Wednesday, May 03, 2006

DELIBERATELY BLIND FEMINIST COMPLAINTS

April is a beautiful month in Washington DC: blooming trees line the streets, gardens erupt with colorful tulips, and people open windows to welcome the warm air. It's a season for optimism. Unless, of course, you are a part of the liberal feminist movement. For the feminists, April is a season for complaining.

Martha Burk, President of the National Council of Women's Organizations, began the month celebrating her own spring tradition-protesting the PGA Masters' tournament in Augusta, Georgia. This year's protest was tame in comparison to her past media-hyped events. She published the obligatory op-ed and press release denouncing Augusta National Golf Club's male-only membership policy and threatening companies (like Exxon) that support the tournament. Fans cheering Phil Mickelson's victory were none the wiser.

But the real feminist complaint festival begins on Tuesday April 25th. To feminists, it's Equal Pay Day, a pseudo-holiday when National Organization for Women and National Council of Women's Organizations lament the disparity between men's and women's wages. Feminists groups claim that the first four months of the year were spent making up for last year's gap. On April 25, women have finally earned as much as men in 2005.

There's one problem with Equal Pay Day-the premise is bogus. Department of Labor data confirms that the median wage of a full-time working woman is three-quarters of that of a full-time working man, but like too many statistics, this fact ignores more than it reveals. This data doesn't account for relevant factors such as occupation, experience and educational attainment.

Feminists may not like it, but the evidence shows that women's choices-not discrimination-cause wage gap. Warren Farrell - a former board member of the National Organization for Women's New York chapter - identifies 25 decisions that individuals make when choosing jobs in his book, Why Men Earn More. Women, he finds, are much more likely to make decisions that increase their quality of life, but decrease their pay.

Most people understand that many women often take time out of the workforce to care for family members, particularly young children. Even women who work full-time log fewer hours in the office on average than full-time working men. It is common sense that a worker who remains employed continually is going to make more than someone who drops out of the workforce for several years.

Working less is just one of the decisions women make that results in less take-home pay. Women also avoid dangerous jobs (more than nine in ten occupational deaths occur among men) and jobs that place them outdoors in the elements. Women are less willing than men to move for a job or travel frequently. Dr. Farrell's book provides a roadmap for how individual women can increase their earnings, by making different choices, including working more hours in the office, assuming more risks or relocating for a job.

It's important for women to recognize these tradeoffs. Women who hear the feminists' rhetoric on Equal Pay Day may feel exploited. But before embracing the victim myth, they should consider how their choices have affected their careers. Most women will find that their decisions have been made based on many factors. Women care about financial compensation. But they also consider the number of hours in the office, whether the work is personally fulfilling, and the convenience of the workplace.

Men place a higher priority on pay than women when assessing a job. Why do feminist join men in fixating on this one aspect of work life? Why should we assume that men have the right priorities? Instead of urging women to act more like men, feminist ought to celebrate the choices that women make, including the choice to forgo income in favor of more time with family or jobs that are personally rewarding.

I'm partially to blame for the income gap. I've chosen a less-lucrative career that allows me to work from home while I care for my infant daughter. But you won't see that in the statistics: when feminists look at the data, I'm simply a full-time worker who is not making as much as she could. I'm not a victim. I'm just someone who has made choices that make the most sense for my personal situation. And unlike the feminists, I'm not complaining.

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TOTALITARIAN CHIC

By Jeff Jacoby

In January 2005, Britain's Prince Harry attended a birthday party dressed as a Nazi. When the London Sun published a picture of the prince in his German desert uniform and swastika armband, it triggered widespread outrage and disgust. In scathing editorials, Harry was condemned as an ignorant and insensitive clod; months later, he was still apologizing for his tasteless costume. "It was a very stupid thing to do," he said in September. "I've learnt my lesson."

For a more recent example of totalitarian fashion, consider Tim Vincent, the New York correspondent for NBC's entertainment newsmagazine, "Access Hollywood." Twice in the last few weeks, Vincent has introduced stories about upcoming movies while sporting an open jacket over a bright red T-shirt -- on which, clearly outlined in gold, was a large red star and a hammer-and-sickle: the international emblems of totalitarian communism. And what was the public reaction to seeing *those* icons of cruelty and death turned into the latest yuppie style? Furor? Moral outrage? Blistering editorials? None of the above.

Nazi regalia may be strictly taboo, but communist emblems have never been trendier. Enter "hammer and sickle" into a shopping search engine, and up pop dozens of products adorned with the Marxist brand -- T-shirts and ski caps, bracelet charms and keychains, posters of Lenin and "Soviet Kremlin Stainless Steel Flasks."

