OK, it’s actually why some feminists hate Sarah Palin, not why all of them do. But there’s certainly more than just a smidgeon of truth in this article.

Left-wing feminists have a hard time dealing with strong, successful conservative women in politics such as Margaret Thatcher. Sarah Palin seems to have truly unhinged more than a few, eliciting a stream of vicious, often misogynist invective.

On Salon.com last week, Cintra Wilson branded her a “Christian Stepford Wife” and a “Republican blow-up doll.” Wendy Doniger, religion professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, added on the Washington Post blog, “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”

You’d think that, whether or not they agree with her politics, feminists would at least applaud Mrs. Palin as a living example of one of their core principles: a woman’s right to have a career and a family. Yet some feminists unabashedly suggest that her decision to seek the vice presidency makes her a bad and selfish mother. Others argue that she is bad for working mothers because she’s just too good at having it all.

What on earth could be driving such feelings? Why would feminists hate Sarah Palin quite so much? Or, again, some of them do so?

The answer given rather rings true for me. It’s that there are some feminists who equate the desired (as I also desire it) legal and opportunity equity for men and women with a whole other series of political desires. For example, there are plenty of proclaimed feminists who see socialism (or it’s dull as ditchwater sister, social democracy) as the only way to gain gender equality. For they see that gender equality can only come as a matter of economic equality….and more importantly, economic equality of outcome rather than just of opportunmity.

Now I’m not saying that’s wrong, although I very much disagree with it, but views like that are obviously going to color one’s views of a conservative Christian woman and her feminism or not. Because she doesn’t embrace the economic part of that feminist argument, thus she cannot be a feminist.

There’s more to it as well I’m sure. I’ve actually read people arguing that abortion of a child with abnormalities is actually something that people should do, not just something that should be possible for them to do. Again, I’m rather steering clear of the main debate there, over abortion itself, but freedom to choose is really rather different from moral pressure to insist upon abortion in certain scenarios.

Finally there’s the point made by the author:

Not to Ms. Marsh, who insists that feminism must demand support for women from the government. In this worldview, advocating more federal subsidies for institutional day care is pro-woman; advocating tax breaks or regulatory reform that would help home-based care providers — preferred by most working parents — is not. Trying to legislate away the gender gap in earnings (which no self-respecting economist today blames primarily on discrimination) is feminist. Expanding opportunities for part-time and flexible jobs is “the Republican Party line.”

It’s part and parcel of that overarching political viewpoint I note above. That simple equality isn’t the major point. How that equality is reached is.

I must say though I wholly agree with this point:

Mrs. Palin’s marriage actually makes her a terrific role model. One of the best choices a woman can make if she wants a career and a family is to pick a partner who will be able to take on equal or primary responsibility for child-rearing. Our culture still harbors a lingering perception that such men are less than manly — and who better to smash that stereotype than “First Dude” Todd Palin?

Well quite….how well you succeed in this life in attaining your goals does in large part depend upon the choices you make in that pursuit. There’s no choice larger than the one about who you marry either. But then that really wouldn’t fit the feminist ideals of those who are so upset with Sarah Palin either, would it? That in order to have it all you need to pick the right man to have your children with? Isn’t that too close to stating that your success depends, again, upon a man?

Perhaps it is but it also sounds a lot closer to observable reality than the idea that a woman with a career, family and a balanced home life isn’t a “feminist”. That was the point of feminism in the first place, wasn’t it, that women would be able to have all those things?

Harriet Harman and David Cameron don’t exactly get on. Apologies for that little piece of news from the backwaters of British politics. But I must admit, this statement by Harman about Cameron rather mystifies me.

Harriet Harman has launched a blistering attack on David Cameron saying he was only interested in women for their votes.

Umm, he’s a politician! What on earth else do you think he might be interested in about any person, living or dead?

Yes, of course, Mad Men was the hit show of the recent TV season. And one of the continual questions the advertising types asked themselves was, “What do women want”?

