Last week, I wrote about the benefits of actually meeting people with whom you disagree, face to face.  It tends to humanize the argument, and drag people out of the petty, stereotype based bickering that attends so much online “debate”.

For example I’ve met the likes of Chuck Olson, Luke Francl and Chris Dykstra from New Patriot; while I disagree with all of ’em on most everything, I’ve found them to be great guys and had a great time talking with ’em all.  I even met some of the giggly fratboys from MNPublius; ditto.  Nice kids; they’ll be smart when they grow up.

Another example; I met “Tild”, who, like most leftybloggers, seems to write for dozens of different leftyblogs.  She was writing for “Norwegianity”, I think, when I deduced from her writing that she was a joyless shrieking scold.  Then I met her at Flash’s place, and found that, in person, she was not joyless.

I stand sit corrected.

But meeting people and becoming acquainted with their arguments pays other dividends.  For example, last month I pointed out that I am the foremost feminist you will ever meet.  Of course, much of the local Sorosphere reacted like I’d farted in church at a Wellstone seance, and responded with great ire in various degrees of “oh, no you’re double-dog not!” 

But Tild referred to something that Mark “Labor Goon” Gisleson put on Norwegianity that went somewhere nobody else has gone; actually using science and stuff to try to attack my claim.

And I’m chagrinned.

Because for all these years I thought that feminism – especially equity feminism – was about working to make sure that women, like my daughter will one day be, don’t face discrimination because of their gender, and have all the doors open to them that their merits and innate drive can kick free.

Silly me.  It’s about how much your blog says “She” versus “He”.  According to this tool, the word “he” outnumbers the word “she” on my blog by 71% to 29%.  Go ahead, check it out!

Of course, since Tild is a leftyblogger, we have to assume that even that ludicrous context is mangled beyond recognition – and, as usual, our assumption is confirmed:

What does this ratio tell us? If you think it reveals that e.g. a site with a higher “he” count is primarily consisting of or appealing to a male audience, that’s not true; for instance, both BlogHer.org as well as AskMen.com show a higher count for “she.” Whatever correlations you might discover, they’re likely not as linear. Below are a couple of examples from different sites:

[Oh, go ahead and look!]

I should’ve figured; it’s all about superficial bean-counting!

Very well.  I’ll redouble my effort to insert feminine pronouns.

(more…)

I saw the breathless news reports last week – about how mothers, if paid at the scale of the various jobs they hold (according to Salary.com), would/should earn $138,095 a year.

It didn’t pass the stink test for me, but I didn’t know why. 

Nihilist – recovering nicely from his year as a City Pages-endorsed blogger – in his capacity as a bean-counter, does know why.  “Mom”, according to the “survey”, has a bunch of jobs:

• Chief Executive Officer
• Psychologist
• Facilities Manager
• Day Care Center Teacher
• Computer Operator I
• Cook – Institution
• Laundry Machine Operator
• Van Driver
• Janitor
• Housekeeper

Nihilist starts going down the list:

Let’s start at the top. Mom as CEO. I recall the salad days of my youth, when mom orchestrated a hostile takeover of the Johnson family down the street and outsourced dad to India before jetting off to Wall Street to make a pitch to Goldman Sachs. No wait, I don’t remember that at all. Because Mom is not a CEO. Let’s strike that one.

Read the whole thing.

I was having an email discussion the other day with a friend who took exception to my continued criticism of Strib columnist Syl Jones.

To be fair (to Jones and to me), unlike most conservative commentators I’ve actually found reason to agree with some of Jones’ work – but it’s been a rare thing.  For starters, I’m desperately sick of his whole “ice people” slur – the whole Melanistic conceit that people of color are inherently emotionally and mentally healthier than white people because their sun-drenched past made them more open and less repressed they’ve “got no soul”, in effect.  Leaving aside the simple fact that no white commentator could get away with doing the same thing in reverse for any reason (assuming they’d want to – and what, indeed, is the point of slandering an entire race’s “soul”, anyway?), it’s a stupid conceit; anyone who can say that a strand of ethnic groups (linked only by skin color, for crying out loud) that produced Bach, Michaelangelo, Beethoven, Turner, Shakespeare, Tolstoii, Byron, Chekhov, Mahler, Ibsen, Hemingway and Ramone “has no soul” is pretty clearly deluded.

But I come neither to bury nor praise Syl Jones.

One of the remarks in my email exchange that grabbed me was the idea that my criticism of Jones was “white-guy-apologist stuff”.  Which prompted me to think – calling someone “white male”, to a fair chunk of our society, is taken as a sort of rhetorical trump card.  The twin involuntary sins of being Caucasian and male are taken as an explanation for the whole gamut of offenses; colonialism, the oppression of women, war, the despoiling of the environment, the alienation of the Industrial Revolution, bad awkward dancing.  Throw in Protestant Christianity (the dreaded White WASP male), and you add emotional rigidness and frigidity, homophobia, unsatisfying sex and patriarchalism.

