Where Was Huma?

Welcome to Clintonia. Or, I should say, welcome back.

You remember your last trip to Clintonia. You recall the semen-stained dress, flashing Paula Jones, groping Kathleen Willey, raping Juanita Broaddrick, the cigar that was not just a cigar and, God help us, the new Clintonian use for one White House sink.

It’s as though Bill Clinton was flashing the world, making a perfectly shameless public exposure of his private parts. We will note in passing, for those who care about such things, that the dowager Empress of Chappaqua has never been the subject of such exposure. Heaven knows what that means, but in Clintonia only men expose themselves.

In any event, the Clinton sex scandals revolved around the president’s virile organ. Similarly, the sex scandals that have now engulfed Clinton’s mini-me, Anthony Weiner, also concern the same organ. Say what you will about Huma but, as opposed to the wife of a certain presidential candidate, there are no naked pictures of Huma floating through the internet.

First, it was Carlos Danger exposing himself to a woman he didn’t know. Now, in what was supposed to have been the last straw for Huma, Weiner has exposed his bulge while lying in bed with his four year 0ld son. Apparently, this was the end for Huma. It has also, and quite properly, provoked an investigation from Child Protective Services. What kind of father does such a thing?

Whatever kind of father does such a thing, Weiner is a Democrat, so liberals feel some need to exonerate him. After all, he did not hire a prostitute and did not, like Bill Clinton, assault any women. You know and I know that Bill Clinton is so far above it all that when he abuses a woman it doesn’t count. Evidently, Weiner did not understand that just because he was Bill’s adopted son, his mini-me, he could get away with what Bubba was getting away with.

Anyway, a good liberal like Michelle Goldberg does yeoman work rationalizing Weiner’s dereliction:

Even jerks, however, don’t deserve the sort of gleeful public shaming visited on Weiner. It was enough to almost—almost—make me root for him when he was running for New York City mayor, simply as a victory for second chances. And then, in the midst of that race, he lost his chance at redemption with yet another sexting scandal….

It shouldn’t surprise any of us that Weiner, a man with a bottomless need for affirmation, was unable to give up virtual sex in the aftermath of his first epic humiliation, before his attempt at a comeback was fully underway. Think of your worst habit, your most shameful vice. Imagine trying to quit it immediately after losing your job, at a time when your marriage is uncertain and your professional future bleak. Nor should it surprise us that, with his most cherished ambitions thwarted, he’s still trading naughty pictures on the internet. Shame rarely makes people better than they were.

Among the errors Goldberg makes—this is a blog post so I cannot detail all of them—she is wrong to suggest that shame rarely makes people better than they are. It is rare that people better themselves without a soul wrenching experience of shame. Assuming that she knows the difference, guilt is far more likely to cause recidivism. When you feel guilty you can confess and do penance. Then you can go out and sin some more.

Be that as it may, and before we try to make some sense out of all this, we will note the one question that no one was asking. While Weiner was at home in bed with his son, doing his best Mr. Mom impersonation, where was Huma? Where was the child’s mother?

We all know the answer. Huma was running around the country with Hillary, managing her campaign and sharing a hotel suite with her. Somehow or other, and it is surely a symptom of something in our culture, we are not concerned by the fact that a mother has effectively abandoned her son. We shrug. 

In all of the media discussion of this situation, Huma’s abandonment of her child is what Sherlock Holmes called: the dog that didn’t bark.

Huma’s dereliction does not rate with Anthony’s, but we do know that men who are humiliated into playing the role of Mr. Mom very often cheat. I was going to say that they do not take it lying down, but, under the circumstances, that would not be the best image.

Anyway, when Weiner’s bulge-shot appeared on the cover of the New York Post, it was the final straw for Huma. She declared that she was separating from her sometime husband. The world cheered her courageous choice, but no one asked who was going to have custody of the child.

All of Hillary’s supporters rushed to the airwaves to explain that this marital fiasco—and I think that that’s a nice way to put it—had nothing to do with the Clinton presidential campaign. Fair enough. But it does tell us something about life in Clintonia.

