What does it mean to ‘believe women?’

"Believing women" doesn't mean we have to accept accusations as evidence. So what might it mean in real life? 

• When a woman makes an accusation, it would mean pursuing all available lines of evidence to weigh the truth of her claims. In the matter of Brett Kavanaugh's SCOTUS nomination, it would mean calling Mark Judge, Kavanaugh's buddy, to testify under penalty of perjury. So far that's not happening. That the Senate Judiciary Committee is not taking such a step suggests they don't have much interest in trying, as best as we poor humans are capable, of making a genuine attempt to determine the truth of the matter. 

• When a woman's accusation is proven, the person convicted of abusing or assaulting her will be given more than a slap-on-the-wrist punishment. 

• And women a woman says she has been traumatized by sexual assault, we don't wave our hands and tell her to toughen up instead of being such a victim. 

None of this means accepting an accusation as evidence. What it does mean is taking the accusation seriously enough to learn the truth, and taking women seriously enough to deal seriously with the men who have assaulted them. 

Given the state of our arguments over Kavanaugh — and I truly don't know if he's guilty or innocent of the allegations, though I'm inclined to believe his accuser — I'd say we're not there yet.

Why smart conservatives should love the Bechdel test

I'm shocked, shocked that a National Review writer has decided to take issue with the "Bechdel test." The test, as I'm sure you know, is a very simple way to check if your movies have even a moment in them that isn't dude oriented. Here's Wikipedia:

The Bechdel test asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added.

And here's NRO's Kyle Smith:

In the past few years, the Bechdel Test has begun popping up casually in reviews like a feminist Good Housekeeping Seal of approval. Take this appreciation last month of the 1992 film A League of Their Own, published by Katie Baker on the site The Ringer: “It is, in my possibly blinded by love but also correct opinion, one of the best sports movies there is. And it is an honest ode to women and sisters and friendships, with a story that breezes through the Bechdel test by the end of the opening scene.” Hey, and you know what? Tom Selleck’s Matthew Quigley appears almost immediately in Quigley Down Under. Hurrah, this film breezes through the Cowboy Test by the end of the opening scene! Neither of these two tests gives you any hint as to the worth of a film, and furthermore neither of them tells you anything about a film’s general feminist wokeness. It doesn’t even tell you whether the film is entirely about a woman.

A couple of observations:

•You know why the "Cowboy Test" is ridiculous? Because there have been a million fricking movies about cowboys. We actually have no need of further cowboy movies — though, admittedly, I'd watch one if a good one came along — because just about every permutation of the genre has been exhausted. The Bechdel test was invented, meanwhile, because such female-centric moments were relatively rare.

•Smith is right that the Bechdel test doesn't tell you about the worth of a film or its feminist bona fides. Nobody makes those claims for it! (Check the video above for confirmation of this.) Instead, the underlying question is this: Does this movie contain a single moment that's not all about the guys in it? It is the very minimum a movie can do, in other words, to put a female perspective onscreen.

• Which means that the Bechdel test doesn't do much to constrain movie art: The art itself is pretty constrained — the movie business has increasingly been designed to appeal to and arouse the passions of teenage boys. To the degree female characters are designed to appeal to this demographic, it's not often with their agency apart from men in mind.

The Bechdel test was created because movies are so dude-oriented that getting such a moment was unexpected, to be noted.

Smith says the Bechdel test is irrelevant because women don't make the kinds of movies that reap big box office. "Have a wander through the sci-fi and fantasy section of your local bookstore: How many of these books’ authors are female? Yet these are where the big movie ideas come from. If a woman wants the next Lord of the Rings–style franchise to pass the Bechdel Test, then a woman should come up with a story with as much earning potential as J. R. R. Tolkien’s."

Which is ... stupid. Tell the makers and viewers of Wonder Woman that they don't like sci-fi adventure. For the love of god, tell my nerdy-ass wife — but give me a head start out of the room.

Hollywood discovers that there's an audience for women-centric movies every couple of years, then promptly forgets it. Using that amnesia to justify the ongoing omission of women and women's perspectives from our films isn't just dumb — it's clearly leaving a lot of money on the table.

Smart conservatives, you'd think, might embrace the Bechdel test for this reason if for nothing else: It just might help them make a ton of cash from an underserved audience.