It’s an “argument” (and I say argument in scare quotes, since there really is no discussion; “you’re a white guy” is tossed out like a rhetorical stun grenade, intended to knock out everyone in the room, without much backup plan as to what happens if it doesn’t work.  One left-leaning woman, on meeting me a few weeks ago and learning I was a conservative, snarked “a white male who’s a conservative.  There’s a surprise!”.  I chalk it up to my inherent restraint that I didn’t respond “a white, upper-middle-class, never-married, childless fortysomething professional woman that’s a DFLer?  Ibid!”) that I’ve pretty much seceded from.  What, indeed, is the point?  Can someone criticize, say, Syl Jones for his many individual misapprehensions of fact (which have nothing to do with anyone’s skin color), as well as the generalized caustic ugliness of constantly referring to “ice people” in his columns – itself “racist” by any rational measure – without having one’s own race dragged into it?

Or does a white male need to subcontract his own critique out to, say, a Hispanic lesbian ghostwriter for it to be valid?

Whatever.  I’m not the one to untangle this society’s angst about race, which started three centuries before any of my anscestors came to this country. Still, if I must be seen to engage in “white guy apologetics”, I’ll just get it out of the way right now.  Every society on this planet that must interact with other societies, from tribes in the New Guinea highlands barely removed from the Stone Age (many of whom have waged constant war on each other for millenia) to tribal clans in Central Asia and the American steppes (whose inherent discrimination against other clans is reflected in the very language the culture uses; the term for “human” in many indigenous languages around the world becomes more derogatory the farther removed from the home clan the subject is), to large, multiethnic societies throughout history.  And of all the thousands and thousands of such societies, from extended family tribes to globe-spanning empires, which ones have been the ones to even attempt to combat systematic racism, to make the genders equal, and to build societies that transcend such bigoties and hatreds?

I’m just saying.

I can’t begin to untangle the issue of race in this society, much less worldwide – partly because a fair chunk of this society’s punditry considers my opinion invalid (I’m a white guy, remember?), and partly because whatever my skin color, I’m not smart enough.  Nobody really is.  It’s something that’ll resolve itself despite the demigoguery and the rhetorical short-cuts and all the other baggage, eventually.  I  hope.  Maybe the demographers are right – the whole race issue will diffuse itself in another fifty generations, as all the races interbreed and the whole planet comes out looking tan.

So maybe the whole “white” part of the “white male” conceit will die off on its own, eventually.  But the “male” part?  That’s where this gets interesting.

Now, I am and remain the foremost feminist I know.  And it both troubles and amuses me to note that many of my fellow guys who call themselves “feminists” seem to feel that the only way for a guy to express “feminism” is to prostrate oneself before women and demand their forgiveness for the sins of ones forefathers, whatever they may have been and whenever they may have happened.

This, of course, is not only rubbish, it’s dangerous – to feminism.

I have a question.  Feel free to discuss it in the comment section.

Background:  This earth has tens of thousands of different societies and cultures.  Many of them – Islam being a key example – are intensely patriarchal (run by men).  However, many are very matriarchal, either behind the scenes (many Asian societies at the family and clan level) or quite overtly (many African cultures).

It’s a given (for most) that boys and girls are different, of course; in kindergarten, boys tend to be physical and spatial, while girls tend to be verbal and social.  Girls, stereotypically, play in groups and gossip about each other (and no, it’s neither a sexist stereotype nor a product of middle-class Western culture, so don’t go there); boys tend toward aggression (almost always stylized, although the feminization of the school system has arguably destroyed the socialization that taught boys to control that aggression, leading to ever-more real violence), physicality and a more-detailed conception of the physical world around them (recognized even in preschoolers as boys’ typically-greater conception of three-dimensional space compared to girls – which helps counterbalance girls’ greater verbal skills).

History’s great conquerors, of course, have all been males; Alexander, the Romans, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Ditka, the British (who were sometimes ruled by queens, but the queen ran a very patriarchal system) and so on.

Who have been the great rulers of matriarchal societies?   Who knows?

The theory I’ve heard – and I can’t remember when or from whom, sorry – is that matriarchal societies tend to be more inward-focused; it’s in matriarchal socities that it’s believed that “it takes a village to raise a child”; according to the theory, a matriarchal society behaves more or less like a group of girls will act; verbal, group-oriented, alternately supportive and undercutting.

Patriarchal societies, says the theory, act like boys; outward facing, rules-based, individualistic.

Most societies, of course, mix the two in some way or another, more or less.  And when two societies collide in conflict, it’s usually the patriarchal one that prevails (see:  the spread of intensely patriarchal Islam across heavily-matriarchal Africa).

Again – as I noted above, the only large, significant society in all of history that has seriously addressed the notion of equity among races, beliefs and genders is the patriarchal, Judeo-Christian western civilization.

Question:  If the Judeo-Christian West were a matriarchal society, would it have developed into small-l liberal democracies?  Or would they be recognizable to us today?  Would they be viable?

Discuss away.  Stupid comments (as judged by me and only me) will be excised.  Not mutilated; I want to stay on the subject, not on a bunch of tangents introduced by certain commenters’ peculiarities.

