50 Eye-opening Women's Studies Blogs

http://onlinedegreeprograms.org/blog/2009/50-eye-opening-womens-studies-blogs/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/oct/25/gay-adoption-fathers-parenting

The Parent Issue

The rise of the gay dad

Having two dads isn't as unusual as it used to be. Rebecca Seal meets the generation of young, gay men who are re-inventing the world of adoption.

• • Rebecca Seal
  • The Observer, Sunday 25 October 2009
  • Article history

More and more children are being adopted by same-sex couples. In the past two years the number of gay men approved to adopt has doubled. Here we listen to some of their stories.

Peter, 44, and his partner adopted brothers Carlos, eight , and PJ, four.

Peter, 44, and his partner adopted brothers. Photograph: Ellis Parrinder

You never know what prejudices you will come across. If you approach an agency about a child or sibling group, they are at liberty to say you don't match the profiles of these children, and you hear nothing from them and you don't know why that is. Even at the recruitment stage, you might hear agencies saying they've already got a gay or lesbian couple on their books and they're not looking for any more, or because you're white you can't go on their books, or because you're gay you'll not get children under five. It isn't an even playing field. But maybe that will change when social workers have more experience of kids doing just as well in gay- or lesbian-headed households.

The statistics from the National Adoption Register suggest gay and lesbian adopters are more open to older kids and sibling groups, and also we're more ethnically mixed as couples than heterosexuals. We represent a different profile of adopters. And being gay or lesbian should help you relate to the experiences of these children, because they've experienced difficult starts in life, they feel different and excluded and aware that other children haven't had similar experiences.

There are a lot of very supportive, well-meaning social workers. But sometimes they can impose a hierarchy of adopters in which married heterosexual adopters with money are at the top and a single, gay, white man would be at the bottom – a single, gay, black man would be higher, since they are keen to match ethnically (most gay and lesbian adopters think they were never going to have children who were going to look like them anyway, so what does it matter?). The law is just about giving gay and lesbian adopters an equal opportunity to apply.

I don't necessarily disagree with lots of stereotypes about gay people – it's the way that they are used to suggest that we are less worthy as parents that's the problem. There's still a heterosexist attitude, where everything straight is seen as better because it's the norm.

You spend months talking to your child's social worker, and to the family-finder whose job it is to match you. We only saw one picture of the boys and read a 200-word profile to begin with – although as it gets closer you get huge documents and masses of files. Then you might first get to meet their foster carer, or a birth relative who is positively inclined towards the adoption. Next, you might get to meet the child for an hour one day, and the next day a whole morning, then the next day you might put them to bed or to take them to the park. So over time you get to know them – maybe a few days if they are small and a month if they're older, and there's a transition where they begin to understand who is responsible for their care. Ours was over 12 days. Our boys attached to us very quickly and it was lovely, a really beautiful time.

We're lucky to be in a school with other children with gay and lesbian parents. I think it is more difficult for people who don't have that, as school very much becomes your world. We know lots of kids who've got a dad and a stepdad. When other kids visit they might think: "Oh, your two dads live together", but I don't think our kids even see us as different, and other kids don't seem to notice.

It's a challenging thing taking on children of a certain age – they've got histories and attitudes and experiences and friends and attachments to people they might not see again. Most people try to give their children the sense that, notionally at least, their birth parents did love them even if they weren't cut out for parenting.

Paul is 49 and has been with his partner Matt, 41, for 19 years. They adopted brothers Harry, eight, and David, six.

Paul, 49, has adopted brothers with his partner. Photograph: Ellis Parrinder

My partner and I talked about adopting one night after we'd had our civil partnership ceremony. We'd been together 15 years and were thinking about what we could do that might help someone. We were so naive – we didn't know who we could adopt or foster; we thought perhaps we could only foster a child of, say, 12, who was in a difficulty for six months or something. Then we started to discover we could be taken seriously as adopters. We were told that often it's harder for a child to be adopted if they are older, that if they are sibling groups they're often at the end of the queue, waiting. It began to get quite heart-wrenching.

It took nearly three and a half years for us to adopt. The day we first met our boys was a shell shock. I remember naively asking about what happens if it doesn't go well and they're not the right ones – do we choose again? And the adoption staff said: "No, no, no – we've found the boys, you've all agreed that this might be a good match, it's happening, there's no going back. These are the ones." We went to the foster home with real trepidation – and because it was a foster home I had this vision of it being a run-down old house and lots of kids and a maternal lady in a pinafore. It was actually an immaculate house. We went up to this glass door and although we'd seen pictures of the boys we had no idea what they were really like, and there they were jumping up at the door, like puppies. They were two stunning little boys, just fantastic. It's a really artificial set-up of course, manufactured by the social workers, who say you'll have a cup of tea and you'll get to talk to them, but you mustn't pick them up, give them space, don't get too close. But it was a great three-quarters of an hour. And afterwards in the car, I said to my partner: "Let's not make too big a thing of this" and he looked at me and said: "You're joking? This is huge." We just knew as soon as we went in that it was going to work.

There was a lot of prejudice in the adoption system, even though it's not allowed and the law states you must treat everyone the same and with respect. There are still individuals who have difficulty getting over the fact that their values and mindset don't fit with what they have to do in their job. And now there's clearly prejudice when people realise the set-up. There's what I call the mummy prejudice – the boys misbehave in public and one of us dads will berate that child, and you get a clear sense from groups of women out with their kids that they think once those boys get home their mum will sort it out. And I'm thinking: it doesn't work like that!

People are quite innocent too – my children are darker-skinned than me, so people often ask if they are my kids and I'll say yes, and they'll go: "Oh. How come?" And this will be in front of the boys.

Their school is absolutely brilliant. It's the first time they've had adopted children with same-sex parents, and they're very sweet – they take you to one side and say: "What should we do on Mother's Day?" We say they can make a card if they want to – although someone did once say: "But they haven't got a mother." To which I responded: "Well, how do you think they got here?"

Times have changed immensely: I put myself forward to be a governor and I got voted in by the parents who know all about me, which is fantastic, because I'm old enough to remember being too scared to ever tell anyone I was gay.

People focus too much on the fact that two men can't have a child. But what they forget is that adoption is not about starting a child – it's about taking over and parenting damaged children, and that's a skill. I'm not putting us up on a pedestal. All I'm saying is that we're a real resource.

Zoltan, 38, and Mark, 35, have been together for 11 years and officially adopted five-year-old Lucia two weeks ago.

Zoltan: I was fostered myself and I wanted to give something back, as it were, and Mark has a really magical quality with children. Kids just feel really comfortable with him. At first we wanted to foster. We went through the fostering approval processes, and our very first placement was two little girls, half-sisters Natalie and Lucia. After a while it became clear that they were never going to go back to their mother and so, two and a half years after she was placed with us, Lucia is now our daughter. The initial plan was for them to be adopted together, by us. But in the end Natalie's real father wanted her (he's not Lucia's father).

