The Bitchy Boss Syndrome

Everyone is talking about Olga Khazan’s Atlantic essay about why women in the workplace are so mean to other women. She exposes the fact that many women are poor managers. One might ask how many incompetent women managers were hired on the basis of their ability and how many were hired for other reasons.

Khazan’s observations are correct. Women in the workplace do not treat other women well. And they do not seem to treat men very well either. This tells Khazan that these women are victims of male dominant cultures, cultures to which they are trying, well or poorly, to adapt.

Is it fair or useful, when discovering that women are less competent managers, to blame it on men. When men are blamed women are made to look like marionettes whose strings are being pulled by the patriarchy. This absolves women of responsibility for their behavior, and of their moral agency.

It might be a good idea to ask whether women who blame men for everything that they do wrong are more or less likely to be good managers. Defining yourself as a victim of the patriarchy does not instill confidence.

And while we are blaming men, let’s also point out that being an executive or a partner in a law firm might very well exact a personal price. While men who rise in stature become more attractive to women, women who rise in stature become less attractive to men. One might ask whether women executives are in such a foul mood because their lives do not resemble what they were promised when they headed out into the world. They might have been told that, having attained personal fulfillment through career success, they would have their pick of wonderful husbands who were going to share household chores.

In truth, they often find that big careers coupled with motherhood make it impossible to be the kinds of mothers they want to be. Their children often suffer from inattention.

One young lawyer understood the root cause of the female partners’ dissatisfaction:

Still, the senior women’s behavior made sense to her. They were slavishly devoted to their jobs, regularly working until nine or 10 at night. Making partner meant either not having children or hiring both day- and nighttime nannies to care for them. “There’s hostility among the women who have made it,” she said. “It’s like, ‘I gave this up. You’re going to have to give it up too.’ ”

Of course, they might be saying: I gave this up. Don't follow my example.

Khazan adds this on the cause of the problem:

Is this what happens when the totally normal, societally sanctioned choices you’ve made—work hard; have children; slave away for a promotion; go on a little vacation, not too long!; come back and work even harder—don’t add up to the life you envisioned? You said the right thing at the meeting, didn’t you? You helped on the important project. Why not you, then? It would be enraging.

But, who said that your choices were normal? (Note that Khazan does not include husbands in the mix.) Who said that sacrificing family for career was normal or even socially sanctioned? Who said that hiring a team of nannies to bring up your children is totally normal?These choices were prescribed by feminist ideology, not by the patriarchy. Dare I say that they are somewhat elitist. And if things did not work out as promised, why blame men?

Consider this example. Recall that Anne-Marie Slaughter quit her job at the State Department in order to care for her children. Her elder son, at around age 13 or 14 had been suspended from school, had taken up with the wrong crowd and had been picked up by the police. So, Slaughter did what any conscientious parent would do: she quit her job and returned home to care for her child.

We note that Slaughter had had a role reversal marriage from the beginning, her husband being Mr. Mom. So, the problems did not begin when she got her dream job.

We note that Slaughter had the option. Her husband was gainfully employed and she easily found a job in Princeton. And yet, what would have happened if these options did not exist? What would have happened if she was the breadwinner and could not quit her job? Do you think that this would have made her a great executive? Would this have made her into a bitchy, bossy, resentful executive who wanted to signal to young women that getting to the top of a male status hierarchy exacted a very serious price?

Anyway, beyond the standard blame-the-patriarchy rhetoric, Khazan’s article offers a damning picture of women leaders. Could it be that women hated Hillary Clinton because she reminded them of the bad female bosses they had had?

One young lawyer, for example, divides partners in law firms into three categories: aggressive bitch, passive-aggressive bitch, and tuned-out indifferent bitch. This woman, named Shannon, apparently did not want to become like a partner, so she quit her job in order to spend more time bringing up her children.

The law partners did not demonstrate great management skills. Khazan reports:

She once spotted a female partner screaming at the employees at a taxi stand because the cars weren’t coming fast enough. Another would praise Shannon to her face, then dispatch a senior associate to tell her she was working too slowly. One time, Shannon emailed a female partner—one of the passive-aggressive variety—saying, “Attached is a revised list of issues and documents we need from the client. Let me know of anything I may have left off.”

“Here’s another example” of you not being confident, the partner responded, according to Shannon. “The ‘I may have left off’ language is not as much being solicitous of my ideas as it is suggesting a lack of confidence in the completeness of your list.”