Oh, and anyone who replies “why does Mitch Berg hate women?” will earn a rhetorical wedgie.

Someone actually sorta kinda got the joke.

Although just to be clear, “Mitch is a totally awesome feminist” isn’t the joke; that’s pretty much true.  No, the fact that I could say something so clearly hyperbolic, and draw so much brow-knitted, sweat-drenched near-derangement from the regional Sorosphere professional bed-wetting class is…

…well, kinda fun.

My, oh my.  I seem to have stirred up a firestorm dust-devil of petulance.

It seems a conservative can’t say he supports women’s right to equal protection, access and treatment under the law and by society without having gaggles of intellectual lilliputians vex him.

Where do we start?

MNob, who writes at Cucking Stool, Norwegianity, MNob, MinBlue, MinLeft, MinVolved, MinDem, DemMin, BlueDem, MinRedWatch, RedWatch, RedWatchMN, BlueStool, Bluegianity, Blog of the Shrieking Incontinent Left, StoolWatch, RedStool, Cucking Blue, BlueVolved, Cuckegiainity, PowerBlue, Lawyers Without Constraints, BlueCuck, Stooling Knob, LeftBlueVolved, Feminixies…

Um, where were we?

Oh, yeah – MNob brings the same keen, logical, intellectual approach to my legitimate claim that she brought to dissecting Olson v. Brodkorb:

Over at Shot in the Dark (no, I won’t link there),

Didja know that’s the latest way Minnesota’s increasingly insular, increasingly paranoid, every-more-gutless leftybloggers try to get atcha these days?  By not linking to people that they’re talking about?

They’re afraid, of course, that their audience will be free to make up their own minds. 

And I tell you – I’m cut to the quick.  To the quick, I say.

But I digress:

 Mitch Berg takes on the events in Austin and domestic terrorism, trying to wrap himself in the flag of feminism to make a point that isn’t entirely clear even after reading the piece three times over.

Of course, MNob’s readers – who don’t have the benefit of a link to my original piece – won’t know that I didn’t “take on” the events in Austin at all (except to condemn them), and didn’t “wrap myself” in any “flag”.  MNob could say pretty much anything she wants to about me (which is, indeed, her usual MO anyway).

My point was pretty clear:  The original blog I linked to, “Feministe”, was a bunch of victim-mongering, hysterical dimbulbs.

…it’s pretty hard to see what the premise is beyond taking “feminists” to task for being angry that they might be exposed to violence when going in for that annual pap smear.

Remember – this woman is a lawyer.  Lawyers, supposedly, spend three years learning to be rigorously logical.  Of course, to be fair, they also spend three years learning to abuse rhetoric to try to win over the unsuspecting.

Nobody will defend people – male or female – against violence for whatever reason more staunchly than I.  And I have put my ass, physically and literally, on the line to prove it enough times in my life to be able to stand behind that claim.  So MNob’s change in subject is particularly callow and logically void.  I took “Feministe” to task for claiming (amid a lot of other hysteria)that there is a big media conspiracy to downplay violence against women. 

One might also wonder if MNob really has much respect for her audience; she giggles at me of citing a CNN report that “regurgitates” data from the BATFE.  Ms. Nob – where else does one go for information about bombs?  The National Organization of Women? 

Of course, MNob tried to stay with substantive discussion (my local leftyblogger standards) of the actual issue. She failed, but she tried. And all Robin “Rew” “Chicken to Drink Around Conservatives Any More” Marty can come up with is a bunch of quotes I’ve made about women, most of which she is apparently unequipped to address, none of which address much less attack the fact that I’m the most feminist guy in town.  It’s what passes for “journalism” among that set these days, I guess. 

And then there’s Jeff “All Snark, No Content” Fecke, one of George Soros’ human schnauzers “citizen journalists” from Minnesota Moneyitor. 

In his second leaden thwack at my claim, he writes (see, leftybloggers?  Linking to people you disagree with not only doesn’t hurt much, it shows your readers you’re not afraid to let them make up their own minds about things)…

…well, a bunch of NOW talking points about Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Summers and the like, which amount to saying “I don’t really know much about this, but I’m faithfully reciting from the manual”. 

And then…:

The avenue to that future is feminism. Not “gender” feminism, or “equity” feminism, but feminism–full stop.

In other words, “just accept everything you’re told, and never approach any of this with a critical mind”. 

Buncombe.  “Feminism” means many things; nobody appointed Jeff Fecke (or the National Organization of Women or NARAL, for that matter) official custodian of the term, or for that matter the belief.

And as long as you continue to hem and haw about how the uppity women just keep demanding rights

Um, Jeff?  I fully support those rights.  Unless (as is likely the case) the only “rights” you’re concerned with are abortion (I reserve the legitimate right to dissent, for very good reason that anyone is free to ask me about) or institutionalizing victimhood.  If those are really the only “rights” you’re concerned about, then we either need to have a different discussion, or you’ll need to change your snark just a tad.

and keep complaining about how little things like bombing attempts fail to make the news,

And again, Fecke either misses the point, ignores it, or is unequipped to recognize it.  Let the self-styled riotgrrls from “Feministe” complain all they want about what the news covers!  That’s why they blog; also, it’s why I blog!  More power to ’em!  I’m calling them, though, on their whiny habit of finding conspiracies around every corner.  