The local authority was very pro us adopting, but we did have difficulties trying to foster. Once you're approved to foster you go on a list, and when social workers have an urgent or planned child to place they go down the list and start phoning people. Five or six times we had false starts – we'd be told a child was arriving and then it didn't happen. I got suspicious, because we were the only male, same-sex couple registered in the borough. It got to a point where we were supposed to be doing respite care with two boys in foster care, and we think their biological family vetoed us, even though the children had been removed from them. So I said to the authority: "You need to assess what your policies are, because this looks like homophobia." I was very tough and a week later, Lucia and Natalie arrived.

The first social worker who came to assess us said: "Would I want my child to be adopted by two gay men? I don't know…" and then she went: "I think I would." And that was her mind made up.

The first adoption panel was a bizarre experience. The maximum number of people on the panel is 15, but, perhaps because we were the only male same-sex couple in the borough, there were 17.

The whole process is in some ways fantastically well thought out and set up: you're assigned a social worker and there's one for the child, plus independent legal representatives who are supposed to represent the children. That's good, but the risk is that people have different ideas and agendas; we felt that one of the legal representatives was homophobic.

The kids in Lucia's class know everything, and there are other children with same-sex parents too. Kids will come up to us and say: "So you're Lucia's daddy?" Yes. "And she's got two daddies?" Yes. "Why?" And then another one says: "Cos her mummy's poorly." It's great. The school has been so supportive – they asked what they could do and who they could write to, and when we told the headmistress two weeks ago she was in tears.

Mark: Sometimes the stress and pressure became immense – we both stormed out at times. But Zoltan's my whole life and we're as solid as a rock. We'd been together nine years when we started this. In Lucia's eyes we're Daddy Markie and Daddy Zoltie. She's very assertive – if I'm helping at her school I'll be surrounded by kids and she'll come pushing through them, saying: "That's my daddy." Lucia's been with us throughout this process, remember, and she's been overwhelmed by it, I think. She's had a lot of uncertainty, and you forget how much they pick up. But two weeks ago we were finally able to say: "You are now our daughter." She got straight on the phone to my mum and says: "Right, Nan, now I'm adopted, what we're going to do is sort my bedroom out" and off they went and bought new curtains.

Simon, 36, and his partner have been together for 12 years. They adopted David when he was six, two years ago.

Simon, 36, adopted David in 2007. Photograph: Ellis Parrinder

Our adoption was very smooth. We started the process in 2006 and it took us about 18 months to get approved and then about six months to actually find our son. He moved in with us two years ago. We were the first gay couple to go through the process in our area, and our local authority gave us so much support. We live in a small village and they've all been good too – we've always been very open, and they knew from day one what we were doing and were more curious than anything.

At first he called us by our first names. Now he calls us Dad and Daddy – I'm Dad, James is Daddy. I think that'll peter out – he won't want to call James Daddy when he's 16. It came naturally that he called me Dad because, as I like to put it, I had my maternity leave, so I was off work for nine months and with him all the time; James was there evenings and weekends.

There's always going to be a degree of prejudice about gay adoption. But these children have come from incredibly bad backgrounds – what they've experienced in the early parts of their lives an adult would find very hard to cope with. These children have one or two loving parents – someone who loves them, who'll give them cuddles. Whether they're a gay or straight couple or a single person, as long as the child is getting support it doesn't matter. The odd person in the village said they weren't sure about what we were doing – that a child needed a mummy and a daddy – and I agree. But when that's not available, there's the next best thing.

Rodney, 41, is single and adopted Sebastian, four, in January.

There are very few men who adopt on their own. I wanted children but never met the right person to do it with. Normally single men who adopt are men who've worked with kids, or who know a particular child and then adopt them. It's quite rare to adopt like me, just because you want to have a child, although it is happening more and more. My agency had never had a single gay guy adopt. I've since been approved to have another child under two, but there are some difficulties. I'm finding it hard to get the authorities to believe that a single gay man is fully capable of bringing up more than one child.

Probably the weirdest thing was that once they've made the match and approved you, you start the process of getting to know the child by making a little storybook about yourself and a DVD of yourself, and the house and your car and their new toys and their room, where they might eat and so on, and they might watch that every day for a week, so they've got a bit of an idea of what to expect. Because I'm single I got a friend to help me, and I pretended that a stuffed giraffe was showing him round the house – it had to be age-appropriate and he was three. He called me Daddy from the start. Lots of tears – it was an incredibly emotional time. My best friend went through the process with me – to have someone at every stage was something I really needed – and then my sister moved over from Australia for 18 months to help. Plus the agency was very clear that I needed a strong support network.

The funniest thing is that 99% of people tell me how lucky Sebastian is, but I feel like the luckiest person in the world. People think we adopters are all doing something great, but it's the best thing I've ever done.

Guy, 31, and Richard, 32, have been together eight years and are in the process of adopting.

Richard, 32, and Guy, 31, are in the process of adopting. Photograph: Ellis Parrinder

Guy: We both always knew we wanted children. We did look into surrogacy very briefly and quickly realised that it was incredibly complicated and expensive, and also knowing that there are children out there who need homes, we didn't feel comfortable with going through all that effort.

As with any couple talking about having kids, you always think: "One day, one day", but now we're really going through the steps. It's a big jump. We bought a house and as soon as we'd fixed it up, we were like: we're ready.

I'm relatively young, so I don't really know anyone else doing this. Until we joined support groups we didn't know any gay couples who have kids, although we have a few friends who are gay couples and are thinking about the same things, or about artificial insemination or surrogacy. In our support group there are older men adopting who 15 years ago found it was impossible. But still, we definitely feel like pioneers.

Richard: There is a certain lifestyle that people associate with gay men rather than gay women. It's not something I've ever identified with. That Queer as Folk lifestyle. There are some great representations of same-sex relationships, but things are often tarnished with that brush of being wild and noncommittal and brash. So it's nice to meet men who have taken that same step of wanting to or actually having kids. It's also generational. Older couples are now out of the closet – my friends have gay neighbours who are in their 60s who have been together 25 years. Ten years ago you wouldn't have seen that – they would have kept a lower profile. But nowadays you realise it's a valid choice and, no, you don't have to go out in Old Compton Street every night.

We are very early on in the process – we have made calls and enquiries, read books and talked about it for a long time, and we just had our first informal meeting with a social worker. Last week they said they would take us on and assess us. Next it's the approval process, which involves six to nine months of meetings, reports and statements from friends, prep groups, and then you hopefully get matched with a child, then there's another panel that makes sure the match is a match. This can take a lot longer for same-sex couples because the kids' social workers can sometimes disregard you in a way they wouldn't disregard others.