Compared to male partners, female partners were bitches:

Some of the male partners could be curt, she said, but others were nice. Almost all of the female partners, on the other hand, were very tough.

Khazan calls it “a pattern of wanton meanness.”

By now, most women have learned the hard way that it is better to report to a man.

Khazan writes:

Large surveys by Pew and Gallup as well as several academic studies show that when women have a preference as to the gender of their bosses and colleagues, that preference is largely for men. A 2009 study published in the journal Gender in Management found, for example, that although women believe other women make good managers, “the female workers did not actually want to work for them.” The longer a woman had been in the workforce, the less likely she was to want a female boss.

And also:

In a smaller survey of 142 law-firm secretaries—nearly all of whom were women—not one said she or he preferred working for a female partner, and only 3 percent indicated that they liked reporting to a female associate. (Nearly half had no preference.) “I avoid working for women because [they are] such a pain in the ass!” one woman said. In yet another study, women who reported to a female boss had more symptoms of distress, such as trouble sleeping and headaches, than those who worked for a man.

Given women’s poor track record as managers, it makes sense that other women would not want to be associated with them. Naturally, feminists believe that it’s about the male dominant organizations. And yet, at the same time, everyone knows that when more women join a company or a profession, its status and prestige will decline. If hiring more women decreases the value of your partnership you might not be happy to hire or to mentor more women.

Destigmatizing Suicide

Sophie Gilbert examines the power of the media in an Atlantic article about the Netflix show 13 Reasons Why. The show depicted a teenage girl’s suicide… and made it look reasonable and even glamorous. Many experts on the subject were concerned that the show would produce more suicide attempts.  The show’s producers replied that they were raising awareness of a problem and encouraging a national conversation. This last rationalization is the first refuge of psycho scoundrels.

Anyway, Gilbert shows that, what with Google searches, we can quantify the increased interest in suicide:

Within days of the release of 13 Reasons Why, Netflix’s teen-oriented drama about a high-school student who takes her own life, the show was being loudly criticized by suicide-prevention experts, who were concerned it could lead to a suicide-contagion effect and a spate of copycat attempts. Now, research published at the end of July argues that those concerns may have been founded. Google queries about suicide rose by almost 20 percent in 19 days after the show came out, representing between 900,000 and 1.5 million more searches than usual regarding the subject.

Search results do not necessarily mean more suicides, but researchers believe that there is a connection. In different terms, do you want to take the risk that your show will offer children a road map to suicide? Or worse, that it will encourage them to take that path.

The study’s authors write that it’s unclear whether an increase in searches regarding suicide meant an increase in actual suicide attempts, although they note that there’s typically a correlation between the two, and that “searches for precise suicide methods increased after the series’ release.” Their analyses, the authors concluded, “suggest 13 Reasons Why, in its present form, has both increased suicide awareness while unintentionally increasing suicidal ideation.”

But, is the contagion effect real? One suspects that it is. Ethan Watters’s book Crazy Like Us showed in detail how media-stoked awareness of certain psychological problems increased their incidence.

Gilbert continued:

In May, I examined how 13 Reasons Why managed to break virtually every rule that exists when it comes to portraying suicide as a subject for teen audiences, featuring a graphic, prolonged scene of the main character’s death in the final episode, and glamorizing her death as a force for positive change in her community. One of the biggest concerns among psychologists and educators was that the show might spark a contagion effect, where increased coverage of suicide in the media leads to a related increase in suicide attempts.

Gilbert is correct to emphasize a point that Watters made:

What the study does show is that art and entertainment have real power, and that as patterns of media consumption change, directors and producers don’t have the luxury of imagining their work in a vacuum. 

The show’s producers have suggested that the show will raise awareness and banish stigmas. Gilbert explained:

Netflix and the producers of 13 Reasons Why, who reportedly disregarded advice from mental-health experts not to release the first season, have repeatedly claimed that the show is raising awareness around the subject of suicide, banishing stigmas and leading to more discussion of a sensitive topic. But as this study implies, focusing public attention on suicide without taking recommended efforts to minimize harm can be counterproductive, and even dangerous. Dr. Dan Reidenberg, the executive director of Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, told me in May that he disagreed with the argument that simply broaching the topic in popular culture is enough. “It has definitely started a conversation about suicide,” he said, “but it hasn’t been the right one.”

You might ask whether we should really want to destigmatize suicide. When you destigmatize something you normalize it. Do we want to make suicide normal or reasonable under certain circumstances?