Some will see this as simply reflective of the desperate sexism of the times (and let’s not beat about the bush, compared to now those were indeed highly sexist times). Thus, of course, no advertising type now would indeed ask the same question now, “What do women want?”, would they? Not even a refugee from the Mad Men’s time would do so, right?

Actually, just about all advertising types do indeed ask that very question all the time today. And no, it’s not down to sexism, just as it wasn’t back then.

The reason is that now, just as back then, women are the decision makers on most purchases by households. Partly of course this is because they do most of the shopping….but even over cars, houses, furniture, things you might assume are joint decisions, women have a vastly larger influence over what actually gets purchased than the men in their lives do.

Here’s what hasn’t changed. The question, “What do women want?” continues to be asked every day. Even now, nearly 50 years past the Sterling Cooper era, men may be doing the grocery shopping, but women make the lists. That’s why so much advertising is directed at them. Make no mistake; advertisers know this. They do copious amounts of research, they listen to their customers and give them the products they desire. The real question is whether advertisers can create meaningful, innovative ways to communicate to women. As Bernbach said, persuasion is an art, not a science. It requires alchemy, insight and Wallenda-like nerve.

I am a working adman — “man” being the operative word there. Yet the majority of the work I do is aimed at women. And understanding the opposite gender is a lifelong lesson, as we all know.

So despite the fact that the people working in hte advertising industry are entirely different from those portrayed in Mad Men the basic question is indeed the same, just what is it that women want. Not from any vestigial sexism, but just because they control the purse strings.

I thought this was also pretty interesting:

And let’s talk about men for a second. Have you ever noticed that most men are depicted in ads as goofy and ham-handed? The reason for this is that white, Anglo-Saxon men are the only safe targets, driven by the fact that so much advertising is based on humour, and humour needs a foil. In other words, it needs a fall guy, or a doofus. Humour needs a pivot point.

This can never be a woman. You cannot make a wife the dumb sidekick, ever, or a storm of biblical proportions will rain down on you. But make the dolt an adult white male, and all is well. Not one letter of protest will be mailed, not one stamp licked in the name of husband-protection. The only caveat here, and I mean the only one, is if the ad only features women, then one can be hapless. But only then.

So that’s why all he men in adverts are idiots then. Finally, we know!

I saw this news story and I thought what a bizarre thought. That inflation affects the sexes (or genders if you prefer) differently. What? Why?

Because of my extreme economic geekness I’m well aware that inflation affects people differently, dependent upon their position. Debtors love it for example, as it reduces the real value of their debt. Creditors hate it for the same reason, as do those living on fixed incomes or interest.

But men and women differently affectd by inflation? What was this I thought?

But according to a recent survey from Australian Unity, while many households are at breaking point, women are hurting more than men.

The study’s author, Professor Bob Cummins of Deakin University, says men still regard themselves as breadwinners, with women becoming increasingly stressed as they manage the purse strings.

“Females are the frontline purchasers for most households. They’re actually the people who know the price of a loaf of bread,” he said.

“But many females who actually do the shopping on a regular basis would know those prices and would be aware of the fact that when they go to the supermarket on a regular basis now, they’re finding that the money that they take there just doesn’t buy them the goods that it used to.”

Professor Cummins says this makes women more in touch with the tangible effects of inflation.

Ah, OK, that does in fact make sense. (Maybe I didn’t get it at first because I, the male, do the shopping in our household.)

It’s absolutely nothing to do with sex at all. Nothing to do with anything innate in men and women. It’s purely because of the socially assigned roles (gender again, if you like) that means that women see inflation more than men do and thus are more upset by it.

Not as bizarre as I had at first thought.

Well, in one way of coursemen are discriminated against, just as women are. In fact, all of us are discriminated against all the time: that’s just peopleusing their own mixtures of judgement and prejudice to decide things about us by our looks, accent, height, weight, whatever.

