty look as if I am not trying hard enough to be small.
I wonder if that’s why my take on the man spreading thing is so different than yours, Barry. I tend to think, yeah, lots of people would be more comfortable spreading, but on public transportation everyone has to feel a little shitty. Avoiding spreading at all (leaving exceptions for the presumably rare kind of spreading that’s a deliberate show to demonstrate attitude or whatever) probably is uncomfortable, but since I’ve always ended up making myself uncomfortable as politeness to other people who, the,selves, are probably also uncomfortable, I’m not deeply sympathetic to the argument. It’s just a “crammed in a tight space” thing. We all have to put up with feeling a bit shitty.
Or maybe some people really are comfortable on public transport? Folks, I envy you. ;)
I’m 6’4″, well over 200 pounds, with shoulders that are too broad to comfortably fit in an airplane seat, and quite long legs. When I fly I crouch down as much as I can to fit in my seat space (except when I’m flying with my fairly small wife, who’s OK with me taking some of her space…). It’s a miserable experience every time but I do it because the person next to me paid for his/her seat space and I’m not going to steal it from them. I have essentially no sympathy for people who say they have to spread out or whatever, unless they can describe a clear medical condition (and having a pair of balls doesn’t qualify – I’m in that category and I still manage).
Can we please avoid having this thread turn into a debate on manspreading? This isn’t the place for it.
I think spreading is a natural tendency, which has been denied to women, rather than a particular display of aggression which is exercised by men. I’m not sure if the distinction matters.
Cathy has written some good articles, but this is not one of her better ones.
Yes and no.
There is no “perfect rape victim.” But the attempt to discuss the “perfect victim” has gone so far as to, in my view, deliberately start to take a one-sided view of a whole lot of evidence. Moreover the “no perfect victim” folks seem to forget that there is also no perfect innocent defendant. And in that view, people need to stop counting evidence for one side only.
For example, if you (global, not you specifically) take the position “rape victims do all sorts of unpredictable shit, and their behavior is a horrible way to determine a rape,” then you need to maintain that position both for support and in opposition. You can’t logically insist that factors are evidence of support for a rape claim, but that those same factors are not evidence against a rape claim. Or any other type of claim. You can’t, for example, say that the lack of a timely accusation doesn’t matter, but that the presence of a timely accusation is really important. Nor can you reasonably poke holes in the minutia of who people might preserve physical evidence, but only do so for one side.
If the race of a cop is relevant when a white cop shoots a black dude (more likely to be racism) then the race is relevant when a black cop shoots a black dude (less likely to be racism.) If someone makes a claim that “you can’t assume no rape based on behavior, because those particular victim behaviors are indistinguishable from people who have not been raped,” then you have to deal with the corollary “if those victim behaviors are indistinguishable from people who haven’t been raped, you can’t retroactively decide they’re relevant proof of rape, since you haven’t yet determined what caused them.” If “someone looked at the evidence and thinks a rape happened” is relevant, then “someone looked at the evidence and thinks nothing happened” is also relevant.
Moving to specifics: Let’s imagine Nussenger had been found responsible for all accusations, at a preponderance, no-presumption-of-innocence, no-procedural-safeguards, no-attorney hearing. I assert that most people would consider those findings relevant evidence of Nussenger’s guilt. (Hell, there were a lot of SJ folks who asserted that evidence of the non-discretionary hearing was evidence of guilt, which is essentially the same thing as considering an accusation as proof.)
The other side is not the same. A lot of SJ folks don’t look at the fact that Sulcowicz lost, and consider that a factor against her, or in favor of Nussenger. I do, and I find their refusal to do so appalling. I don’t know if you, personally, do, so I will ask: How do you weigh those factors? What do you think of the failure to openly consider them?
Taame, it’s an open thread. So why isn’t it the place?
G&W, I agree with you. I think the distinction does matter because it would be nice if comfort was allowed to everyone, regardless of gender.
closetpuritan:
When I was growing up, I used to catch the train to school everyday. School kids who sat in the way a polite adult might, would pretty much mark themselves as the submissive and rule-following type. This in turn made them appear both weak and vulnerable to the kids who would be inclined to start trouble. This made them likely to be bullied. I also know a few people who have been assaulted on public transport as adults.
A more spread out posture might not be as much about feeling entitled to the space, as it is about a defensive signalling of strength. Sitting in a more confined manner might not just be physically discomforting, but also be a source of mental anxiety from putting oneself in a position one knows as vulnerable through visceral experience. Given that men are more likely to be victims of violence in public places, it’s more likely that they would have such a disposition about their posture.
You’re right, that is sloppy thinking. It’s also sloppy thinking to believe that simplistic hypotheses based on political ideologies can give you any definitive insight into the varied and complex processes taking place in people’s conscious or subconscious minds.
