debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

6.8.05

Policy Proxies

One of my pet peeves is policy measures that use one variable as a crude proxy for another. The classic examples are in the realm of gender. For example, some people argue that women should be excluded from the military, or at least from certain positions in it, because they are on average weaker than men. But if strength is what we're interested in, we should test it directly, so that we can hire those few unusually strong women and don't have to hire weak men to make up the difference. Similarly, if the purpose of marriage is to support child-rearing, then using the sexuality of the couple as a proxy measure misses out on infertile or childfree opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples raising children. Likewise, if your concern is really for child molestation, you should be charging people for child molestation, not using the broad brush of a ban on polygamy. And any boy who seeks out a male mentor because he needs someone who understands his natural aggression is going to be disappointed if he asks for advice from a mild-mannered guy like myself.

I bring this up now because I ran across two examples of the crude proxy phenomenon in quite different contexts this morning. The first is in Hugo Schwyzer's post about the fat acceptance movement. The standard retort to those who point out the unacceptability of size discrimination is that fatness is, if not intrinsically unhealthy, at least associated with unhealthy conditions. Thus, say the critics, fat acceptance entails acceptance of poor health. But as fat activists (including, ultimately, Schwyzer) argue, there's no need to use weight as a crude proxy for health. We can encourage people to ride their bikes and eat their spinach based on their actual exercise and eating habits, thus avoiding criticism of healthy fat people or ignoring unhealthy skinny people.

The second came in the comments to a Matt Yglesias post pointing out the injustice of Washington DC (as well as other US territories) not having any votes in Congress. In comments, Brett Bellmore argues that depriving DC of representation is necessary to keep DC's residents of having the double power of both working for the federal government and getting a vote in it. As I point out in reply, however, even if you accept (which I don't) the premise that federal employees shouldn't get a vote, depriving DC of representation is a relatively ham-handed way to accomplish that. On the one hand, many federal employees live across the border in Virginia and Maryland, where they do get votes. On the other hand, there are lots of DC residents who are not part of the federal bureaucracy -- college students, journalists, think-tankers, mechanics, grocery store clerks, homeless people, etc. If you're worried about federal employees voting, the way to do it is to make a federal paycheck contingent upon forfeiture of suffrage, much like Post Office employees have to give up their right to run for office.

Stentor Danielson, 11:19, ,

4.8.05

The Strange World Of Iron John

I've started reading one of Hugo Schwyzer's favorite books, Iron John. My reaction to the first hundred or so pages is: this is frankly bizarre. Robert Bly lives in some strange parallel universe.

Our disagreement starts off at the level of methodology -- Bly is a poet, whereas I'm a social scientist. He draws his conclusions by weaving together mythology, taking themes from old fairy tales as important symbolic statements of the human condition, and connecting them to contemporary manhood through evocative tales from individuals he's met as well as actual poems (including his own). I was frustrated by his insistence on speaking in suggestive metaphor rather than operationalizable terms. And I wondered how much his perspective was skewed by interacting mostly with men who came to his workshops -- what we in the business like to call a "biased sample."

Bly's starting point is that men today lack good models for how to express their masculinity -- true, byt that's as far as our agreement goes. He says most are "soft" New Agey weiner men, while others may fall into destructive forms of masculinity like machismo or the detatched "1950s man." Bly longs for the days when men were closely involved in the upbringing of their sons, and elaborate initiation rituals drew boys into the special realm of men. There is a distinct Freudian theme, as boys are said to require a sharp break away from their mother-dominated feminine childhood world, but mothers are greedy for their sons' affections and want to instill in them the feminine worldview (which includes a negative assessment of the father). On the other hand, in the world where I live, the main problem on the gender front is the persistence of these dominating, macho forms of masculinity. Even those who are surficially weiner men often conceal an undercurrent of dominating entitlement.

The culprit here, in Bly's view, is not feminism precisely, but rather the lack of a corresponding men's movement to balance feminism and keep it on the female side of things. For all his idealization of traditional myth and ritual, Bly insists that past models of masculinity -- notably the "1950s man" -- were often damaging. We might render his historical outlook in Cultural Theory terms something like this. In the past, men adopted a Hierarchist role, using their power to dominate women, who wound up as Fatalists. With the advent of feminism, women revolted against this high-grid society and found their natural place as Egalitarians. They also swept men into the Egalitarian camp. The sensitive, consensus-oriented guys created by the triumph of feminism are a woman's dream boyfriend. But there's a deep lack at the center of their souls, because men are really cut out to be assertive and courageous Individualists.

Bly complicates this picture, and ultimately leads himself into some seeming contradictions, in his attempt to make it compatible with feminism. He continues to insist that men and women are fundamentally different, and that a man can only truly learn how to live from another man (where this leaves intersex and transgender people is unclear). And he points to a nebulously defined quality of assertiveness as the key element lacking from the lives of men raised by women. Yet he then turns around and claims that women, too, can and should be assertive (and all the other positive qualities that go with it). Indeed, he praises feminism for helping women to get in touch with their masculine side. So Bly leaves us with the structure of irreconcilable gender differences that can only be understood by people of one's own gender, but he is unwilling to provide much content for the difference by specifying what qualities it is that are uniquely masculine.

Since Bly is so fond of personal testimonies, I'll end with one of my own. Surficially, I should be a prime example of his gentle, consensus-minded, New Agey weiner man. I'll even admit to having some use for increased assertiveness -- though I read it as a case of inborn shyness, not existential angst about my unfulfilled manhood, and is certainly not related to some Oedipal conflict with my father. As it happens, I have become somewhat more assertive in the past year. The change was not, however, achieved through the acceptance and mentoring of older men. Rather, it was a woman -- my current girlfriend -- who catalyzed my increased assertiveness.

Stentor Danielson, 21:55, ,

31.7.05

Kiosk Update

This John Quiggin post is hardly the worst example of the genre, but it does remind me of something that annoys me. So I have updated the Kiosk to reflect the fact that I'm tired of people complaining about how they don't like the word "blog."

Stentor Danielson, 09:06, ,