Sorry, I'm at about a 1:9 ratio of finished posts to draft posts. If I find the piece of information I'm looking for, I'll repost this. Otherwise, sorry, that was meant to remain in draft stage.

Now I am embarrassed to admit that I hadn't realized Betty Friedan was still alive until she died today. Her unionism and anti-lesbianism leave something to be desired, but it is hard to deny that she was pretty darn right about some pretty important moral issues-- of that day and this one.

I don't know if there is peace to be had, but if so, may she rest in it.

Someone recently pointed me to Linda Hirshman's article in Inside Higher Ed, which discussed some of the same issues as her Prospect article on why women need to take work seriously, which I meant to write about at the time, and also meant to write about when the New York Times' Modern Love section ran a href="http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10A1FF738540C728CDDA80894DE404482">this article about a defender of the stay at home mom who changed her mind when her husband divorced her.

Anyways, I'm writing about all this now.

Hirshman's articles reminded me about a conversation I had with a classmate when I was perhaps four or five years old. The question he'd asked was whether I thought it was better to be a boy or a girl, and my response was that of course it was better to be a girl, because girls could dress up in pink dresses, or wear jeans, while boys could only wear pants and boring colors. Of course, he was unimpressed with my argument because he didn't understand why anyone would want to wear a pink dress because boy clothes were so much cooler.

It was, I think, a tellingly prescient exchange. I don't think anyone can deny that one thing feminism has succeeded in doing is opening up a whole new range of choices for women. An intellient, capable woman starting out her career can aim for power and fortune through the traditional means those come in, choose a less demanding path whose rewards is comfort and satisfaction, or look at work as a sort-term project to entertain her until she settles down to her real calling of raising a family.

Of course, a women still face unique difficulties and discrimination, particularly in choosing the first path, but does anyone really want to claim that it's easier for a man to find a successful woman to support him as a stay-at-home dad than it is for qualified woman willing to sacrifice having a family to succeed in the corporate world?

Most men and many feminists would argue that the lack of this option is hardly a hardship for the man, finding it difficult to believe that anyone could really want to be a full-time homemaker, just as a four year old boy found it difficult to believe that anyone, even a (gak) girl, could want to wear a frilly pink dress. But while nobody really needs to wear frilly dresses, somebody does need to do the work of keeping a house and raising the next generation of children. And so long as men continue to view this work as approximately as desirable as wearing ruffles and lace to a client meeting, women are going to continue to do the lion's share of this work, because it's going to continue to be the path of least resistance for maintaining a happy family.

The thing is, it's not delusions or false consciousness or whatever to see keeping house as satisfying, rewarding work. Especially if one is a member of the upper middle class, who can enjoy the latest in dishwashers and washing machines and expensive vacuum cleaners, and a maid to come in once a month to do the really dirty work and the luxury of throwing clothes and bedding and table linens away as unfashionable before they get old enough to need repairs, what remains is largely interesting, creative, rewarding work.

Yes, tossing together another batch of pasta for dinner is not exciting, but as any regular reader of this blog has by now realized, cooking can be a fascinating pursuit. Similarly, vacuuming the family room is dull, but decorating the space to be warm and welcoming is fun. And while changing diapers is no fun, watching a child grow older and explore the world around them is an experience like no other.

By and large, women get that housework is more than drudgery, and by and large men don't, and this is the divide that most needs to be overcome, and it's one that starts, I firmly believe, with the differing socializations that parents provide to their children. Women aren't genetically programmed with an aversion to mismatched curtains and ring around the toilet. Rather, they're taught socially to value a nice-looking house, and introduced gradually to the process of creating one.

The same parents who will enroll their daughters in all sorts of empowering activities to show them that math is fun and work is good will nevertheless still encourage their daughters to get a summer job babysitting and their sons to bag groceries, resulting in women that have been introduced to the challenges and rewards of caring for children, and men that see babies as mysterious creatures who dirty their diapers and cry for inexplicable reasons. Similarly, the same mother who'll demand that her son learn to wash the dishes and sort his socks will take her daughter to the mall as a special treat to pick out a new bedspread for her room, but just buy one and bring it home for her son.