Harlequin:
He was found responsible by a ‘trial’ that failed to even meet the very low standard established for the process. Without knowledge of the details of why the appeal was successful, the fact that such a poorly run ‘trial’ found him responsible provides no useful information as to his actual guilt.
Ampersand:
For me, it’s less that someone fails to act consistently with some hypothetical perfect rape victim, and more that they act consistently with some hypothetical person who fabricated the claims well after the fact.
Then there’s the question of whether the whole thing was just part of some performance art.
desipis, I don’t actually think it says much about the likelihood of his guilt; I was merely pointing out that g&w’s summary “a ‘not responsible’ finding, time after time” was not complete, and therefore his statement that opponents were ignoring the actual results was similarly flawed.
Sure it does. It provides far LESS information than other sources, but it is still data. We presumably know less than they did, at least at this point.
In my view, it demonstrates something less than 50% likelihood of guilt, given the procedural flaws and bias towards the accuser. But it is still relevant.
Sorry. I’m a lawyer, so by nature I treat appealed-and-reversed findings as “not a finding.” (Again, the system is bad, but it’s the best data we have.) I certainly don’t think it would be proper to consider that as evidence of a finding. Perhaps it would be more accurate to discard that one altogether, at which point I believe there would be three findings in favor of Nussenger.
How did you get here from there?
I think spreading is a natural tendency, which has been denied to women, rather than a particular display of aggression which is exercised by men. I’m not sure if the distinction matters.
I’m not sure why people think otherwise–at least if by “natural tendency”, you mean the tendency to want to do it, rather than the tendency to do it at the expense of others and not back down. If you’re entitled to something but don’t want it, you won’t try to take it. I keep using the word “entitlement”, and I see it used by other people writing about manspreading as well; I don’t think anyone’s used “aggression”. They’re really two different things.
I saw in the Alas! blogroll that Skepchick linked today to an XO Jane post that says
This in turn linked to an earlier XO Jane post that says
The original “Against Being Against Manspreading” links to a Jezebel piece that says
So not only is it not my opinion, I don’t think it’s the most prevalent feminist opinion that men ONLY do manspreading to prove how macho they are and be aggressive to other people (not just ladies, as a reminder).
desipis:
When I was growing up, I used to catch the train to school everyday. School kids who sat in the way a polite adult might, would pretty much mark themselves as the submissive and rule-following type. This in turn made them appear both weak and vulnerable to the kids who would be inclined to start trouble. This made them likely to be bullied. I also know a few people who have been assaulted on public transport as adults.
A more spread out posture might not be as much about feeling entitled to the space, as it is about a defensive signalling of strength. Sitting in a more confined manner might not just be physically discomforting, but also be a source of mental anxiety from putting oneself in a position one knows as vulnerable through visceral experience. Given that men are more likely to be victims of violence in public places, it’s more likely that they would have such a disposition about their posture.
I guess that being bullied on the school bus every day for, what was it? A year? Two years? It was either 7th and 8th grade or one or the other… Was not enough to beat that into me. Actually, I’m pretty sure I was not sitting tucked it, because I was sitting by myself, since of the 3 other kids in my grade, two were bullying me and the third was occasionally giggling. So I guess we can’t blame it my sitting the wrong way.
Granted, it wasn’t physical violence, but yeah, I was being bullied for being a nerdy goody two-shoes, basically. And because the two boys bullying me were bored, and maybe to some extent to impress the girl who occasionally giggled at it–but the reason I was the target instead of the other girl or the other boy was that, as far as I can tell.
I’ve never been a victim of physical bullying, and I expect it is worse. But to suggest that verbal bullying is somehow not enough motivation to change behavior, and therefore this can explain the gender differential, seems very much mistaken to me.
Anyway, if the meek-but-trying-to-seem-tough manspreader gets into other people’s space (which is the only type of manspreading we care about) in an effort to seem tough/cool, he’s doing it at the expense of the ability of the people next to him to seem tough/cool.
It does seem to me that sloppy thinking in SJ circles sometimes leads to treating unconscious bias as conscious ideology and thus, rather than being treated as a human fallibility flaw, it’s treated as an egregious flaw.
You’re right, that is sloppy thinking. It’s also sloppy thinking to believe that simplistic hypotheses based on political ideologies can give you any definitive insight into the varied and complex processes taking place in people’s conscious or subconscious minds.
It’s also just hopelessly naive to think that only the people you disagree with are influenced by their ideologies.
“Definitive insight into the varied and complex processes”, also, is pretty strong and I don’t think is an accurate description of my statements.
In order to get at why men are more likely to manspread than women, I don’t need to explain all the varied and complex processes that might lead people to want to take up more space, I only need to explain why men do it more.
I’m armchair theorizing and you’re armchair theorizing, but repeatedly you and the other people arguing with me seem to believe that only I am influenced by my ideology, and you really know what’s going on–despite the fact that multiple different theories for why men manspread more than women, or alternatively, don’t manspread more than women, have been proposed by the “it’s nothing to do with entitlement!” people. Are you at least willing to admit that you’re also armchair theorizing?