After all, the marriage of Anthony and Huma was an arrangement. It was arranged by the Clintons: Bill’s surrogate son married Hillary’s surrogate daughter. Bill Clinton presided over the wedding. Moreover, it was very multicultural: a Jewish man was marrying a daughter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It may or may not have been a happy marriage, but I do not recall seeing a picture of the couple together in which Huma cracked anything resembling a smile. If you can tell anything by looking at a couple together, the Anthony-Huma marriage was a political arrangement. One suspects that the Clinton marriage—another political arrangement—had worked so well for both of them, that they sold the formula to their mini-me’s. And one suspects that Weiner, an ambitious man on the way to becoming the mayor of New York at the time, happily embraced a formula that had worked for the Clintons and that had surely larded over with promises of political support.

And that is the nice way to look at it. But, this explains nothing about Carlos Danger and about Weiner’s utter foolishness and lack of judgment. Perhaps he was emulating Bill Clinton, thinking that he too could get away with just about anything. But there must have been more to it.

Let’s try this. The point of the Anthony-Huma marriage was to provide cover for Huma’s relationship with Hillary. Weiner was simply Huma’s beard. This suggests that Bill Clinton was Hillary’s beard. And, for all we know, that might well have been the case.

If such is the case, the psychology become clearer. Let’s say that a man has married a woman who is radically disinterested in his virile organ. Let’s say that he has married a woman who is not interested in men at all. Might he not suspect that his decision reflects badly on his own sexuality? Might he not suspect that people will look at him as less than manly? Might he not suspect that people will believe that he too is more attracted to members of his own gender?

Obviously, if a man’s wife is not interested in having sexual relations with him or with any man, he has carte blanche to find other women. It has happened before and it will happen again. But, if he wants to show the world that he is all man and that he does not have an ounce of attraction for members of his own gender, he will need to make his sexual conquests a matter of public record. If he wants to do so, he can reduce the chances of discretion by amassing a large number of sexual conquests and by treating them with less than respect. Ultimately, if he is president of the United States, he can ensure that his affair will go public by getting involved with a 22 year old intern. There is no way that a woman that age will keep secret her having fellated the virile organ of the most powerful man on earth.

Apparently, Anthony Weiner was more uxorious than his surrogate father. And yet, he also needed to affirm that he was a virile male, by showing off his organ to the world entire. Again, choosing to do so over the internet with women he did not know was a very good way to get caught. You are more likely to get caught sexting than you are availing yourself of the services of a high-priced escort.

And besides, one suspects that Weiner now knows that he was had, that he was tricked by the Clintons into marrying someone he did not care for and who did not care for him. And, let’s assume that he does not have any good feelings about having to stay home to act like Mr. Mom. By getting caught he has also humiliated his sometime wife and made the Clintons look bad. His actions were self-sacrificing, but they were less irrational than everyone thinks.

Fertility Day

Once upon a time China had a one-child policy. By government edict couples were only allowed to have one offspring. The policy was designed to solve the problem of overpopulation. And also the problem of mass starvation and poverty.

Apparently, the policy has worked so well that, as of last year, it was being changed to a two-child policy.

Europe, and not just Europe, is facing a different problem. Underpopulation. Young Europeans are not reproducing at a sufficiently high rate to maintain the population. They are reproducing below what is called the replacement rate. Over time this means that ethnic Europeans will die out and their nations will be taken over by peoples who are reproducing at much higher rates.

Quartz offered this sobering assessment:

The average fertility rate in the EU was 2.4 children per woman in 1970, but dropped to 1.5 in 2013, according to the OECD. The OECD says a rate of 2.1 is required to ensure a stable population, so rates below this are bad for countries with aging populations, generous social services, and sclerotic economies. (In other words, for Italy.)

And Jonathan Last explained it this way:

The fertility rate is the number of children an average woman bears over the course of her life. The replacement rate is 2.1. If the average woman has more children than that, population grows. Fewer, and it contracts. Today, America's total fertility rate is 1.93, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; it hasn't been above the replacement rate in a sustained way since the early 1970s.

