Rachel’s Musings

The war in Iraq has to end. To support our troops, we have to bring them home. But how? That’s been the big question in my mind. Fortunately, 45 Democratic challengers to Congress have come up with a plan. Now they need to sell it. Arianna Huffington has some suggestions about that. In the meantime, we need to spread the word that there is a plan out there that was endorsed by a former assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, Dr. Lawrence Korb: “Bringing our troops home is the first, but not the only step that must be taken to ensure a debacle like Iraq never happens again. This plan addresses the root causes that allowed the Bush administration to lead this country into this mess, and sets us in the right direction.”

The Responsible Plan concludes:

The current administration has said it expects to see U.S. combat forces remain in Iraq for another decade or longer. Senator John McCain, the presumed Republican presidential nomination, has said that he would be fine with keeping U.S. troops in Iraq for 100 years.

We could not disagree more. After five years of occupation, the time has come to end our combat involvement in Iraq. The American people want our troops home, as do most Iraqis. They are right.

The real challenges in Iraq are not military. It is not an appropriate role for our combat troops to referee the continuing sectarian conflict in Iraq, nor is it reasonable to ask them to fabricate a military solution to a problem for which the best solutions are non-military. We do face great challenges in Iraq, but they are political, diplomatic, economic, and humanitarian in nature. They can be solved, but not by the military.

Withdrawing our troops, therefore, is not synonymous with ending our involvement in Iraq. By removing our troops we free up the resources needed to help the Iraqis begin the process of rebuilding their country.

We argue for a major new civil society initiative, public works projects that also provide employment, and localized assistance efforts; we propose that this redeployment of resources coincide with the withdrawal of our military forces. And we propose a series of domestic reforms to restore checks and balances in our government and prevent another unchecked rush to war in the future.

Much of the necessary legislation is already written. Other aspects of this proposal will likely have to await our election to Congress later this year. But everything we propose can be done, and done quickly, at significantly lower cost than that of our current military efforts in Iraq.

In so doing, we believe we can not only end a destructive war, but offer a new beginning to the people of Iraq.

The April 7th Huffington Post reports that this Plan is gaining traction.
 

There are two aspects I want to focus on in my summary of Jennifer Hecht’s Happiness Myths: Wisdom gathered from history about happiness and the influence of money on our society. The book is very well written and contains much more insights, gained through taking a historical perspective, than I will touch on here.      Continue reading this post » » »

Kay Trimberger has written an interesting article on the differences between the Indian and the U.S. women’s movements as it pertains to single women. Trimberger traveled earlier this year to India to attend a Women’s Studies conference in New Delhi. She used that opportunity to find out more about the Indian women’s movement, in particular why it fights for the rights of single women and tries to bring all single women together (”single, deserted and divorced women”). She writes:

Social structural differences in how single women relate to the institution of marriage might help explain why single women have been organized in India and not in the U.S. Yet, two insights I gained into differences between Anglo-American and Hindu culture in regard to marriage and singleness seem to me to best explain why the women’s movement in the U.S. has not yet recognized singleness as a problem.

Trimberger describes two key differences between the two movements:

1. There is no negative cultural image in India. Single women seem to be almost revered as having special powers for voluntarily submitting themselves to sexual abstinence. In contrast, in the U.S., “spinsters” are viewed rather negatively and the women’s movement created the expectation that women can do it all: Have a career, kids, and be married, too.
2. In the U.S., coupledom is portrayed as essential to happiness. Indian women do not face this “cultural legacy.”

Trimberger explains the second point:

Marriage in India is more highly valued, but its purpose is family ties, not coupled happiness. Compatibility between spouses is not linked to finding a soul mate, but is seen as the result of patient work, along with family support. Personal happiness has less cultural significance, and is not linked to being coupled.

India might offer us ways of moving beyond matrimania to a culture that values every individual no matter what their single status. Of course, Indian culture has its own prejudices and certainly the Indian women’s movement is fighting a lot of them. Trimberger mentions several of those issues. But discrimination of singles because of their single status does not seem to be one of them.

Reading Stephanie Coontz‘ Marriage, A History is a fascinating journey through time. Coontz’ main argument is that the shift from “yoke mates” to “soul mates” that started in the late 1700s contained the kernel for the demise of marriage. Her historical account also calls into question whether marriage itself is still serving a valuable purpose in our modern world. It seems to me that it’s time to move beyond the idea of marriage. That seems to be the logical conclusion of the ideas of the Enlightenment and the shift toward the pursuit of individual happiness and equality between all people. It would also accept reality: marriage is an outmoded institution. The cultural trances that are keeping marriage alive are getting onto thinner and thinner ice. Back in college, I took a very interesting class on economics and women. One of the marriage “undermining” developments we discussed was women’s increasing labor force participation throughout the 20th century. Especially once we started to close the pay gap at least a little, women had the earnings to be able to stand on our own and leave dissatisfying marriages. And we did: the divorce rates increased.