Also, yeah, I interpret it through the prism of my ideology, but as I alluded to before,
the manspreader feels entitled to the space and has to do with the manspreader’s self-perceived place on the social hierarchy and the perceived place of others nearby who are forced to either accommodate him or get into a passive-aggressive or just plain aggressive shoving match.
doesn’t have to be interpreted through a feminist lens. And indeed, when they do it to other men (my armchair theorizing predicts they’ll do it more to lower-status men*), feminism’s relevance is debatable. (I think you could make a pretty good argument for the relevance of broadly-defined, examing-gender-type feminism, though.)
*Status isn’t the only variable. Greater willingness to be aggressive and potentially sacrifice wellbeing for the extra few inches of space also plays a big role, which is why the Woman Who Sits On Manspreaders exists.
[edited to fix a tag]
Well, if your point is that your opponents are holding beliefs contrary to the evidence, I thought it would reduce (though not eliminate) your complaint if some of that evidence supported their belief instead of contradicted it. (I see now that you disagree you were ignoring that evidence, but the statement you’re replying to was following on from the assumption that you had.)
Mandolin:
I’ve noticed a very strong correlation between “annoyed huff when a passenger realizes they’re sitting next to me” and “elbow stuck over the armrest and digging into my ribs for the entire flight.”
Actually, my point is more that a lot of social justivists in the rape arena refuse to really reference or interact with competing evidence at all, beyond a mere discard. Which is to say: There are certainly some arguments for both sides of “how we should weigh the Nussenger findings,” but the people who write on it don’t generally discuss them.
Mandolin @49 – I’m not sure our takes on manspreading are all that different. I agree with pretty much everything you wrote in @48.
I tend to be pretty comfortable on buses and trains, unless it’s rush hour (and as you say, everyone is uncomfortable then). One nice thing, I guess, about being a fat man is that if there are two empty seats, one of which is next to me, the overwhelming majority of bus-users choose to sit not-next-to-me. (I don’t know if the same is true for fat women). This is true even if I scrunch up as small as I can. So as a result, since I hardly ever take the bus during rush hour, I usually have an empty seat next to me.
Lee1 @50: Do you know that on most planes, the outer armrest on the aisle seat has a hidden button that, if pressed, will let you raise the armrest? Usually this button is on the underside of the armrest; sometimes it’s on the side of the armrest, between the armrest and the seat. It’s a way of giving yourself a couple of extra inches without getting into the space of other passengers.
I’ve been told that often the window-side armrests on window seats can be raised, too, but I haven’t tried that myself.
Of course, that won’t help with long legs. :-(
The last time I flew, I booked my flight through Orbitz. I bought a seat on a flight that was out of economy seats but had “economy plus” seats available. I bought for the economy price, but when I got to the airport they assigned me to an economy plus seat (without charging me extra), which had a lot of extra leg room. I don’t know if that’s something I could repeat on purpose, though.
G&W:
How so? The “no perfect victim” comes up in a particular context, which is usually something like this:
In what way is Patty forgetting that there is no perfect defendant?
Regarding the “not responsible” findings, from the start one of the things Emma Sulkowicz has been saying is that the hearings were systematically biased against victims. So that the hearings usually wound up favoring the accused rapist really doesn’t disprove (or prove) her claims.
I don’t know if Sulkowicz was telling the truth or not – I suspect she is, but “suspect” and “know” aren’t the same things. All I’m saying is that the things that Cathy Young suggests are persuasive evidence that Sulkowicz is lying, such as Sulkowicz’s texts, are not very persuasive at all.
Desipis:
So because an artist does an art piece that was seemingly inspired by her experience of (alleged) rape and how people reacted to her claim of being raped, that implies that she made the whole thing up as part of her art?
Are you really incapable of seeing how full of misogynistic bullshit that “logic” is?
Closet Puritan @59:
I agree.
However, although the type that gets into other people’s space might be the only type of manspreading you and other folks here care about, clearly that’s not the case of everyone concerned about this issue. Checking out a popular blog of photos of “men taking up too much space,” it’s not hard to find photos of men who are taking up more than one seat – but it doesn’t look as if the train is crowded or other people are being forced to stand. (1 2 3 4.)
Regarding the photos on that blog in general, rather than the four examples I linked: Some of the photos clearly show men getting into other’s space, or taking up seats that other people need for sitting; but most of the photos don’t show enough context to say if the train is crowded or if it has plenty of available seating. My guess is that in many cases, there were plenty of available seats.
This. So many times this.