And – lest I’d left any doubt the first several times I said it – bombing abortion clinics is wrong.  Don’t do it.  The explosives would be better used trying to blast some logic and reading comprehension into the skulls of Twin Cities leftybloggers.

you’re actively working with those who would cheerfully place your daughter and mine in the second tier of society. And that’s as far from feminism as is humanly possible.

Get that?  If I don’t buy every crazed nuance of the most deranged feminist fantasy, I’m “actively working” to harm women.  Put other way, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” – the last great refuge of the thug, the fascist, the autocrat, intellectual or otherwise.

Bullpucks, Jeff (and all who think like him recite the same rote, intellectually-desiccated talking points); as an American, a human and someone who takes an active interest in not only the world around me but the one that my kids will inherit one of these days, I have not only the right to question things, but the obligation. 

And if the best defense y’all can mount is “If you’re not with us in every niggling particular demanded by the most dogmatic, extreme, pseudo-religious faction of ‘the movement’ then you’re against us”, then I think the discussion is over.

But if signing off with an ofay snark and declaring victory makes you feel better, by all means do what feels right.

My goodness.  The local leftybloggers are having what passes for a field day in their circles with my statement, in the previous post, that I am the foremost feminist I, or (likely) you, know.

Local rentablogger and Soros byatch talkingpointbot Jeff Fecke notes:

(Note to super-feminist Mitch Berg: this is why distinguishing between “gender” and “equity” feminism is prima facie evidence that you’re not a feminist:

No, Jeff, it’s prima facie evidence that you and I disagree, and that you got your views of “feminism” from the bottom of some fembot’s stiletto as it sank into your throat.   

My view of the difference between Equity and Gender feminism is coherent with, among many others, that of Camille Paglia – and if you want to tell her that she’s, um, prima facia not a feminist, I’ll be happy to sell tickets to people who want to watch her twist your giblets into party animal shapes (rhetorically speaking, of course).

 there’s no equity without adjusting our view of gender.) 

That’s one of those statements that’s about nine syllables too long to be a protest chant, but is usually spoken/written with about the same level of consideration – and it dodges my point (most likely without really knowing it, or why).

Views of gender change.  Doy.

But in an age when women have, for most practical purposes, achieved equity with men in the workplace and in society (yeah, yeah, there are exceptions, bla bla bla.  And I have a fifteen year old daughter who’d going to be going out into the world before too terribly long, so if anyone wants to compare how much they’re onto these exceptions with me, they’re in for a rude, smugness-cracking surprise), the current strain of “gender feminists” aren’t so much “adjusting our views of gender” as they are – to quote the Friesians – engaging in a social revolution…:

…which is essentially based on a form of Marxist theory that substitutes “gender” for Marx’s category of “class,” or simply adds the two together, usually with “race” thrown in. This sort of “race, class, and gender” theory is typically a dangerous form of political moralism, with the same totalitarian characteristics as other versions of Marxism have proven to display. One consequence of this is that the substantive content of criticism is rarely addressed but that it is considered sufficient to vilify critics as, in effect, “class enemies,” i.e. directing ad hominem arguments against them that their status, in terms of race, class, or gender, or simply in terms of their critical attitude, is sufficient to refute their arguments. Hence the convenient device of dismissing most of Western civilization as the product of “dead white males” — though for feminism the inconvenient fact remains that Eastern and Middle Eastern civilization (and every other) must also be dismissed as the products of “dead non-white males.”  

In other words, save the slogans, Jeff.  “Adjusting our view of gender” has little or nothing to do with “gender feminism”. 

SIDE NOTE:   Given that we’re dealing with Soros’ kids here, I’ll take bets on which response will come out first:

1. Rew from Powerliberal/MNMoney:  “Bwahahaha!  Mitch has a crush on me”
2. Jeff Fecke from BlogOModLeft/MNMoney:  “Why does Mitch Berg hate women?”

Place your bets now.

First things first:  I am the most feminist person I know. 

Seriously. I have a daughter.  I want her to be able to go wherever her merits and qualifications take her in her life, whether it’s a career or domestic life or…whatever.  So if and where equity is the goal of feminism, I’m totally on board.

Of course, in the vast majority of our society, the equity feminists have long since won the battles that matter.  Feminists with any common sense are currently sorting out the aftermath of those victories (how many women really want to put off having kids to join the work force?), but for the most part the “war” for women’s equality is down to a mopping-up operation.

Now, the feminism that’s most concerned with establishing womyn as a separate fiefdon with its own victimology-based pseudo-religion?  Not so much. 

So you’d figure – rightly – that a blog called “Feministe” would provide a rich vein of fisking material.  Someone planted a bomb at an Austin, TX abortion mill “female health clinic”. 