In fact, the drudgery part of housework is the easier to divide. Even a neandrathal can be made to understand that a toilet needs cleaning once a week and that fairness dictates that he should therefore complete this task twice a month. However, it takes a rare man who understands why he should spend three hours shopping for the right collage frame to hold the pictures from the last family vacation, let alone one who will take the time to learn what type of frame is ideal. So the well-meaning husband pitches in with the dirty work and resents it as, well, drudgery, while the wife increasingly becomes fed up by the the fact that her husband doesn't even see how much more she contributes to the house.

So for the women who really want to see women represented more equally in public life, Hirshman's suggestions are well and good, but not, I think, likely to get us much further than we are now. Change is only going to come, I think, when stay at home parent is as much an equal opportunity occupation as career parent is now, which in turn is only going to happen when men understand what they're missing and demand to get in on it.

So here's my small proposal: just as we now have Take Your Daughter to Work Day, we need to institute a Keep Your Son at Home Day.

Via Bitch, PhD. an interesting addition to the Maureen Dowd pile-on that's occurring in various sections of the blogosphere. Lindsay Beyerstein asks:

Who gets called frivolous, and what for? Usually, we associate frivolity with gossip, fashion magazines, and giggling. But if we think about what frivolity is and why it's bad, it's clear that men are equally prone to this vice. Frivolity is an excessive and/or situationally inappropriate preoccupation with amusing trivia. There's nothing inherently gendered about the concept. Yet, a guy is unlikely to be dismissed as frivolous if he's excessively preoccupied with poker, sports stats, or horse race politics.

Keeping that firmly in mind, go wander over to the Comments section of Orin Kerr's A3G-unmasking link. This one, by TL, for example:

However, I also agree that it is now kind of disturbing to now know that the pink cascade, and all the sight-ations, and "super-hottie" remarks came from a dude. It made me realize that very gender specific humor exists, even in a (somewhat) serious environment like legal gossip. The little quirks of the other seemed cute or amusing when thinking of them flowing from the works of a female.

Or this one, by Duras:

UTR was (is?) one of the most hilarious and entertaining sights on the net (possibly the most entertaining) AND very informative and sophisticated as well. This revelation, if true (please, please, please, let it not be so!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) is indeed VERY disturbing. The humor is intensely gender specific and that which is histarical and appealing coming from a girl (or someone one believes to be a girl) is, uhm..., something less coming from a guy.

Just... interesting.

Will,

1) Actually, I think even if the ban on wolf whistles, cat calls, and other such entreties did pass the voters, it would not be content neutral, and would fail fairly readily (but it might be a nice few months or even years before the court processes finished).

2) Within one local police jurisdiction, how will you distribute the scare resources and opportunity costs devoted to higher order? Distributing by desire shown for such in a referendum creates a perverse incentive; distributing by property taxes and other abilities to pay makes the ability to live by community-endorsed standards (as judged by the results of a referendum) the provence of the wealthy.

3) I'm fairly dubious of the capability and willingness of the police and judicial system to follow through with accusations that such a law has been violated. He-said, she-said (perhaps with few eyewitnesses around, or at least few that can be found again) and possible difficulties tracing the perpertrators, it's hard to justify spending many resources on these cases. (That said, I'm not sure how much voters would pause to consider the legality and practicality of such a referendum before enacting it.)

(Guest co-blogger PG's post is partially about that topic, but her musings are under the fold).

Street harassment. Lord I loathe it. PG writes:

Street harassment is more an issue of discomfort than fear for me. . . Having a stranger approach you sexually, even if it's something you know he does routinely and with no malicious intent beyond exercising one of his few "privileges," does make one feel fractionally less safe; it highlights the degree to which one is exposed and vulnerable.

I like to think that, despite my small stature and lack of obvious means of defense (there is a leatherman in my purse, but that's not very practical). I can tell someone to f* off and he will obey; successfully getting an obnoxious man to turn tail and walk the opposite way down the street from following you (well, me) is about the only good feeling in the encounter. If he doesn't, though, my back-up plan is pretty scanty; it consists primarily of calling for help and relying on the community to aid me or disperse him.

But street harassment is already a sign that the community has frayed---that a person is publicly acting in such a way because the risk of retribution is too low (and by 'retribution,' I mean social ostracism, not duels)---and that the person is unwilling to abide by normal standards. That's where the fear enters: in not knowing at what point of harassing the person will cede violating standards and quit posing a threat to me. Is it at talking so long as I'm within 10 yards of him? Is at refusing to quit touching my arm no matter how insistently I move away? Is at following me down the street, grabbing my waist and slapping my butt? I don't know. Yes, most men will end at the wolf whistle, but experience has taught me that all three of the above are also possibilities.