Cross-posted from SixOh6.

Teaching our sons not to be Donald Trump

This is the Facebook status of a friend. I'm so angry on her behalf that I can barely hold back the tears.

I've just had a conversation with my son. He's a good kid. But he lives in this stupid, fallen, fucked-up world.

We told him

Never touch a girl or woman without her permission.

Never call her names.

Never act disrespectfully in any way to a girl or woman.

There will be times when it might seem like the fun thing to do. When you see other boys acting that way. That doesn't make it right. There will be peer pressure. Resist. And talk to us, if you will.

I realize that there's only so much we can do. He spends so much time in this stupid, fallen, fucked-up world already without us. So it's imperative that we use the remaining time to affirm, and reaffirm, and reaffirm again, what those values are.

Look at Donald Trump, son. Do the exact opposite.

Contraception and religious liberty

That's what Ben and I talk about this week in the Scripps column. My take:

Religious liberty is a paramount American value; it's even written into our Constitution. A woman's right to make her own health choices doesn't explicitly appear in the document, it's merely a common-sense human right no less deserving of protection and consideration.

So the Obama administration is right to mandate that employers include contraceptive coverage in their employee health insurance programs. And the administration is also right -- if a little late -- to offer an accommodation that ensures access to birth control while permitting religious institutions to adhere to their own teachings.

If only that were the end of the debate.

Unwilling, it seems, to ever take "yes" for an answer from President Barack Obama, Republicans are now pressing ahead with proposals to exempt any employer from having to pay for contraceptive coverage. GOP leaders say this is about "religious freedom" -- but, as other commentators have noted, they're not pushing to exempt, say, employers who are Jehovah's Witnesses from having to pay for blood transfusions.

It's easy to conclude, then, that Republicans are mostly interested in hindering women's access to birth control.

"Obamacare" is one of the administration's great achievements. But as recent developments have shown, it is imperfect and leaves most Americans at the mercy of their employers when it comes to health coverage.

That's not the system that most liberals desired. We wanted to see either a fully government-run "single-payer" health insurance system -- or, failing that, a "public option" government insurance plan to stand alongside private insurance, both to drive down costs and to give individuals a wider range of health choices.

Such a system would've allowed American women to choose (or not to choose) birth control with little hindrance. A woman's health decisions should be between her and her doctor, not her and her church, nor her and her employer. That important concept -- and not religious liberty -- is what faces the greatest threat today.

Ben says: "The argument isn't about a woman's 'access' to contraception. ... No, this is all about who pays and why it matters." But we've decided—in a law that was modeled on legislation that Republicans originally crafted, and which was passed into law by a Republican governor now running for president—that for the most part, employers will pay for employee health insurance. If that's the route we're taking, then it really does become a denial of access if the person with the wallet gets to decide you don't get birth control. Conservatives don't want the government making your health decisions—remember death panels? It's beyond me why they'd grant that power to private employers instead.

Philadelphia: Where women are still prostitutes and men are still innocent

It's not just the Mummers club. Apparently, it's really, really hard to get arrested for buying sex in Philadelphia—and really easy to get arrested for selling it. Our latest example is a bust at the Penthouse Club in Port Richmond, where seven dancers and one manager were arrested Friday night on prostitution charges.

And the johns? Off scot-free. Once again.

Some interesting details:

The investigation and subsequent raid by the LCE and the police Citywide Vice Unit had been prompted by community complaints, including those from the spouses of men who'd blown their family's grocery money at the club, said Sgt. Bill LaTorre of LCE. 

At the Penthouse Club, on Castor Avenue near Delaware, men would pay $300 for 30 minutes in the champagne room or $250 for a skybox, police said. There, guys could partake in any number of sexual acts with the dancers, including "the front door, the back door and the upstairs," LaTorre said. 

State Police did not immediately identify those arrested. LaTorre said the seven female dancers and one male manager were charged because they soliticted undercover officers, but he suggested more people could have been involved in prostitution.

I'm going to go ahead and say the men who blew their family's grocery money on sex at the Penthouse Club were involved in prostitution. None of them were arrested. Again.

Again, I'm not sure that prostitution should be a crime—and if it should be, the women who engage in prostitution are often its victims, not merely the perpetrators. But we should all be able to agree that you can't sell sex if nobody's buying. In case after Philadelphia case, though, the official stance is that it doesn't take two to criminally tango. It makes no sense.