However, the available kids are usually black or of dual heritage, so we as a white couple can't really help them out. Most problems have been because we are Caucasian rather than both being male. I think this, in part, is because people can no longer express any homophobia directly, as it's so against their policies now. I think a lot of the local authorities are under more pressure to recruit same-sex adopters. So it's actually a positive time to do it.

Ideally we would like two children, and that also helps in terms of age range. Babies are rare. Aged two to five is the most competitive area, and there you are competing with more conventional couples. So we are open to most ages. There is such a vast difference between the ages, and it's hard to know if you don't actually have kids. At the start of everything, there are a lot of questions about what you would like and want and will or won't accept, and I find it quite surprising, as you just don't know. You are talking about individuals. An eight-year-old needs a home as much as a four-year-old.

The children's names have been changed.

New Anti-Choice/Personhood Initative

http://coloradoindependent.com/40520/personhood-initiative-lining-up-friends-and-foes

Personhood initiative lining up friends and foes

New anti-abortion plan would freeze much genetic and fertilization research in the state

By Joseph Boven 10/27/09 10:15 AM

A version of the anti-abortion initiative soundly defeated by Colorado voters in 2008 is making its way to the 2010 ballot, this time reworked as an “egg-as-a-person” initiative.

This new version would move the legal definition of a person further back into the reproductive cycle, granting cells the full spectrum of citizen rights. Opposition groups, including Colorado genetic and fertilization researchers, say the law would have spiraling consequences, that it would put women at risk and freeze current work in medicine and reproduction.

Colorado Right to Life and Personhood USA, the groups behind proposed Initiative 25, are undeterred by the fact that Coloradans voted against the test-run amendment last year by a margin of three to one. The new amendment is even farther reaching, moving the initial marker for the beginning of life from “fertilization” to “the beginning of the biological development of a human being.”

Personhood Colorado Director and the initiative proponent Gualberto Garcia Jones told The Colorado Independent that the change was made “to be more comprehensive in our definition of a person” and was not done to make it more appealing to voters.

“It’s intended to account for human beings who may be created through asexual reproduction in laboratories and used as raw material for research, organs, or stem cells. Fertilization would not have properly applied to asexually reproduced humans, but even asexually reproduced human beings have a definite biological beginning,” Jones explained.

“Over half-a-million Coloradans voted for the personhood initiative in 2008,” Jones said in a press conference announcing the campaign. “Their votes acknowledging the God-given right to life of the pre-born revolutionizes the pro-life movement and encourage us toward victory. ”

Science stoppage

Johnathan Van Blerkom, professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, said if the personhood initiative were passed and upheld, it would have negative consequences for those not only involved in embryonic stem cell research but also for individuals looking to participate in in-vitro fertilization programs.

“To begin with [embryonic] stem cell research would stop,” Van Blerkom said. “There would be no research in genetics in the causes of the origins congenital diseases that occur in humans, how to fix them, how to protect them early.”

“You would find in this state, myself included, that embryo research would freeze. If there were criminal penalties or you were lumped together with abortionists for looking at embryos that are discarded because they are abnormal and you want to know why they are abnormal … no one is going to do it.”

Van Blerkom who works at a fertilization clinic as well, said that in-vitro fertilization would likely end in the state. He explained that the very process of fertilization can kill the embryo if more than one sperm gets into the egg. He said legal liability would loom over all procedures.

“It’s criminal liability. So would any program want to freeze an embryo in the state of Colorado? If the embryos die, as they frequently do when they are thawed, is that your responsibility? Is it an act of God? An act of science?”

Women’s rights

Monica McCafferty, media relations specialist for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, said the slightly modified language does nothing to protect the rights and safety of mothers.

“The new initiative has the same goal [as Amendment 48], to ban all abortion even in the cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the woman is in danger.”

McCafferty said that the language is vague and misleading but the ramifications are clear. “This would have huge implications.”

The legislation would end women’s right to choose in Colorado but would also hamper their ability to take many forms of birth control. McCafferty said the law would create major government intrusions into private lives.

“Coloradans have said time and again that they don’t want government or the courts in their lives when it comes making these personal private decisions.”

Jones frankly agreed. He said the goal of the amendment was to provide a child in the womb with due process and equality of justice.

“If passed, the Personhood Amendment would regain the state’s right to extend protections broader than those granted by the U.S. Constitution, and it would help transform our current decadent culture which currently values a person’s utility instead of their innate worth as a human being.”

But Jones didn’t agree that the language was vague.

“We have proposed a very simple, level-headed definition of what a person is. Namely, a person is a human being from the very beginning of his or her biological development.”

During the 2008 debate over the personhood initiative, Jessica Berg, professor of law and bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, told NPR that fertilized eggs in fertility clinics might need to be counted on the census and that pregnant women presumably could use the high-occupancy traffic lanes. There are absurdities that grow out of this kind of thinking, she said.

“If you don’t know you’re pregnant and you drink or do something dangerous — or you do something problematic very early on, and you’re in Colorado or even passing through Colorado — have you committed child abuse and endangerment?”

Power politics

Asked why voters did not support the initiative in the past Jones told The Colorado Independent that the initiative fell victim to power politics.

“We realize that there are very large political and corporate interests that will do everything in their power to twist this simple proposition into ludicrous scenarios. We’ll be more aggressive this time around in addressing those scare tactics.”

He said that with groups such as Planned Parenthood heading up a coalition of groups to oppose the initiative — last year’s coalition was called Protect Families, Protect Choices — the “pro-abortionists have almost unlimited funds.”

“You see, killing babies pays. Saving babies doesn’t.”

Jones said Planned Parenthood had taken in more than $1 billion in 2008.

RH Reality Check recently reported, however, that anti-abortion rights groups are not hurting for funds.

Wendy Norris, former editor for The Colorado Independent, wrote that personhood groups have brought in almost $58 million in donations. The American Life League, an organization where Jones recently served as legislative director, has brought in more than $35 million since 2003.

National drive

Emilie Ailts, executive director of Denver-based NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado, said that the initiatives are part of a nationwide attempt to advance personhood legislation. She said that Personhood USA initially had hoped to introduce legislation in 29 states but that Personhood USA now seems ready to mount grassroots efforts in only nine states.

Aits said that the initiative would change the Colorado Constitution in 20,000 different places.

“People can not even prognosticate how once it was fully implemented how it would affect peoples lives. It would impact so many laws.” She said it would impact not only fertilization and stem cell research but also access to many forms of birth control in the state.

NARAL, like Planned Parenthood and the Republican Majority for Choice banded together with the Colorado Bar Association and 90 other groups, many which do not normally deal with reproductive issues, to create Protect Families, Protect Choices, Aits said. Like last year, she expects the same groups to oppose the measure should it make its way onto the ballot.

“Everyone saw this as something so draconian in 2008 that it would have very negative impacts on the lives of women and their families in the state of Colorado.”