The nation's falling fertility rate underlies many of our most difficult problems. Once a country's fertility rate falls consistently below replacement, its age profile begins to shift. You get more old people than young people. And eventually, as the bloated cohort of old people dies off, population begins to contract. This dual problem—a population that is disproportionately old and shrinking overall—has enormous economic, political and cultural consequences.

When fewer young people pay into the social welfare system a nation might need to import young people from the outside. Otherwise the system will go bust or the elderly will see their benefits cut. Of course, this requires refugees to go to work and to earn their way. If refugees go on welfare, it compounds the problem.

In Italy, the Health Minister recently tried to solve the problem by declaring something she called a “Fertility Day.” She might have used the old standby—“be fruitful and multiply”—but she did not. Whereas the Biblical injunction was addressed to a couple, the Italian Health Minister addressed herself to women, in particular to women who had been postponing marriage and family. Similar programs had been known some success in Denmark and Russia.

It sounds absurd to proclaim a national day celebrating procreative sexuality, but, like it or not, it has come to this. Of course, the Minister notwithstanding, it is not merely a woman’s problem.

The New York Post reports:

The Italian Ministry of Health is in hot water after launching a campaign for a Fertility Day, which is exactly what it sounds like.

The country, which faces a declining birth rate that’s putting its economy in danger, is urging anyone who can make a baby to do so on Sept. 22. “Fertility is a common good,” the campaign urges.

The outcry was swift and vehement. How dare the health minister remind women of their biological clocks?

The New York Post continues:

The Ministry has since removed the initiative’s Web site (fertilityday2016.it), but the bizarre and even offensive images created for the campaign live on. One ad urges, “Beauty knows no age. Fertility does.” Another reads: “Young parents. The best way to be creative.” With the unemployment rate at 42 percent for Italians ages of 15 to 24, writer Giulia Blasi points out that there may be better ways to get creative than popping out a kid you can’t afford. She argues that Italy’s efforts would be better spent making it easier for women to balance motherhood and work.

As one might expect many feminists want the government to solve the problem. But, then again, if the problem reflects a stagnant economy and an absurdly high youth unemployment rate, then perhaps free market reforms will be more effective.

Think about this: how many young Italian men are sufficiently solvent to want to marry and start a family? Rumor has it that many young Italian men are still living at home, cared for by mothers who are perfectly happy to feed them, to clean up after them and to do their laundry. Why trade that in for diaper duty and Mr. Mom?

One imagines that the problem has something to do with the fact that pregnancy has become the modern version of what used to be called “the curse.” For many feminists pregnancy has become a patriarchal plot designed to keep women chained to their homes and out of the workforce.

And yet, the problem of a low replacement rate extends to places like Iran and Japan and Russia… so it is difficult to pin it entirely on Western feminism.

Certainly, a stagnant economy demoralizes the population and produces a generalized feeling of depression.  As we know, this condition causes diminished libido.

And, in our modern age, procreation does not seem quite as urgent as it once did. Low infantile mortality rates and increased longevity have made it easier to defer and delay having children. Not too long ago people did not have a very long lifespan. High infantile mortality rates induced people to have more children. If you expect that some of your children will not live past childhood, you are more likely to want to have more children. If you expect that your male children will be sent off to war you are more likely to want to have more children. If you have a shorter lifespan you will be more likely to want to start having children earlier.

Also, if governments do not provide pension programs you are more likely to have more children… to take care of you in your old age.

And yet, reason, many young men are no longer capable of supporting families. Among the better educated this has produced a declining marriage rate and declining fertility. It is the responsible thing to do. But, the less educated and the less talented continue to reproduce at higher numbers.

Feminists believe that it will all be solved once we have more government policies that protect a woman’s right to be a working mother. Yet, what if women and men are on the same page. What if women are balking about having children because they do not want to work and be mothers at the same time? What if women would prefer to have the option of staying home with their children?