Had that bomb been found outside a post office or a school, the headlines would have been hysterically running on about ZOMG TERRORISM TERRORISM IS AL QAEDA INVOLVED?

Dunno, “Zuzu”; statistically, bombs in the US aren’t aren’t nearly as rare as we’d like.

And the right-wing warbloggers would be pissing their pants and hyperventilating about profiling Arabs and banning Muslims from public life and dhimmitude and how if they had been there, they’d have stopped it with their concealed carry and their extra-super special powers of righteousness, just like they saw in a movie once and BOMB IRAN! and 9/11 CHANGED EVERYTHING!!!

Are we done yet?

No? 

but they still have better things to do than join the military, but they’ll be happy to go into the woods and hunt Russians and shout WOLVERINES!!

But it’s an abortion clinic, so. Ho-hum.

Now are you done?

Yes?

Is it “terrorism” to put a bomb in an abortion clinic, with an aim toward scaring people out of being suppliers or consumers? Absolutely.  And as anti-abortion as we are, I don’t think you can find a single credible right-of-center voice that doesnt’ condemn it.

But is a bomb in an abortion clinic the deeply-evil act of a person who is putting his or her personal quest to protect human life above the law of the land, or part of a coordinated attack against the US?

For some reason, terrorism doesn’t count if it’s directed against women and their health care providers.

Er, right.  Which is why protestors at Planned Parenthood clinics are kept across the street, right? 

 It’s just not news, and the fact that it goes unremarked in the national media — and hell, even in the local media, as in the case of the Austin bomb — contributes to the idea that women are not important and that violence directed at women is not only to be expected, but to be dismissed.

To the extent that it didn’t get covered in the news, it’s more a symptom of the values of the news industry; nobody bleeds, the story doesn’t lead.  It’s worth noting that while abortion-related violence has been declining, eco-terrorism has been growing, even though the media aren’t knocking themselves out covering that, either.

Does that mean that the nation doesn’t care about loggers and meat producers?  Or that it’s really not news?

But if all you’re after is to assuage your own sense of invincible righteous victimhood, knock yourself out.

And I don’t mean “knock yourself out” to imply I support domestic violence against women, even if it’s self-inflicted.  We’re clear on this, right? 

UPDATE: Lesser feminists than I chortle at my opening sentence, proving two things: Twin Cities leftybloggers are largely incapable of carrying on a logical discussion (preferring, with a few exceptions, snark and obscenity), and George Soros is a terrible comparison shopper.

Seriously, Rew:  try to ding my premise.  Preferably in terms other than “bwahahaha” or “Mitch has a crush on me”.  Side benefit:  If you manage to do either and/or avoid dumb scatology or wondering why I’m not in the Army, you’ll be staging a better argument than 95% of leftybloggers, including the entire Minnesota Monitor staff, can manage.

An exchange:

I am Guy
I am Guy
Guy I am

I seek a date!
I seek a mate!
I do not like
to have to wait!

“Do you like
fun and romance?”

I will not wait,
potential mate.
I do not like
to have to wait.

“Would you please
send me a pic?”

I will not send
to you a pic.
Take my word,
I’m not an ick.
I do not like this
“sending pics”.
I’d rather poke my eyes
with sticks.

“Do you like to eat
Tex Mex?
And would you rather
wait for sex?”

I do not like to eat
Tex Mex,
I could not, would not
wait for sex.
(I would like sex
WITH tex mex…).
But really do not
want to wait.
I really really love romance.
I do not like to wear my pants.

“What kind of food
do you like to eat?
And where on earth
would you like to meet?”

Not in a car.
Not in a bar.
Not on a boat.
Not in a moat.
I would not meet for barbecue.
I would not meet your Uncle Hugh.
I would meet if you wore lace.
Why not over at MY place?

“Would you, could you,
just slow down?”

Meet me! Meet me,
somewhere downtown!

“I won’t like you.
You won’t like me!
I will not like you
you will see!”

You would not, could not meet me now?
Not any time! not anyhow?

“I do not like you in a box.
I do not like you pounding rocks.
I do not like you on your Harley.
Not Metallica, not Bob Marley.
I do not like you here or there.
I do not like you anywhere.
I do not like your house or car.
I do not like you, Guy-you-are!”

A date! A date!
A date! A date!
Could you, would you,
obey fate?

“It’s not a date! It is not fate!
Neither early, Guy, nor late!”

I would not, could not, leave you be.
I could not, would not, set you free.
I won’t forget your pic on Match.
I won’t forget you – I’m quite a catch!
I will not eat crow here or there.
I will not eat crow anywhere.
I do not take rejection well,
I won’t forget you, Girl-From-Hell!

Say!
In the dark?
I feel a spark!
Would you meet me at the park?

“I would not, could not,
in the dark.
I can not, do not
feel a spark.
Not in the dark. Not at the mall.
Guy, I won’t meet you at all.
I do not like you, Guy, you see.
No booty call. No chemistry.
Not at the mall.  Not once at all.
I will not, shall not, on the border.
I will get a restraining order!

