Month: April 2003

Wendy McElroy on the War’s Effects on Feminism

Wendy McElroy wrote an essay back in March on the likely effects that the war on Iraq would have on feminism in the United States. McElroy argues that the war will have the same impact on feminism as the Civil War (which led to feminism’s narrow focus on the right to vote) and the Vietnam War (which transformed feminism into a largely Left wing enterprise).

McElroy argues that as predominantly Muslim countries liberalize, the conflict between the emerging Islamic feminism — which situates a call for equality within the confines of Muslim beliefs — will come into conflict with Western feminism — which, if not atheistic, is extremely hostile to religion — and lead to a transformation of feminism.

McElroy writes,

Most Islamic feminists base their demand for equality upon the teachings of Islam. They do not separate themselves or their identity as women from the larger context of religion. To them, the current inequality results from a misinterpretation of the Koran.

By contrast, Western feminists reject a religious basis for equality and argue from an entirely secular perspective. Indeed, they are hostile to religion, and especially to Christianity, which is viewed as an institution that oppresses women.

McElroy argues that Western feminists will end up simply ignoring and/or mischaracterizing Islamic feminists.

But then what happens to Western feminism? The September 11 terrorists attacks were the beginning of the end of Left wing feminism. The wide gulf between the small number of women who are involved in the feminist movement and women as a group in the United States has never been more obvious in last 18 months.

On the domestic side we’ve seen national feminist figures engage in handwringing and protests over two successive wars that enjoyed overwhelming support from women. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have done more to help women in those countries than all of the protests by feminists. In fact, the toppling of the Taliban regime seemed to both outrage and embarrass feminists. After all, it’s hard to portray the United States as being on the verge of A Handmaid’s Tail-like future when a Republican president is on national TV denouncing and then removing a regime that was absolutely hideous toward women.

Source:

Iraq war may kill feminism as we know it. Wendy McElroy, FoxNews.Com, March 18, 2003.

Sheila Gibbons on Sexist Language

Sheila Gibbons wrote a piece of commentary for Women’s E-News about that pressing problem facing women — the rise of sexist language in the media.

Gibbons writes that,

Despite years of effort by women’s groups, linguists and educators to encourage speakers of English to adopt words that are gender-neutral, they note, and I note, a lapse into lazy terminology that excludes women. This slippage is occurring even at major newspapers where their executives should know better.

What sorts of things does Gibbons think go beyond the pale? Here are several quotes from news reports that upset Gibbons,

“For seasoned newsmen, trained to see through political spin, the spectacle is cringe-making.”

Personally, “cringe-making” is a far bigger offense than “newsmen” in that sentence.

“There’s nothing to connect to the reader or enable him to feel a real part of a public debate.”

“. . . most scientists and philosophers were still trying to draw distinctions between man and beast . . .”

“. . . a number of other scientists have been working to erase the man-animal distinction . . .”

“Journalists losing touch with the man on the street.”

Gibbons is also unhappy that post-9/11, the words “lawman” and “fireman saw a resurgence as well as the fact that even 30 years after attention was first brought to sexist language, people still talk about “manning battle stations” or talk about the achievements of “mankind.”

She does come up with a few examples that, on their face, are exclusionary (though she doesn’t provide enough context to be certain). She describes, for example, a news report of an accident in which a man and a woman were injured where the man is named early in the story and the woman is simply referred to as his wife for several paragraphs before his name is given. But, for the most part, Gibbons comes across as the sort of person who reads the newspaper looking for even the most trivial of apparent gender bias. Really, do we need to force journalists to start talking about the difference between “persons and beasts”? Yuck.

For someone so concerned about exclusion and accuracy, it is interesting that Gibbons herself throws around a term without offering any evidence. According to Gibbons,

Some of these usages stem from habit — others are stubbornly adhered to by those who scorn repairs in the fundamental biases of English, believing it’s a silly exercise proposed by “feminazis.”

Despite the voluminous quotes she offers as evidence of sexist language, Gibbons doesn’t even bother to offer a single quote where a journalist, editor or anyone else in the media asserts that efforts to curtail sexist language is the work of “feminazis.” I assume she does so because no serious person has made that claim, but it is useful to throw out there to smear anyone who might disagree with her views on language as an extremist.

Apparently sexist language is out, but rhetorical chicanery is definitely in.

Source:

Mankind, other lazy terms, return to news pages. Sheila Gibbons, Womens E-News, March 11, 2003.

Requiring Men to Wear Ties Is Sex Discrimination?

The Daily Telegraph reported in March that a 32-year-old civil servant had won his sexual discrimination complaint against his employer after a new dress code required men at the company to wear ties.

The actual dress code required employees at a JobCenter office to dress in a “professional and businesslike manner” and went on to say,

For men the basic standard is to wear a collar and tie; for women to dress appropriately and to a similar standard . . . Within these rules staff are free to decide what clothes to wear.