(As for mice, I never did quit giving small screens when one would dash out from along the floorboards of my Chicago apartment, and hated the idea that they'd probably found their way into my roommate's unclosed 50 lb bag of rice. I submit in my defense, though, that my scream was primarily directed at the sudden movement---I'd do the same if a chunk of plasterboard scurried from behind the couch to the corner).

In two previous posts (here and here), I attacked the notion that there is something fishy about Congress exercising its constitutional power to regulate the District of Columbia, and in particular attacked this NYT editorial suggesting that if Congress wants to retrieve the powers it has delegated to the local D.C. agencies it ought to take a pay cut. (But see U.S. Const. Amdt 27 (forbidding such a pay cut for Congress to take effect until after the 2006 election))

PG penned a solid retort to my first post, and then, finding my second post non-responsive, penned an even more thorough one here. I concede partial defeat. Yes, even in situations where it has plenary power to regulate-- over national parks, over forts, arsenals, and other needful buildings, over conquered territory, and over the District of Columbia, Congress should regulate with a special humility. And yes, this belief is logically independent of whether one believes Congress should have (or should exercise) plenary Constitutional power with respect to the states. I stand corrected.

However, there are valid competing considerations in this and other such cases. One includes the legislature's personal preference about what is right. Just as Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul may vote for general legislation even if it would fail a popular referendum, Congressmen may sometimes validly decide that the interests of an important or oppressed minority of the District are more important than those of the majority, or that the majority of a district has misjudged some critical empirical fact that makes a bill more or less desirable. More importantly, Congressmen may-- indeed are obligated to-- avoid passing legislation that is unconstitutional, no matter how much their constituents want it. (I think such an obligation probably extends to repealing unconstitutional legislation already passed, at least in some circumstances.) To be sure, these considerations sometimes compete, and reasonable people can disagree about how they should come down. As, for example, PG and I seem to. I stand corrected.

But in blogospheric fashion, I will end this concession with a new argument. I am puzzled as to why PG ends her post by knocking the idea of legislative constitutionalism:

Surely if the D.C. gun restrictions are "presumptive[ly] unconstitutional," their unconstitutionality ought to be corrected by the part of government, either local or federal, that generally decides whether something violates the Constitution, i.e. the judiciary. ... While I understand the argument that each branch of government should act to enforce the Constitution -- that it does not belong to the judiciary alone -- to say that something is "presumptively unconstitutional" in the absence of a judicial finding demands more than the barefaced statement.

A better-informed reader (cough, my brother and avid racing fan, cough) informs me that Ms. Patrick is more than beauty and talent. She's also real skinny. Therefore, so claims said fan, she

does, to some extent, have an unfair advantage in race car driving.... This is that she, as do most women, weighs considerably less than the average, fit, male. Weight naturally (in most cases) slows a car down in both acceleration and other various characteristics of a good performing car. Racing series don't have a weight requirement for a car with driver inside because it has been assumed that most drivers will be male. Males will, of course, have variance in their weight, but it has been something of a punishment for overweight drivers. This forces drivers to stay in shape and thus most racecar drivers weigh about the same. By including a fit female in the mix, her weight is naturally lower than that of the men's and thus does lend her something of an unfair advantage that rules haven't taken into account.

The same thing applies to height; you simply do not see tall race car drivers as they are not aerodynamically efficient in open wheel racing (Indy racing and Formula 1).

Apparently the racing world was abuzz with this whining. AP claims Robby Gordon [another driver?] "meant no disrespect" by pointing out the same issue. The Times offers a counter-explanation from the league's president, Brian Barnhart. He notes that Ms. Patrick's weight made "had a virtually minimal effect on the competition" because of the structure of the race. [caveat: I know little about the physics of car racing. At the same time, it doesn't matter to this post; so don't bug me about it.]

In order to argue that a performance advantage based on body type is “unfair,” these drivers and their buddies seem to claim that some physical advantages are legitimate while others--weight, in this case--aren’t. What’s curious here is that, contra Martin, Ms. Patrick’s advantage makes her a better driver in terms of performance.

To my (granted, limited) understanding of gender and sports, the entire justification for the existence of all male professional sports is that the best men are better than the best women at these sports. The men are simply better athletes in terms of pushing the sport on its own to a higher level. I find it curious that the moment a woman can present the same argument for her participation in a sport, the difference is now “unfair.” I somehow doubt the NBA would exclude Shaquille O’Neill because of his “unfair” size advantage.

Generally, I ignore the New York Times editorial pages. Mostly, this is because I don't like editorials--600 words is too long for a bon mot, but too short for any sort of substantive analysis--but also this is because I don't like New York Times editorialists in particular. Nevertheless, every once in a while I get sucked in by an engaging headline, like John Tierney's (also blogged about by my co-blogger, trumpeting that it holds the secret to "What Women Want."

(The very image of a male columnist holding forth on what women want always brings to my mind the image of a prosperous late Victorian gentleman holding forth in public that his wife certainly doesn't want to vote--she trusts him to look out for her interests in the dirty world of politics--while the wife in question takes advantage of her husband's absence to attend a Suffragette ralley.)

According to Mr. Tierney, what women want, or at any rate what most women don't want, is competition. He cites a psychology experiment in which men demonstrated a preference for a competitive payoff, while women preferred not to compete, even when they seemed likely to win.

He then glosses over the possibility that the women's reluctance to compete could result from people like him hammering into their heads that competition was unwomanly by saying, "You can argue that this difference is due to social influences, although I suspect it's largely innate, a byproduct of evolution and testosterone." On the basis, apparently, of one psychology experiment Mr. Tierney seems to think it appropriate to conclude that it's just not in women's natures to enjoy the rough and tumble world of competition.

(I am again reminded of that Victorian gentleman claiming that women's brains are simply not up to the rigors of serious study, while his daughter simpers and giggles in public company, because everyone knows that men don't marry bluestockings, and women who don't get married are failures.)

Mr. Tierney then claims "There will always be some jobs that women, on average, will not want as badly as men do. Some of the best-paying jobs require crazed competition and the willingness to risk big losses - going broke, never seeing your family and friends, dying young." If he really believes that women in significant quantities never willingly choose "crazed competition", he clearly has not met any aspiring actresses, models, or dancers--female-dominated fields in which the time commitments and level of competition required make the business world seem about as strenuous and risky as an afternoon stroll in the park. Or how about getting a Ph.D. in comparative literature (female-dominated, fantastically competitive)?

One wonders if the researchers were to redo their experiment with the activity involving answering SAT-style analagies rather than mental arithmatic if women would have chosen competition in greater numbers? What if it had been a dance competition--anyone care to bet that the men choosing to compete would have outnumbered the women?

I agree with Mr. Tierney's central point--that a business world organized as a tournament is neither healthy for women nor for business generally--but chalking that up to women's innate lack of competitive drive is unbelivably simplistic. Incentive structure (the age at which the rewards for winning the business tournament start to kick in is generally the age at which women either have to slow down at least somewhat, or forego hope of having children), lingering gender discrimination, and deeply ingrained societal expectations about what it means to be feminine (hint: they most certainly don't involve a trading floor) all most likely play a role as well.

My mother once told me that the secret to a successful marriage was separate bank accounts and separate bathrooms. Amber Taylor is apparently in favor of the former but against the latter. (To be fair, my mother meant bathrooms in a house; Amber wants unisex bathrooms in public life). Phoebe Maltz, meanwhile, approves of joint bank accounts and does not appear to mind unisex bathrooms. Matthew Yglesias and Tom Sylvester both chime in on the bank account debate (Yglesias wants separation, Sylvester wants unity) as does Heidi Bond but none, so far as I know, has entered the bathroom debate.

Both of these topics for blogospheric debate come, of course, from the New York Times-- this column by David Brooks and this article by Patricia Brown.

My own takes: In his column, Brooks seems to champion joint accounts not because it makes joint expenditures easier to account for but because he thinks that individualism and private property are dangerous to married life. I am dubious-- problems of scarcity do not go away, so there still have to be answers when the question is "who gets to use which toothbrush?" or "should the extra money be spent on a bottle of wine or a football game?" However much one wishes, two utility functions do not become one via marriage ceremony. So one still needs a method of intra-family allocation, and it seems to me that private property is helpful to that. I also endorse almost all of Heidi's and Amber's thoughts here.

What of bathrooms? I don't have strong feelings-- I mildly prefer gender segregation here, but if my preferences must be overriden in the interests of desegregation/equality, I would not care that much. Better still are the single-user unisex bathrooms tucked away in low-use areas, although in high-traffic areas they create intolerable waits.