It is not clear why this is “misogynistic bullshit,” Amp. You appear to be looking at the problem incorrectly: you’re taking the whole set of ‘true accusations’ and claiming that some (unspecified) percentage of cases of true accusations are made by people who subsequently behave differently than the ‘perfect rape victim’ supposedly behaves. I think your observation here is almost certainly true, i.e. it seems extremely likely that some rape victims will appear to react casually or ‘exhibitionistically’ to their trauma (though there are obviously issues with the absence of objective and statistically reliable data from which a neutral observer could assess the percentages involved).
That is not, however, the problem that presents itself to an outsider observer. Instead, an outside observer is presented with (simplifying) two types of accusers: those that behave in a stereotypically traumatized fashion, and those that behave in a more casual, flippant, or ‘exhibitionistic’ fashion. I think most people would find it reasonable to believe that a significantly higher proportion of accusations coming from the ‘casual’ group will be false or unfounded than those that come from the ‘traumatized’ group. (Please note that I’m putting ‘casual’ and ‘traumatized’ in single quotes because I’m using them as labels, not because I’m intending them as air quotes.)
Of course, the absence of objective and statistically reliable data stymies our ability to know whether or not this reasonable conclusion is, in fact, an accurate one. If you’ve stumbled on such data, I think it would be much more productive for you to share it rather than hurling invective at someone.
As it is, given that (as g&w points out) official college proceedings have repeatedly found the chance that Emma Sulkowicz was actually raped by Paul Nungesser to be less than a coin toss, it does not strike me as unreasonable — much less “misogynistic” — to wonder whether her subsequent behavior is consistent with a motivation other than having actually been raped by the man she accused.
Ballgame, I’ll “hurl invective” when I think it’s appropriate. I don’t do it often, but when someone posts some misogynistic rape-denying bullshit, I’ll call it out in the harsh terms it deserves. If you can’t stand that, this may not be the blog you want to hang out on. Our blog, our rules.
Desipis’ statement, which I was responding to, wasn’t about qualitative data. It was about one specific case of an artist doing a work which appears to have been inspired by her own (alleged) rape. According to Desipis, that she made a art piece about her own (alleged) experiences raises “the question of whether the whole thing was just part of some performance art.” Nothing you wrote substantively defends the specific point I was objecting to.
I’ve seen a bunch of people (mostly on Twitter) imply that Cathy Sulkowitc made up the whole thing because she wanted to be famous. (I didn’t save the links, so you’ll have to take my word for it, or not). I think the Desipis point I quoted fits squarely into this genre.
Finally, since Sulkowicz’s case from the start has included her claim that Colombia’s proceedings are biased against rape victims, I don’t think that citing the results of those same proceedings proves anything about Sulkowicz’s claim.
Huh? That makes no sense, Amp! That’s the opposite conclusion of one that an objective observer would make, namely, the fact that Emma claims the Columbia’s proceedings were biased against her proves nothing (in and of itself) about whether those proceedings were actually biased.
But yes, to an outside observer, the fact that the college tribunal found — in multiple instances — that the likelihood that Emma’s accusation was true to be less than a coin toss would, in fact, carry significant evidentiary weight. (Unless of course someone can point to substantive ways in which those proceedings were — en toto — biased against her. Everything I’ve read about these proceedings generally — including much that I’ve read here — has suggested that they are biased against the accused, and I haven’t seen anything that has made the case that Columbia’s specific process substantively differs in ways that make it overall biased against the accuser.)
I agree with g&w’s point above, that it’s rhetorically stacking the deck to claim that if a college tribunal finds a student guilty (at the preponderance of evidence threshold), then that means he’s guilty!! but if he’s found not guilty, well, that doesn’t mean anything.
Actually, it appears to have been inspired by something other than her own (alleged) rape. That’s the whole point. Her allegation was found to be dubious. Despite this, you’re claiming that anyone that finds her allegation to be unlikely — just like the college tribunal did, repeatedly — is guilty of misogyny. Such a person may be wrong — but the notion that they’re guilty of misogyny is BS.
I do not believe that all women who write or make art about their victimization experiences must be false accusers. It seems to me that kind of self expression could easily be a healthy and cathartic response to trauma. However, given the context, there appear to be very good reasons to wonder about the actual motivations in this case.
Looks like another Chait-like piece about social justice and college campuses has come out.
Interestingly, although Schlosser refers to Chait’s piece mostly-approvingly, they have opposite takes on whether SJ-influenced college students are Not Able To Handle Rough-And-Tumble Debate or are Too Heartless To Their Opponents. I’ve decided that I will treat all such accusations, on this subject or any other, as free of any content other than “I’m Team [Enlightenment/Romanticism] and so my opponents must be Team [Romanticism/Enlightenment]!” until I see evidence otherwise.
PZ Myers has some good criticisms, which are particularly gratifying to see after Schlosser basically said that anyone who disagrees does so because of a lack of experience. OTOH, PZ Myers also questions whether Schlosser is a liberal for no particular reason other than that he’s criticizing liberals in this piece, as well as says that he willfully misreads a tweet when I suspect that he was simply less disposed to be charitable to the tweeter than Myers. (Schlosser has since admitted that he misread the tweet, in an update to the article.)
@Amp:
Yeah, I think based on the specific arguments I was responding to (probably combined with the fact that I’ve barely looked at the manspreading blogs) I sounded less concerned about the way some of those blogs are presenting things than I am.
There’s so much terrible stuff online. It seems like people will try their hardest to find an excuse for why someone is “bad” and should be attacked.
This would be pretty much a textbook example of the social justice “blind to competing evidence” stuff which I am talking about. If you didn’t sound serious I’d have a hard time thinking you didn’t mean this as a joke.
Here’s the reverse statement, had Nussenger been found guilty: “Since Nussenger has claimed from the start that the process was biased against him, the fact that Nussenger was subsequently found guilty doesn’t actually demonstrate anything about his guilt.”
Both the first and second statements are equally ridiculous, and no matter how I stretch I can’t see you signing on to the second one. How, then, can you be signing on to the first one?
@Mandolin: I just feel really uncomfortable seeing all these men arguing for their right to take up as much public space as they want regardless of the feelings of others.
Actually, the two claims are not contradictory, and both of them are true, imo.
I didn’t think there was more than one university proceeding (was it a tribunal?) regarding the complaint made by Sulkowicz. Am I misremembering? It’s very possible I am.
Ampersand:
No, I said it was a question not an answer. It’s not that it clearly implies she made the whole thing up, but rather that it lends credibility to such an argument. If someone demonstrates a consistent willingness to go well outside the bounds of cultural and social norms to garner attention and make a political point, then I think it’s only prudent to question whether that willingness applies to criminal or disciplinary matters.
Edit:
If anything, it’s being negative towards performance artists in their ability to be taken seriously, not women.
I feel like you do this kind of a lot – attribute arguments to me that I’ve never made – and you’re very often wrong. I wish you wouldn’t do that.
It seems an obvious fact that sometimes courtrooms are biased, and that sometimes innocent people – including innocent people accused of rape – are found guilty due to bias from judges or prosecutors or both. It follows, therefore, that sometimes when a “guilty” person says the system railroaded them, they are telling the truth.
If a man was found guilty of rape but claims that the court was biased against him, it would be necessary to look at the claim. And if 23 people filed a plausible joint legal complaint about consistent bias by the same court, I would certainly want those complaints taken seriously enough to be investigated, not dismissed as “convicts always lie” or whatever, and the fact of the complaints would put the court’s guilty verdicts in legitimate doubt.
* * *
ETA: On rereading, I should have said “actually demonstrates very little” rather than “doesn’t actually demonstrate anything.” Sorry for not being more careful with my wording there. It means more than nothing; but it not nearly the slam-dunk evidence you seem to think it is.
I’m not impressed by the “I wasn’t suggesting anything, I was just raising the question” dodge. It’s a way of accusing someone of something, but dodging taking responsibility for having made the accusation.
Hey, you have a blog in which you state some fairly unconventional views. And you have a blog, itself an attempt “to garner attention.” So if you’re accused of a crime, would it be fair for me to point to your blog as evidence that you committed the crime?
Huh?
My attribution of what you said–the “first statement”–was accompanied by a direct block quote from your post.
The second example statement–including a hypothetical “if Nussenger had been found guilty” part was not attributed to you. In fact, I specifically said that there was no way I could even imagine you saying it.
If you think that was confusing I’m sorry, but I didn’t do what you say I did.
Sure, but since the losing side (whoever they are) makes some sort of similar statement in the vast majority of claims, the statement itself is generally regarded as providing almost no proof.
I don’t think it’s a slam dunk. I think it’s just as relevant as it would be if they had found him responsible, given the preponderance standard and such. Not to speak for you: If Nussenger had been found guilty, would you think it was largely irrelevant?
I do not think it’s hypocritical for folks to generally treat title 9 findings as irrelevant. But I’ve been reading a lot of people who seem to think that it’s relevant when the outcome is “responsible” and not what it’s “not responsible.” The old (correct) saw that “not guilty =/ innocent” is from a criminal reasonable doubt presumption of innocence setup.
Amp @64: I have done that a couple times, but then the problem is I’m blocking part of the aisle and it becomes a hassle for people trying to use it (and can be painful when the drink cart comes by…).
Tamme @74:
I’m not sure how much your comment was directed at me, but since mine was the comment immediately preceding yours I’ll just point out that I was doing pretty much the exact opposite of that – as I said I don’t think I have a right to take other people’s space just because I’m big.
Ampersand:
I didn’t make an accusation because that wasn’t my point. My point wasn’t about truth, it was about trust.
As an analogy: I’ll assume you’re not dirt broke and have some sort of savings; and I’ll assume you put those savings in a bank. Why are they in a bank? Presumably because you trust the bank not to just disappear off into the night with all your money. So why not just give that money to some random person on the street? Because you don’t trust that person to not run off with the money. But that’s not the same thing as accusing that person of being a thief.
