Weblog Entry - 07/12/2005: "Two posts in one! The Plame game, and: More on reproductive choice"

07/12/2005 Entry: Two posts in one! The Plame game, and: More on reproductive choice

Should I keep doing these what-I'm-reading roll-up posts, or should I start posting one entry per link? (since I've turned comments off for now, y'all will have to email sev@byz.org if you want to actually weigh in on this question.) The problem with going one-post-per-link is that I'm really not going to have time to go into the kind of detail that I'm putting into this post:

Shakespeare's Sister posted a link to a Washington Post article by Dan Froomkin on the "who outed Valerie Plame" game. If you haven't been following the recent revelations in the hunt for who leaked the identity of Valerie Plame, a covert CIA operative, to the press, then Froomkin's article is the place to go to get caught up.

It's become pretty clear that at the very least, Rove identified Plame to journalists. Calling her the wife of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV does in fact unambiguously identify her, seeing how as in this country, people can legally have a maximum of one spouse. All the speculation about whether he used her name or not is kind of silly. It's disingenuous to suggest that giving someone enough information to uniquely identify a person isn't "leaking" just the same way that giving someone the person's actual full name would be.

How often do men get referred to as so-and-so's-husband? Maybe Rove doesn't understand how a reference like that could in fact be construed as identifying information. He *might* be that dumb. And, as a privileged white male, perhaps he's just too sheltered to understand. How many of you know what Rove's wife's name is? I mean, we know that Clinton's wife is named Hilary, the shrub's wife is named Laura. It was trivial for me to discover that US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's wife's name is Rebecca Turner Gonzales, though I can't say I ever hear her referred to except to point out that that's the name of Gonzales's wife. But at least her name is included -- they don't just call her "Mrs. Gonzalez." Rove's wife's name is "Darby" and not just "Mrs. Rove," something that would surprise me if my only source of information was mainstream news. Somehow, they mostly just call her "Mrs. Rove."

How we refer to women isn't a straightforward problem. Even when we're talking about women's accomplishments, we often find that women are referred to using their first names, or using their relationships to men (wife of, daughter of, mother of) instead of using their full name. Stripping women of their names is a linguistic power game in which women's status is reduced and mens' dominance is reinforced.

Get a grip, Rove. As much as you and the rest of the patriarchy would like to reduce women to mere appendages of men, we do in fact have our own names, our own careers, our own ambitions, our own lives.

So, now: the white house promised to fire anybody involved in leaking the identity of an undercover CIA agent. And the man hasn't even had his security clearance suspended -- a common practice when there's an investigation going on. Helloooooo? How's about a sign, any sign at all, that the white house gives a sodding screw about living up to the promises made to this country? Y'know, the parts of this country that *aren't* Halliburton stockholders?

And, as for the rest of the what-I'm-reading list:

When I talk about reproductive choice, I'm talking about giving men and women the same set of choices about kids. It's still assumed that women take care of kids, even when women have careers of our own. People still ask women if they "work outside the home" -- do people ask men that? According to Google, there are fourteen times as many references to "working mothers" as there are to "working fathers" on the web. Mothers with careers are still, on some level, an oddity to be discussed, a problem to be addressed. Fathers with careers are considered perfectly ordinary.

In this context, when the university of Memphis adopts a policy which prohibits employees and students from bringing their children on-campus, but still doesn't offer childcare to faculty, they're making it ever-harder to integrate family and career. True reproductive choice requires child-friendly workplaces; creating barriers between having children and having careers reduces the available choice for women much more drastically than it does for men.

If the University of Memphis is concerned about unsupervised children, then make policies about unsupervised children. Don't penalize the professors and students whose children sit quietly at a desk and draw while their parent teaches or learns. I mean, really. What better way to instill a love of learning in a child than to make their parents' university someplace they can go watch people learn? Sheesh.

Another tip of the hat to Shakespeare's Sister, who reminds us not to forget about The Downing Street Memo:

"it’s important to see them all as part and parcel of one larger issue. Practically and factually, that issue is information manipulation and message control, and allowing ideologically-driven and –designed propaganda to trump fact-based intelligence."

Majikthise cuts right to the heart of the nice guys problem:

"With certain notable exceptions, nice guys don't feel compelled to tell you how nice they are."

Go read the whole thing. The comments, too; some of them are insightful. Particularly this one by Jeff.

The men in my life are "nice." Which is at least partially orthogonal to their presence in my life. There's a whole host of misbehaviors I just won't accept in my life -- in lovers or in friends. But the absence of those misbehaviors does not entitle any one to my affection.

Bush v. Choice points us to Voices of Choice, a multimedia project in which physicians describe life before Roe v. Wade. What's at stake in the battle for Supreme Court nominations? Go find out.

In related news, availability of over-the-counter emergency contraception has not increased its use in the UK. So if the DoJ would just remove its head from its butt we can start seeing things like eighty-eight percent fewer pregnancies from rape.

Happy birthday, Comfort Music. I like the redesign.

Eric's Advice For First-Time Technical Presenters. Applies to at least some of the nontechnical presentations I've made, too.

On the "evidence that we've still got a ways to go" front: The Columbia Journal Review reports that bylines in the nation’s top intellectual and political magazines are heavily male. The playing field is still not level, dammit, and it does everyone a disservice to try to act as if it was. It's not enough to maintain the status quo.

Posted by sev @ 11:14 AM PST |

insert witty comment here