I get the police perspective: It's harder to make the cases against the johns—undercover officers aren't necessarily privy to the transactions in which men buy the sex. But the pattern of enforcement in these big stings is that the men whose appetites create the crime are allowed to walk away free, while the women who are the objects of those appetites are burdened with arrests, criminal records, and social opprobrium. 

It's unfair. More than that, it's obscenely wrong.

LaTorre told the Daily News that police will probably doing a lot more of these strip club prostitution busts. If we continue to see these kinds of the stories in the news—where lots of women are arrested, but the johns never, ever are—there will be only one realistic conclusion: That Philadelphia police and prosecutors are happy to engage plainly sexist methods of enforcing the law.

Why not bring criminal conspiracy charges against men in the Mummers prostitution case?

I'm clearly a bit cranky that the criminal burden of the Mummers prostitution party has fallen upon the female prostitutes involved. Here's a question for Philadelphia police and prosecutors: Why not bring criminal conspiracy charges against some of the Mummers' leaders?

Here's how the Inquirer describes the investigation:

The investigation into the club began almost two months ago, after police received tips that women were soliciting sex on the second floor of the building every second Tuesday of the month between 7 and 11 p.m., Blackburn said.

Lt. Charles Green of the citywide vice unit said an undercover officer gained access to one of the parties last month after wrangling an invitation from Crovetti. Inside, the officer saw women walking around wearing next to nothing, as well as about 50 men.

About 7:30 Tuesday night, two undercover officers made a repeat visit to the party. As the officers made their way around the building, they saw a man pulling his pants up near a naked woman in one room, and others engaging in sex acts in view of the bartenders and others. Meanwhile, Green said, 10 women approached the officers about paying for sex.

"It was just so out in the open, and so obvious what was going on," Green said.

If it was so obvious what was going on—not just in that moment, but to the point that it sparked a two-month investigation—then it was probably obvious to the folks who run the Mummers' Downtowners Fancy Brigade clubhouse. They—in all likelihood—knew what was going on and permitted the illegal activity to continue.

Seems like that fits the definition of a criminal conspiracy under Pennsylvania statutes:

A person is guilty of
conspiracy with another person or persons to commit a crime if
with the intent of promoting or facilitating its commission he:
(1) agrees with such other person or persons that they
or one or more of them will engage in conduct which
constitutes such crime or an attempt or solicitation to
commit such crime; or
(2) agrees to aid such other person or persons in the
planning or commission of such crime or of an attempt or
solicitation to commit such crime.
(b) Scope of conspiratorial relationship.--If a person
guilty of conspiracy, as defined by subsection (a) of this
section, knows that a person with whom he conspires to commit a
crime has conspired with another person or persons to commit the
same crime, he is guilty of conspiring with such other person or
persons, to commit such crime whether or not he knows their
identity.

In other words, you don't have to have had a conversation saying "let's do this criminal act together" in order to commit criminal conspiracy. It can be implicit and tacit—and the justice system can infer evidence of such a tacit conspiracy.

Well, hey: Pretty much the whole city has made the same inference here.

It's another question entirely whether prostitution should be illegal at all. (I'm of mixed opinions on the topic.) But right now it's not just illegal to offer sex for money; it's illegal to pay money for sex. We've only one side of that equation here—and women, again, are bearing the criminal burden of it. Philadelphia police and prosecutors can do better than that.

'Our main targets were the females': Police, the Mummers, and prostitutes

Lawrence Crovetti, charged with
promoting prostitution—the only man
to face sex charges in the case.

We get a bit of an explanation in today's Inquirer:

John Murray, 56, of Deptford, the club's financial secretary, and Alfred Sanborn, 44, of South Philadelphia, its steward, were arrested on liquor violation charges. The two acted as bartenders during the parties, and the clubhouse did not have a liquor license, police said.

Murray and Sanborn were aware of the prostitution, said Deputy Police Commissioner William Blackburn, but police did not have enough evidence to charge them with prostitution-related offenses. The dozens of men seen interacting with the women were not arrested, either.

"We weren't privy to the conversations between the males and the females, where there was a price and a particular act that was identified," Blackburn said. "Our main targets were the females."

