Half Changed World

Last week, Phantom Scribbler asked me to post a bit about how I’m keeping shabbat. 

The short answer is "inconsistently."  But that’s actually a step toward observing it, not away.  In the past, I’ve let perfectionism get in the way — which means that I’ve been least likely to celebrate shabbat those weeks when I’m stressed and overwhelmed, most in need of a step back.

So two weeks ago, we lit candles and said motzi over sliced wheat bread because we hadn’t bought any challah and said p’ree hagafen over apple juice, rather than grape juice.  (I know, it should be p’ree ha-etz, fruit of the tree, not fruit of the vine, but we were pretending it was grape juice.)  And we went to tot shabbat services the next morning.  Last week, D had a sleepover with a friend, and I went out to dinner with my friends, so we didn’t really do anything.  It varies.

I’m actually baking challah this week.  Or rather, I left it to rise in the fridge this morning, and T should have put it in the oven sometime this afternoon.  I know, it sounds very Martha Stewartish, but it’s really not any more of a hassle than making a separate trip to the bakery.  But D loves challah — it will probably be all he eats for dinner tonight — and I love the feel of kneeding dough.

As I said last week, I’m trying to cut back on my computer time.  I should probably just turn it off, and not turn it on until Sunday.  I’m encouraging board games, but not banning television.  I’m willing to drive to services or the library, but trying not to run a million errands.

And tomorrow I’m spending all day in my training class. Oh well.

Sometime a month or so ago, I was checking out BlogPulse and I was horrified to find that most of the blogs it thought were in my neighborhood were pretty right-wing.  My dad’s theory was that I talk about economic concepts like "opportunity cost" and "signaling" and very few liberals use that sort of language.  (It was also fairly soon after I added my new URL, which I think confused its software.)

Well, liberals and progressives who want to learn how to throw economics terms around with the best of them should check out the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s free Economics Seminar.  If you’re in the DC area, you can attend in person.  If not (or if Thursday evenings are busy for you), you can download the audio files.  I haven’t listened to them myself, but they look like they should be interesting.

For a great example of how economic reasoning can be mis-used, check out this post on the elite colleges and SAHMs issue from Richard Posner at U Chicago.  He’s arguing that professional schools should discourage applicants who aren’t going to work as much as possible by charging more for tuition, but rebating a portion for every year they work.  It falls apart because of two fundamental flaws in his assumptions.

First, he assumes that the need/desire/ability to benefit from a good can be measured by willingness to pay for it.  This is a classic assumption of market economists, but it only holds if people have comparable resources.  If my son is willing to pay $5 for something, it means that he values it very highly, because that’s the full amount of his savings.  If I’m willing to pay $5 for something, it doesn’t mean much at all…

Second, he assumes that there are positive externalities to use of professional skills:

"while successful lawyers and businessmen command high incomes, those incomes often fall short of the contribution to economic welfare that such professionals make. This is clearest when the lawyer or businessman is an innovator, because producers of intellectual property are rarely able to appropriate the entire social gain from their production."

I think this is a highly questionable argument — a lot of people would argue that sucessful lawyers often produce negative externalities.  As Gary Becker, Posner’s blogging partner, responds:

"The private gain to a working lawyer or MBA graduate seems to capture pretty much all the social gain from their work. Posner stresses the potential innovations produced by these graduates, and the taxes they pay. But major innovations from graduates of these schools are surely rare, and taxes affect the incentives of everyone, not only professional school graduates."

This whole discussion is pretty ironic, since good parenting is among the best examples of an action where the person doing it captures very little of the social gain.

I’m wiped, so this is mostly going to be a few pointers to some links I found useful in putting that Times article about Yale women and their future plans in context.

• Gelf Magazine has the full text of the "survey", showing that many of the questions were fairly leading.
• Mediabistro reports that the students quoted in the article are pretty unhappy about it.  Am I being too cynical when I think that maybe they just realized that this is the first thing that’s going to come up when anyone — a potential employer or a potential date — googles them for a long time to come.  (Via Alas)
• Jack Shafer at Slate hit the ground running last Tuesday with an article pointing out Story’s use of "weasel words" like "many" in the article.  Friday, he followed up with a second article, noting that the Times had run a very similar article back in 1980.  I was particuarly amused by that, since the last time I went hunting for statistics on mothers’ labor force participation, I found a 1994 BLS article entitled "Are women leaving the labor force?"  Some things never seem to change.
• There’s been a ton written about this article around the blogosphere, but I think Fred Vincy at Stone Court does a particularly good job of sorting out the different questions that can be asked.
• Judith Stadtman Tucker at Mothers Movement Online offers a thoughtful response to the article that goes beyond pointing out its flaws.
• Finally, I think it’s worth noting that none of the family-oriented young women quoted in the story seemed at all interested in David Brooks’ and Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s advice that they get busy having babies right away.