Thank you.

We’ve talked about the “wage gap” in this space before, by way of noting that as long as you compare apples and apples, there really is none.

The media has carried Op Eds on both sides of the issue this past week – from the sublime (or at least sensible) to the ridiculous.

Representing sensible, Carrie Lukas writes in the WaPo:

 In truth, I’m the cause of the wage gap — I and hundreds of thousands of women like me. I have a good education and have worked full time for 10 years. Yet throughout my career, I’ve made things other than money a priority. I chose to work in the nonprofit world because I find it fulfilling. I sought out a specialty and employer that seemed best suited to balancing my work and family life. When I had my daughter, I took time off and then opted to stay home full time and telecommute. I’m not making as much money as I could, but I’m compensated by having the best working arrangement I could hope for.

Lukas hits on two of the key truths of the issue:  Women exercise different options before and during their careers.  Some pundits – Warren Farrell being a key one – might add that it’s because women have more socially-acceptable options than do most men; while our society is pretty open about women being anything from stay-at-home moms to CEOs, men with kids are pretty much expected to provide, provide, provide (to the point that if a marriage breaks down, or never happens, it’s a matter of rigidly-enforced law).

Women make similar trade-offs all the time. Surveys have shown for years that women tend to place a higher priority on flexibility and personal fulfillment than do men, who focus more on pay. Women tend to avoid jobs that require travel or relocation, and they take more time off and spend fewer hours in the office than men do. Men disproportionately take on the dirtiest, most dangerous and depressing jobs.

Leaving aside dirt and danger, there are some social norms at work here.  Women are more likely to go into lower-paying fields like social work, non-profits, humanities and services; Men are more apt to end up in engineering, technology and sciences, fields that pay more right out of the entry-level gate.  After that, of course, women are vastly more likely to take time -years – off to have and raise kids; men are not. 

If you take a man and a woman who start at a job at exactly the same time, earning exactly the same money, and check back twenty years later, what do you think you’ll see?  If the man has clocked twenty solid years of work without a non-vacation break, and the woman took ten years off in the middle to have and raise kids, who do you think is going to be paid more?

Who do you think should?

When women realize that it isn’t systemic bias but the choices they make that determine their earnings, they can make better-informed decisions.

Smart people – irrelevant of their gender, really, since many men do stay home with the kids these days – know this.

But Lee Roper-Batker, writing Friday’s Strib, does not.

Women’s personal choices are to blame for lower earnings? Systemic workplace discrimination for women is a myth? Rubbish. Lukas presumes that her choices represent the preferences and complex geographic, social, racial and economic realities of women everywhere.

 Roper-Batker then utterly fails to show that Lukas’ example isn’t germane.

 Her assumption is that if women sought “the dirtiest, most dangerous and depressing [of] jobs” like men did, we would achieve equal pay. Tell that to Lois Jenson [one of the Iron Range miners that won the stories lawsuit in 1988 enshrined in the movie North Country] and other women across the nation who “get dirty” fighting to earn a livable wage.

This, of course, is a red herring.  The example of a small group of women who won the right to work a dangerous, dirty job (and, more to the point, not be harassed on the job) has nothing to do with the raw comparative numbers of men and women at dirty, dangerous jobs; even less does it address the real point – that men go into higher paid work because they are expected to, and stay with it more consistently.

Roper-Batker shows a keen sense for comparing apples with axles:

In Minnesota, we’ve modeled how a marketplace can be corrected. In 1982, the Legislature passed the bipartisan State Employees Pay Equity Act. On paper, the bill outlawed sex discrimination against state government workers. In practice, it eliminated the wage gap among 45,000 Minnesotans. Since then, average earnings for women employed by the state have reached 97 percent of average earnings for their male colleagues.

Which, of course, directly supports Lukas’ point!  If you compare apples and apples – people of similar education, experience, and consistency on the job – men and women earn very much the same money.  Indeed, in fields where women start younger and work more consistently (technical writing being one in my personal experience) they tend to out-earn men.

But across the nation, women continue to represent a disproportionate (more than 64 percent) share of minimum wage earners — and an even more disproportionate 40 percent are women of color.

And so Roper-Batker moves on to comparing apples with bowling balls – or at least, we think they’re bowling balls; one doesn’t know what sampling of “women” comprise 64 percent of minimum wage earners; all women over the age of 15?  People over 18, or over 21?  Comparing state employees with a general swathe of minimum-wage workers is misleading to the point of meaningless.  Without addressing why adults are working for minimum wage (or even knowing that they’re adults at all), it seems Roper-Bakter is tossing factoids out and hoping that her audience doesn’t care enough to ask questions.

According to Amy Caiazza, program director for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, economists give three reasons for the wage gap.

One-third is due to differences in skills and education. Solution: Let’s fund expanded education and training for women that will lead to higher-paying jobs.

But women are already a decisive majority of students in higher education – and the number is rising, to the point where people are seeing a crisis. 