Matthew Thompson filed a complaint with an industrial tribunal that this was sex discrimination. Thompson argued that since the dress code mentioned a specific set of clothes for men — collared shirt and tie — but did not mention any specific clothes that women had to wear, that it was discriminatory.

And the industrial tribunal agreed saying, in part,

If we were to turn the argument round and the only mandatory item of clothing had been for a woman to wear, say, a skirt, and she was disciplined for wearing some other item, would that be deemed discriminatory against her on the grounds of sex? We believe it would be.

Can’t you wait until tribunals like this are scouring through our lives looking to abolish every hint of an imbalance between the sexes?

Source:

Telling men to wear ties is sex discrimination. Sandra Laville, The Daily Telegraph (London), March 12, 2003.

Switzerland Ups the Legal Status of Pets

Although stopping short of granting animals legal rights, a new law went into effect in Switzerland April 1 that boosts the legal status of pets as something more than simple property. The law’s provisions do not apply to animals that are not pets.

The new law changes conditions for pet ownership in Switzerland. People named as beneficiaries in a will are now required to care for the deceased’s pet, including using part of the inherited assets to cover costs of care if necessary.

Similarly, if a couple separates a judge will now determine which partner is best able to care for any pets that the couple owned. Owners of pets are also now entitled to seek emotional damages in the event that a pet is injured or killed in an accident.

Sources:

Animals win legal recognition. SwissInfo.Com, September 18, 2002.

Animal rights get a boost. SwissInfo.Com, April 1, 2003.

Australia Looks to Genetically Engineered Virus to Stop Mouse Population Explosions

Australia has a regular problem with explosions in its mouse population that occur in roughly four year cycles. The number of mice quickly increases to billions and costs Australian agriculture upwards of US $90 million in crop damage.

The problem is so severe that Australian researchers are currently investigating an exotic solution to prevent such population explosions — a genetically modified virus that renders female mice sterile.

The virus is a modified form of he herpes virus that is spread by mouse-to-mouse contact. Once it infects a female mouse, it will prevent sperm from fertilizing eggs. Researchers at Australia’s Co-operative Control of Pest Animals has shown the modified virus works in the laboratory setting, and now wants to test the virus in the field.

That, however, will have to wait for extensive testing to ensure that the virus will not jump the species barrier and infect other animals besides mice. But Australia has experience with using such solutions. It used myomatosis disease 50 years ago to control the rabbit population, and in the 1990s used the calci virus to lower rabbit populations. The calci virus killed an estimated 90 percent of the country’s rabbit population, allowing some ecosystems that were overrun by the animals to begin to recover.

Sources:

Australia invents new mousetrap with herpes virus. Reuters, April 8, 2003.

NT Queens’s Birthday Honours. ABC Rural, October 6, 2002.

PETA Continues Lies about Medical Research

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has taken out billboards denouncing the March of Dimes for supporting medical research with animals. The Shreveport Times described the billboards thusly,

This, the second billboard PETA has put up in the Shreveport area in the last six months, depicts a pregnant monkey with wires cemented into her back. The caption reads, “march of Dimes Helping or Hurting.” Similar billboards will go up, or have gone up, in several other cities nationwide.

PETA spokeswoman Brandi Valladolid told the Shreveport Times that they placed billboards in the cities that the March of Dimes claims have the highest rates of birth defects. But, surprise, the March of Dimes tells the Shreveport Times that it does not produce a list of birth defect incidence by city.

Imagine that — a PETA activists with inaccurate information.

But Valladolid doesn’t stop there. She repeats the nonsensical claim made repeatedly by PCRM and PETA that the diet drugs fen-phen show the dangers of animal testing,

. . . because animal testing cleared them as safe for human consumption when in fact they are not.

How do you know a PETA activist is lying? He or she is still talking.

First, fen-phen was an off-label prescription that was never tested in animals. Of course for PETA and PCRM to understand this, they’d have to leave their fantasy worlds to actually develop an understanding of how drugs are tested and prescribed.

Second, animal testing conducted prior to approval of both fenfluramine and phentermine revealed side effects that could cause the sorts of problems that the combinatory treatment was eventually linked to. Fenfluramine, for example, was only approved for use by patients for at most a few weeks, but doctors prescribed it to patients for months and years. Similarly, the FDA noted in approving phentermine that there was no safety data at all for its usage beyond 1 year.

But when the drugs were pulled off the market, the average length of time patients had been on the off-label combination was 9 months. The animal and human testing of both drugs worked fine — physicians simply chose to ignore that data and the warnings and cautions from the FDA based on that data.

But PETA has never let the facts get in the way of a good lie, so why start now?

Source:

PETA takes on animal testing in new billboard campaign. Sarah Pancoast, The Shreveport Times, April 4, 2003.