I’m also working on a post about SAHMs and welfare, but I know too much about welfare and so keep getting lost on tangents…

Today’s book is The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and "Women’s Work," by Kathleen Norris.  It’s a small book, 4" x 7", with only about 90 pages, and is the text of a lecture that Norris gave, the 1998 Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality.  Based on the list of previous title in the series, it appears the lectures always focus on women and spirituality.

I requested the book because I read about it (can’t remember where, sorry), and the title intriged me.  And I often feel overwhelmed by the everyday (which is what both "quotidian" and "mundane" mean), so I thought it might be helpful. 

Overall, I can’t say I found the book illuminating.  Norris waxes enthusiastic about the possibility of finding spirituality in the midst of ordinary chaos, and praises "those who manage to find God in a life filled with noise, the demands of other people and relentless daily duties that can consume the self" but fails to provide any guidance for how to do so. (Except for a nagging suggestion that "young parents juggling child-rearing and making a living" should, "if they are wise,… treasure the rare moments of solitude and silence that come their way, and use them not to escape, to distract themselves with television and the like.")

Norris writes that she knew "since high school, that whatever I was destined for, it was not motherhood."  And she is best known for her book about life as an oblate in a monastery.  I found her cheerleading for the joys of the quotidian a little bit like someone who hikes unencumbered up a mountain while I am carrying a huge pack.  When I trip in the mud and beg for help, she tells me, oh no, my journey will be so much more impressive than hers for having carried the pack.  Perhaps, but I’m not sure I’m going to make it at all. 

Norris is at her best when she shares her enthusiasm for laundry (especially when hung on a line) and daily liturgies, and how she uses them to bring herself out of terrible blue funks (although she uses the archaic word "acedia" instead of admitting to depression.).   And I’m happy to have read the book if only for her discussion of collecting manna as the prototypical daily chore.  (As you may remember, the Torah says that God provided manna each day and the Israelites had to collect it each morning.  There was no point in collecting extra so you wouldn’t have to do it the next day, because except for the double portion provided for Shabbat, it all went bad overnight.)

Last Friday, the Washington Post website carried a pair of stories about senior citizens afflicted by the hurricanes.  One discussed the sequence of events at a nursing home in New Orleans that failed to evacuate in the face of the hurricane warnings.  Twenty-two people died.  The other reported on the bus that exploded, carrying senior citizens from  a Houston nursing home, evacuating in the threat of Rita.  Twenty-four people died.  Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

I’m not arguing that the governmental preparations for Katrina, or the immediate response, were appropriate.  There were major screw-ups at many levels, no doubt.  But I have some sympathy for the planners, because figuring out how to prepare for this sort of high consequence, low probability event has got to be one of the hardest tasks there is in public policy.  If you mobilize fully every time there’s a risk, you’re going to sound a lot like Chicken Little.

In grad school, we did an extended policy exercise around the 1976 swine flu scare.  It’s a useful cautionary tale.  As with today’s worries about a bird flu pandemic, this was a case where experts were convinced that there was a high likelihood of an outbreak of a flu variety that no one living had been exposed to, with fears that it could resemble the deadly 1918 epidemic.  HEW undertook a massive vaccination campaign in the fall of 1976, with over 40 million people vaccinated.  However, the vaccination campaign was called off in mid-December, as reports started coming in of cases of Guillain-Barre Syndrome among people receiving the vaccine.  The anticipated epidemic never occurred, and the federal government was widely criticized for exposing people to a dangerous vaccine. 

Last week, Mieke emailed me to draw my attention to her post about lead found in soft vinyl lunch boxes.  Her post is based on a report from the Center for Environmental Health which is suing the makers and retailers of kids’ lunchboxes in which they found excessive levels of lead in an assortment of kids’ lunchboxes that they tested.