Since the economic necessity for marriage is largely gone, the cultural trances have become more subtle, directly playing to the pursuit of happiness idea. We are bombarded with the messages that we would be happier in marriage, that our blood pressure would be lower (at least when we sleep), and that we’d be lonely and miserable if we’re single. Reality, as usual, is different than the cultural trances: Happiness and marriage are not linked and neither is blood pressure. More and more singles speak out that they’re perfectly happy with their lives and feel very fulfilled without a marital partner. That reality - there is happiness outside of intimate relationships - has helped me leave several frustrating and unhappy relationships. I am sure there are many others who made similar calls. I suspect that it has raised our expectations but also lowered our tolerance for crap in relationships. At the same time, though, healthy singles are happy because their lives are grounded in community and connections with others, some more intimate than others (see Kay Trimberger’s analysis for more information). This seems to point to new ways of relating that could inform intimate relationships: away from the insane focus on the man-woman nucleus (or the homosexual equivalent) to the integration of such relationships into a bigger network of friendships and relationships - building a new form of community. Ironically, this might make those intimate relationships more stable because we no longer expect a “soul mate” who will meet our every need. Of course, it would redefine relationships - again - but hopefully in a more rewarding way than deluding ourselves about marriage.

What quantum mechanics is to the New Age movement, neuroscience seems to be to sexism: Neuroscienctific terminology can be used to lend false credibility to sexist arguments. Like: men’s and women’s brains are so different that their traditional roles are based in the neurological firing of our brains. Cordelia Fine wrote an interesting - and upsetting - article taking apart the “findings” from neuroscience popularized in recent books (thanks to the Feminist Philosophers for blogging on Fine’s article!). Here are some excerpts from Fine’s excellent article (please see her article for all citations):

Unfortunately, scientific accuracy and commonsense are often casualties in the ugly rush to cloak old-fashioned sexism in the respectable and authoritative language of neuroscience. [...] Most lay readers, of course, have neither the background nor the resources to question the many inaccurate and misleading claims made about gender differences in the brain. There is also recent evidence that neuroscientific explanations enjoy a special “seductive allure”. [20] People’s capacity to spot the unsatisfactory nature of circular psychological explanations is significantly reduced when impressive-sounding neuroscientific terms are introduced. [...] What, exactly, is the draw of gender stereotypes dressed up as neuroscience? For men, perpetuation of the idea that they lack women’s hard-wired empathizing skills is a small price to pay for licence to lay claim to more valued and potentially profitable psychological advantages. [...] For women, a possible explanation of the appeal of neurosexism lies in the palliative system justification motive, “whereby people justify and rationalise the way things are, so that existing social arrangements are perceived as fair and legitimate, perhaps even natural and inevitable.” [11] Jost and colleagues have found that lower status groups have a remarkable capacity to rationalize what goes against their self-interests, internalize limiting stereotypes, and find legitimacy in the very inequalities that hold them back. [...] And as Cameron [5] has noted in her popular critique The myth of Mars and Venus, the effect, and also perhaps the appeal, of the idea of “timeless, natural, and inevitable” differences between the sexes is that it “stops us thinking about what social arrangements might work better than our present ones in a society that can no longer be run on the old assumptions about what men and women do.” Popular neurosexism permits us to sit back and relax, with its seemingly neat explanation of our social structure and personal lives. The answer, ‘Oh, it’s the brain,’ offers a tidy justification for accepting the status quo with clear conscience. [...] There is evidence that accounts of gender that emphasise biological factors leave us more inclined to agree with gender stereotypes, to self-stereotype ourselves, and for our performance to fall in line with those stereotypes. [...] Nineteenth century medical opinion proposed that girls who overtax their brains might never reproduce. Twenty-first century neurosexism warns that women who reproduce risk overtaxing their brains. It is, perhaps, a little less progress than many working mothers would have hoped for.

Fine calls this neurosexism: Sexism that appears to get the stamp of approval and scientific support from the hot new field of neuroscience. And it seems to be working: One of the books Fine mentions is on the New York Times bestseller list (#15) and has been translated into other languages. Is this a new version of a backlash or just the same old backlash in new clothes?

While there are differences between male and female brains - after all our bodies aren’t the same - look at the conclusions some of these authors come to, as quoted by Fine:

Levy [author of The Essential Difference] adds, “[t]his is no basis for equality. It is not an accident that there is no Nobel Prize for making people feel included.”

Freud said that women couldn’t be lawyers because they didn’t experience the Oedipus complex and thus never developed a super-ego. It is sad that almost 70 years later, we’re still bombarded with scientific-sounding nonsense that perpetuates gender stereotypes, cements the status quo, and leaves us all without alternatives for new gender roles that let us integrate all parts of who we are, whether they are “traditionally” male or female.

You’ve no doubt seen the headlines: Marriage keeps your blood pressure low. Well, at least when you’re happy in the marriage. Yet, even with that after-thought qualifier, the media got it wrong (again). Bella DePaulo took the time to actually read the original published article. Here are some of the things she found out:

• There were NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES in blood pressure [ when averaged across the 24 hours of the observational period] between the married people and the single people.
• There were NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES in blood pressure between the married people and the single people during waking hours.
• Married people look better than single people only if you compare reductions in blood pressure when the participants are unconscious [while sleeping].

I wonder what these married people dream about…

The other flaw with the media’s conclusion about this study is, as so often, their usage of a correlational study to explain causation: Even if married people had lower blood pressure than singles, that would not mean that one caused the other. As DePaulo points out, we cannot really scientifically study whether there is a causational effect because that would require an experiment with random assignment of people to the marital and single statuses, which would violate a boat-load of ethical standards. One possible way around this would be to look at longitudinal studies, which follow people for years, or even decades. No one has undertaken such a study about blood pressure yet, though the one study about marriage and happiness clearly disconfirmed the myth that married folks are happier than singles (a draft version of that study is available online).

I am also wondering what the effect of this type of media reporting has on our collective blood pressure. Like DePaulo, blatant singlism like this raises my blood pressure…