Men who are no longer breadwinners do not want to take on responsibilities they cannot meet. And women who cannot find husbands who can support them also do not want to take on responsibilities they cannot meet as they would wish.

We are not going to solve the problem tomorrow.

Is Colin Kaepernick Whipped?

When the Dallas Cowboys wanted to place a decal on their helmets to commemorate the police officers who had been murdered by a leftist fanatic the NFL declined the request. Wouldn't want to politicize football.

When ESPN announcer Paul Finebaum declared that blacks in America are not oppressed, he was forced to hang his head in shame and to apologize.

Yet, when washed-up football player Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem and was caught wearing socks depicting police officers as pigs, media figures rushed to defend his right to free speech.

This is, after all, the Age of Obama. And the oppression narrative that has driven the Obama presidency has now become dogma. Dispute it at your peril.

Kaepernick is probably going to be cut by the San Francisco 49ers, but the point does need to be made. When you are working for a company and wear a uniform identifying you with the company you do not have a right to say anything you please. The team and the league certainly have a right to make standing for the national anthem is obligatory, not optional. They ought both to do so.

Kaepernick’s job is to play football. Not to politicize the game and to distract the other players who want to play the game. As if the country was not sufficiently divided already.

The point also needs to be made that Kaepernick does not own the meaning of his gesture. Recently, he has declared that he did not mean to disrespect the flag and did not mean his protest as an anti-American gesture. But, you cannot have it both ways. Kaepernick was declaring that America is about oppressing blacks, and about nothing else. Thus, it was unworthy of his respect. He was, by his gesture, disrespecting the flag and demonstrating unpatriotic sentiments toward a country and toward people who had, after all, treated him better than well.

It doesn’t matter what he meant. If he had wanted to express his patriotism he knew how to do it. Since he did not, he was expressing something other than patriotism. Now he has said that he will contribute money to a cause that appeals to him. This does not change the meaning of his gesture.

And since the biracial Kaepernick was abandoned by his black biological father, to be adopted and brought up by a white family, his protest against white people suggests a singular lack of gratitude. He did not just disrespect America; he disrespected the people who had raised him.

While we are here, can you think of another biracial man whose black father abandoned him and his mother and who was brought up by white people? You guessed it: Barack Hussein Obama, himself. Maybe we should have national conversation about black fathers who abandon their children.

Kaepernick’s sentiments notwithstanding, demeaning and denouncing the country does not make anything better. It divides the nation and turns whites and blacks against each other. We have had nearly eight years of it under the aegis of Obama. It’s about time that we returned to an inclusive patriotism.

Be that as it may, all indications point to the fact that Kaepernick was not acting of his own volition. Rumor has it that he protested because his girlfriend told him to do it. Rather than being a strong social justice warrior, Colin Kaepernick was showing the world that he is… whipped!

It’s all about seduction. It’s about one person seducing the other person’s mind, making the other person the spokesperson for a trendy cause that the other person does not really understand.

Seducing minds is not limited to dumb jocks. The tech titans of Silicon Valley often seem to be mouthing progressive platitudes, platitudes that directly contradict their business practices. For example, they are all for diversity but have very un-diverse work forces. Even when they make an all-out and discriminatory effort to hire more minorities—as Facebook recently did—they still fall short. It’s not about oppression; it’s about the absence of qualified candidates.

In the meantime, the woman who controls Kaepernick’s mind is his girlfriend, named Nessa Diab, an MTV DJ. Diab is a Muslim social justice warrior who has expressed great admiration for Black Lives Matter and for Fidel Castro. I add a picture so you will have some sympathy with Kaepernick and understand that if he became her puppet, perhaps there were compensations.

Lately, Kaepernick has been filling his Instagram feed with radical messages and images:

But 31 of his last 42 posts have strong social justice connotations, often featuring quotes from radical Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X, Black Panthers founder Huey Newton and cop killer Assata Shakur. During a Sunday news conference about the flag flap, Kaepernick dressed in a black hat with a large, white “X” and a T-shirt that featured photos of Cuban despot Fidel Castro and Malcolm X.