Their not-a-bank status means you place less trust in them to hold your money, it doesn’t imply any truth to the supposition they are a thief. Likewise, the attribute I was talking about is something that means I would place less trust in them to be a witness required to invoke punitive institutional power, not that I would claim that there is truth to the supposition that they are lying.
The State of New York is having a heckuva hard time coming up with a teacher certification test for which they won’t get sued.
On the one hand, the plaintiffs allege that the tests aren’t actually testing teaching ability. Which, perhaps, is true. They seem to test more broad liberal-arts knowledge.
Here’s a sample question.
On the other hand, in a liberal-arts-based school system where the kids aren’t ding super well, it is difficult to understand how testing people for knowledge of the liberal arts is really that out of line, much less a discriminatory act.
G-i-W, it seems to me that the State of New York is going to get sued for discrimination as long as any test they come up with has racially disparate outcomes.
I think they’re going to have a hell of a time coming up with a test that doesn’t.
Amp, from Amanda Hess on Bahar Mustafa:
Plenty of men have had what they claim to have intended as irony or sarcasm taken to be unconscious representations of what they really think, and have had to change their discourse accordingly. So I would suggest that the young feminist Internet natives either get used to that or drop “ironic misandry”, because the criticism of it is not going to stop.
Fair enough – but there’s an occasional element of pain that enters into one situation here but (I presume …) not the other.
I’m 6′ 2″ and well over 200 pounds and I’m in Amp’s category of “people tend to not sit next to me if there are other seats available.” When I fly I do my very best to sit on an aisle seat and if it’s cattle call seating I try to get into group “A” – at which point the seat next to me will be one of the last to fill (and I shower every day) and usually someone smaller.
The tendency on airlines to allocate smaller space for seating has not been my friend. No, not a bit. I have to spread out some in an airline seat – there is physically nowhere to put my legs otherwise. I spend much of the flight sitting sideways in one direction or the other, especially when the flight attendants are going up and down the aisle, which does wonders for my back….
On public transport I’m in the category of “these damn seats are just too damn small”. I do my best if it’s crowded – often I just grab the overhead rail and stand the whole ride rather than sit if there aren’t two unoccupied seats next to each other available. But I don’t take public transport much in the Chicago area. I do if I’m visiting my daughter in the Boston area, which is where most of my familiarity with public transport comes from these days.
The courts don’t normally issue rulings in advance. But when it comes to large public-sector stuff like this, it might be better to make it so that there was some way of determining this ahead of time. Maybe, even, asking the plaintiffs to commit to what they think IS fair? To commit to what a base level of knowledge should be? After all, the concept that we would test our teachers should be unobjectionable.
I guess I’m a bit depressed at the response of “this test is inappropriate” rather than “holy shit, why are there groups characteristics which are so strongly linked to test performance??!!” I would have predicted that a lot of teachers wouldn’t have done well, but since race has nothing to do with intelligence or learning ability, I would not have predicted the vast racial gap in test scores.
So what I want to know is simple: Is there a group differential or a test problem? The disparate-impact claim is basically an assertion that there’s a test problem, but if there was actually a group differential then we would want to know. Wouldn’t we?
@Mandolin: You asked why this wasn’t the right place to have this discussion. I answered.
That would depend on your objective and on what your underlying assumptions are.
If your objective is to get more minorities into the State of New York’s teaching pool and your assumption is that there are a sufficient number of minority people who are a) academically qualified and b) inclined to teach in the State of New York, then no test that results in a disproportionately small number of minorities is going to be acceptable. I doubt seriously that the people who are initiating these lawsuits are going to propose a test format and question samples up front. If they did that and the results were still disproportionate they’d have to accept the results, and they’re not going to take the chance on accepting any result other than getting the numbers the way they want them.
Another possibility is that their objective is to get more minorities into the State of New York’s teaching pool and their assumption is that academic qualifications do not tie directly to the ability to teach, then it’s going to be real interesting as to how they propose you structure a test to figure out who’s best qualified to teach. But then, again, I doubt that they will make ANY such proposal. They want to place the burden on the State of New York to get them the numbers they want, regardless of the methodology they use to get there.
Based on what I’ve seen of letters from and speeches by teachers discussing public policy and education during the Chicago Teachers’ Union disputes, a solid background in the liberal arts – especially in the English skills of expository writing, grammar and spelling – have been sorely neglected in our K – 12 teaching staffs. And since these are some of the most important skills for the kids to learn and are needed by a teacher no matter what subject they teach, it seems to me that mastery of their basics is essential for a teacher. How a teacher can be expected to open the minds of children to the liberal arts and sciences if the teacher’s has not explored them himself or herself?