Another third is due to job segregation: Women tend to cluster in lower-paying occupations. Solution: Let’s work to expand our girls’ visions of the types of jobs they can occupy.

But we’ve been “expanding girls’ visions” for a couple of generations.  When I was in high school, the girls got endless rah-rah about how they could be anything at all.  And they were!  Among my female classmates from Jamestown High in 1981 are doctors, lawyers, nurses, military officers and noncoms, teachers, scientists, engineers and professionals, as well as housewives and service workers – pretty much the gamut of the American labor force.  If a bunch of girls from all kinds of backgrounds from a rural town from almost thirty years ago are all over the occupational map, how can it be that Lee Roper-Bakter, president and CEO of the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota, can think that girls today, beneficiaries of boundless information, generations of their mothers, aunts and sisters working in the big world, and thirty years of constant pep-talking about their potential (that has made them three-fifths of our college students) could be doing worse?

Indeed – what actual evidence is there that girls today don’t have every bit as expansive a vision of their future as boys do?  Quite the contrary – since women are approaching 60% of those in higher education, after a generation of feminized education, it’d seem quite likely the opposite has happened; boys’ visions are the ones becoming constricted.

(Barring, of course, the girls who get pregnant as teenagers and take themselves out of the workforce, and consign themselves to the minimum-wage ghetto right out of life’s gate.  Of this, of course, Roper-Bakter makes no mention – even though they are a drag on women’s numbers in general.  Five’ll get you ten they’re a big part of the “minimum wage” numbers Roper-Batker cited, but I suspect she’d be the last one to tell you).

The final third of the wage gap is “unexplainable.” Solution: Let’s work together to end factors like sexism and racism that suppress women’s pay.

But other than a disjointed, out-of-context claim about minimum-wage workers, Roper-Batker can’t really make the association between sexism and racism with any meaningful numbers.  Are black women really paid less than black men with similar experience, training and consistency on the job?

These smack of systemic failures to me, but ones that can be corrected. The glass ceiling and gender-typed jobs are not illusions, as Lukas suggests, but social constructs.

At this point in history, Roper-Batker might be right.  They might be social constructs – where “society” means “left-leaning dogmo-feminist lobbyists pimping a government solution that might address a non-existent problem – but will certainly give plenty of power and influence to the likes of Lee Roper-Batker”.

 Just as Lois Jenson’s courage ended sexual harassment as an accepted workplace practice, legislation will end persistent wage gaps.

This is ludicrous.

How?

Let’s take the real-world example that Lukas alludes to, and that I cited; a man and a woman who start with the same background and salary.  How – why – should the government mandate that the woman, with ten years’ less experience than the man after twenty years, be paid the same?

And has anyone shown that male apples and female apples – people with the same training, experience and time on the job – aren’t paid the same? 

No. 

So while Lukas blames women for the wage gap and doesn’t support federal legislation requiring “paycheck fairness,” the state of Minnesota knows better. It has already demonstrated that the proof is in the numbers — or legislation — to correct the marketplace. Now we just need to expand it, for the rest of us.

The piece is instructive in its incoherence.  Although there’s no demonstrable problem, Roper-Batker wants the government to tackle it anyway.

Robbing from the axles to spite the apples.

As it happens, I’ve worked in a number of fields where women tend to earn more than men.

I spent five years as a technical writer – a field that had been dominated by women (since it started as a “promotion” from secretarial work, back in the 1940’s). Traditionally, women out-earned and out-ranked men in the field, because individually, they’d been doing it longer. Eventually, I – individually – earned more than many individual female technical writers. And sooner than later I moved out, because let’s face it, technical writing bored me stiff. Sheesh.

I’m reminded of this when I see stories like this one, about “women’s groups” pushing for “equal pay” at the capitol:

Equal pay laws that apply to state and local governments would be extended to private contractors doing business with the state, under a proposal outlined Monday by leaders of womens advocacy groups.

After years of efforts under gender equity laws, or “comparable worth” initiatives, women in state and local government now earn 97 cents for every dollar men make, said Patty Tanji, president of the Pay Equity Coalition of Minnesota.

Meanwhile, in the overall workforce, the gender gap lags behind at about 75 cents for women, Tanji said. While the proposal would apply to only the 1,800 companies that do business with the state, “its a step in the right direction,” she said.

It absolutely infuriates me that the press still repeats that soggy old statistic verbatim, when commanded to, by whatever special interest wants to wave it around. Women at large make less money, because they traditionally tend to get less education, go into lower-paying fields (the standard gender cliches would be social work versus engineering), and – the big clinker – tend to take years off from their careers to have and raise children. This slows promotions and raises – and, according at least to Warren Farrell, lengthens their lives, but we digress.

Who should get more money for a job in a fair world, all other things being equal – someone who’s been on the job for ten years without a break, or someone who took a couple of years off in the middle of those ten years to have and raise kids?

Note that I was gender-neutral, there; what if the woman worked for ten years straight, and the guy stayed home for two years? Is there any rational reason the guy should earn the same money as the woman?

Why?