The glamorization of communist imagery is widespread. On West 4th Street in Manhattan, the popular KGB Bar is known for its literary readings and Soviet propaganda posters. In Los Angeles, the La La Ling boutique sells baby clothing emblazoned with the face of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro's bloody henchman. At the House of Mao, a popular eatery in Singapore, waiters in Chinese army uniforms serve Long March Chicken, and a giant picture of Mao Zedong dominates one wall.

"A French government agency, the National Lottery, was crazy enough to use Stalin and Mao in one of its advertising campaigns," observed Stephane Courtois in his introduction to The Black Book of Communism, a scholarly survey of communist crimes. "Would anyone even dare to come up with the idea of featuring Hitler or Goebbels in its commercials?"

What explains such "communist chic?" How can people who would never dream of drinking in a pub called Gestapo cheerfully hang out at the KGB Bar? If the swastika is an undisputed symbol of unspeakable evil, can the hammer-and-sickle and other emblems of communism be anything less?

Between 1933 and 1945, Adolf Hitler's Nazis slaughtered some 21 million people, but the communist nightmare has lasted far longer and its death toll is far, far higher. Since 1917, communist regimes have sent more than 100 million victims to their graves -- and in places like North Korea, the deaths continue to this day. The historian R.J. Rummel, an expert on genocide and government mass murder, estimates that the Soviet Union alone annihilated nearly 62 million people: "Old and young, healthy and sick, men and women, even infants and the infirm, were killed in cold blood. They were not combatants in civil war or rebellions; they were not criminals. Indeed, nearly all were guilty of . . . nothing."

Yet communism rarely evokes the instinctive loathing that Nazism does. Prince Harry's swastika was way over the line, but Tim Vincent's hammer-and-sickle was kitschy and cool. Why? Several reasons suggest themselves.

One is that in the war to defeat Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union fought with the Allies. World War II eventually gave way to the long-drawn Cold War, but America's alliance with Moscow left in many minds the belief that when it counted most, the communists were on our side.

Moreover, the Nazis didn't camouflage their hatefulness. Their poisonous rhetoric made only too clear that they loathed Jews and other "subhumans" and believed an Aryan master race was destined to rule all others. By contrast, communist movements have typically masked their malice and ruthlessness with appealing talk of peace, equality, and an end to exploitation. Partly as a result, the myth persists to this day that communism is really a noble system that has never been properly implemented.

Third, the excesses of Joseph McCarthy hurt honest anticommunism. In the backlash to McCarthyism, many journalists and intellectuals came to dismiss any strong stand against communists as "Red baiting," and conscientious liberals found it increasingly difficult to take a vocal anti-Soviet stand.

But perhaps the most compelling explanation is the simplest: visibility. Ever since the end of World War II, when photographers entered the death camps and recorded what they found, the world has had indelible images of the Nazi crimes. But no army ever liberated the Soviet Gulag or halted the Maoist massacres. If there are photos or films of those atrocities, few of us have ever seen them. The victims of communism have tended to be invisible -- and suffering that isn't seen is suffering most people don't think about. "Communist chic?" The blood of 100 million victims cries out from the ground. To wear the symbols of their killers is no fashion statement, but the ultimate in bad taste.

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THE INCORRECTNESS OF GAMBLING

American addiction expert Stanton Peele chastises British commentators who see gamblers as fickle victims: 'As a general rule, convincing people that they are powerless to influence events in their lives is not a good way of going about things. And telling gamblers that they are sick or diseased is likely only to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.'

Stanton Peele, the loudest critic of what he calls America's 'addiction to addiction' - where it has become the norm to see everything from compulsive shopping to biting your fingernails as diseases that require medical or psychological intervention - has come to Britain to give a talk at a conference in Bath, Somerset. He arrives at a time of great concern about gambling addiction, where numerous commentators claim that the New Labour government's support for more super casinos will cause an 'epidemic' of problem gambling and precipitate a 'public health crisis'. 'That kind of language seems based on the idea that people can't help themselves', says Peele. 'In fact they can.'

Peele has been described as a thorn in the side of America's therapy industry. In the land that has given us Oprah, phrases such as 'damaged goods', and books on chocolate, shopping and sex addiction (who can forget when the slightly slimy Hollywood star Michael Douglas confessed to being a 'recovering sex addict'?), Peele is in a minority who criticises the 'medicalisation' of personal and social problems. 'The US in particular specialises in trying to define people's problems in medical terms', he says. 'It's tempting because then you think you can come up with some treatment and solve the problem. But of course it doesn't work like that.'