The main targets were the females? Why? If the police are correct, Tuesday night's Mummer's prostitution party was a monthly event. They went to the trouble of getting an undercover officer invited into the club. They couldn't take the time to develop a case against the people who were facilitating the prostitution parties, or taking advantage of the services?

It takes two to tango. Certainly, this particular Mummers club has received a black eye it may not recover from. But it is the women—with one exception—who are charged with crimes involving sex. Not the men who were also committing crimes. With due respect to the difficulties of developing a prosecution-worthy case, it is simply wrong that the criminal burden of this situation falls so heavily, so exclusively on the women involved.

Not just the criminal burden, but the social burden. The men who sought blowjobs and who knows what else from these women won't have their pictures published in a photo gallery at Philly.com, forever viewable by anybody able to use Google. (And look at those photos, how bedraggled and worn most of the women appear. It should put the lie to any media-fueled fantasies we have about Julia Roberts-style glamorous hookers.) The men were paying for sex, but it is the women who are paying the price. It is a shame. A damn shame.

Jenice Armstrong's unhelpful anti-bitch advice for women in business

Here is the opening of Jenice Armstrong's column in today's Daily News: "IF PROFESSIONAL women really want to get ahead, then they have to stop acting like bitches."

No really. It gets better from there.

To be fair, this isn't Armstrong speaking for herself. Instead, she's quoting Susan Tose Spencer, former vice president of the Eagles—her father owned the team—who has a new book full of advice for business women. Like: Use your "feminine wiles" to your advantage. But don't complain about sexual harassment! That's whining! The best thing to do is just ... add more sexiness to be harassed. At least that seems to be the lesson here:

In her book, she shares an anecdote about the time she ran into a problem with her biggest customer's male buyer. He was the touchy-feely type and kept reaching for her leg under the restaurant table. (If it had been me, I would have had that loser's hand twisted up behind his back and slammed his face up against the tables. But then again, I'm just a wage slave, and Spencer couldn't afford to alienate the guy.)

So, she writes, the next time she met him for dinner, Spencer brought a beautiful female colleague with her. She and the other woman made a point of sitting on either side of the buyer, so he had to turn his head and look from one to the other. The distraction kept him from playing grab-a-leg, enabling Spencer to keep his business and her own virtue.

"You can't embarrass the male ego. Once you embarrass them, you make an enemy," Spencer warned.

Ick. You notice the burden here isn't on the man to avoid getting handsy because he might make an enemy of a well-connected businesswoman. Just: Ick.

But get back to the whole "bitch" thing. Spencer's contention is that women get the label because they deserve it: "You know they're always called bitches. Well, why? Because they act like them. Think about it. They kind of try to sabotage a guy. Or they'll talk behind his back."

Here's the problem: A successful woman will always—always—have the bitch label affixed to her at somewhere along the way. We all know this. I bet Spencer has been called it a time or two. Or three. My workplace experience is that women are no more or less likely to do the sometimes-ugly work of getting ahead. But when they do, it's the b-word for them. And men aren't held to the same standard: Steve Jobs was famously hurtful to his employees at times, yet the last week of hagiography-eulogizing has somehow mitigated that quality—or turned it into an advantage: He was just trying to make the product better! And maybe that's so. But is there any doubt that a Susan Jobs would've been seen much, much differently?

Spencer's journey, too, is shaped by the fact that she had access to the top rungs of the corporate ladder by virtue of her lineage. Would she have been vice president for the Eagles in the 1980s if her father hadn't owned the operation? Maybe ... but doubtful. It's pretty easy to dispense advice on taking third base if you were born there—and easy to be all sugar and charm if you didn't have to fight your way to the top. I'm not sure Spencer's advice is all that helpful to real women—or that Armstrong's amplification of it is all that helpful to Philadelphia.

In Topeka, nobody wants to prosecute domestic violence

Back in my home state of Kansas, the Shawnee County District Attorney has decided to stop prosecuting domestic violence misdemeanors including domestic violence (see comments below) because of budget cuts. The city of Topeka—the county seat, and state capital—has responded with an ordinance to repeal its own domestic violence law so it doesn't get stuck with all the domestic violence cases.

Seriously.