A spokesman for the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce said pay equity mandates are unnecessary. Tom Hesse said studies have shown that the gender gap in pay is due mostly to factors not related to discrimination.

“When you take into consideration the difference in occupations that men and women choose, and length of time on the job, there really is no wage gap,” he said.

Which is, in fact, the truth.

Which makes sense when you realize that this really isn’t about equal pay for anyone.

The pay equity proposal was one of more than a dozen being supported by leaders of womens groups at the State Capitol on Monday.

Dubbing their effort “Presidents on Presidents Day,” the presidents or top officials of more than 22 womens groups said they are coalescing at the Legislature [while I’ve said a lot of bad things about politicians, even I don’t believe  they’ve done anything to deserve that – Ed.] to push for: increasing womens pay and workforce flexibility, providing health insurance to an estimated 343,000 uncovered Minnesotans, reducing violence against women, and providing improved health care and more affordable birth control and family planning services.

It’s about feminizing poverty and collecting a lot of markers from the DFL.

Women, in general, have an insurmountable advantage in custody trials, especially if the kids involved are younger than four years old. It’s almost impossible for a woman to lose under those circumstances, barring crack addiction (maybe) and gross moral turpitude. Especially if the fathers are famously moronic.

And yet…

But [Britney Spears] stayed less than 24 hours before returning to California, where she briefly visited her sons in Malibu before shaving off her hair, getting tattooed and dashing to a hospital in the early hours and asking for help.

K-Fed? If it’s legal vindication you want, you married and divorced the right chick.

Maybe.

Periodically, I highlight – er, “lowlight” – dismal moments in my dating life (Parts I and II). 

But it could  certainly be worse:

The victim, 45, and [accused vampire wannabee Tiffany] Sutton, 23, were lying in bed naked at early Wednesday when Sutton asked if he wanted to be tied up and he consented, police said.

But that’s when Sutton reportedly pulled out a knife and cut the victim’s leg, police said.

Sutton reportedly told him that she “likes to drink blood” and made several cuts to his upper body, police said.

He also said Sutton drank a “little bit” of his blood, police said.

He was able to break free, run out of his home, but Sutton reportedly followed with a pickaxe, police said.

The victim passed out before his friend found him covered in blood called the police, police said.

You really have to read the fine print on Match.com…

In honor of Valentine’s Day, this is a follow-up to one of my most popular posts.

CASE 1: Flinty fortysomething executive type – let’s call her “Lynnette”. Kicks off a conversation with “I tend to be too direct”. As she’d only been divorced less than a year, after nearly twenty years of marriage, I expressed some concern – I’ve been bitten by that whole “rebound” bug too many times. This brought on a litany of pique, the upshot of which was her contention that, despite conventional wisdom, plenty of research, and oodles of my own personal experience, she really was an emotionally-available, completely-recovered outlier to reality.

WHAT I SHOULD HAVE SAID: “Er, what you call “Direct” most of us call “rude and self-absorbed. And I don’t think you’re nearly as squared away as you think you are. Check please…”

CASE 2: Cute, if somewhat way-too-thin-for-my-tastes accountant. Let’s call her “Ann”.

After two fairly nice dates, a phone call. “I’m narrowing down my list of guys to [names another guy she’s also been going out with]. Sorry”.

WHAT I SHOULD HAVE SAID: “Are you Paula, or Randy? Because I do a much better Simon…”

CASE 3:  “I am crazy about vampires”

WHAT I SHOULD HAVE SAID: [clattering of chair, cloud of dust as I ran for door].

It’s February 13, “Rejection Day” – the day for everyone who doesn’t have anything special to celebrate tomorrow.

Even if I do have someone interesting in my life, Valentines is one of my two most dispensable “holidays” of the year (along with Halloween). 

One of the reasons I loved the movie Hi Fidelity so much was that, at one point in my life, it was about basically me. At one point, single and in my early twenties, I had a notebook crammed with lists of the Top Five Songs, or Albums, for any given situation.Most are long-forgotten. Some come back enough to keep themselves imprinted in your brain.

Such is Shoot Out The Lights, the 1982 album that Richard and Linda Thompson wrote and recorded as their ten-year marriage was skittering into oblivion.

If love has eaten your brain, left trash around your head, and scattered for parts unknown taking all your beer and keying your car, there’s no better album to marinade your brain in.

(more…)

Via Ecker, we have a blogger whose wife has found a great cure for blogger’s block:

In an effort to encourage me to revive this blog, my wife has imposed this “No blog, No sex” rule. The rule is simple: I am supposed to blog at least once a week in exchange for love-making…

Note to self and other bloggers:  Date only non-writers.

No, not lately.

So at the nadir of my misery on Monday, I fire up the MP3 player. 

And what are the first three songs that insensitive software bastard serves up immediately?

• “Found Out About You”, Gin Blossoms 
• “Backstreets”, Springsteen.
• “Light Don’t Shine No More”, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes

So much for the “healing power of music”.

(No, don’t worry – I actually got a good laugh out of it).

Get through the morning without blowing chow.

So far so good.