By the way, what if you took this argument and changed one element. Instead of suicide, what if we were talking about the national media presentation of transgenderism. Does the media mania encourage more children to convince themselves that they are transgender? Does it encourage more physicians to mutilate the bodies of these children with puberty-blocking hormones and gender reassignment surgery? 

After all, transgenderism is a belief... not a fact. Can't the media work to manipulate children's minds to make them believe many things that are untrue.

Dumbed Down by Weed

Here are some fun facts for those who have been beating the drums for marijuana legalization. I am thinking especially of New Jersey Senator Cory Booker who has just proposed legalizing weed nationwide. Apparently, Booker thinks that if we have fewer laws there will be fewer crimes. It isn’t illogical, but still it’s a bad idea.

Recent research suggests that the academic performance of students who have more access to weed suffers. Who imagined that weed would make students dumb… especially when it comes to mathematics. Now that America is lagging the world in student academic performance, and now that America has fewer and fewer students studying engineering, what we really need is more… weed. 

In a better world our senators would be militating for better academic performance. Alas, nowadays they are protesting against it. They want to dumb down an already academically challenged nation.

It was all reported in Vox:

According to a study recently published in The Review of Economic Studies, access to legal marijuana may significantly reduce academic performance.

The study took advantage of a natural experiment in the Dutch city of Maastricht. In 2011, the city sought to pull back some of the marijuana tourism going to its coffee shops, where marijuana sales are legally tolerated. So through the local association of cannabis shop owners, it banned some foreigners of certain nationalities from buying pot at these venues.

This let researchers Olivier Marie and Ulf Zölitz, in the cleverly titled “‘High’ Achievers? Cannabis Access and Academic Performance,” compare the academic outcomes of Maastricht University students with varying levels of access to legal pot.

What they found: The students who weren’t allowed to legally access marijuana saw their grades significantly improve, especially in classes that require numerical and mathematical skills.

That suggests that a significant consequence of marijuana legalization could be worse academic performance — and that could of course trickle out to any other outcomes or work that generally require using your brain. That doesn’t mean that legalizing pot is necessarily a bad idea, but it is something advocates of the policy now have to think about and account for as they move forward.

Note the last paragraph. Your ability to do a job that requires you to use your brain, especially in mathematics, will be compromised by too much weed. Does that sound like an argument for legalization?

Here’s some more information:

“On average, students performed 10.9% of a standard deviation better and were 5.4% more likely to pass courses when they were banned from entering cannabis shops,” the researchers concluded, although there were no statistically significant changes in dropout probability. The effect is stronger for women and low-performance students. They also found bigger effects on courses that require numerical and math skills — backing up previous research that has found marijuana consumption most negatively impacts quantitative thinking.

This is not the first time that marijuana has been shown to be harmful:

A review of the research published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine earlier this year found that marijuana seems to pose a significant risk for respiratory problems if smoked, schizophrenia and psychosis, car crashes, lagging social achievement in life, and perhaps pregnancy-related problems.

Of course, Vox, being a voice of the left, does not believe that marijuana should be illegal. After all, other legal substances comport risk also. Whether they make you dumb is another story.

I allow Vox the final word, even though it sounds like it was written by someone who was doped out on weed:

So it seems likely, based on the Maastricht study, that marijuana legalization really does lead to negative outcomes on academic performance. But maybe that’s okay.

Then again, maybe it’s not okay.

Hate Mongers on the Atl-Left

The New York Times is late to the party, but, as they say, better late than never. This time the issue is the leadership of the much praised Women’s March against President Trump. It turns out that the March’s leaders are anti-Semitic and pro-terrorism. Author Bari Weiss is right to be concerned that feminism and progressivism are being hijacked by extremists. (Via Maggie's Farm)

Considering that the Vice Chairman of the Democratic National Committee is a protégé of notorious anti-Semite and racist Louis Farrakhan, it is not a moment too soon. And considering that every Democrat’s favorite president was a protégé of notorious anti-Semite and racist Jeremiah Wright, it might be too late.

Who has been praising the leaders of the Women’s March? Why, no one other than New York’s waste of a senator, Kirsten Gillibrand.

Weiss opens on this note:

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand gushed about them in Time, where they were among the top 100 most influential people of 2017. “The Women’s March was the most inspiring and transformational moment I’ve ever witnessed in politics,” she wrote. “And it happened because four extraordinary women — Tamika Mallory, Bob Bland, Carmen Perez and Linda Sarsour — had the courage to take on something big, important and urgent, and never gave up.”