I outsource my commentary to my friend Notorious PhD:

Of the many things that counties and states have shoved off on municipalities (just as the federal governement offloads its responsibilities onto the states), why is it women* whose bodies are being put on the line?

That was a rhetorical question.

Poverty and frustration with long-term unemployment increases the incidence of domestic violence (especially male-on-female domestic violence). There are complex cultural reasons for it tied up with American notions of masculinity. But the point is that the same thing that is causing violence to rise is also behind this move to decriminalize this type of violence. There are very likely outcomes here, none of them good.

Read the whole thing.

In my household, we've sometimes discussed whether we'd ever want to move back to Kansas given its recent political turn to extreme rightwingism. The state has always been conservative, but it's often been a kind of moderate conservatism. No more. The debate in Topeka is one more sign that my home state—which I have great fondness for, still—is becoming unlivable.

The next big discrimination barrier to fall in the armed forces: Letting women fight

Under the law, American women are not allowed to serve in combat roles in the military. In practice, of course, wartime necessity has meant something different. Officially, though, the discrimination still exists—and with good reason, defenders say: Women tend to be smaller and weaker, and changing combat-ready standards to include them would diminish the readiness and roughness of our armed forces.

My response has always been: Don't change the physical standards. Just change the discrimination. And now I see that's what is happening in Australia:

In a landmark move for the Australian military, women will be allowed to risk their lives alongside male soldiers and serve on the frontline. In a move described as "a significant and major cultural change" the Australian army will remove all gender barriers over the next five years and women will be able to take up roles that previously were considered too dangerous.

Women who met the same stringent physical and psychological criteria required of men would be able to work in the most dangerous of roles after the Australian cabinet approved the measure, said the defence minister, Stephen Smith.

"This is simply about putting into the frontline those people who are best-placed to do the job, irrespective of your sex," he said. "In the future your role in the Defence Force will be determined on your ability, not on the basis of your sex," said Smith.

Conservatives have other objections, of course—the co-mingling of female and male soldiers, the ability of Americans to deal with seeing women soldiers come home in body bags. In truth we've been dealing with both situations for years. And yes, there have been some horrific bumps along the way. But there's no reason the country should deprive itself of the service of the people best prepared and most willing to serve it—no matter their gender.

Why is Andrew Klavan proud of his sexism?

This Andrew Klavan blog post, I think, expresses a certain kind of conservative mindset about as succinctly as possible. To sum it up: the dangerous sexism of the Muslim world makes the sexism of American-Christian conservatives charming, benign and even desirable.

Let's break it down.

I am a sexist. I believe men and women are inherently different and that it’s therefore appropriate to treat them differently. I continue to open doors for women, curb my occasionally profane tongue around them and stand when they leave the table. Feminists have occasionally berated me for this, believing such manners display a patriarchal and protective attitude toward them.

I'm not going to begrudge Klavan's door-opening for women. But.

Even if one accepted, broadly, that "men" and "women" were different, that in no way accounts for all the millions of individuals who might not fit those norms and who deserve to be treated on the basis of their own individual qualities instead of consigned to a broader group. Sexism is just lazy. In Klavan's hands, we can see pretty quickly, it's lazy and smug.

And in any case, it's a pretty short trip from "men and women are inherently different" to "men and women are unequal, and thus men deserve to have the power." Which leads us to...

They’re right: a protective patriarch is exactly the kind of patriarch I am.

Um, that's swell? Let's move on -- this sentence will be important in later context.

Compare our Muslim friends. In his book What Went Wrong, Bernard Lewis reports that a Turkish visitor to Vienna in 1665 was flabbergasted by the “extraordinary spectacle” of the emperor tipping his hat to a lady. He speculated this bizarre behavior might derive from Christian respect for the Virgin Mary. Maybe so. It's certainly true that the local rules of politeness bear within them the deepest attitudes of the culture. Which is something to consider in light of the imminent stoning of Sakineh Mohammadie Ashtiani in Iran, an Islamic horror story which inspires in me the very impolite desire to slug somebody, preferably with a clawhammer.

I'm glad that Klavan -- along with many of his fellow conservatives -- is so angry about the the imminent stoning in Iran. Let's get to the final statement, though.

I can’t help thinking that when feminists attack gentlemanly manners (and the Christianity behind them) they are threatening the very wellspring of their most basic rights.