As it happens, I read her email about half an hour after I had ordered D a Buzz Lightyear lunchbox.  (His teachers have asked that we provide him with a full-sized backpack, and while I was ordering the backpack, I decided for an extra $5, we could spring for the matching lunchbox.)  So, what am I going to do?  Am I going to throw it out?  Or spend as much as the lunchbox itself cost on a lead test kit?  Or give my precious child a potentially toxic bag?

Probably the last.   I read the CEH press release carefully, and it never says how many lunchboxes they tested, or what fraction tested high.  My guess is it’s a fairly low percentage, or they would have said.  And, as they said:

"The levels CEH found in the lunch boxes are not high enough to cause acute lead poisoning during normal use. However, if your child is exposed to lead from other sources, a leaded lunch box would add to their health risk."

As a basis for comparison, the amount of lead any child is likely to be exposed to through a lunch box is small compared to what every one of my generation and earlier breathed as a result of leaded gasoline.  I’m not criticizing Mieke or anyone else who wants to test their child’s lunchbox.  I’m glad that CEH is keeping the manufacturers’ honest.  But I’m not going to worry about it myself.

Except at 2 am.

Earlier this week, I turned on the radio and heard this NPR story about the bridge at Gretna.  My husband, who generally avoids the news as much as possible, hadn’t heard about this event before.  When the story was over, he looked at the handful of goldfish crackers that he had picked up, and discovered that he had turned them into goldfish dust from clenching his fists.

Rob at Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk faxed a letter to Mayor Ronnie Harris of Gretna, and Harris called him back.  Rob posted his transcript of their conversation.  It’s quite fascinating.

Rivka at Respectful of Otters suggests that cognitive dissonance leads some people to portray the victims of Katrina as bad people, who got what they deserved.  She writes:

Cognitive dissonance gets particularly ugly when reality collides with the just world hypothesis, the belief that "the world is an orderly, predictable, and just place, where people get what they deserve." Faced with tragedy, victimization, or injustice, just world believers have four options to reduce the cognitive dissonance: they can act quickly to help relieve the victim’s suffering (restoring the justice of the situation), minimize the harm done (making the tragedy a less severe blow to their beliefs), justify the suffering as somehow deserved (redefining the situation as just), or focus on a larger, more encompassing just outcome of the "poor people will receive their rewards in heaven" variety.

When the NPR story on Gretna ended, I said "And when they die, they shall go to the Pearly Gates.  And there will be a bridge to get there…."

Unfortunately, I don’t really believe in a heaven/hell where everyone gets their just deserts.  So I’m left believing that the only justice in the universe is that which we create.  And that’s often a pretty weak justice.

The usually funny WaiterRant got all philosophical in the aftermath of Katrina.  He quoted a pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed for his part in an attempt to assassinate Hitler, who said: “God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us.”

The Waiter’s take on this was:

"But within Bonhoeffer’s words lies a challenge. Since God doesn’t come down in a blizzard of special effects to bail us out – we have to help each other. We recognize the suffering of others and are moved to relieve it. We can’t coop ourselves up in our apartments, churches, and mosques wishing all the bad things will go away. There’s no room for childish magical thinking. We have to act. The rescuers of 9/11 and the Gulf Coast understood this without all the fancy theological reflection. Bonhoeffer would say when we help each other that is God helping us."

That sounds about right to me.

I’m trying to make Shabbat more a part of my life, and (at least for right now) that involves staying away from the computer.  See you Sunday.

Yale dorm rooms are kind of small.  It’s not unusual to have four students sharing a two-bedroom suite that was built in a previous age for two students, or possibly even for a student and his servant.  One of the stories that floated around when I attended is that Yale used to have a goal of admitting "1000 Leaders of the Future" each year.  Then they decided to admit women (in 1969!), but they didn’t want to stop admitting "1000 Leaders of the Future," and they didn’t think women could be "Leaders of the Future," so the class size was increased by 250.  The story isn’t entirely supported by the data, but it’s certainly believable.

Yesterday’s Times had a story about Yale women who plan on being stay-at-home mothers.  It’s been a subject of heated discussion on several of my email lists, as well as of posts at Stone Court, Rebel Dad, And the moon is slowly rising and elsewhere.  My usual litany of complaints applies (unrepresentative sample? check. framing of work-family issues as a purely women’s issue?  check.  little discussion of societal factors at play? check.)  And yet, I found myself interested in the article nonetheless.

This blog is named after the subtitle of Peggy Orenstein’s book "Flux."  I recognized a lot of myself and my peers in her description of women who in their 20s thought that their possibilities were limitless, but by their 30s had started making accomodations and compromises.  Louise Story describes young women who have already concluded that they can’t "have it all," who won’t be so unpleasantly surprised down the road.  (Of course, the story doesn’t touch at all on the role of the NYTimes in creating that impression.)

So why was I depressed by this article?  Laura at 11d suggests that some of the complaints about the article are signs of prejudice against SAHMs and the work of childrearing.  I don’t think that’s my case.  My husband is also a Yale grad, and I certainly don’t think he’s "wasting his education" chasing after the boys. 

If I really believed that these young women were thinking seriously about what they value, and making career and life decisions based on those values, I’d be cheering about this "trend."  But as Ann Bartow points out, law school probably is the last thing you should be signing up for if your goal is to work part-time or to move in and out of the labor force.   Why go tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt if you know that you’re only going to work for a short while?   Or are Mom and Dad supposed to foot the bill?  And can’t you please figure out how to explain your choice in a way that doesn’t involve slamming people who make other choices?

Perhaps the most telling quote in the story is at the end:

"Ms. Ku added that she did not think it was a problem that women usually do most of the work raising kids.

‘I accept things how they are,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind the status quo. I don’t see why I have to go against it.’

After all, she added, those roles got her where she is.

‘It worked so well for me,’ she said, ‘and I don’t see in my life why it wouldn’t work.’

The scary thing is that Ms. Ku is right.  Conformity has worked very well for her so far.  Fundamentally, you don’t get into Yale by bucking the system.  You get into Yale by sitting in the front row in class, and doing your homework, and doing very well on tests that involve filling in circles with number 2 pencils.  You get into Yale by playing a musical instrument or being on the debate team or organzing a major charitable event, or preferably all of the above. 

If Yale is still interested in developing the "Leaders of the Future," it needs to figure out a way to admit some more kids who do mind the status quo.  And it needs to shake some of the complacency out of the ones who don’t.

In a comment on my last post on gender differences in children, Darleen urged me to read As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, by John Colapinto.  I had heard good things about the book before, but I hadn’t read it, so I added it to my list.

The book is about David Reimer, the man who was one of the most famous medical "cases" ever, a touchstone in the debates about gender identity and the roles of biology and culture.  As an 8-month-old baby boy, his penis was totally destroyed in a freak circumcision accident.  (Lesson one of the book: don’t let anyone circumcise your kids with an electrocautery machine.)  Following the advice of Dr. John Money, a respected psychologist, the Reimers had the baby castrated and a rudimentary vagina created surgically and raised her as a girl, "Brenda."  Brenda would have been a subject of scientific interest in any case, but the fact that she had an identical twin brother, Brian, turned her into close to the holy grail for researchers, an experimental case with a control.  Dr. Money featured her in dozens of articles, arguing that her successful transformation into a normal girl was proof that nurture, not nature, was the dominant factor in determining gender identity.

Unfortunately for Dr. Money’s argument, John Colapinto shows that Brenda was a desperately unhappy little girl who rejected all traditionally girl-ish pursuits, in spite of her parents’ frantic efforts to make her conform to her new gender identity.  She resisted all attempts to convince her to have the plastic surgery needed to complete her genital transformation, and as soon as she learned her true story, insisted on changing her name and living as a boy. He eventually had surgery to recreate male genitals, as well as a double mastectomy to remove the breasts that he had grown from taking female hormones.  While David had a period of deep depression as a young man, today at the time the book was written, he is appeared to be content in his life, happily married and a father through adoption.  [Edited to reflect the fact that he later committed suicide, as Fred informed me in his comment.]

The other major strand in the book is Colapinto’s damning portrait of Dr. Money.  He makes a convincing case that Money consistently ignored the growing evidence that Brenda’s sex transformation was a disaster, because it was contradictory to his theory, continuing to cite the case as a success long past the point when such a claim was reasonable.  Moreover, he suggests that Money’s treatment of Brenda was essentially sexual abuse, as he pushed the young girl to discuss her fantasies and even role play sexual situations with her brother.  (Because Money totally refused to cooperate with the writing of the book, there is no attempt to portray his side of the story.)

So, it’s a fascinating human-interest story, and Colapinto does a good journalistic job of laying it out for the reader.  But where does it leave us in the endless nature-nurture debate?  While I enjoyed reading the book, at times I yearned for a more acute scientific guide, someone who would probe further into the contradictions of what we mean by gender, who didn’t take Brenda’s willingness to throw a punch and her desire to pee standing up as proof positive that she was meant to be male. 

The one piece of solid scientific ground is that Money’s pure nurturist hypothesis seems to have been pretty much totally discredited, in part because of the case of David Reimer.  The more we learn about fetal brain development and its sensitivity to a variety of environmental influences, the less reasonable it becomes to think that powerful hormones like estrogen and testosterone would have such fundamental effects on other aspects of fetal development, but none on the brain.

But I think it’s fair to say that we simply don’t have a theory of gender identity that really makes sense of — and listens to with respect — the experiences of both David Reimer and biologically normal transsexuals like Jennifer Boylan.  We don’t even have a language to talk about gender identity that doesn’t fall back on such caricatures as ascribing all concern about appearance and relationships to femininity and all interest in mechanics and competition to masculinity.  And without such a language, we spend a lot of time talking past each other.

Arrgh!  Typepad just ate my post so I have to start over. 

Arrrr!  Did you know that today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day?  It’s a wonderful example of how silliness can take off.  Two guys had an idea, they emailed Dave Barry, and the rest is history.

Oh come on, some of you are saying, it’s not a real holiday.  Well, my local Barnes and Noble thinks it is.  We went in last week, and they have a big display labelled "September 19: Talk Like A Pirate Day."  Ok, it’s hidden in the children’s section, but still… if it’s being merchandised, it must be a real holiday.  Shiver me timbers!  And flea is even offering a special discount of 40% off all purchases from her sex toy shop. 

So, go to it.   Arrr.

Update: Pass the grog, mateys!  Many of my favorite bloggers are joining in the party:

• Yo Ho Ho, from Mr. B
• Pirates ONLY, from Pharyngula (although he appears to have walked the plank midday).
• Happy International Talk Like a Pirate Day, by Lauren at Feministe
• Aye! Avast Me, Chiklits, from Kameron at Brutal Women.

D is on a big three-toed sloth kick lately.  Whenever we go to the playground, he has to hang upside down on one of the curved ladders, just like a three-toed sloth.  For a while he was saying he wanted to be a three-toed sloth for Halloween, but I think we’ve talked him out of it.  (T is officially in charge of costuming in this household, so it’s not my problem in any case.)  And we’ve consumed the full extent of the library’s juvenile sloth section (Carle’s Slowly Slowly Slowly Said the Sloth and Robinson’s The Upside Down Sloth).

Those of you who don’t have preschoolers (or whose preschoolers don’t watch TV) are probably scratching your heads wondering where on earth D got a thing for three-toed sloths.   Those of you with munchkins probably know that Dora’s cousin Diego is responsible.  D thinks Diego is "awesome."

The ability to pursue enthusiasms like this, rather than staying doggedly on a fixed curriculum, racing against time to cover all the material that will be on a standardized test, is the strongest argument I’ve heard for homeschooling.  But, for a variety of reasons, we’re not really considering going that route any time soon.  I’m hopeful that there will be enough non-school time to provide the boys with the opportunities to follow their interests.

Last month, the Center for American Progress and the Institute for America’s Future issued a report on how to improve public schools.  Their first recommendation is to increase the length of both the school day and the school year, as well as to make better use of in-school time.  I have extremely mixed reactions to such a proposal.  I’m afraid my basic response is that it’s a good idea — for other people’s kids.  In particular, it’s clear that one of the reasons that KIPP and similar schools have had such success with disadvantaged populations is that the students spend so much more time in school than their counterparts.

But for my own kids, I think I’d be reluctant to give over even more of their lives to formal schooling.  I think they need time to run around the playground like lunatics, time to read books with no literary merit, time to bake cookies, and yes, time to learn about three-toed sloths.