But in the more specific sense, are men now sexually discriminated against? There does seem to be some evidence that there is, as this quoted by Dr. Helen shows.

According to a 2006 survey commissioned by Kelly Services, a firm that finds temporary and permanent staff for companies, 34.8% of men said they believed they had experienced discrimination over the past five years at work compared with 33.3% of women. Similar findings were reported by University of Toronto sociology professor John Kervin. In a survey of business students at an Ontario college, Prof. Kervin found that just as many men as women — 21% each — felt their professors were biased against them because of their gender.

It’s the classic workplace discrimination scenario in reverse: All things being equal, if a man and woman are up for the same job, the woman has an unfair advantage, say men’s rights advocates. And they blame decades of affirmative action initiatives that have encouraged companies to promote women and minorities.

There’s a branch of socioligical thought which says that men cannot be discriminated against in this manner. It’s very closely allied with the idea that racial minorities cannot be racist themselves. Only those in the position of power in a society can be guilty of such discrimination. Thus minorities cannot be raciost (which will be huge news to those who have encountered such racism first hand) and men cannot be discriminated against in a patriarchy.

This particular strand of sociological thought is worth even less than most others in that benighted discipline of course. Discrimination is discrimination whether it is of the affirmative kind or not.

But if we’ve reached the point that just as many men are being discriminated against as women, might it not be time to call that whole policy of affirmative discrimination into question? If what we’re trying to do is wipe out such unfairness, it doesn’t seem very sensible to be adding to it ourselves, does it?

OK, so we find once again that the male and female brains have (slightly) different structures.

Men and women show differences in behaviour because their brains are physically distinct organs, new research suggests. Male and female brains appear to be constructed from markedly different genetic blueprints.

The differences in the circuitry that wires them up and the chemicals that transmit messages inside them are so great as to point to the conclusion that there is not just one kind of human brain, but two, according to recent neurological studies.

OK, now that’s part of our own theory around here. We go on to point out that simply because soeone is XX that doesn’t mean that they’ll have a female brain, or that someone XY will have male. It’s a probability that the former and latter will, not a certainty. But this research leads to a much larger point:

Professor Jeff Mogil from McGill University, in Montreal, Canada, who has demonstrated major differences in pain processing in males and females, puts it even more forcefully. He is astonished that so many researchers have failed to include female animals in their studies. “It’s scandalous,” he said. “Women are the most common pain sufferers, and yet our model for basic pain research is the male rat.”

Looks like a number of female rats are in for a torrid time of it but that’s something we really ought to do, don’t you think, whatever PETA says about it.

I think this is absolutely wonderful this piece of research. Firstly, think about how the researchers actually ggot their data. Given that tehy needed to collect samples from these people while they were on a restful holiday far from the madding crowd, the researchers clearly needed to stay at the vacation resort, far from the madding crowd, so that they could do so.

Tough job, eh, but somebody’s got to do it.

Then there was their result:

ABSTRACT. The authors collected saliva samples from 15 married couples and 13 women staying with a female companion (N = 43) during an 8-day stay at a spa resort in Nagano, Japan. To examine changes in endocrinological stress markers, the authors evaluated participants’ levels of salivary cortisol and chromogranin A (CgA) by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. By the eighth day, women staying with their husbands had significantly increased levels of cortisol and CgA. During the protocol, the authors observed no significant variation in levels of cortisol or CgA for either the women who were staying with same-sex companions or the male spouses. These findings suggest that the effects of long-term stays in a spa resort are more beneficial for married women staying with their husbands than for either married men or women staying with female companions.

So, going on vacation with your buddies doesn’t do anything and for men, going on vacation with their wives doesn’t do anything. But for wives, going on vacation with their husbands does benefit them.

That’s a weird weird result and I’m struggling to think what might be causing it. Maybe it’s that being relieved from the pressure of paid work doesn’t make much difference, but that being relieved from domestic work (and yes, Japan, where this was done, is a very rigidly divided society in terms of gender roles) does?