By now everyone knows about Linda Sarsour. For those Times readers who missed the depths of Sarsour’s hatred, Weiss runs some of it down:

  

There are comments on her Twitter feed of the anti-Zionist sort: “Nothing is creepier than Zionism,” she wrote in 2012. And, oddly, given her status as a major feminist organizer, there are more than a few that seem to make common cause with anti-feminists, like this from 2015: “You’ll know when you’re living under Shariah law if suddenly all your loans and credit cards become interest-free. Sound nice, doesn’t it?” She has dismissed the anti-Islamist feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the most crude and cruel terms, insisting she is “not a real woman” and confessing that she wishes she could take away Ms. Ali’s vagina — this about a woman who suffered genital mutilation as a girl in Somalia.

Lately, Sarsour and her cronies have been out praising a cop-killing terrorist:

On July 16, the official Twitter feed of the Women’s March offered warm wishes to Assata Shakur. “Happy birthday to the revolutionary #AssataShakur!” read the tweet, which featured a “#SignOfResistance, in Assata’s honor” — a pink and purple Pop Art-style portrait of Ms. Shakur, better known as Joanne Chesimard, a convicted killer who is on the F.B.I.’s list of most wanted terrorists.

If you disagree Sarsour will accuse you of being an Islamophobe.

All four of these horrors strongly support Louis Farrakhan. In case you forgot, Weiss offers a review of some of Farrakhan’s greatest hits:

On May 11, Ms. Mallory posted a photo with her arm around Mr. Farrakhan, the 84-year-old Nation of Islam leader notorious for his anti-Semitic comments, on Twitter and Instagram. “Thank God this man is still alive and doing well,” she wrote. It is one of several videos and photos and quotes that Ms. Mallory has posted of Mr. Farrakhan.

Ms. Perez is also a big fan. In the fall, she posted a photo in which she holds hands with Mr. Farrakhan, writing, “There are many times when I sit with elders or inspirational individuals where I think, ‘I just wish I could package this and share this moment with others.’ ” She’s also promoted video of Mr. Farrakhan “dropping knowledge” and another in which he says he is “speaking truth to power.”

Weiss continues:

“And don’t you forget, when it’s God who puts you in the ovens, it’s forever!” he warned Jews in a speech at a Nation of Islam gathering in Madison Square Garden in 1985. Five years later, he remained unreformed: “The Jews, a small handful, control the movement of this great nation, like a radar controls the movement of a great ship in the waters.” Or this metaphor, directed at Jews: “You have wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government, and you are deceiving and sending this nation to hell.” He called Hitler “a very great man” on national television. Judaism, he insists, is a “gutter religion.”

Of course, you know all about this. For New York Times readers it will come as a shock. Perhaps it tells us how progressives have lost America.

The Bad News about Green Energy

Zealots who promote clean renewable energy always promise the world. They tell us that clean renewable energy will be cheap and efficient. We will all have the power we need and will be able to pay for it. Perhaps the technogeeks Silicon Valley and Al Gore can pay for it, but increasingly, in Queensland, Australia, the cost of electricity is soaring and average people are being disconnected.

The Sunday Mail of Brisbane tells the story. Via American Thinker and Maggie’s Farm:

TODAY’S confronting revelation that more than 464 Queenslanders a week are having their electricity disconnected because of soaring power prices is a wake-up call to the Labor Party. (snip)

Labor’s zealotry on renewable energy targets is sending the country broke. (snip)…

With a Queensland state election looming – the likely date being late October or early November – cost-of-living pressures are emerging as a major poll issue. In fact, power prices could emerge as the biggest single issue. (snip)

Latest official figures from the Australian Energy Regulator show a 55 per cent leap in the number of households that had their power cut off in the three months to March. With more than 18,000 disconnections in the first nine months, the 2016-17 total is set to easily top last year’s 21,667. And in a further indication of consumers’ struggle, the number of Queensland customers entering formal payment plans with their providers has soared by a third to 42,361. Payment plans allow consumers to pay agreed amounts in instalments – according to their capacity and estimated usage over the coming year – to make it easier to budget.

Welfare specialists say people are doing it incredibly tough around cost-of-living pressures. Mark Henley, CEO of Queensland Council of Social Service, says energy is “the one that is really hurting people’’. Of course, it’s the regions that once again are hit hardest. The air-conditioning costs in north Queensland are onerous because of the heat.

Of course, the clean green energy crowd was lying. They want you to return to the state of nature, without any electricity. As you swelter in your mud hut you can comfort yourself with the thought that you are saving the planet.

If that’s not sufficiently comforting, keep in mind that, in the absence of air conditioning thousands of older people died in their homes in Paris a few years ago during a heat wave.

Happy days!

Recycled Socialism

Maybe there’s something in the water but we seem to be having a wave of futurology. In the past it used to be called prophecy. Today, its proponents present themselves as visionaries. From Steven Pinker to Yuval Noah Harari self-styled prophets have emerged to tell us that human beings have overcome violence and are living in peace and harmony, more than ever before. Sort of....

Especially since World War II, says Pinker. The Harvard psychologist is promoting atheism, though, like many other new atheists, he rejects the fact that the twentieth century saw the most ambitious attempts in world history to create atheist cultures.

Between them, the atheist paradises of Communist countries killed over 100,000,000 people. Many of them died in Mao’s China, in the post-World War II period, but upwards of 35,000,000 starved to death. One supposes that Pinker does not count them as violent deaths.

If the new atheism is going to supplant religion as the cornerstone of a new culture, why wouldn’t practical efforts to do so count? Aren’t we supposed to be rational and empirical thinkers, caring about all outcomes of our experiments?

As we examine this tide of optimistic prophecies we can only think of intrepid stock market forecasters who believe that a rising stock market will keep rising forever. They never seem to consider that markets rise and fall and that blind optimism paves the way for destruction. The more we blind ourselves to the possibility of a breakdown, the more likely it becomes.

Besides, the nations of the world possess enough nuclear weapons to incinerate the planet many times over. If you believe that no one will ever use one or more of them, you are hopelessly naïve.

Pinker is the best known of today atheist prophets, but we also have Yuval Noah Harari. Clearly, he joins Pinker and, in a strange sense, Francis Fukuyama, in promoting the belief that their fictional Heavenly City will descend on the planet, the result of Enlightenment thinking. It’s not a new idea. Carl Becker also presented this idea in his classic book: The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers. As I recall, Becker was suggesting that these self-styled rational atheists were really hiding the fact that they were simply recycling Biblical prophecies. Not so much to bring them up to date, but to establish their own self-importance.

Harari is not areligious. He practices Buddhist meditation, presumably to spare him the indignity of ethical thinking. It also spares him the other great idealistic indignity:  imagining that the course of human history does not follow a roadmap laid out by Hegel or the Book of Revelation, but depends on the free choices made by free people.

Lawrence Klepp has written an excellent review of Harari for the Weekly Standard. He says:

Harari begins by assuring us that humanity is on a winning streak. Famine and plague, two historical scourges, are disappearing, and a third, war, is no longer routine statecraft. For the first time in history, more people die of eating too much than eating too little. More people succumb to ailments related to old age than to infectious diseases. Victims of all kinds of violence are, as percentages of the population, at historical lows in most places. The next stop, presumably, is Utopia.

Apparently, Harari overlooked the Great Famine in China during the early 1960s.

Harari argues that human success has not been an unalloyed good. We humans have created a new paradise by exploiting and destroying other species and even nature itself.

Klepp writes:

But if it’s the best of times, it’s also the worst of times—at least for other species. In the present era, which Harari follows other writers in calling the Anthropocene epoch, a dominant, overbreeding humanity is playing the role of the dinosaur-dooming asteroid 65 million years ago. We’re transforming the planet. Many species of larger wild animals are reaching the vanishing point, while the now far more numerous domesticated animals raised for food have been bred into miserable, bloated, immobilized travesties of their wild ancestors. We live in an age of mass extinctions. 

In another context, this would be called guilt tripping. It argues that we should not believe that we have accomplished anything, because our gain is always someone else’s loss. It rejects the notion that a rising tide lifts all boats.

Moreover, Harari suggests that the human species is now on the road to bifurcation, between techno-gods and the exploited rest. This feels like a Platonic division between philosopher kings and the unwashed masses. You can the impression that Harari missed his calling: to be a novelist.

Klepp summarizes a point that attracts the attention of tech oligarchs:

In a few decades, we might have a new caste society that, in Harari’s account, looks something like the Egypt of the pharaohs. Most of humanity, made redundant by artificial intelligence and robots, will be ushered into subservience or virtual-reality obliviousness. But there will be a rich elite whose technical mastery will bring them something approaching omniscience. They will periodically arrange complete biochemical makeovers, giving themselves perpetual youth, and they will have assorted injections and brain prosthetics to bestow unflagging confidence and intelligence and bliss. They will be beings apart, experiencing mental states unknown to all previous merely human beings. 

And,

Amid his Homo deus conjectures, Harari remarks that by achieving immunity to disease and aging, the new technocratic elite will be potentially immortal, but they would still be vulnerable to death by accident (or assassination, I would add). In other words, the supergeeks of tomorrow may have godlike aspirations, but they will be extremely nervous little gods. They may never get out of the house.

Actually, some of the supergeeks are currently working on schemes to ensure us all immortality. One recalls the words of our psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, who once said that, given the choice, no one would ever want to live forever. With the exception of the technogods no one could afford it.

According to Klepp, Harari ignores the looming climate catastrophe and the possibility of nuclear war. And, naturally, he ignores the potential threat of terrorism. Worse yet, he avoids the simple fact that too much technology is not necessarily a good thing for human beings:

Harari has nothing to say about how today’s technology seems to be aiding and abetting our descent into an increasingly crude, inarticulate, and barbaric society—online bullying and abuse, livestreamed suicides and rapes and murders, terrorist recruitment and incitement, and so on—and thus fails to project those trends into the future. In fact, he downplays terrorism as a desperate measure adopted by history’s losers.

It’s nice to see terrorists as losers, but hundreds of millions of losers can wreak considerable havoc.

Klepp warns us against jumping on the prophecy bandwagon. He reminds us of past predictions of a wondrous future. Socialist novelist Edward Bellamy wrote one in 1888. Klepp reminds us of Bellamy’s vision:

In 1888, Edward Bellamy, an American socialist, published his immensely popular novel Looking Backward, which envisioned a happy future in the year 2000: We would have no wars, no banks, no money to put in them, no poverty, no wealth, no prisons, no politicians to put in them, no advertisements, no professional sports, no bad manners, and (now comes the good part) no lawyers—just a rather genteel Industrial Army receiving equal rations of modest middle-class amenities. No mention of computers and the Internet, nor even radios, but there would be telephone connections in every home to a symphony orchestra playing live music.

One lesson is: beware of socialist selling a vision of utopia.

Harari is not a bright-eyed optimist. Or else, he is hedging his bets. Even better, he is dissimulating his idea, the better to seduce people into accepting policies that have failed. After all, socialism promises everything and delivers nothing. Since everyone ought to know it by now, proponents of that program tend to disguise it… the better to dupe the gullible.

It’s a rhetorical tactic. more than a vision of the future. Klepp describes it:

Except for a few remarks about Marxist mistakes, Harari doesn’t deal with the picturesque ruins of the bright futures of the past. And he confesses, reassuringly, that he does not know what the future will be like. Nobody does. He is, he claims, only sketching a few indistinct possibilities and not endorsing any of them. But like Bellamy and other past futurologists, he is extrapolating current technological and social tendencies and cutting and pasting them onto the blank slate of the future, and his chances of being right are not any greater than theirs were. What makes his book readable—his sweeping, high-altitude style of analysis—also makes it somewhat facile.

Desnudas Gone Wild

On this rare occasion something that is too good to be true is true.

The story comes to us from New York’s Times Square. The space has recently been invaded by nude female panhandlers, covered in body paint.  They harass tourists and they even harass some native New Yorkers. They call themselves Desnudas, because they are naked and Hispanic. It turns out that many of them are illegal immigrants. Therefore, they are protected in New York, a sanctuary city.

Fox News has the story (via Maggie’s Farm):

Lewd and rude “desnudas” – naked female panhandlers – are harassing tourists in New York’s Times Square, but cops reportedly can’t arrest them “because most of them are illegal immigrants.”

The desnudas -- a Spanish word meaning "naked" -- are part of a Times Square assembly of popular costumed children’s characters and mostly-naked females hitting tourists up for money in the uber-popular New York City district. A law enforcement source told The New York Post that past proposals to license the often obnoxious street performers went nowhere because most of them are illegal immigrants and wouldn’t register anyway. Plus, City Hall, under Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio, isn’t interested in going after illegals such as the desnudas, the source told The Post.

So with little police enforcement, squads of Minnie Mouses, Incredible Hulks and painted women continue to pester passersby.