Any group differential will be ascribed to racism. After all, inner-city schools are lousy and so the kids can’t be expected to learn in poorly financed schools. Unless those schools are in Chinatown, where poor Asian kids seem to be able to learn fine. Cultural differences cannot be ascribed any weight in this.
Let’s assume that the disparity of test results means that the white candidates tend to have higher academic achievement than the black candidates. A stated objective of increasing the number of minority teachers is to benefit the kids, not the black teaching candidates; to give the kids role models of their own race. The question then seems to be whether that objective outweighs having a white teacher of greater academic abilities rather than a black teacher of lesser ones teaching black kids. The argument of “academic achievement isn’t a fair measurement of fitness as a teacher” seems specious to me. Surely it’s not the ONLY measure; you can have a lot of achievement in that area but be lousy with kids. But certainly you’d want a higher than average level of achievement in that area. There should be a cutoff just for that, and then cull the pool down from there using other metrics (“hates kids”).
What these folks want is to presume that any issue here is the output and the process that produced it. That the possibility that the issue here is the input and that changing the process to get the output they want is wrong is not something they’re going to want to accept.
“So what I want to know is simple: Is there a group differential or a test problem? The disparate-impact claim is basically an assertion that there’s a test problem…”
Not my area of expertise, but I believe you can file a disparate impact claim on the assertion that what the test is testing shouldn’t be tested. Like, if I required my assistant to bench at least a hundred pounds. There’s nothing sexist about the test- here’s a heavy object, lift it- but it would disparately exclude women, and bears no relation to the skills required for the job.
Sorry, Patrick; I unspecifically included that as a “test problem.” Which I guess is a “post problem” then, by me ;)
Personally, I am usually quite skeptical of “insufficiently related to the job” claims, especially without any demonstration or suggestion of animus. Like, the concept that the state can’t decide that liberal arts are sufficiently related to teaching a liberal arts curriculum, because it has to prove them first, seems strange. Especially in big public-interest cases like “teachers,” I would love to pin the plaintiffs down on what THEY think the job description is, and how THY would measure it.
Also, as an interesting side note, I read an interesting article, which ties a lot of that stuff together with some college issues. The author’s general theory is that
1) Employers used to more commonly use aptitude tests and the like. These produced disparate impact, though they permitted re-testing to pass them.
2) Then the EEOC started using disparate impact theory to stop the use of such tests.
3) So employers looked for a screening alternative.
4) One big screen that they could find was “college degree,” so they started requiring one for as many things as possible.
5) This EEOC decision had two largely unforeseen consequences, namely the increasing gap between “college” and “no college,” and the dumbing down of college to meet the increased demand for “has a degree” criteria.
It’s an interesting read.
Tamme @ 86:
Are you requesting a response from Mandolin? Because your answer was this, right?
Tamme @ 74:
I had the same response as Mandolin when you made your initial comment: this is an open space; anything is fair game, particularly as Amp had a link relevant to this topic.
In your answer, it sounds like you feel uncomfortable with the topic even being discussed here. Is that right? If so, what kind of response would you expect to your explanation?
-Jut
Ah, okay. I misread you, then; my apologies.
I have read a couple of reports on it but am by no means really up to speed. As far as I understand things there seems to be a suggestion that race matters for student achievement, though to the best of my understanding they aren’t sure why. (There are a lot of competing explanations.)
There are also some studies suggesting that teacher quality can make a big difference.
I have no idea whether we have determined a way to figure out who those “good value-add teachers” actually are; or whether that has anything at all to do with the type of test being challenged in the disparate-impact arena. I’d like to know, if anyone happens to understand the data.
I haven’t been keeping up with this much lately–I haven’t taught in, I think, four years?–but my impression at the time was: no, or at least not before they’re in the classroom. You can measure it, in some cases, once they’re in the classroom–but even that can be difficult if the students are already high-achieving, because they’ll do well on tests even if the teacher is bad. The Measures of Effective Teaching project, for example, has a lot of detail on evaluating teachers (and why and how it’s hard), so that might be a good place to start if you’re curious.
RonF: You have my sympathies. While there are other “manspreaders” who seem to clearly not be doing it for the same reasons as you, it’s good to know more specifically why some people might be doing it so that I can keep that in mind.
I haven’t traveled by air much–3 times round trip, I believe, 2 of them with my husband in adjacent seats, so we didn’t have to worry so much about brushing against a strange person. I tweaked my knee hiking late last summer, and it seems to have healed–but the last time it bothered me was after my most recent airplane trip, in early spring. My legs aren’t long enough to hit the back of the seat, so I’m not sure if it was just the immobility, or what.