Anyone got any better theories?

Saw this at Bloomberg and thought it worth a brief mention:

As they struggle to achieve parity with their male counterparts, women at the highest levels of Wall Street are catching up in one category — losing their jobs.

That might not actually be the type of equality that many women were searching for.

However, it is of course possible to take a more positive view of this. As you regular readers will know, I’ve got a background in economics and I’m very much one of those free market sorta guys. One thing that many over look (or choose to ignore) is that markets themselves are entirely amoral. The people within them might be immoral or moral, but the market exchange system itself is entirely amoral. It doesn’t care about your sex, gender, sexual preferences, color, place of birth or religion. It cares only about what you’ve got to offer and what you want in return for it.

There are some who aren’t all that convinced, who think that cultural attitudes still play too large a part:

There might be more women in such lofty positions if attitudes toward women on Wall Street changed, said Linda Bialecki, president of Bialecki Inc., a New York-based boutique executive search firm.

“Stereotypes embedded in our society are so pervasive, so accepted by men and women that it’s truly extraordinarily difficult to move beyond them,” Bialecki said. “As a definition of leadership, men can be assertive, aggressive and decisive. Those are not words that are positively ascribed to women.”

But the reality is that:

The market, as everyone has discovered, takes no prisoners

And that’s a good thing, for just as it doesn’t discriminate between hte sexes or races on the way down, when people are getting fired, not does it on the way up, when people are getting hired.

The people in the markets might discriminate, but the markets themselves do not.

Sorry to have to disappoint people here but that book that Carrie reads from in the Sex and the City movie, “Love Letters From Great Men” does not in fact exist. Despite there being hundreds upon hundreds of people asking booksellers for it, no, there really is no book called “Love Letters From Great Men”.

Well, yet that is. The story has been all over the place in the past few days.

A consumer alert for the millions who have seen the feature film version of “Sex and the City”: There is no such book as “Love Letters From Great Men,” from which Carrie Bradshaw reads while in bed with her beloved Mr. Big.

Well, that’s from AP so I guess we have to take it as being true. Certainly, when the Christian Science Monitor (I find the philosophic ideas there a tad odd, I have to admit, but the newspaper is certainly first class) says them same I’m inclined to believe it.

They called the show “Sex and the City” but as those of us who used to watch it know, far more often it was about love – or the search for a close facsimile, anyway. So there’s nothing surprising about the fact that in the movie version we see Carrie sitting in bed reading a book called “Love Letters From Great Men” (and pondering tender words from lovers as diverse as Beethoven and Napoleon.)

What is kind of funny, however, is last week’s Associated Press story on the hundreds of queries retailers have received from readers looking for that book. Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist.

The news has even reached as far as Australia:

Fans of the new ‘Sex and the City’ movie have been flooding bookstores and online retailers in an attempt to track down the book ‘Love Letters From Great Men’ that Carrie Bradshaw is seen reading - the only problem is, it doesn’t exist.

The thing is, this is true now, yes. But I don’t think that this book not existing is going to last for very long. For some bright spark is bound to write one and get it out into hte market…..if hundreds or thousands of people are willing to buy something with that title, wouldn’t it be a sensible idea?

In fact, I have to admit that it sounds so sensible that I’m likely to start writing it tomorrow.

There’s something that doesn’t really quite make sense here about Natascha Kampusch.

For years television was her main form of entertainment and view of the world as she lived in an underground prison. Now the kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch is to become a TV talk show host herself - a career of which she dreamed during her incarceration.

Less than two years after her release, the 20-year old Austrian says she is now learning “the other side” of the media. On Sunday she will host the first in her chat show series, “Natascha Kampusch Meets …” on the private television channel Puls 4.

I mean, yes, she is famous, she’s certainly had a different life so far to almost everyone else. But, umm, are we entirely sure that the best training for chatting to people is to spend eight years in a cellar on your own?