As for Diab, we read this:

Diab said in a March 2014 interview that she spent many of her formative years in Saudi Arabia, after her dad was transferred there from a job in California. She described being in the Kingdom during the Gulf War and how the threat of bombings later colored her impression of American tragedies.

“When 9/11 happened, it didn’t surprise me at all,” Diab said on the Guy Code Podcast. “’Wow. Mmkay. This is what we went through, probably, every couple months.’”

And also:

Posting about Alton Sterling’s controversial shooting by police officers, Diab remarked “they will also try to discredit the store owner’s account of what occurred because he’s Muslim and we know Islamaphobia is at an all-time high in this country.”

Diab said her parents, who were originally from Egypt, were highly educated, but denied some jobs in the U.S. “because they have an accent.”

Or else, consider this from Diab:

Scott McKay describes Diab’s influence on Kaepernick:

And after he started dating Diab, Kaepernick’s preparation and focus on football melted into nothing. Last year he lost his starting job amid an atrocious season, prompting San Francisco head coach Jim Tomsula to bench him in favor of Jacksonville Jaguar castoff quarterback Blaine Gabbert. And when Tomsula announced an open battle for the job in the offseason, Kaepernick largely withdrew from the team, skipping voluntary workouts and neglecting to match Gabbert’s effort.

Kaepernick’s career is over. Now, he will not be going out with a whimper. He will be going out and will be remembered for spitting on America.

A Psycho Election: Anxiety vs. Depression

What makes Hillary run?

This morning Peggy Noonan shared an epiphany she had watching Hillary deliver a speech in New Hampshire. I don't think that it explains very much, but I like it anyway:

If she weren’t here, she’d be in an empty house in Chappaqua, N.Y., the focus of no eyes—not important, not glamorous, no aides or staffers. I thought: She needs to run, it’s this or reruns on Bravo. I thought: This is why you pick up that there is no overarching purpose, theme or mission to her candidacy—because there isn’t. There is only her need—not to be powerless, not to be away from the center. It’s not The America Project, it’s The Hillary Project.

From this Noonan concludes that Hillary is the depression candidate. She adds that Trump is the anxiety candidate. By her slightly dubious version of these psycho categories she means that Hillary is the same old thing, a tired remnant of yesterday. And that the Donald is the new kid, the one who has no qualifications or experience, whose every appearance makes you afraid of what he is going to say and whose possible presidency makes you dread the future.

She concludes that Mr. Anxiety has an advantage over Ms. Depression because anxiety is a more awake state. There is some truth to that. When you are depressed you have pretty much given up and when you are anxious you are fearing what’s coming next.

Of course, when you are anxious you are not optimistic about what the next day will bring. You might be anxious to greet the new day, but as the term is used in psychiatry, it means that you are awaiting punishment for a crime of word, thought or deed. Raskolnikov was anxious. He was not depressed.

And, to be fair, when you are depressed you might very well throw tantrums, the better to buck up your flagging self-esteem. Freud once noted that depression was anger turned against yourself. He was wrong about that—depression is learned helplessness—but he pointed to the fact that people who are depressed often try to cure their condition by striking out in anger. The correct term would be impotent rage, because it’s better to be enraged and to hide your impotence than to show the world that you are helpless.

Take this as a cautionary note: one should be careful using grand psychiatric categories.

As for the rationale behind the Hillary candidacy, I find it intriguing that Noonan pictures Hillary alone in her house in Chappaqua, watching television. That is, without a husband and without Huma. But, now that Huma is going to be single, perhaps she can move in to Hillary’s place in Chappaqua, to keep her company. As of now, it appears that Hillary and Huma share a suite when they travel for the campaign. Hillary is effectively never alone. Her shadow is always there.