I think it would be highly appropriate to study the “This isn’t the place to have that discussion” move sometime, especially when (as here) it’s made in a place that is explicitly an appropriate place to have that discussion. I believe it’s because a lot of people are made “uncomfortable” by any disagreement at all, and do their best to shut it down. That was the case in Tamme’s post, as person explicitly told us in #74. It’s not necessarily a gendered tactic, but I think males are more likely to try to block discussion by ridicule (“Arguing on the Internet is like competing in the Special Olympics…”), though “This isn’t the place for it” seems to be popular with both sexes. Invoking one’s personal discomfort seems more likely to be done by females. Either way, though, the intention — ideological but perhaps unconscious — is to shut down disagreement. Which, of course, can make people uncomfortable. Maybe we need some “unsafe zone” notices. You have the right to be uncomfortable, Tamme, but not to direct and limit the discussion in someone else’s open thread on bogus grounds (“this isn’t the place for it”).
I quite agree with Veronica Strazheim that “women are in fact expected to take up less space than men.” To me the proper solution, which is informed by a longstanding thread in radical feminism, is that women should be expected to take up more space rather than that men should be expected to take up less. Somewhere I read that Virginia Woolf once said that the trouble with privilege is that everybody doesn’t have it. I’ve never been able to track it down to the source, but I agree with it.
So: women are also expected to get less education than men. The remedy for this is not to deny education to men, but to push for more education for women. Women are expected to be less athletic than men, often at the expense of their health. The remedy for this is not to make men more sedentary, but for women to be encouraged to exercise more. The remedy for footbinding was not to start binding the feet of men.
Of course in situations like mass transit, we need to be aware of and considerate of other people. Many people, for many reasons, try not to be aware of the people around them. Some of those reasons are good, like the woman who wears dark glasses, listens to music through headphones, and reads a book in an attempt to signal that she’s not available for conversation with random males. Others may not be so good. We can’t always know what’s going through the minds of strangers (or even friends), and I’m becoming more alert to many people’s eagerness to assume the worst about others’ motives.
Tamme #47:
Tamme, I’m not a moderator here, but:
If you feel uncomfortable because someone has made an ad hominem attack on you, used abusive language, etc., then they are violating the standards of this place. But if you intend to attempt to shut down discussion because its content in and of itself, or the sex/race/politics of the people addressing it makes you feel uncomfortable, and that discomfort on your part justifies shutting down a discussion and limiting discussions to ones that do make you feel comfortable – perhaps this is not the place for you.
God knows no one here seems to have ever worried about what makes ME feel uncomfortable. And let me hasten to add that I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Duncan:
What? Says who? In many areas of the world, sure. Here in the U.S.? I find that dubious without some kind of support. Especially considering that the majority of people graduating from college are female in the U.S.
Are you presuming that she’s only trying to defer conversation with men? Are you presuming that only men are likely to strike up conversation with random people on public transport? “random people” I can see, mind you.
No. Excuse me if I seem brusque, but we don’t need any warnings. Come on down and check the place out. If you don’t like it, leave. But it’s not “unsafe”. No one is going to get injured if they see opinions or topics that make them feel uncomfortable or offended. The concept that such a thing is “unsafe”, and that we have an obligation to warn people of that and that people have a need or a reasonable expectation to be warned of that is one that we should not merely not honor, but should actively fight.
RonF:
For what it’s worth, I am a moderator here, and I hope Tamme sticks around.
@Duncan:
I think it depends. I think in some cases it’s better to think of it, rather than privilege/lack of privilege, or be like men/be like women (femmephobia!), as restrictions [inhibitions?]/lack of restrictions. Sometimes lack of privilege is presence of restrictions, sometimes it’s lack of resources. In the case of people not spreading out when there’s plenty of room, it’s simply a matter of restrictions/inhibitions, with no particularly good reason behind them, and it doesn’t require much in the way of cooperation from other people for women to take up more space. In the case of the type of manspreading that I (and other people commenting in this thread) think is bad–manspreading that forces other people to scrunch up or be unable to sit entirely, and is within the manspreader’s control–it is unfortunately a zero sum game, and for women (and less assertive-of-their-space-rights men) to take up more space, the “manspreaders” have to be willing to take up less. Sometimes we can just reallocate resources away from some third thing, but often we can’t and it will involve one group giving up some of a resource so that the other group can have an equal amount.
In cases where privilege comes down more to lack of restrictions than lack of resources, we should look at why the restriction is in place; if there’s no good reason, we should lift it; it there is a good reason, we should consider restricting the other people, too. E.g. I’d rather see men feel less free to call out “Nice butt!” to strangers just trying to walk to work than see women feel more free to do it. But when in doubt, I’m in favor of less restrictions. (I’m disappointed that rather than becoming friendlier to hairy-legged women, things seem to be getting less friendly for hairy-chested men.)
What we assume about other people’s motives seems to depend quite a bit on the situation, too, I think. I’ve seen people be quite resistant to assuming any kind of bad motive at times. It probably comes down to some mix of factors that includes whether you see the other person as in-group (which itself can change depending on context), whether you’re generally cynical or optimistic, whether you like to think of yourself as cynical or optimistic, how cranky you’re feeling that day…
Obligatory Jane Austen quote: