Despite the Riots….

Posted on March 21, 2009

Check this out:

Last week, I wrote an article defending free speech for everyone – and in response there have been riots, death threats, and the arrest of an editor who published the article.

Here’s how it happened. My column reported on a startling development at the United Nations. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has always had the job of investigating governments who forcibly take the fundamental human right to free speech from their citizens with violence. But in the past year, a coalition of religious fundamentalist states have successfully fought to change her job description. Now, she has to report on “abuses of free expression” including “defamation of religions and prophets.” Instead of defending free speech, she must now oppose it.

I argued this was a symbol of how religious fundamentalists – of all stripes – have been progressively stripping away the right to freely discuss their faiths. They claim religious ideas are unique and cannot be discussed freely; instead, they must be “respected” – by which they mean unchallenged. So now, whenever anyone on the UN Human Rights Council tries to discuss the stoning of “adulterous” women, the hanging of gay people, or the marrying off of ten year old girls to grandfathers, they are silenced by the chair on the grounds these are “religious” issues, and it is “offensive” to talk about them.

- Johann Hari: Despite the Riots and Threats, I Stand By What I Wrote.  Read the full article here

The author touches on some deep issues in the article (which goes on quite a bit longer and which I highly recomend that ya’ll go read) but I think the best is that Freedom of Speech must be unrestricted in order to function and that the antidote to people who use it to say stupid and ridiculous things is more freedom of speech from other people who oppose them – not government or religious censorship in the name of “public decency” or any such garbage.  Public Decency laws have nothing to do with decency and everything to do with the people who control the State using morality as an excuse to silence those who threaten the status quo.

Interview with Naomi Wolf: A Battle plan for American Revolutionaries

Posted on October 6, 2008

Naomi Wolf, author of 10 Step to Fascism, gives an interview about the ongoing fascist Coup and what you can do to fight it.

Sexism, atitudes, and the gender gap.

Posted on September 23, 2008

found a great article on a new survey on gender, sexism, attitudes, and the persistant gender gap in pay between men and women.    Very intersting stuff.  check this out:

Organizational psychologists Timothy Judge and Beth Livingston found that men who reported holding traditional views (that is, that women belong in the home, while men earn the money) earned on average $11,930 more annually for doing the same kind of work as men who held more egalitarian views. The reverse was true for women, to a much smaller degree. Female workers with more egalitarian views (that men and women should evenly divide the tasks at home and contribute equally to their shared finances) earned $1,052 more than women who did similar jobs but held more traditional views.

The effect was starkest, however, when researchers compared women’s salaries to those of men, while also taking into account their gender-role biases. Men with traditional attitudes not only earned more than other men with egalitarian attitudes, but their annual salary was $14,404 greater than women with traditional attitudes, and $13,352 greater than women with egalitarian attitudes. Put differently, men with traditional attitudes made 71% more than women with traditional attitudes, while egalitarian-minded men made just 7% more than their female counterparts.

Time Magazine, Sept 22, 2008.

This is groundbreaking because it suggests that the pay gap in gender has as much to do with social conditioning, what people are taught to expect, and how they view themselves as it does with overt societal gender bias.  In other words, people who teach their daughters to defer and not be assertive about their rights are actually harming their ability to earn a competitive salary over the course of their lives.

The section on why ‘traditionally’ minded men make more then egalitarian men was also really interesting to me.  The idea that men who view women as equals are actually rewarded with less pay for their work is perhaps not as shocking as it should be, but still a big deal.  It’s as if society says to them “oh, so you believe a woman is just as good as you?  we’ll just treat you like one then.”  However you explain it that’s some powerful negative reinforcement.    The researcher’s hypothesis that it might be at least partly the result of men who view themselves as the primary breadwinner being willing to take bigger risks and be more assertive when negotiating pay also reminded me of something I posted a while ago that also looked at risk and rewardds in relation to gender.  Interesting stuff.

So what do ya’ll think?  How should we interpret this information, how is it useful to folks looking to build towards gender equality?  and what in the world can we do we do about the fact that teaching men to view women as their equals seems to harm their earning potential?