And there we have it: My sexism is ok, because I'm not going to kill you! Be grateful, women!

Maybe that's unfair. But let me rebut Klavan in a manner I think conservatives will understand: I'll use the Cold War as an analogy.

Everybody agrees that the Soviet Union was a horrible, awful place: No personal or economic freedom, millions of people died because of Joseph Stalin's cruelty and tyranny. But the Soviet Union was also powerful, if despised. After World War II, the United States helped create the system of "social democracy" in Western Europe -- a hybrid of capitalism with a very, very thick social safety net -- in order to keep Soviet-style socialism from being too tempting to the masses and preserving a rough balance of power between superpowers.

Now: Stalin-era Soviet Union was about exploiting the people. Social democracies were about, for lack of a better word, comforting them. These days, though, there's lots of folks who see the social democracy of Western Europe -- with its high taxes, heavy regulations and monthlong vacations for workers -- as a way station to tyranny. Sure the people of Western Europe are and were more free than citizens of the old Soviet Union. But that's not free enough for many of today's American conservatives.

So it is with sexism. The choice isn't really between an Iran-style tyranny that kills its women or a "protective patriarchy" that uses less overtly coercive methods to still keep women in their place. The alternative is to recognize women as full human beings, possessing the same rights as all of us -- not "granted" to them by dudes -- and worthy of respect as a result.

(Hat tip: Julie Ponzi)

Scientific proof that Kathleen Parker's sexism is dumb

Via Andrew Sullivan, linguist Mark Lieberman gets into the Kathleen Parker "Obama is a woman" column that got me so irritated yesterday. Parker suggested that the number of "passive voice" sentence constructions during his big oil speech were proof that he lacked a certain "rhetorical testosterone."

Lieberman makes an observation similar to one I made:

The first thing to say is that there isn't the slightest evidence that passive-voice constructions are "feminine".

Right. But if Parker does want to play that game, well, there's some unsettling evidence:

Women don't use the passive voice more than men, and among male writers, number of passive-voice constructions doesn't appear to have any relationship at all to real or perceived manliness. The "passive is girly" prejudice seems to be purely due to the connotations of (other senses of) the term passive, misinterpreted by people who in any case mostly wouldn't recognize the grammatical passive voice if it bit them on the leg. ...

But I did just make a quick analysis of president George W. Bush's post-Katrina address to the nation. I count 142 sentences, 25 of which contained one or more passive-voice tensed verb constructions. That's 17.6%. Doing the same thing with Barack Obama's post-oil-spill address, I count 135 sentences, 15 of which contain one or more passive-voice tensed verb constructions. That's 11.1%.

I don't think Kathleen Parker will get another Pulitzer Prize for this column.

And in any case, it's worth noting that even if Barack Obama has a "feminine" communication style, that doesn't make him a bad leader. That was the point of Parker's column -- an insult both the the president's manhood and, well, to women.

Kathleen Parker: Obama is just like a woman. Not in a good way

Seems like it was just last week that Kathleen Parker was complaining that conservative women can be feminists too, darnit! Since then, of course, she's agreed to host a TV show with America's most famous patron of prostitutes. And today she offers up the theory that President Obama is a bit of a girl.

I say this in the nicest possible way.

Well, sure. She just doesn't mean it in the nicest possible way, though she tries like the dickens to act like she's not being, well, terribly sexist.

Generally speaking, men and women communicate differently. Women tend to be coalition builders rather than mavericks (with the occasional rogue exception). While men seek ways to measure themselves against others, for reasons requiring no elaboration, women form circles and talk it out.

Well, that doesn't sound so bad does it? But that's not really what Parker's getting at. Obama's not like a woman because he talks things out. He's like a woman because he's ... passive.

His lack of immediate, commanding action was perceived as a lack of leadership because, well, it was. When he finally addressed the nation on day 56 (!) of the crisis, Obama's speech featured 13 percent passive-voice constructions, the highest level measured in any major presidential address this century, according to the Global Language Monitor, which tracks and analyzes language.

The masculine-coded context of the Oval Office poses special challenges, further exacerbated by a crisis that demands decisive action. It would appear that Obama tests Campbell's argument that "nothing prevents" men from appropriating women's style without negative consequences.

But being a "coalition builder" isn't really the same thing as being "passive." And Parker makes no attempt to show that it is. She'll get no argument from me that Barack Obama has failed to demonstrate better leadership in handling the gulf spill. But Parker has taken generalizations about the way men and women communicate, then fashioned her argument about Obama's "femaleness" based on evidence that has nothing to do with those generalizations.

The upshot is that she insults both the president and women without a good basis for doing so. I'll never say that conservative women can't be feminist. But Kathleen Parker hasn't really shown us how that's possible.

A brief thought about Al Gore's alleged sex assault

Byron York prints plenty of disturbing details from the police complaint against Al Gore, but this is the one I find most infuriating:

Finally she got away. Later, she talked to friends, liberals like herself, who advised against telling police. One asked her "to just suck it up; otherwise, the world's going to be destroyed from global warming."

To that "friend" let me offer up a piece of advice: Go to hell.

Snarky folks at The Corner are treating this revelation as being run-of-the-mill Democratic politics, but honestly the problem here -- as is often the case -- is of power generally. You can see an almost carbon-copy dynamic at play when people angrily defend the Catholic Church against accusations of widespread child molestation. Victims are urged to hush up, to go away, because their truth threatens The Mission of whichever person or movement or institution is involved.

And while it's often true that sacrifices must be made in order to advance a worthy cause, you can easily tell the difference in the worthiness of those sacrifices by asking one simple question: Is the dignity of the individual who made the sacrifice enhanced by that sacrifice? Or is it diminished?

If the answer is the latter -- if a woman is obliged to be silent about a sexual assault -- than the person, or movement, or institution is almost certainly unworthy of the sacrifice. I don't want the allegations against Al Gore to be true -- but that's mostly because I don't want the woman in question to have been victimized. Shame on her supposed friends for valuing her dignity so cheaply.

The Flyers and feminism

You don't have to be a Flyers fan or a feminist to think this Chicago Tribune "pullout poster" is simply stupid:

Get it? HE'S A GIRL! Hahahahahahaha!

Jeebus. Flyers play the Blackhawks tonight. Now I doubly hope the Flyers win.

Christopher Hitchens is wrong about the French burqa ban -- but maybe for the right reasons

Christopher Hitchens almost makes sense with his defense of the French burqa ban:

The French legislators who seek to repudiate the wearing of the veil or the burqa—whether the garment covers "only" the face or the entire female body—are often described as seeking to impose a "ban." To the contrary, they are attempting to lift a ban: a ban on the right of women to choose their own dress, a ban on the right of women to disagree with male and clerical authority, and a ban on the right of all citizens to look one another in the face. The proposed law is in the best traditions of the French republic, which declares all citizens equal before the law and—no less important—equal in the face of one another.

Hitchens appeals to my humanist-slash-libertarian side here, briefly, by casting the proposed burqa ban as a blow for women, letting them cast off their subjugation by forcing them to remove the veil from their faces. But that's not what the proposal does -- at least, not entirely.

Instead, the proposed burqa ban substitutes one set of restrictive authority -- you will always hide your face! -- for another -- you will never hide your face! Women who are forced by husbands or male family members (or, more or less indirectly, by their co-religionists) to cover their faces are given no more choice in how they express themselves through dress than women who are forced by the state to make a precisely opposite decision. Either way, women are treated almost like playthings in the broader Culture Wars/Clash of Civilizations/War on Terror or what have you. It's not about letting them make their own choices; it's about deciding their choices for them in advance.

That's still not any kind of meaningful freedom.

Indeed, the New York Times story that serves as the basis of Hitchens' column hints at this a little bit:

Fewer than 2,000 women in France wear a version of the full veil, and many of them are French women who have converted to Islam. The full veil is seen here as a sign of a more fundamentalist Islam, known as Salafism, which the government is trying to undercut.

It is impossible to know the story of every French woman who converted to Islam and started wearing the veil, but it certainly seems as though many of those women freely made their choices. It's not a choice I would've made, nor would I have made it for them -- but that's not really the point point, isn't it?

There are, of course, separate questions about the veil and the public's right to safety in public places -- and that is a debate that deserves to be hashed out: It's certainly not a debate contained to France. But the feminist argument advanced by Hitchens -- and French President Nicholas Sarkozy -- rings hollow. You don't free women by making choices for them.