McCafferty said that while Protect Families, Protect Choices worked diligently to oppose last years personhood initiative, it was the Colorado voters who made the decision to reject the amendment.

Jones said he is confident his measure will pass.

“With so much money comes a lot of influence, earned and bought media, and friends in high places. Against this, personhood only has one thing, the truth. The amazing thing is that it is only a matter of time before we prevail.”

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

http://jezebel.com/5391981/do-men-just-suck-at-folding-laundry?skyline=true&s=x

Do Men Just Suck At Folding Laundry?

We couldn't help but wonder:

We've been talking a lot lately about the delegation of household tasks. And while the conversation is obviously rooted in history, society, a traditional gap and the burden of context, one question inevitably comes up: if women want things done right, do they have to do them themselves? As the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus puts it today, "I could delegate more to my husband, but then I'd also have to accept that pasta with store-bought pesto equals dinner. If you want someone else to step up to the plate, you have to live with what he puts on it." And she puts it even more strongly: "In fact, to some extent women are reluctant to yield dominion over the home front even as they become the majority of the paid workforce."

Of course, this doesn't really address why she's not satisfied with the same sketchy domesticity. Gail Collins touched on the same issue in her interview with Doree Shafrir yesterday when she said,

Half of the world believes it's because guys genuinely do not have as high a standard about making sure you get invited to dinner every once in awhile, or having matching socks. It's possible that guys, if they don't care, then it's very hard to impose those standards. Others argue that this is all a plot and the guys are just waiting out the women. I would go for 50-50. Clearly guys enjoy the higher standards-they just don't want to be in charge of them.

I'm not the one to ask; my boyfriend and I both come from the 'wait-as-long-as-is-humanly-possible-before-tackling-squalor' school of housekeeping, whose equality, it could be argued, is certainly a harbinger of some kind of progress - or of our generation's general lack of responsibility. Growing up, my father was indifferent - and to my mother's chagrin, would ask friends over with impunity when the house was in a state she found humiliating. Maybe that was more the core issue: she saw the state of the home as some reflection on herself; my dad did not. Of course there are Felix Ungers who are defined by house-pride and a love of domestic routine. But that's why they're a comic stock character: the trait was regarded as effete, effeminate, humorous.

Discussing the report "A Woman's Nation Changes Everything," by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress, Marcus observes,

Both sexes agree that women continue to bear a disproportionate burden in taking care of children and elderly parents, even when both partners in a relationship have jobs," John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira write in one chapter of the report. Here's the interesting subtext, though: Fifty-five percent of women strongly agreed (and 85 percent overall agreed) that "in households where both partners have jobs, women take on more responsibilities for the home and family than their male partners." Just 28 percent of men strongly agreed, and 67 percent agreed. That's a pretty big perception gap.

Marcus suggests that part of this disconnect is rooted in, not just self-congratulation for doing the minimum, but a sort of martyrdom. As she would have it, women want help, but also control. There is, she says, "something comforting in keeping a connection to mundane household tasks even when you're running a major-league research lab. Perhaps younger women don't feel this tug toward domesticity. But for women of my generation, there remains an impulse to live up to the standards of our stay-at-home mothers even as we race out the door each morning." I'd say younger women do, indeed, feel the tug of domesticity - but largely because it's a choice. Canning, knitting, home decor - these have become reflections of who we are rather than the other way around. And the quotidian rites of household maintenance, more than servitude, imply adulthood - which is a whole 'nother kettle of ambivalence.

The Nobel For Brisket Goes To . . .[Washington Post]

Earlier: Gail Collins: "The Revolution Will Be Achieved When No One Has To Do The Ironing"

An Equal Partnership? Michelle and Barack Obama's Marriage

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/magazine/01Obama-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

http://jezebel.com/5392203/nyt-magazine-how-can-a-marriage-be-equal-when-one-of-you-is-president

"Restless Vagina Syndrome"

http://jezebel.com/5391166/do-you-suffer-from-restless-vagina-syndrome

Do You Suffer From Restless Vagina Syndrome?

The brilliant headline "Restless Vagina Syndrome" had me primed to giggle at whatever Terry J. Allen wrote underneath it, but instead, I ended up fuming at Big Pharma and the patriarchy. So, you know, must be Tuesday.

In the article, Allen traces the marketing of "Female Sexual Dysfunction" (FSD) — yes, the affliction itself, since you can't start marketing a cure until enough people are convinced they have the disease — which might more accurately (if less amusingly) be described as "Listless Vagina Syndrome". "The FDA's evolving definition of FSD includes decreased desire or arousal, sexual pain and orgasm difficulties — but only if the woman feels 'personal distress' about it. So, convincing women to feel distress is a key component of the drug company strategy to market a multi-billion-dollar pill that will cure billions of women of what may not ail them."

And even though the FDA has not yet approved a treatment for Listless Vagina Syndrome, the campaign to inform women that our sex lives are inadequate — but treatable! — is already working. Doctors have written 1.4 million off-label prescriptions for Viagra and 2 million off-label prescriptions for testosterone in an effort to alleviate FSD. And they have done this despite absolutely no evidence that either one will help a flagging female libido! Not to mention, "as filmmaker Liz Canner shows in her excellent new documentary Orgasm, Inc., testosterone is usually teamed with estrogen, which increases risks for stroke, cancers and dementia." Fantastic! Not only will your non-existent illness not be cured, but you might get a whole new one!

I should pause here to point out that there are doubtless plenty of women who wish their libidos were more active, or who otherwise suffer from something that could rightly be termed "sexual dysfunction." And as someone whose life was changed very much for the better by an ADHD diagnosis, I am wary of making any "It's all a plot by Big Pharma!" arguments that erase people who have real problems supposedly invented by greedy drug manufacturers. Nevertheless, the genuine existence of a disorder doesn't mean that aggressive marketing can't lead to an epidemic of overprescription and — especially when it comes to female sexuality — self-recrimination. And it's no coincidence that "experts" in FSD often have ties to pharmaceutical giants. Increased awareness of Female Sexual Dysfunction might be helpful to some women, but it's important that we're at least equally aware of a far more widespread sickness. As Allen puts it:

The companies and clinics that narrow the range of sexual normality to porn industry standards suffer their own disease. Symptoms include: a compulsion to concoct illnesses and then develop drugs to treat them, and vice versa. Either way, the syndrome is typically accompanied by a rash of conflicts of interest.

Restless Vagina Syndrome [In These Times]

http://bitchmagazine.org/post/which-lady-gaga-will-you-be-for-halloween

Which Lady Gaga Will You Be For Halloween?

She Pop blog post by SadyDoyle, October 25, 2009 - 2:26am; tagged halloween, lady gaga, let's play dress-up.

So, Halloween is upon us once again. Or, as I like to call it, "The Night of a Thousand Gagas."

You guys! SO MANY PEOPLE are going to be Lady Gaga! You can find tips on how to be the Gaga of your choice; you can design your own Gaga; a close friend of mine is getting into the spirit by manufacturing multiple Gaga costumes for a Gaga-themed party.

The appeal of the Gaga costume is undeniable. For one thing, it is easy. It goes (a) blond wig, (b) sunglasses, (c) the most absurd thing you can think of. Do you have a leather jacket? Would you consider wearing it with a swimsuit? Lady Gaga sure would! BLAM, Halloween costume achieved. But then, there's another factor: the fact that the entire "Lady Gaga" concept is, basically, a Halloween costume already. Gaga just wears it all year round.

I have devoted many a word, in She Pop, to Gaga. But, for some reason, Halloween gets at the very center of her appeal: the fact that she's just playing dress-up, and knows it. People like to rag on her for being "pretentious" (I will admit, it was more fun to think of her as a "performance artist" before she'd called herself one approximately 1,000,000 times). But, despite her avowed self-seriousness and tendency to overblown rhetoric (her latest tour is apparently going to be "a truly artistic experience that is going to take the form of the
greatest post-apocalyptic house party that you've ever been to," which, OK, I hope there will be some catchy tunes also) the truest, purest thing about her appeal is her willingness to just treat her body and persona as a canvas, and to do the oddest things with them that she can imagine.

It's tempting to compare Gaga to Madonna (Madonna, for example, seems fond of doing it) because of their similar affinity for roleplay and self-dramatization. But Madonna's roles, although taken on for a purpose, always seemed more fundamentally serious; she played them straight. If she was Marilyn Monroe, then by God, she looked like Marilyn. If she was a vaguely mystical lady who'd found spiritual salvation through (appropriating) Indian culture and/or William Orbit, then she played the part to the hilt. If she was in blackface, then... ew, wow, wait. Madonna did BLACKFACE? RECENTLY? Yikes.

Anyway! Gaga seems different than Madonna, not only because she hasn't done any blackface that we know of, but also because, though they share a commitment to slipping in and out of different personas, hers never seem quite so crushingly serious. Even her "performance artist" schtick has a note of willful absurdity and playfulness to it. The woman is giving away a lock of her hair with special editions of her album; you can't do that with a straight face.

Women have always been roped into performing other people's fantasies. So have pop stars. What seemed liberating about Madonna, once upon a time, was how easily she slipped into and out of roles, and how she maintained her power no matter what role she found herself in. And, in that sense, she was very much of her time. She came along at a point in feminist history when the quest for purity - the call to divest yourself of all gendered roles, of anything vaguely resembling patriarchal conditioning - had not only caused some serious schisms between women committed to the movement (the radfem v. sex-positive battles being the most obvious example), but had also become exhausting to women who were less involved in feminist organizing, but had nevertheless considered themselves feminist and had seen their lives change as a result of feminist progress. People were realizing that it might not be possible to embody ultimate purity, or to entirely escape the patriarchal paradigm, no matter what attitudes they took toward bras or body hair or lipstick; furthermore, enough progress had been made that some women were genuinely able to consider the lipstick again, not just because it was expected of them (though it was and is expected, albeit to a lesser degree than it once was) but because it looked like fun. Madonna, who was able to imitate pre-feminist Marilyn whilst emanating a distinctly feminist-era defiance, was in some ways a reflection of a time when women had made enough progress to start toying around with the old fantasies in a new way.

That time is not now, however. The whole Paglia "sex is power" equation lost its luster for many feminists as soon as we saw that, though being "sexy" did in fact give you some social advantages, it never did make you quite as powerful as the men - it still made you reliant upon male approval for whatever power you had, for one, and for another the "power" you got was always subject to being undermined or stripped from you the second someone took it into his head to call you a slut. We still had the consciousness that all the many feminine roles we were asked to choose from were precisely that: roles, acting, artifice, which had no bearing on how smart or strong or capable we actually were. And we still knew that we had the option of toying around with those roles. But the belief that somehow playing the right combination of roles in the right order would save us was pretty well over.

Enter Gaga: the woman of a thousand increasingly weird faces, all of which she happily admits to creating for herself, and none of which are remotely possible to take seriously. The weirder they get - the weirder she gets - the more she seems to remind us that we are all, ultimately, self-created. And she seems to point to a new way of approaching those roles - not with Madonna's chameleon slippage from persona to persona, but by exaggerating them to the point of blatant parody. She's a breath of fresh air because we're used to pop stars who look ridiculous - or celebrities who look ridiculous, or ridiculous feminine "ideals" and roles in general - but we're not used to people who so clearly know they're being ridiculous even as they're doing it, and for whom the goal is taking the inherent absurdity of being a "sex symbol" or an "icon" or any sort of ideal to a new level of goofiness. OK, we may be trapped in this; we may never be able to fully see outside of culture; we may always be presented with a selection of extremely limited feminine roles from which to choose, Lady Gaga's persona seems to be saying. But do we really have to take them so freaking seriously? Look: I am basically wearing a gyroscope right now. I defy you to figure out this nonsense.

And, for this precise reason, I am entirely in favor of the Lady Gaga Halloween costume epidemic. "Lady Gaga" just means dress-up; it's a persona that consistently points to its own fakeness. Underneath it, she could be anybody. And I'd even say - at the risk of Taking It Too Seriously, which I am known to do - it's a statement on the silliness and limitations of the roles we all take on every day. So, given that Lady Gaga could be anyone, is it any wonder that so many people are - for a night, at least - going to be her?

Fun Menstrual Flow-Chart

http://jezebel.com/5388607/menstrual-flow+chart-coolest-thing-weve-seen-all-week

What could be funnier than me having a sudden nosebleed during a class discussion of menstruation? How about this? Happy weekend! jm

Menstrual Flow-Chart: Coolest Thing We've Seen All Week

Since we're currently working on the hypothesis that we are cycle-syncing over the Internet, illustrator I Heart Guts' menstrual flow-chart is both handy and topical. Legends like "Day 13: HORMONE PARTY!" and "LUTEAL LUNACY!" make bleeding seem...fun.

I Heart Guts explains herself thusly:

The guts grew from a single drawing of a broken heart, after a string of bad hookups, dead-end relationships and lame-o boyfriends. At the time, I was also doing a lot of drinking, so a sad liver and bummed-out lung followed.

Sounds like our kind of lady. I'm raising my it's-after-noon cup o' Blog Juice to you, whoever you are!

Meanwhile, I think I have an EGG PREPARING TO ESCAPE, so, let me get right on that.

I Heart Guts [Official Site]

Via: The Good Ol' Menstrual Cycle [Street Anatomy]

"The Boy Crisis in Education"

http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2005/12/09/the-boy-crisis-in-education/

For discussion in relation to previous posting.

More Women Than Men in Universities

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/technology/More%20woman%20than%20making%20grade/2123763/story.html

More woman than men making the grade

Universities ponder growing gender gap in Alberta and across the country

By Keith Gerein, Edmonton JournalOctober 20, 2009 10:02 AMComments (2)

• Story
• Photos ( 1 )

Female students comprise more than half of Lindsay Jantzie's medical class at the University of Alberta.

Photograph by: Ed Kaiser, edmontonjournal.com

EDMONTON - Three decades ago, when Lindsay Jantzie’s mother was in medical school, there were just a dozen women in her class of 100.

Even after graduating and establishing herself as a family physician, the female doctor sometimes had trouble gaining respect from male counterparts. At one point, a colleague suggested she should wear glasses to make herself look smarter.

Today, with Jantzie now in medical school, the gender jibes are pointed in an entirely different direction. That’s because her class at the University of Alberta is more than half female.

“There might be an occasional joke like, ‘Boys watch out because the girls are taking over,’ ” says Lindsay, a third-year student hoping to do family medicine like her mom.

“There is definitely nothing holding women back anymore. They have gotten the message they can do anything they want.”

Jantzie’s comment may be something of an understatement.

Historically a minority in the halls of higher learning, female students have not only climbed to equal status, but have now made men the under-represented gender in universities across Canada — a trend that raises some interesting questions about the future of academia.

While some observers suggest the shift is no big deal, others say they are worried about what U of A president Indira Samarasekera calls a “demographic bomb” working its way through the system. The problem is no one seems entirely sure what to do about it.

“The presidents of the major universities are very concerned we are not attracting young men in the numbers we should,” Samarasekera says.

“I got asked recently about special programs to get more women CEOs, and my response was let’s not worry about that because that will come in due course. The bigger worry is that we’ll wake up in 20 years and we will not have the benefit of enough male talent at the heads of companies and elsewhere.”

Usher of the Educational Policy Institute.

Figures from Statistics Canada show females now comprise about 58 per cent of the student body at Canadian universities. The split is about the same in Alberta, where the numbers have held fairly steady for close to 10 years.

The change has not been uniform, however. Efforts continue to get more gender balance into fields like engineering, architecture and computer science, which remain firmly male dominated.

Yet in many other high-prestige programs such as medicine, law and general sciences, male students now frequently occupy less than half the seats. Even smaller percentages go into nursing, education and the social sciences.

“It’s not that there are fewer men going to university,” Usher says. “It’s that mostly all the growth is from females.”

Just how that happened is a question of some debate. While some argue it’s a matter of men simply choosing different career paths, others wonder if there are factors at play making it harder for males to succeed academically.

Explanations have tended to favour the choice argument in Alberta, where it’s believed the trend has been exacerbated by a job market that has lured young men to the oilfield instead of the lecture hall.

“People go where the greatest incentives are,” Usher says. “The argument often made is that the gap in pay between women with a degree and women without a degree is bigger than for men. Therefore, a degree is worth more to women.”

Young men, in general, may be more focused on career prospects than finding something they love to do, adds University of Calgary provost Alan Harrison. Others wonder if males are more adverse to taking on student debt.

“Their way of looking at things is sometimes, ‘If I do political science, what kind of job can I get?’ ” Harrison says. “Female students don’t tend to ask that question quite as much.”

Now that the Alberta economy has weakened, administrators say they are watching to see if young men who skipped post-secondary studies decide to come back to class. Although too early to draw conclusions, preliminary reports indicate some are.

Besides economic incentives, some administrators think there could be more complicated factors discouraging men from academia. One theory notes young men tend to mature more slowly than women, which could mean they are less interested and less prepared for university by the time Grade 12 ends. It could also be they are not getting enough career mentoring as teenagers.

“I am concerned about those young men who just seem to drift,” Grant MacEwan University president Paul Byrne says. “We’re seeing a general trend now where the males who are coming to us are struggling a bit more, and it’s the women who are generally the ones pushing and chasing grades and so on.”

Samarasekera says educational leaders may also need to look at how high schools are structured, because there could be aspects of the system enabling more young women to succeed than young men. Her assertion is backed up by a recent research paper on Canadian youth that indicates male students are something of a “disadvantaged” group. The study suggests some boys are barred from campuses because their marks are insufficient to get in — and even hard work won’t put them on par with their female counterparts.

“Whatever is going on in the high school system rewards girls more than boys,” says Torben Drewes, an economist who led the study.

Officials at Edmonton Public Schools, however, say they see no evidence that one gender is greatly outperforming the other. Nor do they believe girls and boys are treated differently.

But beyond questions of how and why, others are trying to figure out what it all means to have female-friendly universities. So far, there’s little more than speculation.

At medical school, Jantzie says there has been increasing interest from students on not just learning medicine, but also on how to manage a medical career.

“We’ve done talks about taking maternity leave during residency,” she says. “There’s instruction on eating well and surviving the grind. How a physician’s family can be affected by the job. Those lifestyle aspects are reflected more in the teaching.”

While Jantzie believes such curriculum additions may be due to the number of women in the program, classmate Jon Loree isn’t so sure. He says he appreciates learning about work-family balance as much as his female classmates.

“I don’t know how much the (changes) have to do with women. I think it’s more just what students of my generation want today — men and women both,” Loree says.

Looking ahead, there are also questions about how more female graduates might impact various professions. The Alberta government, for example, is currently struggling with a demographic reality that may require a new “rhythm” to health delivery, says U of A provost Carl Amrhein.

“Female doctors want to be mothers and don’t want to work 18 hours, seven days a week the way men historically did, constantly on call.”

Some studies indicate female doctors also tend to treat patients differently. They may, for example, try to spend more time on each case and collaborate with other physicians to treat the patient’s “peripheral” issues, including problems with their family and lifestyle.

But again, there is no way to tell if such differences will persist. The generation of young male doctors now coming into the system is more sensitive to work-family issues and may take the same approach to care as women, says Verna Yiu, an administrator with the U of A’s faculty of medicine and dentistry.

Such qualities could potentially spread into other fields where women have gained on men. Is it possible society could soon produce more compassionate CEOs and lawyers?

While interesting to ponder such potential effects of the demographic shift, some argue there is little reason to care.

“Honestly, I think it’s an overblown issue,” Usher says. “Men have been occupying the senior management positions in the public service, but did that make a difference to society? If you don’t think it did, why would you think women taking over those positions — and they will — will make a difference?”

Penni Stewart, president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, notes that although women now have the edge at the undergraduate level, they are still behind men in many graduate programs, including PhD programs. There are also considerably fewer female professors. Until those numbers change, it’s hard to see any major impacts in store for society, she suggests.

Others, like Samarasekera, remain concerned.

After all, if it was considered a problem when men outnumbered women, shouldn’t it still be a problem in the reverse situation?

Left unchallenged, the shift will eventually lead to a loss of gender diversity in high-profile positions, including CEOs, political leaders, non-profit bosses, administrators and judges — all of whom have profound influence on the world, she says.

The next step, she says, is figuring out what to do about it. To date, answers have been hard to come by.

One idea is that men need more mentoring programs, both at high school and at university. Just as there are programs encouraging women to go into science and engineering, perhaps there should be similar initiatives pushing males into nursing and sociology. Increasing scholarships in those areas may help, or universities could consider new types of curriculum. Perhaps “men’s studies” courses could be offered to match women’s studies?

Samarasekera says the U of A has no plans for a major “recruit men” campaign, but might consider enhanced support services to ensure men properly make the transition from high school.

Universities may also need to make greater efforts to convince young men on the financial benefits of a degree — an argument that may be easier to sell now that the oilfield economy has slowed.

Regardless of what approach is taken, Samarasekera says she can use her position as a university president, a woman and a visible minority to be a leader on the issue.

“I’m going to be an advocate for young white men, because I can be. No one is going to question me when I say we have a problem.”

kgerein@thejournal.canwest.com

© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal

Rihanna's New Album and Narratives of Domestic Abuse in Popular Culture

http://bitchmagazine.org/post/do-we-need-an-angrier-rihanna

Do We Need An "Angrier" Rihanna?

She Pop blog post by SadyDoyle, October 17, 2009 - 1:40am; tagged anger, celebrity trauma, domestic abuse, post-traumatic stress, rihanna.

Rihanna's new album is coming out soon. And with the new album - about which we know pretty much nothing, aside from a few vague quotes - comes the speculation about whether she'll address The Incident - her public assault by, and break-up with, Chris Brown. Specifically: is she going to be angry?

An article at CNN.com (via ONTD) says: maybe! Ne-Yo, who worked with her on the album, has said that we can "expect an edgier, almost angrier Rihanna on this one." And it is, as CNN reminds us, The First Album Since The Incident. But Tracey Johnson, of NeonLimelight.com, says "[Some fans] feel like it would be good for her to represent abused women in some sort of way and say something, but in my perspective, she doesn't owe us anything."

I don't know much about her website, but I'm with Tracey on this one. She doesn't owe us much. Particularly not one specific emotion. After what she's survived, asking her to present us with one simple "appropriate" or fan-requested emotion is just unfair.

So... angrier than this, then?

I have no problem with "angry," as a musical direction. I also think that, if anyone has the right to be angry in public, it is probably Rihanna. I furthermore think that it makes total sense - and is entirely predictable - that a pop star who was involved in a fairly enormous, public incident between albums would refer to that incident in her first album after the fact. But the fact that we are all sort of leaning in to see how she is going to express that anger, or if she is going to express that anger, or what it means if she does or does not express that anger, speaks to a larger cultural anxiety and need: the need to create a narrative around domestic violence and trauma.

Crimes like domestic abuse, which require that a loving relationship must exist between attacker and victim before the attack takes place, tear a big hole in our understanding of loving relationships, which are supposed to be safe places. Rape, and especially acquaintance or marital rape, are disturbing in the same ways: sex, an intimate, pleasurable act - heck, a loving act, for many people, or at the very least a friendly one - is transformed into a weapon, and all of a sudden the things we think we know about sex don't seem true any more. Most women who are raped know their attackers, but our understanding of "rape" usually centers on the idea of being attacked by a stranger, perhaps in part because it's hard to comprehend how a person could be capable of doing this to someone they knew and loved, or at least liked.

Speaking for myself, a lot of my own feminist work and reading and theorizing has been based on the simple need to know how or why these crimes happen. I learned, when I was around sixteen, that more than one of my female relatives had been abused by male partners, and suddenly the world looked different, as did most of my memories of family gatherings and interactions. Was that why I never wanted to be alone with that guy, even if I didn't know it at the time? Was that why she looked so upset that day? You know the drill, if it's happened to you. I needed not only to figure out what these crimes meant, but how they could exist in the world I thought I knew. It was one thing to consider them happening in rare cases, to strangers; it was another to realize that they'd been a part of my own family history without my knowing it.

We develop theories and narratives of abuse, identify the signs of abusers and the effects of abuse on its victims, not only because understanding these things is clinically useful or useful to our activism, but because understanding them helps us to place them in context, and create a mental image of the world in which these things can exist. Nothing is as scary once you have an explanation for it, because if you can explain why it happens you can also formulate theories about how to make it happen less often, and how to heal the damage caused when it does happen. And it's definitely true that there are observable patterns, both in terms of abusive dynamics and in terms of how abuse survivors react - I mean, "post-traumatic stress disorder" wouldn't be a diagnosable illness if it didn't affect a lot of different people for the same or similar reasons, after all.

But what I want to talk about here, that is perhaps harder to understand than any of the above, is that reactions to abuse can differ from person to person. And putting pressure on people to behave as we think abuse survivors should, or as we think abuse survivors usually behave, can legitimately hurt them. The narrative of abuse, even when imposed by well-meaning people - you should be angry, you should be devastated, you should never want to see him again, you should never feel at all conflicted about what happened - sometimes just doesn't line up with the experiences of people who have been abused. Sometimes they feel immediately, overtly devastated; sometimes they don't. Sometimes they're angry; sometimes they're not. The human mind works in odd ways. I can't speak for your human mind, but I can say that I am more likely to respond with immediate, strong emotion to lesser problems than to major ones. Some people simply go numb when they can't immedateiy comprehend or cope with a situation. And, although it's important to send the message that one should end an abusive relationship quickly and definitively, when at all possible, for safety's sake, and that abuse is always only the abuser's fault, there is the fact that ending an abusive relationship means ending a relationship, and often entails the same conflicted feelings that any other break-up does. If anything, those feelings (of regret, of needing the person you lost to come back, of blaming yourself for the end of the relationship) are apt to be more extreme and less reasonable in the case of abuse than otherwise, simply because abusers so often work to warp or destroy the abused person's understanding of what they deserve and what they should take the blame for. Our understanding of how abuse can affect people is intended to help those of us who have been abused - to help them map their own reactions, to help them to come to grips with the long-term effects that abuse may have on their lives, and to give them a sense of the situation that may not be immediately clear from where they're standing. But when those reactions become prescriptive, rather than descriptive, we run into trouble.

Consider: there are some survivors of abuse and sexual assault who take a long time to even recognize that what happened to them was abusive, or to give it the name of abuse or sexual assault or rape, who struggle with even incorporating the term "abuse" into their vocabulary, simply because they don't think their experiences fit the narrative. Not only do the experiences they've had not fit what they've seen in the movies or read about in books, but their reactions somehow don't fit that pattern either. Some even use their lack of "appropriate" response to excuse what happened to them. I didn't crumble; I wasn't angry at him; I didn't hate him - that means it wasn't that bad, right?

Well, no. Abuse is bad. But our reactions to it don't always fit some pre-determined pattern, and that does not affect the fact that choosing to abuse someone is always a bad thing.

I'm not sure what the public interest in Rihanna's potentially "angrier" musical direction means. On the one hand, she's a celebrity, and celebrity has, for whatever reason, become its own product; they don't just sell us movies or music any more, they sell us stories about who they are. And the desire for a public, musical reaction springs just as much from the desire for more story as it does from the fact that people have weird reactions to abuse. But most of the sources quoted in the article acknowledge that Rihanna doesn't owe them anything, in terms of personal disclosure - that's never really been her thing, it would seem - and I tend to agree. Whatever her feelings are, they're bound to be complicated. Maybe too complicated to hash out in a song.

Women's (Un)Happiness & Feminism

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ehrenreich14-2009oct14,0,7471297.story

Are women unhappier? Don't make me laugh

A study says women have become steadily more miserable since 1972, causing some to point a finger at feminism. But the research doesn't pass the giggle test.

By Barbara Ehrenreich

October 14, 2009

Feminism made women miserable.

This, anyway, seems to be the most popular take-away from "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers that purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Ariana Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant "I told you so!"

On Slate's Double X website, a columnist concluded from the study that "the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave us a steady stream of women's complaints disguised as manifestos ... and a brand of female sexual power so promiscuous that it celebrates everything from prostitution to nipple piercing as a feminist act -- in other words, whine, womyn, and thongs." Or as Phyllis Schlafly put it: "The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy. ... Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness."

But it's a little too soon to blame Gloria Steinem for our dependence on antidepressants. Three things need to be pointed out about the Stevenson and Wolfers study: (1) that there are some issues with happiness studies in general; (2) that there are some reasons to doubt this study in particular; and (3) that even if you take this study at face value, it has nothing at all to say about the impact of feminism on anyone's mood.

For starters, happiness is a slippery thing to measure or define. Philosophers have debated what it is for centuries, and even if we were to define it simply as a greater frequency of positive feelings than negative ones, when we ask people if they are happy, we are asking them to arrive at some sort of average over many moods and moments. Maybe I was upset earlier in the day after I opened the bills, but then was cheered up by a call from a friend -- so what am I really?

In one well-known psychological experiment, subjects were asked to answer a questionnaire on life satisfaction, but only after they had performed the apparently irrelevant task of photocopying a sheet of paper for the experimenter. For a randomly chosen half of the subjects, a dime had been left for them to find on the copy machine. As two economists summarize the results: "Reported satisfaction with life was raised substantially by the discovery of the coin on the copy machine -- clearly not an income effect."

As for the particular happiness study under discussion, the red flags start popping up as soon as you look at the data. Not to be anti-intellectual about it, but the raw data on how men and women respond to the survey reveal no discernible trend to the naked eye. Only by performing an occult statistical manipulation called "ordered probit estimates" do the authors manage to tease out any trend at all, and it is a tiny one: "Women were one percentage point less likely than men to say they were not too happy at the beginning of the sample [1972]; by 2006, women were one percentage more likely to report being in this category." Differences of that magnitude would be stunning if you were measuring, for example, the speed of light under different physical circumstances, but when the subject is as elusive as happiness -- well, we are not talking about paradigm-shifting results.

Furthermore, the idea that women have been sliding toward despair is contradicted by the one objective measure of unhappiness the authors offer: suicide rates. Happiness is, of course, a subjective state, but suicide is a cold, hard fact, and the suicide rate has been the gold standard of misery since sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote the book on it in 1897. As Stevenson and Wolfers report -- somewhat sheepishly, we must imagine -- "contrary to the subjective well-being trends we document, female suicide rates have been falling, even as male suicide rates have remained roughly constant through most of our sample [1972-2006]." Women may get the blues; men are more likely to get a bullet through the temple.

Another distracting little data point that no one, including the authors, seems to have much to say about is that while "women" have been getting marginally sadder, black women have been getting happier and happier. To quote the authors: "... happiness has trended quite strongly upward for both female and male African Americans. ... Indeed, the point estimates suggest that well-being may have risen more strongly for black women than for black men." The study should more accurately be titled "The Paradox of Declining White Female Happiness," only that might have suggested the problem could be cured with melanin and Restylane.

But let's assume the study is sound and that (white) women have become less happy relative to men since 1972. Does that mean that feminism ruined their lives?

Not according to Stevenson and Wolfers, who find that "the relative decline in women's well-being ... holds for both working and stay-at-home mothers, for those married and divorced, for the old and the young, and across the education distribution." It also holds for both mothers and the childless. If feminism were the problem, you might expect divorced women to be less happy than married ones and em- ployed women to be less happy than stay-at-homes.

And if the women's movement was such a big downer, you'd expect the saddest women to be those who had some direct exposure to the noxious effects of second-wave feminism. As the authors report, however, "there is no evidence that women who experienced the protests and enthusiasm in the 1970s have seen their happiness gap widen by more than for those women who were just being born during that period."

What this study shows, if anything, is that neither marriage nor children make women happy. (The results are not in yet on nipple piercing.) Nor, for that matter, does there seem to be any problem with "too many choices," "work-life balance" or the "second shift." If you believe Stevenson and Wolfers, women's happiness is supremely indifferent to the actual conditions of their lives, including poverty and racial discrimination. Whatever "happiness" is ...

So why all the sudden fuss about the Stevenson and Wolfers study, which first leaked out two years ago anyway? Mostly because it's become a launching pad for a new book by the prolific management consultant Marcus Buckingham, best known for "First, Break All the Rules" and "Now, Find your Strengths." His new book, "Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently," is a cookie-cutter classic of the positive-thinking self-help genre: First, the heart-wrenching quotes from unhappy women identified only by their e-mail names (Countess1, Luveyduvy, etc.), then the stories of "successful" women, followed by the obligatory self-administered test to discover "the role you were bound to play" (Creator, Caretaker, Influencer, etc.), all bookended with an ad for the many related products you can buy, including a "video introduction" from Buckingham, a "participant's guide" containing "exercises" to get you to happiness, and a handsome set of "Eight Strong Life Plans" to pick from. The Huffington Post has given Buckingham a column in which to continue his marketing campaign.

It's an old story: If you want to sell something, first find the terrible affliction that it cures. In the 1980s, as silicone implants were taking off, doctors discovered "micromastia" -- the "disease" of small-breastedness. More recently, as Big Pharma searches furiously for a female Viagra, an amazingly high 43% of women have been found to suffer from "female sexual dysfunction," or FSD. Now it's unhappiness, and the range of potential "cures" is dazzling: Seagram's, Godiva and Harlequin take note.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of "Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America." A version of this article also appears at tomdispatch.com.

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times