One of his big worries is that defining every compulsive experience as a kind of illness ends up convincing people that there is little they can do to overcome their difficulties. 'The disease model of addiction makes everything into an accident. It says "Oh you have a gene or a certain propensity and that is why you do what you do". It discourages people from facing up to the uncomfortable truths of why they spend too much time on slot machines or have 15 drinks instead of three. It tells people there isn't much they can do to turn their life around, without a lifetime of guidance from therapists, that is.'

So people who scoff too much chocolate aren't just being greedy or comfort-eating to avoid something else - they apparently have a medical addiction triggered, according to some accounts, by the 'love chemical' phenylethylamine found in chocolate. And Michael Douglas, pre-Catherine Zeta-Jones, was not just a serial womaniser or cheat (allegedly) who could stop sleeping around if he really wanted to; he was a 'sex addict' who could not control his urges.

In Britain, all eyes are currently focused on gambling. The government has faced fierce criticism over its Gambling Bill, which will allow eight Vegas-style super-casinos to open and for 24-hour gambling in certain establishments. Reading some of the critical coverage you would think the government had implanted a disease in the population. It might be fighting the arrival of bird flu, but apparently it is encouraging the spread of 'gambling sickness'. The Daily Mail says Britain 'faces an epidemic of gambling addiction'. '[C]rime will increase, lives will be ruined and families destroyed as punters lured by the promise of big-money prizes become hooked...mesmerised', the paper says, envisioning a 28 Days Later-style Britain with slot machines rather than monkeys turning the masses into zombies.

In the Guardian this week, Polly Toynbee worried about the creation of more and more 'dead-eyed punters', and accused the government of giving a 'green light for an addiction that blights children's lives' (4). Others have explicitly discussed gambling as an illness. In 2004, the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Draft Gambling Bill said that if the government went ahead with its plans then the Department of Health should be readied to deal with the inevitable 'public health' consequences. The BBC website reports that gambling is an 'illness' which some people have to 'live with every day until they die'. There is even talk - though more in America than in Britain - of a 'gambling gene' that makes some people become hooked on the slots or the horses.

'It's easy to forget that for most people gambling is a pastime, not a disease', says Peele. 'A lot of people drink alcohol and only a few of them become addicted - and quite a lot of people gamble and not too many of them become addicted. Worrying endlessly about the creation of more incurable gambling addicts because super casinos are opening is like fretting about more alcoholics every time a new bar opens on your street.'

Peele is no fan of gambling. He recognises that for some people gambling can become problem gambling, and argues that, yes, it can be compulsive and addictive. 'It is a very immediate and powerful experience that has the capability of captivating people's consciousness with detrimental effects, and that's a kind of definition of addiction', he says. He's also critical of governments which profess to be terribly worried about compulsive behaviour in the general population but who sponsor casinos because gambling has big tax benefits. He points out an irony in America. Certain state governments are starting to 'feel the financial pinch', he says, of having successfully reduced the number of smokers through bans on smoking in public places and other measures - so now they are looking to gambling as a way of making money. 'The way they see it, at least gambling doesn't cause lung cancer', he says, sceptically.

But Peele has little time for the idea that every gambler is a short step from becoming a problem gambler, and that these problem gamblers are somehow zombies on a path to self-destruction. 'I don't think experts realise how damaging it is to tell people they are weak and cannot help themselves. If you talk to alcoholics now they will say they can't overcome it, that they have to live with their "disease" forever. How useful is it to tell overweight people or gamblers that they have a disease? It is such a strange enterprise.' He notes that very often it is liberals who pursue this enterprise. 'In general I'm a political liberal', he says. 'So I'm surprised that liberals are attracted by the idea that people can't control their behaviour and need to be pitied. That is a very infantilising view.'

In fact, individuals often come through their trials and tribulations. 'People can overcome these things on their own. In the United States, the growth in gambling is highly focused on college campuses. If you're a 20-year-old student worried about your finals, and spending a lot of time on gambling websites trying to forget it all, does that mean you're a lifetime gambling addict? No. And convincing people that they are is counterproductive. In most cases, like with drinking and drugs, people mature, they develop responsibilities like work and families, and they realise that they have to desist from their bad habits. In short, they get a life.'

Indeed, at the conference 'Unhooked Thinking' in Bath tomorrow, Peele will argue that most people who develop a drinking or gambling problem are better left untreated, or certainly untreated by disease-model therapists. 'I will reveal that even in the US, where alcohol treatment is rampant, three quarters of people who were ever alcoholic do not undergo treatment - and a larger percentage of these people overcome alcoholism than those who undergo treatment. Those who are treated by something like Alcoholics Anonymous - which very explicitly tells them they have a disease - are often less able to control or moderate their alcoholic intake.'

'And when it comes to problem gamblers, too', says Peele, 'let's not tell them they're diseased or zombified. Most of them will use their own volition to get a grip'.

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