If I may disagree with Noonan, I think that Hillary has a “darker purpose.” She is running in order to vindicate and validate her life. She entered into a marital arrangement with Bill Clinton in order to advance herself, to gain power for herself and to advance the cause of feminism. When you sell out at that level,  you are sorely in need of a large payoff.

Hillary’s main qualification for the job is that she is female. She is yet another in a string of unqualified candidates who owe their jobs to affirmation action and diversity quotas. She has never really gotten any of her big jobs on her own. If her name were not Clinton she would have been working for some government agency or NGO trying to save the world.

Hillary’s candidacy is cultural politics at its worst.

Noonan suggests that Hillary is depression because you know what you are going to get. If you imagine that you are going to get Bill Clinton, think again. The irony here is that the great champion of women’s rights and female empowerment is riding her husband’s coattails. And this suggests that she cannot possibly run the country or the government on her own. Hillary’s resume and much of her life looks, to most Americans, completely fraudulent. She has the advantage of having an army of eunuchs who are willing to lie for her.

These facts make the email scandal salient, an overt expression of something that people have suspected all along. I think that most people are more worried about putting a fraud like Hillary, someone whose claim to be strong and powerful is pure posturing, into a position where her manifest weakness will invite aggressors.

Hillary’s surrogates keep saying that she is tough enough for the presidency. They thought the same of Barack Obama, one of the weakest presidents in memory. Foreign leaders never respected Obama and they surely do not respect Hillary.

And that spells a general anxiety about the nation’s prospects. Putting the military in the hands of someone who is weak and ineffectual—we’ve done that already. How is it working out?

So, I would say that Hillary generates more anxiety than Trump. It may be the case and it is almost surely the case that Trump does not possess anything remotely resembling a qualification for the office of president. Noonan herself debunks the comparison between Trump’s trip to Mexico and Nixon’s trip to China.

She wrote:

A Trump supporter told/spun me that it was a Nixon-to-China moment, which it was not. Nixon knew exactly what he was doing and why, the diplomacy of it had been long and secretly arranged, and it wasn’t driven by immediate political need but by America’s strategic requirements.

And yet, Trump did go to Mexico. Hillary did not. Trump traveled to Lousiana, Hillary did not. Trump puts himself out there in front of the press. Hillary refuses to do a press conference.

Trump would be foolish if he was not afraid of winning a job he is unqualified for, but he is looking a lot less afraid than the dowager empress of Chappaqua.

Hillary is pretending to be confident and in command. But, by avoiding all difficult situations she is looking like a coward. And that makes people anxious.

Surely, Trump is more bluster than courage, but, compared with the feckless Hillary and our current coward-in-chief, he looks like a tower of strength. Thus, as a cure for anxiety.

The Last Word on the Minimum Wage

Over at the Moonbattery blog Dave Blount has the last word about minimum wage increases. (Via Maggie’s Farm) You know what happens when governments force businesses to increase the minimum wage: people lose their jobs. But then, wanna-be socialists try to solve the problem by increasing the minimum wage some more.

Blount describes it well:

By then, mobs of underachievers will be demanding $20/hour for unskilled work that is worth less than half that, and that in many cases can be done more efficiently by machine. The collectivist demagogues in charge will be happy to comply, knowing that the more people who get laid off, and the more who are never able to get onto the first rung on the economic ladder, the more votes there will be for the party of coercive wealth redistribution — at least until we get to the point where there is no more wealth to redistribute.

Gender Stereotypes Forever

If you consider all the time and energy that feminists have put into railing against gender stereotypes and the traditional division of household labor, you would expect that people would have gotten the point.

In fact, they have gotten the point. They have learned to ignore the rantings of feminists. As it happens, most people still divide household chores by gender. For all we know gender stereotyping might have a rationale that goes beyond social construction. Perhaps it has something to do with the biological difference between the sexes. Perhaps it has to do with economic efficiency. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that members of one gender are more competent at performing certain tasks.

Slate reports on an Indiana University study:

If an actual glass ceiling breaks in a couple’s home, which partner sweeps up the shards? According to a new study from Indiana University, most Americans would give that duty to the woman. Study participants who read sample marriage scenarios assigned more chores in general—especially traditionally “feminine” chores such as cleaning, cooking, and child care—to women, even in scenarios that described straight couples where the woman earned more money than the man. Nearly 75 percent of participants thought women in straight couples should be the ones to buy groceries, cook, do laundry, and clean the house; nearly 90 percent thought their male partners should do the auto work and outdoor tasks.

Note that the study does not specify the gender of the respondents. This suggests that couples agree to the normal division of household labor. Does this mean that the feminist project of gender neutering all Americans is failing? We can certainly hope so. Does it mean that, however successful the campaign to gender-neuter everyone’s language, people are going through the motions. Just think of all those texts that use the generic feminine pronouns or that ban the word “man” are any variant. Could it be that these texts are manifesting a syntactic affectation?

Anyway, the unfortunate IU researchers not only discovered that gender roles are not a social construct. They discovered, to their added chagrin, that even in relationship between people of the same gender, household chores were still divided according to masculine and feminine characteristics.

Slate reports:

Gendered housework stereotypes run so deep that even members of fictional same-sex couples got assigned certain chores over others based on how feminine or masculine their interests were. A man who likes shopping and rom-coms, for instance, would get stuck with washing dishes and grocery shopping, while his basketball-playing, guns and explosions–loving husband got to breathe the crisp fall air as he mowed the lawn.

Of course, some have argued that it’s not about gender. They believe that it's about who is the breadwinner. The person who is not working outside the home or who is working less than the other will be assigned more household chores. Feminists believe that once men and women are equals in the workplace they will divide chores equally at home. In fact, they have produced some pseudo-scientific studies demonstrating their point. Still, it’s an illusion, but don’t tell your neighborhood feminist.

Anyway, Slate tells us that the research has shown that breadwinner status does not count for very much either:

The authors of the study were taken aback by the results; they expected income to play a larger role in housework division. “Most research on housework suggests that couples divide housework along different axes; for example, lower-earning partners do more housework than higher-earning partners,” study author Natasha Quadlin told the Huffington Post. “Instead, our findings suggest that [gender] is by far the biggest determinant of Americans’ attitudes toward housework.”

And also,

Female breadwinners were still expected to do more household chores and child care than their lower-earning male partners; 75 percent of participants said the straight female partner should take care of laundry while only 57 percent assigned it to the lower-earning partner. The only aspect of child care that a slight majority of participants assigned to men was discipline.

Slate continues:

In scenarios involving straight couples, participants had gender outweigh gendered interests when it came to divvying up chores: Women who loved sports still had to do more feminine chores than male partners who baked cookies in their spare time. Among gay couples, lacking a traditional mold in which to shape household labor division, participants’ brains shorted out and defaulted to other recognizable stereotypes: They tasked the more feminine partner of either gender with meeting the physical and emotional needs of children.

To be fair, the author of the Slate article finds this all to be very upsetting. She does not like the fact that gender norms are far more deeply entrenched than she would like.  In itself this tells us that feminist zealots have no real interest in allowing reality to intrude on their illusions. Thus, we are grateful that she is reporting them fairly. That she draws the wrong conclusion—well, nobody’s perfect.

Banning FGM in Egypt

If the Huffington Post can cheer this new law, everyone with any sense should do the same. Everyone, that is, except those who persist in supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.

At issue is the Egyptian practice of FGM. The term is an acronym for Female Genital Mutilation. Some insist on calling to female circumcision, but that is, dare I say, a deceptive euphemism.

Even though the Egyptian government outlawed the practice in 2008, it still persists. Now the Egyptian government is moving toward changing the law by making FGM a felony, not a misdemeanor.

The Huffington Post reports:

Three months after a teenager died while undergoing female genital mutilation conducted by a doctor, Egypt is cracking down on the practice.

The Egyptian cabinet approved a draft bill on Sunday that would enact a punishment of five to seven years in prison for anyone who performs FGM, according to Ahram Online. Previously, the penalty was three months to two years.

The bill, which still has to be ratified by parliament, raises the penalty from a misdemeanor to a felony.

“A strong law is the first step to protecting every girl at risk,” Suad Abu-Dayyeh of women’s rights organization Equality Now said in a statement to The Huffington Post. “We have seen some reduction in FGM in Egypt, but at the same time health professionals and others are still not being held to account for carrying it out. With a better law, it is now more likely that this can change.”

Female genital mutilation involves the total or partial removal of, or injury to, the external female genitalia for no medical benefit, and can cause bleeding, infertility or death. The World Health Organization considers it a violation of women’s rights.

The practice of FGM has been illegal in Egypt since 2008, according to the BBC, but it is still widespread.

Egypt has one of the highest rates of FGM in the world, with 87 percent of women aged 15 to 49 having undergone the procedure, according to Unicef.

Think about that: 87% of young Egyptian women have been genitally mutilated.

On several occasions I have remarked that, to do voter outreach before the 2012 presidential election, the Muslim Brotherhood sent mobile surgical vans into the poor neighborhoods of Cairo, to make it more convenient for parents to mutilate their daughters.

Now I have discovered an article  from 2012 that described the outreach program in detail:

In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood have offered to circumcise women for a nominal fee as part of their community services, a move that threatens to reverse decades of local struggle against the harmful practice argues Mariz Tadros.

Voting in the Egyptian presidential election is underway and what better way to win over votes of the poor than through offering badly needed low cost services and free goods. The Muslim Brotherhood, who have a track record in community outreach through services and goods, have added a new service for Egyptians: circumcising girls for a nominal fee. The practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) or female circumcision as it is popularly called, involves the removal of the clitoris and part of the labia minora under the pretext that this will protect a girl’s chastity. FGM, although practiced for thousands of years, has been on the decline in the past decade thanks to a socially sensitive and nationwide campaign to show that FGM is neither religiously prescribed, nor linked to a woman’s moral behaviour. Thanks to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis, the progress made in eliciting positive social change on curbing the practice now risks being reversed.

As it happened, the Brothers denied the charge. However, reporter  Mariz Tadros found a flyer from the Freedom and Justice Party, the Brotherhood political party that said otherwise:

The flyer which has the party’s logo on it says “The Freedom and Justice party in Abou Aziz is honoured to organize the yearly health clinic which covers all specialisations for a nominal fee of LE 5 for a check up on Friday the 20/4/2012 at the Islamic Institute after Friday prayers”. This was followed by a list of specialists including surgery, gynaecology and obstetrics, dentistry, dermatology etc. At the bottom of the list is a note saying “We receive cases for circumcision for males and females for LE30 a case”. What is significant about this flyer is the reference to male and female circumcision as if the practices were similar, and the fact that these are treated as medical cases, “operations” to be performed by members of a medical team.

It is unclear whether the mobile health clinic did actually go ahead with circumcising the girls. Since the introduction of the law criminalizing the practice in 2008, the villagers have been circumcising their daughters secretly with the help of a nurse who visited once a year, in secret, and circumcised the girls in groups. Hence, it is unlikely that the villagers would readily admit to the clinic offering FGM as they have collectively been practising it illegally for a long time. A resident of the Abou Aziz village - who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals - said that the flyer was posted everywhere in the village, but that immediately after the publicity the flyers disappeared.

In view of the political standing of the Muslim Brotherhood and their religious influence among many Egyptians, there is no denying that the impact of their promotion of FGM is deep and far reaching. Whether girls were circumcised or not on the 20^th of April is not the point: what is at issue here is their propagation of a practice that has been proven to be detrimental to women's well being and bodily integrity. 

The article goes into extensive detail. It is filled with denials and counter denials. To some extent the Mubarak government succeeded in reducing the practice of FGM. And the Muslim Brotherhood was going to facilitate its return… or, at least, to offer the option.

So, one asks again, why was the first foreign leader to grace the presence of newly elected Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, the American Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton?