Noli Irritare Leones

I guess I’m a “fun feminist.” It’s not how I’d ever have thought to define myself. “Fun feminism” sounds to me like Madonna or Mae West, with maybe a dash of that Cosmopolitan Girl thrown in, and I’m definitely not any of that. I keep my legs unshaved beneath long pants, most of the time, wear hiking boots instead of high heels, and, except for the occasional donning of green fingernail polish in honor of the protestors in Iran, wear no make up. I’m a nerd who winces when I hear the word “pampering,” because I know it’s going to involve a suggestion that the best way for me to indulge myself and give myself pleasure is to spend time fussing over my appearance in ways I don’t find pleasant.

Still, in the eyes of certain feminist bloggers, I’d fit, very much, their definition of “fun feminist,” not the serious kind, the kind who addresses the real basis of women’s oppression.
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When I started in the computer industry in the early 80s, one thing that I did not encounter was networking organizations for women in tech. It’s possible (maybe even likely) that such groups existed, even then, but, if they did, they were low profile enough that I neither heard of them from other women at the Stanford computer center, nor at the women’s center (which focused on any number of issues, but certainly not on women in technology), nor from any of my coworkers at my first jobs. Most of my mentors were male, and what contact I did have with other women in tech was ad hoc and one on one. (And, yes, budding female geeks, I walked to school through snow piled three feet high .)

It’s different now, and here’s where I turn to probably my last post in this women in tech series. Kay, at Feministe, responded to the Arrington article, and pointed out some things that I had missed. First, Michael Arrington’s defensive “don’t blame me” article was apparently a response to a piece in the Wall Street Journal about the dearth of women leading startups, but Shira Ovide didn’t stop with pointing out that shortage; rather, she talked about what women are doing about it.

Start-up executive Dina Kaplan and Gilt Groupe CEO Susan Lyne and the Paley Center for Media CEO Pat Mitchell run a group – which they call the “Breakfast Club” — of young and established tech and digital media executives who meet for professional networking, social support and swapping practical advice about running young digital companies. Start-up incubator i/o Ventures this month teamed up with Arianna Huffington, designer Donna Karan and former U.K. first lady Sarah Brown to launch a $25,000 competition for the “next female tech trailblazing entrepreneur.” This December for the first time, the influential technology conference TED is holding a women-focused conference.

Kay talks about other ways in which women are acting to encourage other tech women.

Getting more women into fields science, math, and technology is going to take time and a lot of work. Those numbers are slowly improving. This might be, in part, thanks to an increase in awareness of girl geek culture. Other sites like Skepchick and Geek Feminism try to support and encourage women in non-traditional industries like math, science, engineering, and technology. Rachel Sklar, of Mediaite, co-founded a group called “Change the Ratio” that seeks to encourage women to make their presence felt at tech events. These are just some of the ways tech women are working to support other tech women.

I myself subscribe to Systers, a mailing list run by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. Among other things, they host the annual Grace Hopper Conference for women in computing.

My sister has passed on to me an announcement of another event, the Women Who Tech Telesummit, which is taking place on September 15th. You can follow Women Who Tech on Facebook, Twitter, or Linked In.

Shira Ovide’s Wall Street Journal piece reports that

These women-power efforts aren’t without controversy. “I personally do not participate in any female tech organizations because they make more harm than good sometimes, because they [segregate] women,” said Yuli Ziv, founder of Style Coalition, a network of fashion and lifestyle digital publications. Instead, Ms. Ziv said she tries to encourage women to integrate more forcefully into male-dominated tech events such as the New York Tech Meetup.

I’d argue that there’s a place for both. Most of the tech events I attend are, after all, and will remain for the foreseeable future, male-dominated. But the mailing list that’s geared more for women gives us a chance to ask and answer questions of each other that may fit the situations of more women than men. It’s also on Systers that I learned of an opportunity to do tele-mentoring of a junior high school girl interested in a computer career, which I did for two years. I forget the name of the program I took part in, but it may be this one. Girlstart is another organization that encourages girls interested in math, science, and techology. The American Association of University Women has a further list of resources.

It’s a lot more than I can remember seeing when I started out in the field. I guess the times are changing.

My college roommate, Kanef, once wrote a song in honor of my other college roommate, Judy. Not a love song, of course, for Kanef is as gay as they come. Rather, Kanef wrote a filk song, to the tune of Billy Joel’s “She’s Always a Woman to Me.” The song is called “She’s Always a Hacker to Me” (“hacker,” here, has the old meaning of someone who loves and is good with computers, not the newer one of someone who breaks into computers), and it has lines like “And she works on her code until twelve after three. She lives like a bat but she’s always a hacker to me.”

Judy was, in fact, probably the most enthusiastic and technically adept of the undergraduate women I knew in the computer center crowd. (Sandy Lerner doesn’t count here, since she was either a grad student or maybe staff by this time, and part of the graduate school of business computer center, rather than the undergraduate one.) The first person in her family to go to college, on a union scholarship, she didn’t, like Joel Bion, find computers at the age of eight. But when she did discover them, early in her college career, she took to them like, well, a bat to the night time sky (and, by the way, working on your code till twelve after three was indeed the way to go, if you wanted to get the choicest times on the mainframe). It was Judy, I was told, who inspired the computer bulletin board debate that drew the attention first of Zimbardo, and then of the stream of reporters I talked about in my last post.

As I pieced together the story from the accounts of several people (not, I think, including Judy herself), Judy had a boy friend who resented her newfound love of computers. That Judy, polyamorous then and to this day, had also found an additional boy friend probably added to his resentment. At any rate, he is said to have instigated an online debate about the hazards of computer addiction, which came to the attention of Philip Zimbardo, meshing perhaps with his research interest in shyness, and inspiring him to write for Psychology Today a warning of the effects of computers on human interaction. Now, of course, you have no need to go to universities to find people who spend gobs of time online, but back then Stanford became the hot spot for reporters to find their cautionary examples of computer addiction. Judy, though, persisted in her passion for computers, lost the boy friend who resented them, and paid no heed to anyone’s complaint about how computers might be warping her social interactions. At the time I met her, she had a part time job at Muppet Labs (though she’s not the Muppet Labs woman I referred to in my last post), and when we graduated, she went straight into a full time systems programming job. She’s a software engineer to this day.

In my last post, I talked about why many women don’t go into tech jobs, or bail from the computer industry once they’ve started. In this post, I want to talk about what makes a woman willing to go into tech anyway. I can do this most easily by talking about the woman I know best – myself. As I see it, the reasons I felt free to pick a career that was, then even more than now, not so conventional for a woman, are several.

1. There’s my father, the IBM traffic scientist, who set me math puzzles when I was small and encouraged me to take computer classes when I was older. I never doubted that he valued my brains, or that he thought I could achieve just as much as any man.
2. There’s my mother, a scientist herself, who raised seven children and then went back for her Ph.D. I can remember her taking me to her lab and showing me her experiments.
3. There’s my grandfather, who, when in high school I thought I might want to be an economist, arranged for me to get the information I wanted about what the latest Nobel Prize in economics had been awarded for. That same grandfather, an engineer himself, later encouraged me to advance my computer career by taking a job at a startup.
4. There’s the grade school teacher who, when I was slower than other children at completing my multiplication tables, didn’t assume I was just another girl who could do handle words but not numbers, but rather paid enough attention to notice that I was uncoordinated and couldn’t write quickly, and let me show him orally that I could answer the questions quickly enough.
5. There’s the junior high school math teacher who saw that I’d gotten beyond her regular math textbook, and found me another one I could use, with more advanced material.
6. I would include, even, the high school computer club leader I talked about in my last post; he may have lost me then as the one girl in the club, but I think the fact that he cared about trying to teach me programming still made a difference in the long run.

The trail to success in tech, as elsewhere in life, is strewn with breadcrumbs left by many people, some of whom may never see the results of the signs they left.

Among the hotter topics on my Twitter feed yesterday was discrimination in the computer industry: how there really isn’t any at all against women, but there’s a whole heap of it against older people. Or, as Sharon Fisher puts it, Older Men Discriminated Against, But Women Just Suck.

To be fair, the two articles, though both published just Saturday in Techcrunch, were by two different people. Still, it’s no surprise that the one on women, Michael Arrington’s “Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men,” drew such a firestorm from women and some men that Arrington tweeted yesterday

thinking I’ll delete the women in tech rant and just replace it with “I care. We need to do more.” That’ll be far less painful.

The comment thread that follows Arrington’s article illustrates the problem discussing this issue, as a woman in tech. The first comment reads

Less women undertake degrees in quantitative disciplines than men. This is due to brain function. Men and women are not equal, nor is one sex better than the other. It just is the way it is.

There’s no one to blame, which is why people are upset with this topic. Blame must always be placed.

and then, when a woman engineer protests this absolute pronouncement that all differences between female and male participation are due to the inherent fact that our female brains just don’t get numbers, men pile on her and other women, making sweeping statements about the wrongness and harmfulness of feminism, which has turned into this awful, angry ideology. The original commenter, who apparently hasn’t heard of Larry Summers and had no idea any women engineers would feel their bottom line was affected by spreading stereotypes that women Just Don’t Get Math, gets all wounded and complains that he “said nothing even close to controversial in my first post.” Because scientific opinion is apparently absolutely uniform as to how far gender differences are biologically driven and how far culturally driven, and the most obviously biological of the lot, surely, is gender differences in quantitative disciplines, which aren’t influenced by cultural stereotypes one bit. (FWIW, one commenter does give a much more plausible hypothesis of how brain differences could be in play here – one that doesn’t oblige you to ignore a huge chunk of the evidence on gender differences – “My thought is that though there are likely differences in brain function, that these differences are amplified by at least an order of magnitude by social expectation.”)

I blog under my own name. I know that any prospective employer can (and probably will) Google me. So, I’ll get all the standard disclaimers out of the way right now. Yes, I mostly like and get along with men. I had a father who encouraged me from a young age in math and science, I have a husband who supports my career, lots of my friends are men, and I’ve had plenty of male bosses and coworkers who have respected me. It’s possible that I’m now making less money and getting less professional recognition than I would have, in my field, if I’d made exactly the same decisions and been male, but I don’t usually stay up nights worrying about it. My ex-boss, who occasionally still reads my blog, can vouch that I’m not cohttp://notfrisco2.com/leones/wp-admin/post-new.phpnstantly in people’s face with my feminism on the job.

That said, give me a break. Arrington’s article bears little resemblance to reality in the computer industry.

Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If your idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich.

I’ve run into a lot of male computer nerds who believe this, and I understand why they might. Everyone wants to believe that the field where he’s gotten recognition runs on pure merit, and all you have to do to win is be the one to build a better mousetrap. It may be even more appealing to believe this if you’re a male nerd, and found, in the computer world, a place that recognized your merit far more readily than the jock driven world of high school. But the reality is that there’s no place in the world where “It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are.” Not here in the land of the free and the brave, where we actually have rather less social mobility than some countries in Europe. Not in the old Communist bloc, which had its own not necessarily merit based elites. But also not in Silicon Valley.

Part of the problem in perception is that the interaction between merit and other advantages is complex. Look, I went to Stanford. And, like everyone else I know of who went to Stanford, I damn well wouldn’t have gotten in if I hadn’t been smart and studious, very possibly (the heck with false modesty) smarter and more studious than you, dead reader. And it’s also true that the chance to go to Stanford and other name brand schools isn’t equally open to everyone who’s equally smart and studious. At the same time, only a few of us who went there have such clearly cushy beginnings that you can say we were born on third base. As it is with prestige college degrees, so it also is with cool computer jobs.

Now, Arrington in fact does have a bit of a point, here:

The problem isn’t that Silicon Valley is keeping women down, or not doing enough to encourage female entrepreneurs. The opposite is true. No, the problem is that not enough women want to become entrepreneurs….

A. There’s a fascinating company, Zivity, it’s a venture-funded, adult photography community — yes, they put up pictures of naked women online — it was co-founded and is run by a woman, Cyan Banister. She wrote me in response to a post about women who are entrepreneurs, saying, basically, though these are not her exact words, women [stink] as entrepreneurs a lot of the time because they are nurturing and not risk-taking enough by nature. She also said when men roll the dice and take risks, that society doesn’t punish them at all, and it’s in their nature to take stupid risks….

There are a couple of obvious problems with this line of argument – that he’s started an article talking about why there aren’t more women in tech, and then somehow shifted ground to the narrower field of people in tech who are entrepreneurs, that he’s making this a finger pointing game of don’t blame men, blame women for not trying. But there’s a point buried in here that’s valid, and that’s the fact that a lot of the difference between the jobs men and women take, whether it’s who goes into tech or who gambles on starting a company, starts way earlier in life than when people actually in the tech field get to judge us. “She also said when men roll the dice and take risks, that society doesn’t punish them at all” is something that we learn in childhood, and, no, it’s not men’s fault, nor yet women’s fault either; we all both participate in, and are shaped by, social conditioning.

So, let me return to the matter of merit, and let me make an example of one guy I knew at Stanford, and, since in this particular instance I have nothing bad to say about him, and little to say that isn’t already easy for anyone to find out, I’ll name him. His name is Joel Bion. For a while, at Stanford, we hung in the same crowd, a crowd centered around the computer center. Now he’s Senior Vice President of Research and Advanced Development at Cisco Systems. I’ve long since lost touch with him, of course, but I still think I know enough to make an example of him.

At the time that Joel and I and others were sharing late nights at the computer center (the better to get good time slots on those old mainframes, as these were the days when almost no one owned any sort of personal computer – Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack, who would later found Cisco, were doing well to have their own computer terminal at home), reporters used to occasionally descend on the place, to interview us and tell the world breathless stories about what socially inept computer addicts we were. I dodged such interviews – who, I figured, wants to be known to the world as socially inept and unable to function away from a computer – but a lot of my friends let themselves be interviewed, Joel among them. Here’s one of those computer “hacker” stories (these were the days when “hacker” still meant someone who was really good with computers, and not simply someone who breaks into computers).

Joel Bion, a sophomore at Stanford, explains how he got hooked: “I’ve been working with computers since I was eight. I grew up in Minnesota and I didn’t have many friends. I wasn’t into sports and couldn’t participate in gym class because I had asthma. Then I found a computer terminal at school. I bought some books and taught myself. Pretty soon I was spending a few hours on it every day. Then I was there during vacations. Sure, I lost some friends, but when I first started I was so fascinated. Here was a field I could really feel superior in. I had a giant program, and I kept adding and adding to it. And I could use the computer to talk to people all over the state. I thought that was great social interaction. But, of course, it wasn’t, because I never came into face-to-face contact.”

Joel managed to break his addiction after a few years and is now a peer counselor at Stanford. But his lack of interpersonal relationships during the hacker period is common and this problem has led Stanford psychologist Dr. Philip Zimbardo to take a closer look at the hacker phenomenon.

I think the “managed to break his addiction after a few years” part of this has to be the reporter’s interpretation of Joel, and not his own. I met Joel after his sophomore year, and he was, not a guy who had “managed to break his addiction” to computers, but a guy who was as dedicated (and skilled) a hacker as ever, but, like a lot of nerds who grow older, had reached the point in his life where he knew plenty of people in real life who could appreciate him as the nerd he was. That’s not breaking an addiction; it’s part of the normal process of growing up. But what I want to draw out here is not the friendless, asthmatic boy the article says he once was (maybe played up a bit, since this is, after all, an article in the then popular “computer nerds are obsessive social losers” genre), but the line “I’ve been working with computers since I was eight.” Joel would have been eight in, what, maybe 1969? How many people do you know who had access to computers at the age of eight, back in 1969?

In any merit driven world, a guy like the Joel I once knew ought to thrive in his career; as a student, he was sharp, enthusiastic about his chosen field, and conscientious in applying himself to his classes. He had the skills and the good work ethic, and I would bet that he’s deserved and earned every one of his promotions at Cisco. He also had (besides young access to computers at a time when that kind of access was rare), if I remember right, a private prep school education, he certainly had an elite college education, and he had a bit of luck in the fact that he was a good friend, when he was at Stanford, with Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack, who would later go on to fly so high when they founded Cisco. A Silicon Valley merit driven success story, where the guy who can deliver and whose idea rocks rises to the top? Or a story of the ways in which things other than merit influence who gets rare? Like most real life success stories, it’s a bit of both.

I say these things with no resentment, because I had similar advantages. I may not have gone to a private prep school, but I went to a public high school that’s the equal of private prep schools, one that, to quote Wikipedia, “was ranked #46 nationally in the 2008 US News & World Report rankings of “America’s Best High Schools,” and #7 among those with open enrollment.” And I, too, went to Stanford. I even also had more exposure to computers at a young age than many of my generation.

Here, though, is how my own story played out. When I was around the same age that Joel was getting lost in a computer, my father was giving me math and logic puzzles to challenge me. I can remember going, with all the other IBM families, to an event where the IBM research center displayed all their cool research, and getting to see fiber optics, and a computer that took photos (built out of letters and numbers), and to listen to Dad talk about his research in traffic theory, and experiments with the Lincoln Tunnel.

I was the girl who looked ahead in her math books and learned things before the teacher got to them, the girl who, for fun, played with different tricks to solve equations, the girl who had to be one of the ones to dissect a frog when other girls opted out and found it gross. And so, when I was in junior high, a little behind Joel in getting onto a computer for my first time, but ahead of most of the rest of the world, I was the girl who got picked to be one of a small group of kids – the ones who’d done best at math – who would be allowed to check out a computer. For a few sessions, we each got to use it, and then perhaps something, I don’t know what, happened to that computer, because we stopped being taken to see it. It was, after all, the time when even really good public schools didn’t have computers. I would get my next chance at using a computer in high school; my high school, at the time I went, had a single computer to be shared among all its students.

And I was the girl who, when told she had to pick cooking or sewing instead of metal working (because those were the days when home economics and industrial arts electives still could be segregated by sex, Title IX not yet being sufficiently implemented to sweep all those rules away), insisted on applying for metal working, and showing up for the first metal working class to say that she belonged there, not upstairs in the cooking class (but I did wind up upstairs in that cooking class, after all). And I was the girl who, when given teacher recommendations to take the advanced math and science going into high school, and a guidance counselor who thought it would be too hard for her to take both, argued him down, and said that yes, I did have the smarts to take both, and yes, I was taking both, and he’d better sign off on it. But I was also the girl who dropped out of the high school computer club. And it’s in one sense a classic story for the “don’t blame us, we’re trying to get girls” side of the argument, because I dropped out against the wishes of the school advisor for that club, and despite his efforts to keep me.

I was, to begin with, the only high school girl in the computer club, among a whole bunch of budding boy nerds. I got a book on APL, a few words on how to use computers, and instructions on how to sign onto the one computer at the school. The budding boy nerds managed to get in and grab all the time slots, so I found none left for me. So I decided, the heck with this, and instead headed off to learn Mandarin Chinese from a high school friend from Taiwan; there went the time I would have spent on computers. The teacher running the club noticed my absence, and talked to the boys, and tried to get me on the computer, but it was too late; I was already spending my time on languages (German, Russian, modern Greek, Mandarin Chinese) instead of computers. I then pursued a course of high school study that included being on the advanced track in math and science, that included getting a 5 on the Calculus AP test, but that also included plenty of history and language study, went through Stanford with a psychology major rather than an engineering one, took my first computer class in my junior year, joined the Stanford “hacker” (old meaning of the word, not new meaning) world in earnest in my senior year, and, by the time I graduated, had a BA in psychology with a lot more computer programming courses than the average psych major. (An odd quirk of Stanford’s system allowed me to count all those programming courses toward the “related courses” part of the psychology major requirement – probably it was meant to encourage psych majors planning to go into research to learn to use computers for statistics.) In this, I’m like many women in tech, of my generation; on average, we found our way to an interest in computers a bit later than our male peers (even when otherwise possessed of the same advantages), and wound up with educations more generalist and less specifically technically focused than the men. And, even to have gotten this level of technical background, we were unusual women. The women who got into tech early and thoroughly, as Joel did, were very rare birds indeed.

You could call this my “fault,” but I think it was nobody’s personal “fault,” not mine, not that of the budding boy nerds who were just doing what high school boy nerds do, and not that of the teacher. It was as natural a thing for the only girl in the high school computer club to fade out of the club as it was for the asthmatic, sports hating boy that Joel once was to disappear into a computer. We all respond to our social incentives, and one of the ways we respond is that it’s only a very exceptional teenager who can be kept as the only one of her sex, in a group that’s otherwise made up only of boys. I saw similar things happen, in junior high, to the boys who were interested in the chorus club; a few boys joined, and then dropped out of the overwhelmingly female club, so we were left with our only boy a boy who had been known since grade school for being the one boy in the class to do girly things (and keep doing girly things, no matter how much he was teased for it).

It’s nobody’s individual fault (and there’s not even anything wrong with being the girl who learns Mandarin Chinese instead of APL, any more than there’s anything wrong with being the boy who’d rather use a computer than play sports), but there are ways to change this kind of thing, if you really do want more girls to grow up and pursue scientific or technical careers – exposing girls to women who do these kinds of jobs, mentoring of girls who have an interest in math and science, etc. I believe these things make a difference because they’re already being done, and, sure enough, there are now more women in technical majors at college, including computer science, than there were when I was in college. And there will continue to be more women in tech than in my generation; on this point I’m a grateful and optimistic feminist, more than I’m an angry one. The trends are in place; you couldn’t stop them if you wanted to.

I do believe that most of these differences have to do with girls and boys, more than with what happens to adult men and women once they’re already in the computer industry. And I haven’t, for the most part, found the computer industry to be all that hard an environment for me, as a woman. Sure, there have been moments. There were the guys at the first company where I worked who insisted on calling me “sweetie” – but they worked on the loading dock, and I had the actual computer job, so I had the last laugh there, didn’t I? There was the customer, on the line when I was working tech support, who wouldn’t believe I knew what I was talking about till I turned him over to a male colleague who repeated the same answer I’d just given, and was accepted as an expert right away. That sort of thing happens, but it’s not most of my life as a computer professional. Most of my work life involves doing good work, and getting respect for that work, from male colleagues, even when I’m the only woman in my work group.

Still, I’ve talked with enough other women in tech to know how the field may lose women, once we’ve gotten there. To begin with, because we women, on average, have taken a more winding route into the field, and gotten our computer background a bit later than our male peers, we’re more likely to start in areas other than development, areas that get less pay and respect than development, and some women at that point bail and go for something else. But that kind of goes back to the difference in socialization between girls and boys, and isn’t the “fault” of people in the field.

What is the “fault” of the computer industry, to the extent that it makes sense to speak of “fault,” is that, for adults as well as for teenagers, it’s still easier for most women to find their environment welcoming if they’re not the only woman in the room. Every so often a complaint will circulate among women in tech. It may be a conference where a presenter decided to liven up his presentation with a few scantily clad women. It may be an article a woman wrote on the web about a technical subject, and, while the men writing articles for that same web magazine get comments on the substance of their articles, the woman gets an onslaught of comments evaluating the photo of her that accompanied the article. Some of these would probably bother me personally more than others (I can sit through the occasional photo of a scantily clad woman, but don’t you ignore my substance, when I’m speaking as a professional, to vote on whether you’d date me). But they add up to the fact that, when you’re one of the few women in a room of men, sometimes what to the all the male nerds is just doing what comes naturally is, in the eyes of all the female nerds, disrespect. And then, in addition, there’s the factor raised in the Seldo.com response to Arrington’s article, that I linked earlier:

And above all your gender matters. Because the ugly truth is that the men of Silicon Valley do not take women in tech seriously by default. I see it every day. If a woman walks into the office, people ask if she’s in HR or marketing or legal or product, or frankly anything other than engineering. And distressingly, most of the time they’re right, because there aren’t many women in tech. And as everyone knows and keeps saying, that’s a vicious circle: the expectation that women don’t get into tech is what keeps them out of it.

A woman I knew who, when I was starting out in my first full time job at SRI, worked as a statistician at Muppet Labs, once told me that she made darn sure to wear only pants to work, because she’d found skirts were an extra ticket to being taken for an administrative assistant. It can be extra work to be recognized for what you are, if what you are is unusual for a woman.

But what about the women who break the mold? One such women was Sandy Lerner, high flying entrepreneur and co-founder of Cisco Systems. People like to quote Emerson: “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” In fact, though, the world will beat a path to your door if you build and promote a better mousetrap, and are willing to take the risks to get your mousetrap business going. Sandy Lerner’s a smart woman, but there were many smart women at Stanford (graduate or undergraduate) when she and I were there. Where she’s a rarity is that she’s a smart woman who combined knowledge of computers, a willingness to promote herself, and that openness to risk that makes someone willing to found a company. So she and Len Bosack built that better mousetrap, and the world beat a path to their door. And then Sandy ran into personality clashes with other people in high places at the company she’d helped found, and she and Len left the company, bitter over their experience, but rich. And she went on to found another company in which she marketed her own cosmetic line.

I’ve wondered, sometimes, whether the personality clashes, whatever they may have been, went all the harder because she was a woman. They might have. Women in the business world do face a Catch-22, where they both may have to be pushier than a similarly qualified man to get ahead, and get more grief for being abrasive than similarly abrasive men. But it might be that her being a woman entrepreneur had nothing to do with it; Steve Jobs at one point ran afoul of Apple in ways that sound not unlike Sandy’s clashes with the company she co-founded. What I do know is that, in a world where boys get a more encouragement than girls in all those rare qualities that go into making a Sandy Lerner – from an aptitude for technology to a willingness to take risks – it’s going to be a long time before women who are technical and entrepreneurs are going to be other than rare birds. Just rare birds that should get the same chance to fly as any other bird who makes the grade.

I dreamed I saw Dre again. At first he didn’t recognize me, but then he hugged me, and we talked, and I ran and got Joel and introduced him. The odd thing about the dream wasn’t that content – a perfectly ordinary dream about seeing an old friend again – but rather the “am I dreaming” part. Often, in the middle of a dream, I’ll realize it’s a dream. Sometimes I even move beyond that to realizing that, because I’m dreaming, I can control the dream (often the simplest version of this is simply to wake up if the dream starts doing something I don’t like).

The stages of becoming aware that I’m dreaming, for me, are two: First, the possibility that I’m dreaming comes to mind, and then I test it. I don’t pinch myself, as people do in stories. Rather, I do one of two things. Either I look for odd gaps in my memory – do I know how I got to the location where I am now? Or I attend to my sense of procipiation (awareness of where different parts of my body are). Normally, if you pause and sense your body, you can feel where everything is, and it matches your other senses. In a dream, in my experience, I’ll try to sense my body, and realize that something’s wrong.

This time, though, I thought, maybe I’m dreaming, and then, without bothering with either test, became convinced I wasn’t. Until I woke up.

And of course I walked the dog, and checked Twitter, and went to meeting (with refreshments), and came home and recorded some Youtube videos. I’ll embed one of those videos at the end of this post. But before that, I want to pass on a few links. There’s one that I’m going to give its own post of commentary, but these are short.

The Economist on Faith and faithfulness: Praying for your partner stops you straying. More, apparently, than just thinking good thoughts about your partner. Maybe this has helped keep me faithful to Joel. I pray for him every day. Though he, now agnostic, doesn’t pray for me, and is still faithful.

Augustine, Evolution, and Two Books. Those two books being the Bible and the book that God has written in Nature, both seen as complementary sources of God’s revelation.

A Muslim woman asks on her blog Question: Why Do Muslim Men Talk About Hijaab?

Five myths about mosques in America.

Does your language shape how you think?

Germany’s offering rescue funds to its banks, and manager magazine reports on skeptics of the rescue plan: Will it encourage banks to take unwise risks? Will banks game the rescue funds? Are there now even more banks “too big to fail” than there were when Lehmann proved insolvent?

Meanwhile, in Greece, Papandreou promises growth measures, sort of.

PASOK is hoping that now Greece is on track to reduce its deficit, in line with its agreement with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, it will have some room to develop economic policies that are not constrained by the demands of the EU-IMF memorandum….

However, the government spokesman made it clear that Greeks should not expect to hear Papandreou announce a series of handouts during his speech at TIF, as has been customary for many prime ministers in the past.

“We are not taking the populist route, announcing measures that our economy cannot withstand,” he said….

Obama suggests that he has better things to do than respond to questions about whether he’s really a Muslim: Obama: I Can’t Always Have My Birth Certificate Plastered On My Forehead.

Fake Name Generator. In case you’re stuck for a name for a character, or just for fun. Supplies a fake name, fake mother’s maiden name, fake birth date, and fake occupation.

Questions to ask that character you just gave a random fake name (or maybe, more inspired, gave your own fictional name).

And here’s one of my latest Youtube videos:

First, here are a couple of columns in Hurriyet Daily News that I found interesting. Mustafa Akyol, in Is Greece any better than Turkey? reflects on how

Nothing really changes when Turks and Greeks say to each other, “Let me take the speck out of your eye,” while they disregard the “planks” in their own eyes.

He first discusses ways in which Greece and Turkey face similar problems

Yet other problems in Greece that my U.S.-based Turkish reader listed carefully looked very familiar to me. To be more precise, they sounded very similar to Turkey’s longtime policies toward its own Kurdish population.

and then broadens his scope

In fact, the same problem exists on a global scale. Westerners, for example, are wrong when they only blame the Muslim world for its lack of freedoms, but do not see their own partial role in its making – historically through colonialism, support for dictatorial regimes, or double standards in international affairs. Muslims, in return, are wrong when they only speak about such sins of the West, but never honestly address why minorities, women or “apostates” are not free, and are even threatened, in their part of the world.

The right thing to do is to criticize not only the alien nation or civilization, but also our own kin. Only then, we will be talking honestly. And only then, we will be making a difference.

The second, from Semih Idiz, takes a worried look at human rights in Europe.

We always talk about Turkey in terms of human rights, but it is time we also talked about what is happening in Europe in this respect. What Nicolas Sarkozy’s France is doing to the Roma, or the Gypsies as they are popularly known, carries overtones of a sinister period of European history that is still part of the continent’s living memory.

It also portends ill for other groups in Europe – mostly Muslim – who are already seen increasingly as “undesirable,” and who will no doubt be affected by this sinister development in time given that no one knows where this ball will stop once it starts rolling.

Now, let me turn to the US, where Muslims are concerned about the current wave of anti-Muslim sentiment. My blog friend Vanessa Gatsch opens up her blog to a guest post from her father, Yes, I am a Muslim-American.

Am I an American? Why am I asking myself this question again? Yes, I am an American, a Muslim African American.

Why am I asking that question again? It is because the monster is trying to once again rear its ugly head. A monster who once tried to trick me into believing that I was not an American because of the color of my skin and because of the origin of my parents and the first language that I spoke (Spanish) as a child….

Know this oh beast, I will stand firmly on this sacred ground that I call my country, my home, my place of birth. A place called America; I stand here with no fear of you in my heart. Knowing with surety who I am and why I am….

My other blog friend, Bint Alshamsa, defends her brother, a Muslim taxi cab driver, in the wake of hearing about the stabbing of a Muslim taxi cab driver in New York.

Imam Rauf, the head of the Cordoba Initiative, has been described as moderate. I want to make it clear that he and his organization have every right to build the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” regardless of whether they are the least bit moderate. Once the project passed the same zoning regulations as any other construction, it may not be held up because you dislike the religious beliefs of the organizers, and it matters not whether it is a mosque or an interfaith community center, whether Imam Rauf is an exceptionally progressive Muslim, or an ordinary one, or the Muslim equivalent of Jerry Falwell. In this, Christopher Hitchens, no bigger fan of the Cordoba Initiative than he is of any religion, is right when he says that “here is exactly how not to resist” religious intolerance.

Still, given that others, such as Jeff Goldberg of the Atlantic, have described Imam Rauf as “a moderate, forward-leaning Muslim,” who spoke at Daniel Pearl’s memorial service to express solidarity by declaring himself a Jew, I’m curious as to what that forward leaning looks like. So, here’s one example, An article in the Washington Post discussing the varied Muslim interpretations of sharia, reports that

Imam Feisal Rauf, a Sufi Muslim who is spearheading the controversial mosque center, runs something called the _blankShariah Index Project, which seeks to create a more progressive benchmark for measuring the “Islamicity” of a state. Daisy Khan, Rauf’s wife, said the couple believe the word “sharia” primarily refers to several broad principles called “maqasid sharia,” which include the protection of life, property and religion, among others. These principles are believed to be the foundation of the faith.

Also, here’s Ross Douthat on Imam Rauf and Moderate Islam.

One of my own favorite progressive Muslim web sites, before it went down, was Muslim, Wake Up! Here’s an old article by Ahmed Nassef, editor-in-chief of Muslim, Wake Up!, on Egypt’s leading feminist.

Drima, the Sudanese Thinker, is another of my favorite progressive Muslims. Also of interest:

Farid Esack.

Women Living Islam Out Loud.

The International Association of Sufism.

The Centre for Islamic Pluralism.

Anthony Manousos is a Quaker who has long been engaged in dialog with Muslims (when I’ve arranged interfaith connections with Muslims for my own meeting, he’s the one who has gotten me connected).

Finally, a word on my own attitude toward Islam in particular, and other faiths in general. There’s a tendency to see any defense of Islam by people on the left as some sort of claim that Islam is better than other faiths, a problem-free religion of peace. I don’t believe that of any faith; that’s why some of the Muslims I’ve followed with most favor are the self-critical ones, just as I also prefer a self-critical Christianity. What I do believe is that any faith that lasts long enough and grows large enough tends to draw within itself all the tendencies, both good and bad, of people in general. It may have been born as a pure swindle to line someone’s pocket, but over time it will come to transcend that swindle and also express people’s charity, mysticism, and yearning for peace. Or it may have been born as the purest inspiration from God, but over time it comes to express people’s bigotry and intolerance and hatred. It is not that all religions are the same, but they are all the same in this: they all come to draw from the same good and bad in human nature.

What if the Cookie Monster were Nigerian?

I bring you Ugollywood.

Ushahidi blog on Mapping the Future of Cities & Education.

Making Ushahidi.

Charissa Granger and the musical possibilities of the steelpan.

“Where Ghana Went Right”

Ghana: Hydropower Dam to Solve Power Outages.

Maker Faire Africa 2010 Begins!

Kenya’s Top Banks.

Africa: The 2nd Safest Continent to Surf the Web.

Husking machine takes off.

Robotocist,Entreprenuer-Solomon King.

Nigeria: Govt to Privatise Power Sector.

Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan have been lately engaged in a debate about same-sex marriage; several others, including Adam Serwer and Eve Tushnet, have weighed in. Let me start with Eve:

1. Sullivan argues that in order to accept my or Douthat’s understanding of marriage, you have to accept the entirety of Catholic teaching on sexuality, and therefore our opposition to gay marriage is narrowly sectarian and unavailable to those who don’t share our entire set of religious beliefs.

I disagree! I mean, I get that both the New York Times and Busted Halo juxtaposed my beliefs about God and my beliefs about marriage. That was their framing. It has never been mine. When I actually lay out my own beliefs about marriage, I don’t use religious language. While I’m skeptical that any moral claim can be made in entirely secular terms all the way down–in other words, eventually you do have to discuss your fundamental metaphysical beliefs and deepest loves/loyalties–I think the case against gay marriage is about as secular as the cases against, say, torture or the death penalty. In other words, I think we can talk for a while before you get to God, and that’s what I try to do. (Similarly, when I talk about being gay and Catholic, I try to open up some space in the discussion for people who are themselves celibate for religious reasons but nonetheless support gay marriage.)

Sullivan really can’t just assert that my argument can only be accepted by those who accept the entirety of Catholic sexual morality. He has to offer an argument or evidence to that effect, beyond the argument ad celibatem.

The way I’d put it is that I think that it’s hard to find a satisfying argument for the actual current legal distinctions between how same-sex and opposite sex relationships are handled, if you don’t think there’s anything wrong with forming same-sex romantic and sexual relationships. Let’s start with Eve Tushnet’s Busted Halo interview, which Ross Douthat quotes:

If you have a unisex model of marriage, which is what gay marriage requires, you are no longer able to talk about marriage as regulating heterosexuality and therefore you’re not able to say: Look, there are things that are different about heterosexual and homosexual relationships. There are different dangers, there are different challenges, and, therefore, there are probably going to be different rules.

Ross Douthat follows up on Eve’s argument:

The marital ideal that justifies calling gay unions “marriage,” by contrast, is necessarily much thinner, because it’s an ideal that needs to encompass not two but three different kinds of sexual relationships — straight, gay male, and lesbian. So it ends up being about the universals of love and commitment, rather than any of the particular dynamics of heterosexual intimacy. And I think this thinness is a problem: It makes it that much harder to imagine the marital institution doing the kind of work that it was originally developed to do, and needs to do now more than ever — the work, as Tushnet puts it, of directly addressing “the specific ways in which sex between a man and woman can be really devastating to society, or really fruitful.”

So, in what ways do same-sex and opposite sex relationships differ? The obvious one is that opposite sex couples, in most cases, at least while they are young, can easily have children without particularly trying, and need to jump through certain hoops to reliably not have children. And there are others, related to difference. Men and women differ in the nature of the risk pregnancy poses to them, differ in their average relative physical strength, differ in various other ways: from how often and easily they have orgasm in the course of a typical one night stand to how much of the childcare they typically take on.

Some of these differences are socially determined, and narrowing (and this is obviously part of the reason support for same-sex marriage is increasing). So, for instance, one of the social differences between same-sex relationships and opposite sex ones that leaps to my own mind – that it’s a bit easier, in the case of opposite sex relationships, to guard your fidelity by avoiding the people you’re attracted to – also seems to me a fairly contingent thing, where mileage may vary a lot. I think what I just said is at least somewhat true – that more gay and lesbian couples than straight ones wind up socializing with old flames, that some straight people, but few gay and lesbian people, have their spouse as their only close friend of the sex they’re attracted to – but there are lots of monogamous straight couples who manage their fidelity in ways very similar to the way I see monogamous lesbian couples managing theirs.

Still, there are some differences between how a relationship plays out when you have these particular differences – strength, burden during pregnancy, etc. – where it may take a bit more imagination to see the other person’s position, and one in which your circumstances are more similar. Of course, we all have lots of other differences and similarities to bridge or not, a point Adam Serwer makes.

Every marriage on earth is “distinct” in its “challenges and potential fruit,” its unclear to me why those facing gays and lesbians provoke a government interest in preventing their marriages from happening.

But the point I want to raise is different, and it’s about how well the actual legal distinctions being made track with the actual differences, such as they are, between same and opposite sex romantic relationships. For that, I turn to Alan B. Morrison’s post at Balkinization, Defending The Indefensible: The Defense Of Marriage Act.

… The most surprising finding of this study, which District Judge Joseph L. Tauro mentioned only in passing, is that, after taking into account the benefits and detriments to same sex couples, the result is that DOMA costs the United States Treasury nearly $1 billion a year – a very heavy price in any economic time for blatant discrimination.

But there is more, and it all operates to undermine other important objectives in federal laws. Over the years, Congress has established conflict of interest rules that forbid federal employees from participating in certain matters where they may have financial conflicts of interest. Thus, a person nominated to be Secretary of Energy could not own stock in ExxonMobil, and a high official in the antitrust division could not participate in a case involving a corporate merger if she were a shareholder in an objecting competitor. But telling the high official to divest or not participate is meaningless if the prohibition did not also apply to assets of the spouse, which it does. In addition, the laws that require disclosure, but not divestiture, of potential conflicts of interest, cover the spouse as well as the employee.

And that’s where DOMA comes in and makes the system quite irrational. If, as DOMA mandates, a couple is not married unless they are of the opposite sex, then none of these conflict of interest laws applies to same sex couples, thereby undercutting a significant protection for the Government and the taxpayers. Similarly, federal judges are disqualified in cases in which their spouses are parties or have a financial stake in the outcome, but DOMA bizarrely says “never mind” if the spouse is of the same sex. Yet in all other ways – including joint bank accounts – the couple is every bit as married as opposite sex couples. And with the increasing numbers of same sex married couples now in Government, the problem will only increase….

This is what the legal difference between same-sex and opposite-sex relationships looks like, today, in California, to the best of my knowledge (bearing in mind that I am not a lawyer and don’t play one on the net).

1. If you happened to get married within a particular narrow window, after the California Supreme Court overturned the ban on same-sex marriage and before Proposition 8 was approved, your relationship has the exact same legal standing within California as any heterosexual marriage, and is also portable to Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Washington, D.C., and the Coquille Indian Tribe in Oregon.
2. If you didn’t get married in that window, you can form a domestic partnership, which is as close legally to marriage as the California legislature could make it, but which isn’t, as far as I know, portable outside the state. Although perhaps it might be, to states that have civil unions; the law here is unclear to me, and may depend on case by case decisions in particular states. At any rate, it’s less clearly portable than marriage.
3. Whether you’re married or in a domestic partnership, the Federal government doesn’t recognize your marriage, with the results described in Morrison’s post.

This legal difference doesn’t track at all with whatever the legal difference might be, if you tried to design a system from scratch to accomodate straight, gay, and lesbian couples in whatever way suited their various needs. And, in fact, I have trouble thinking of a set of legal differences that would track well with these actual differences. The way the differences work in states at the other end of the continuum from California, in their level of recognition of same-sex relationships outside of marriage (don’t make any legal provision at all, even one that would allow things like hospital visits) doesn’t track particularly better with whatever the actual differences may be.

Differences in social norms are another story; it’s easy to see why people may, for instance, weigh in with different kinds of advice regarding unmarried same-sex and opposite-sex relationships. In the case of opposite-sex relationships, you need to keep babies from being born into relationships where you don’t want them, whether you do this by trying to get everyone to stay chaste till marriage, or whether you do this by trying to get everyone to reliably use birth control when they don’t want kids (and make realistic decisions about when they’re ready for kids). But legal differences? I’m not sure what they could even look like – if you think same-sex relationships are fine and dandy, and if, then, the differences you’re willing to promote do not include trying to get people not to act on their same-sex desires.

For this reason, there’s been a lot of focus, in these discussions, on monogamy, a question Andrew Sullivan takes on.

The first thing to say is that lesbians seem to be far more eager to marry than gay men. Duh. It’s not because they’re lesbians, it’s because they’re women. It follows, however, that lesbian couples are likely to be more monogamous than most straight couples as well as more numerous than gay males ones. So adding lesbians to the mix actually reinforces monogamy as an ideal and feminizes marriage in ways that Ross would presumably favor.

Gay men? I think it’s fair to say that the fact that they are men makes monogamy less likely than even straight marriages. If Eliot Spitzer had married another Eliot Spitzer, he may have had more sex on the downlow and spent a lot less money on hookers. Male-male marriages that survive are likelier to have some kind of informal level of permission and forgiveness and defensible hypocrisy on this score than most male-female marriages or female-female marriages, especially if the men marry young. I think the honesty within these relationships can actually be a good thing and can help sustain a life-long commitment rather than weaken it. But I can also see why it might worry Ross if this became publicly celebrated rather than privately tolerated. Given the way in which the straight family as a whole is involved in such marriages, I believe private toleration will likely prevail over public celebration. But the defensible hypocrisy of straight marriages may have an extra twist here.

But here’s the thing: what, exactly, is the alternative in a world where openly gay people and couples exist?

The thing that interests me, in this argument, is the reference to lesbian couples. My own experience of the lesbian community has been that, on the one hand, in some ways the norms about monogamy resemble those in among gay men more than those in the straight world. What I mean by that is that, if I were to announce that Joel and I have an open marriage (we don’t, but just suppose), there would be lots of people coming forth to tell us what a Really Bad Idea that is. While, if I were married to another woman, and were to say the same to my lesbian friends, there’d be more of a sense that, well, you shouldn’t judge another person’s relationship, and if we think polyamory was OK for us, then perhaps we’re right (the “don’t judge another person’s relationship” norm being stronger in the GLBT world than in the straight world). But at the same time, the actual couples formed tend to be, as Andrew Sullivan says, at least as monogamous as straight ones. In other words, norms about monogamy, and the way gay relationships influence them, are complicated things.

Flooding in Pakistan: Join the Relief, Recovery, and Reconstruction Effort.

Blogger beware: Postings can lead to lawsuits.

Here, zombies, zombies: hundreds of brains can be found below the Yale Medical School library.

Quran Burning and Other Issues of Religious Freedom.

Nation’s First Muslim College Opens in California.

DNA tests reveal Hitler’s Jewish and African roots.

Kids, too, can learn to prevent rabies.

My Alexandria co-blogger Hyphenated-American had a question for me, on my earlier Park 51/Cordoba House post, that I’ll quote in full and comment on a bit further down. So, in this post I mean to talk more broadly about what I think the First Amendment does and doesn’t mean. But before I get there, I’ll say, quickly, that though some cases (e.g. what you do about Bob Jones University) may be fuzzy, as a First Amendment issue the Park51 project is clearcut. Their local government has already put them through the normal zoning approval process, and found in their favor. Some people outside that board, and in the overwhelming majority of cases outside Manhattan (such as, for example, certain New York Republican gubernatorial candidates), have proposed finding government regulations that could be used to prevent the Park51 community center from being built in the proposed location. They propose using government regulations in this way because the building will have a prayer room used by Muslims. The right to pray as you like is a First Amendment right as core as you get, and government regulations may not be selectively applied to restrict that right. And community groups are now organizing to restrict that right, for Muslims, not just in Lower Manhattan.
Read the rest of this entry »

I have some thinking posts I’m mulling over, but I’m sure I won’t write them (if I manage to write them at all) till after I’ve done my homework this weekend, so instead here’s a quick linking post.

How do you improve the data quality of crowd sourced reports? Robert Munro (a Graduate Fellow at my own alma mater, Stanford) addresses this issue on the Ushahidi blog in How to cope with very large volumes of crowdsourced reports? Add more crowd!

As Facebook Places rolls out, the instructions appear on how to set your settings to make sure other people can’t tag you on it. Why would you want to do that? Well, maybe you want to preserve your ability to lie to your friends. For me, though, that wasn’t a big consideration. The last time I lied to anyone about my location was several years ago, to Joel. I had driven with my mother to LA, and we had parked her rental car several blocks away from where we were going, and discovered we couldn’t find it again. So I told Joel, when he called to ask where we were, that we were on the freeway stuck in traffic, so he wouldn’t panic about me and Mom wandering around some shabby neighborhood in LA on foot, searching for a car we couldn’t find. And I called my cousin, and he picked us up and drove us around so we could find the car faster, and I confess my lie and my reason for it as soon as I saw Joel again. Anyway, being able to lie, not a big issue for me. Not having to worry about someone else’s privacy settings and whether they’re broadcasting to the whole world that my house is vacant at the moment, bigger issue. I turned tagging off. I’m paranoid that way.

The Economist on Darfur and the perils of peacekeeping.

Jeffrey Goldberg defends the ‘Ground Zero’ Imam: ‘I Am a Jew, I Have Always Been One’ (his words at a memorial service for Daniel Pearl).

Oliver Wang at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog has some words on Teen Sex Drama! and how research gets reported.

2.) One of the most interesting conclusions they draw is that hookup culture—where it does exist—is detrimental for women in terms of the double-standard of public perception (i.e. promiscuous women are sluts, promiscuous men are just…men) but also in terms of sexual satisfaction:

“England’s survey revealed that women orgasm more often and report higher levels of sexual satisfaction in relationship sex than in hookup sex. This is in part because sex in relationships is more likely to include sexual activities conducive to women’s orgasm. In hookups, men are much more likely to receive fellatio than women are to receive cunnilingus. In relationships, oral sex is more likely to be reciprocal. In interviews conducted by England’s research team, men report more concern with the sexual pleasure of girlfriends than hookup partners, while women seem equally invested in pleasing hookup partners and boyfriends.”

I’m fairly certain this angle rarely comes up in discussions about casual sex that take on an all-too-familiar, reactionary/moralistic tone. You have to love how simple a motto you can make from it: “Hey ladies: don’t hook up, you won’t get off.”

3.) On the other hand, committed relationships aren’t exactly without shortcomings either….

Heather Corinna at Scarleteen reads the actual study and goes over it in detail.

… It does not use the term committed, nor does it address or define what a committed relationship is or is not. It also does not define or classify intercourse in nonromantic relationships as being about, or not about, “hookups” or “casual flings.” McCarthy made clear to me that they expressly avoided that language, in part because it is not at all clear what those terms mean.

What the study does address is sexual intercourse in the contexts of romantic and/or nonromantic relationships, using those terms. The data itself was not collected by the authors of the study, but gathered from other sources. Those sources, in determining which was which, asked participants to self-report what kinds of sexual relationships they were in by only those terms (romantic or not romantic), which was the primary way that status was determined. Determinations were then secondarily made based on agreement or disagreement with a series of statements about interpersonal behaviors/activities and a weighted scale was used for participants answers to those statements about their relationships.

Those statements were:
I met my partner’s parents.
I told other people that we were a couple.
We went out together alone.
We held hands.
I gave my partner a present.
My partner gave me a present.
I told my partner that I love him or her.
My partner told me that he or she loved me.
We thought of ourselves as a couple.
We kissed.

There was no mention of “commitment,” no questions about length of the relationship, about if someone loves someone or not, aims to marry or make babies with someone or not, not even about sexual exclusivity. The ten criteria in that list strike us as quite sound and age-appropriate questions about adolescent romantic/nonromantic relationships that don’t project older adult norms or models unto them….

(And, of course, I mentally ran through the list of everyone I slept with in my younger days, to see which of those behaviors I’d actually done: I met at least one parent for nearly everyone; almost no one told me that he loved me. I conclude that the only person I’ve actually done all of those things with is the guy I actually married, but I’ve never slept with anyone I did none of those other things with – having sex without kissing, in particular, is something I find distinctly unappealing.)

Tricia at Feministe points to an “Is my husband gay” checklist. She concludes that everyone she’s ever dated is gay; I conclude that it depends a whole lot on how you interpret the questions. For instance, technically, oral sex used to count as “sodomy,” which would make for massive failure of the criterion about “strange sexual demands” and “sudden interest in sodomy”; likewise, I don’t think I actually know any couples who go so far as to agree that

For the sake of trust, a married couple should share everything, including phone logs, email accounts, chat friends and website histories.

But if you construe each question narrowly, you can probably find a guy who fails only a couple of these “is he gay” tests.

Mom rating (for my mother – how upbeat is this movie): This movie is as upbeat as it’s possible for a movie to be that begins with the protagonist ruined and contemplating suicide, and builds to a climax at a funeral.

Bechdel Test (do two named women talk to each other about something other than a man): Yes, the protagonist’s mother and sister talk to each other plenty.

The Romance: Kirsten Dunst plays the Manic Pixie Dream Girl role with verve. In fact, it turns out, if you Google Manic Pixie Dream Girl, that this is the movie that gave the trope its name. Since Dunst’s opposite number is Orlando Bloom, there are actors with sufficient sex appeal to please people who swing toward either gender.

Other Tropes: What’s the trope for people from the more sophisticated parts of the country learning simple wisdom when they head to a small Southern town? There’s got to be a trope name for this meme already; I know Elizabethtown isn’t the first movie I’ve seen it in.

Subplots: The Orlando Bloom character’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” relationship with his dead father appears in counterpoint to his cousin Jesse’s “too determined to be my son’s best buddy to set limits” relationship with his spoiled young son.

Race: Everyone of any significance in this movie is white. The whole Bailey family, both the Oregon and Kentucky branches, has managed not to marry a single person of color, and even the shoe company where the protagonist works is lily white. Not only is everyone white, they’re WASP white. Not so much as an Italian or a Jew anywhere in the movie.

This WASPy whiteness may well, for all I know, be realistic, given that (other than the shoe company scenes) practically the whole movie takes place in one family in a small Kentucky town, and, hey, maybe people in small town Kentucky intermarry way less than people in the states I’ve spent most time in, especially since the states I’ve spent most time in are New York and California. But what I found interesting was that, having set up such a white cast, the movie then makes one of its protagonist’s key inspirational stops, as he drives his father’s ashes back to Oregon, a site commemorating Martin Luther King.

Non-Elizabethtown stuff:

House: We’re up to the point, renting House, where Cameron and Chase have their friends with benefits arrangements, and when everyone finds out about it they’re convinced Cameron, as the woman, is the one who will get hurt. House, of course, gets all the funny lines, like, “If you mean, by seeing each other, having sex in the janitor’s closet,” but I did kind of like Foreman’s line when he tries to persuade Cameron that there’s no such thing as “just sex” and Cameron challenges him as to whether people can’t disengage their emotions: “Nobody does it well; women do it worse.” What I liked about it is, there’s a tendency, when people talk about sex differences in pop culture (whether nature or nurture – I don’t at the moment want to get into the “how much of this is really born in us” controversy), to talk as if men and women are opposites. If men and women differ in how they approach sex, the difference has to be that men find it oh so trivial to divorce sex and having feelings for someone, while women find it absolutely impossible. So it’s nice to see them posed as more of a continuum – since, in my experience, that’s more how sex differences, the emotional ones anyway, work in real life. (FWIW, at the moment it appears to be Chase who’s having more trouble staying at the friends with benefits level.)

Do celebrities deserve a private life department: Allison Samuels at Newsweek makes the case against celebrity gossip, and, predictably, gets some blowback in comments of the “if they wanted privacy, they could have chosen more private lives” variety.

In fact, there’s no way public figures are going to get the same level of respect for their privacy as private figures. It’s not how our law works, it’s not how our culture works, and practically nobody expects it. But I think, because celebrities’ lives make such convenient gossip fodder for drawing whatever morals we like, that there’s a tendency for people to overstate just how much that loss of privacy is knowingly chosen. Take this comment, for instance:

PS Their private lives are part of what entertain us. They know this, and this is why many celebrities intentionally shock, act out, etc. If they don’t want this attention, they can live more privately like others do. If their popularity decreases as a result, so be it. You can’t have the fame, adoration and extreme money and the privacy too…It’s a choice they make, they know it, and they choose to be in the limelight for the fame and money. They like it as long as everyone adores them.

Is it really “a choice they make, they know it”? Some of the celebrities who’ve made the biggest tabloid fodder – Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods, Britney Spears – got put on the path to the limelight as children. And even for people who choose to go into sports or entertainment at the same age the rest of us are choosing our careers, well, for the ones I’ve known personally, most people went for acting or singing or whatever because they loved to act or sing. And for most of them, success was making a solid living at all doing what they loved. And so, for the couple who did hit the jackpot and have their own Wikipedia entries, can it really always be said that they got where they were knowing and expecting that they were going to lose their private lives? Plus, while some celebrities may intentionally shock and act out, well, don’t a lot of people just assume that those protests that the sex tape was released against the celebrities will are insincere? Which “I know you said no but you must really mean yes” attitude feels creepy to me, even if the celebrity, once the sex tape is out, makes a settlement with Vivid and uses the limelight to her advantage as best she can.

Some of my favorite commentary on the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” (that isn’t a mosque and won’t be at Ground Zero) comes from:

Josh Barro at the National Review.

Reihan Salam at the National Review.

Keith Olberman at MSNBC.

Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.

Dude, it’s just a mosque.

And the New York Daily News reports how ordinary NYC life goes on in the blocks surrounding the WTC site.

One church that was actually at Ground Zero is still not rebuilt; while I don’t agree with the title of the Facebook group Rebuild St Nicholas Church at Ground Zero First (the freedom of religion rights of the sponsors of the Park 51 Muslim community center aren’t contingent on who else has managed to raise enough money to build their churches), I’d like to point out that you can donate money to rebuild St. Nicholas Church, and, if your concern about Park 51 is that you think its presence would be some sort of Muslim triumphalism, promoting religious pluralism by donating to one of the other religious bodies in the area seems a more constructive way to express that concern than looking at all the kinds of zoning laws that conservatives normally oppose to see whether one of them might provide a loophole to restrict someone else’s freedom of worship.

Meanwhile, the US State Department continues its effort to persuade the world’s Muslims that we’re at war only with Al Qaeda, not with Islam, by setting up a web page on Ramadan in America.

From disaster relief to promoting peace, Muslims are making a difference in communities throughout the United States.

One piece of Ramadan good news from elsewhere in the world is that the PKK, the outlawed Kurdish group that is fighting Turkey from northern Iraq, has declared a ceasefire for Ramadan.

African news:

To no one’s surprise, Paul Kagame won Rwanda’s presidential election last week with 93% of the vote. While Rwanda may not have had a very competitive election, it did have attractive polling stations.

Ms Magazine loves Kenya’s new constitution.

Zambia’s mobile health clinics are vital.

Miscellaneous:

Poll numbers reveal that most border residents feel safe.

Mitigating the Strengths of (Prior) Convictions. (The post is perfectly worksafe, but the blog isn’t always, and is titled “Real Adult Sex, so nannyware may hit you anyway.)

Threats hidden in the moral of the story.

True love means looks still matter. (All the same, I am not wearing heels. Exercise enough to stay trim and fit in my hiking boots, maybe.)

Shadow economies have grown since the financial crisis began. Unsurprisingly, Greece has one of the larger shadow economies in Europe, but not the largest.

Andrew Sullivan has kept his blog hopping posting reader responses to this review, by John McWhorter, of Amy Wax’s book Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century.

Here’s the part of the review that speaks most to me:

Wax appeals to a parable in which a pedestrian is run over by a truck and must learn to walk again. The truck driver pays the pedestrian’s medical bills, but the only way the pedestrian will walk again is through his own efforts. The pedestrian may insist that the driver do more, that justice has not occurred until the driver has himself made the pedestrian learn to walk again. But the sad fact is that justice, under this analysis, is impossible.

I do believe this, that there are certain things that you can only do for yourself. At its most positive, I think, conservatism is a reminder of this need for personal responsibility. The negative side of this comes when the emphasis on personal responsibility gets mixed with the just world fallacy, the assumption that people who are losing are losing only because they didn’t take that responsibility. In real life, some people are born on third base and get multiple second chances when they screw up, while others get fewer chances. And, in any case where someone is still running over pedestrians and breaking their legs, you need to do something about those trucks, even as the pedestrians, of necessity, fair or not, will need to take their own steps to learn to walk again. Still, that said, the parable makes a fair point about the limits of justice. You do need to recover from your own damage, even if that damage was the result of injustice.

Here’s the part of the review that’s alien to my experience:

The focus on culture that Wax champions would be one in which a black family would be deeply ashamed of the man with two “baby mamas” who works only “odd jobs” and largely gets by selling drugs. But the implacable present-day fact is that in his actually existing community today that man is considered less than ideal but still quite normal. He is loved and accepted, not least as a consequence of the latent meme that only so much can be expected of black people because of the oppressiveness of The System.

I’m not saying communities don’t exist where the man described would be “less than ideal but still normal.” I’m saying I’ve personally never lived in that world, and that includes the black people I know personally. Most of the black people I’ve known personally, I’ve met in the same way I met the white, Asian, or Latino people I’ve known personally: some went to my high school, Horace Greeley, some went to my college, Stanford, and others I’ve run into through work, professional associations, Quaker meeting connections, etc. They’ve been the woman working on her dissertation for her Ph.D., the couple starting out and working different shifts, him as a computer operator and her as an administrative assistant, the guy in my software quality assurance professional association who can be counted on as a volunteer, etc. And they’ve come either from middle class families or from the sort of working class family where both parents stay gainfully employed most of the time and usually stay married to each other. To meet people of any race whose lives are closer to the two baby mamas, odd jobs, and selling drugs model, I have to go volunteer somewhere (and then, indeed, I’ll see some such people, but they won’t all be black).

McWhorter, being himself both black and middle class, presumably knows plenty of similar families, even as he laments the family patterns of the black underclass. But I bring it up because as these stories hop from discussion among black conservatives to the white people side of the racial divide, I’ve seen how perceptions get distorted, until soon certain people are talking as though the kind of black people who are actually most of the black people I’ve ever personally known were some sort of freakish exception.

The part of the post that I think is key to the difference in perceptions, between left and right, on racial issues:

Wax is well aware that past discrimination created black-white disparities in education, wealth, and employment. Still, she argues that discrimination today is no longer the “brick wall” obstacle it once was, and that the main problems for poor and working-class blacks today are cultural ones that they alone can fix.

Discrimination is no longer the “brick wall” obstacle it once was, but how far is it really a thing of the past? If unemployment rates among even college educated black people are still higher than such rates among comparably educated white people, if you can still find studies showing people reacting more negatively to the same resume if cued that the person submitting it is black, might there not still be room for improvement on the discrimination side of the fence, even as poor and working-class blacks address any cultural problems that they alone can fix?

It’s interesting to note that, while McWhorter shares Wax’s belief in the limitation of government programs, and in the importance of cultural factors in perpetuating the racial divide, he does still see some useful things that government can do:

Wax stipulates that the government should do all that it can to ensure equal opportunity, which includes providing decent education and enforcing civil rights laws. I would say that there is somewhat more that the government can do, given the historical circumstances. Programs to ease ex-cons back into society could do infinitely more for black inner-cities than suing car companies over small differences in loan deals. Those who think that Obama has no “black agenda” are unaware of how many black people attend the community colleges to which he has given extra (if insufficient) funding.

Still, his closing paragraph indicates that he wants the emphasis to be on self-help rather than government help.

I wasn’t going to post on the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque,” because much of what I’d have said has already been said by others. What changed my mind is this week’s report of a CNN poll in which, as Talking Points Memo puts it,

According to the new survey, 68% of Americans are against building the Cordoba House, a Muslim community center planned to be constructed two blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center. Twenty-nine percent favor the plan.

In interpreting such polls, the actual phrasing of the question makes a big difference. So, here’s the actual question to which those Americans were responding:

As you may know, a group of Muslims in the U.S. plan to build a mosque two blocks from the site in New York City where the World Trade Center used to stand. Do you favor or oppose this plan?

Note that the question does not ask, should the government allow the Muslims to build Cordoba House, given that it’s on private property, and given that we do have a First Amendment? It asks “Do you favor or oppose this plan?” This means that the 68% of respondents who marked “oppose” may include both people who have so lost sight of the Bill of Rights that they think Muslims should be prevented from building Cordoba House, and also people, who, if asked more directly, would agree that they should have the legal right to that land use, but who feel uneasy about a mosque close to Ground Zero, and wish that it would be built further away. As Nate Silver puts it,

I imagine there is a spectrum of about five different positions that one might take on Cordoba House:

1) I support the project: its goals seem laudable, and it would be a welcome addition to the neighborhood.

2) I am indifferent about the project itself — I can see the arguments both for it and against it. But this is a free country, and the developers certainly have a right to express themselves.

3) I’d rather that the project weren’t built, especially so near to Ground Zero. But it’s certainly not the government’s business to stop its construction.

4) I’m opposed to the project and hope that it isn’t built. But I’m indifferent about whether or not the City should act to stop it.

5) I’m definitely opposed to the project, and the City should exercise its authority to prevent it from being built.

Arguably, responses 3 through 5 all qualify as “opposition” to the project, whereas only the first one indicates clear support. But one’s personal position on the mosque is not necessarily the same as thinking that the City should take affirmative steps to prohibit its construction by eminent domain laws by or other means, a position held by only those in Group 5. This is somewhat analogous to asking: “do you support or oppose flag-burning?”.

Now, I’ll be plain. I don’t, myself, oppose the building of Cordoba House in any way, shape, or form. I’m just fine with its construction, for many reasons.

I’m fine with Cordoba House for the reasons Katha Politt gives.

Park51, a k a Cordoba House, won’t be a mosque; it will be a $100 million, thirteen-story cultural center with a pool, gym, auditorium and prayer room. It won’t be at Ground Zero; it will be two blocks away. (By the way, two mosques have existed in the neighborhood for years.) It won’t be a shadowy storefront where radical clerics recruit young suicide bombers; it will be a showplace of moderate Islam, an Islam for the pluralist West—the very thing wise heads in the United States and Europe agree is essential to integrate Muslim immigrants and prevent them from becoming fundamentalists and even terrorists. “It’s a shame we even have to talk about this,” says Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a longtime supporter of the project….

I’m fine with Cordoba House, because I’ve seen a Youtube video made by someone walking through the area in which it’s proposed to be built, and this area, two blocks from Ground Zero, appears in the video as an ordinary neighborhood, where life goes on, not some sort of set apart hallowed ground. There are lots of things within two blocks of Ground Zero: the grave of Alexander Hamilton, three gay bars, twenty-five different churches.

I’m fine with Cordoba House because having the kind of moderate Muslims Osama Bin Laden hates promoting interfaith understanding right near Ground Zero strikes me as a great way to stick it to Al Qaeda, and display the commitment to freedom for which I prize the country he chose to attack.

I’m fine with Cordoba House because, as a Facebook friend of mine put it in one of her status messages,

To those opposed to the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”, I ask, what about the families of Mohammed Salman
Hamdani, or Mohammad Sallahuddin Chowdhury, or Tariq Amanullah, or of any of the number of Muslim victims who were murdered on 9/11? Don’t they deserve a place close to the site to pray while they are mourning the loss of their loved ones?

For all of these reasons, if I’d been asked to participate in that poll, I’d have marked myself among the 29% who “support” the building of Cordoba House rather than among the 68% who “oppose” it. I support the building of Cordoba House. But I’m not offended if you don’t.

I’m not offended if you don’t, because for me the difference between Nate Silver’s positions 3 and 5 is vast. There are many, many things that neither pick my pocket nor break my leg, that I nevertheless “oppose” in the sense that I’d rather you not do them. I oppose, vehemently, Scientology’s opposition to psychiatric medicines, but as long as they simply propagate their unscientific nonsense about psychiatry, and don’t try to prevent people like my husband from taking the medicines he needs as much as he needs the medicines he also takes for his diabetes, then they neither pick my pocket nor break my leg, and, as propagating their unscientific nonsense is covered by the First Amendment, they should be permitted to continue to do so. I oppose flag burning, and have helped to talk people out of it when they proposed to do it at demonstrations I attended, but I think it’s protected by the First Amendment. I oppose all use of religion to promote the oppression of women, whether the religion in question is Islam, Christianity, or some other faith. But as long as you’re using words to encourage women to consign themselves to a subordinate position, rather than force to keep them there, the old saying holds, that “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

And if you think the builders of Cordoba House are insensitive in their choice of location, if you wish they’d take their community center elsewhere, if you think building it two blocks from Ground Zero won’t promote the reconciliation between faiths that they say they want, if you really, really dislike the idea of seeing any sort of mosque that close to Ground Zero, but you agree that they have, and ought to have, the legal right to build Cordoba House on the private property where it’s proposed to be built, then I can accept your position. Because Cordoba House isn’t entitled to your approval, and it isn’t entitled to your love. What it’s entitled to, as a private property use that neither picks your pocket nor breaks your leg, and that is protected by the First Amendment, is the same respect for its legal rights as we accord the twenty-five churches that are already in that two block radius. Mayor Bloomberg puts it well.

The simple fact is this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship.”The government has no right whatsoever to deny that right – and if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question – should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion?”

I would defend, as a matter of free speech, your right to say anything you damn well please about the group that is planning to build Cordoba House, and I’ll defend, as a matter of freedom of religion guaranteed by that same First Amendment, their right to build their community center, and not be blocked by someone pulling out eminent domain just because he doesn’t like their religion. The First Amendment holds for all private property, whether that private property is in Tennessee, or California, or two blocks from Ground Zero.

Technology News Department: The Ushahidi blog introduces Crowdmap.

Mashable on how to avoid a social media disaster.

Saudi Arabia is allowing Blackberries again. The Economist reflects on Spies, secrets and smart-phones.

Der Spiegel on the effectiveness of antivirus software, Google and privacy, and Wikileaks.

Racism and the Tea Party Department: David Weigel argues that it’s a myth that the Tea Party is racist.

Yes, there are racists in the tea party, and they make themselves known. But tea party activists usually root them out.

Lurleen at Pam’s House Blend argues the opposite.

I think that if you have to remind your whole membership not to carry signs that are racist, it’s a tacit admission that there’s plenty of racist propensity in the ranks.

Economic News Department: US expert calls for policies to avoid entry barriers to trade (via my sister).

The Economist says that London’s economy is coming up for air.

Kathimerini also sounds an optimistic note today.

Anyone who follows Greece closely will note that the intensity of true public discontent has been surprisingly low. It appears that however unhappy many people may be with a reduced income and the fact that their country has been shamed by thieves and incompetents, they also understand the need for reforms. There is far greater public tolerance of the need for reforms than we were conditioned to expect during the decades in which no government dared take on the unions nor do anything else to upset voters. This tolerance of change, however, has been offset by the way in which the bank employees’ deaths and the gangland-style murder of a journalist by terrorists have merged with the general image of Greece in international media. Again, Greeks have done about as much as they can to make their country’s image as bad as it is, but it is far from being a «war zone,» as the Sect of Revolutionaries sociopaths would like to portray it.

Miscellaneous Department: A Flickr pool of Greek vacation photos.

A potential new therapy for Alzheimers.

Muslim-baiting loses in Tennessee.

The Economist on Europe’s irreligious. It doesn’t surprise me that Greece turns out to be one of the countries with the highest church attendance (not that the Greeks I know are all super religious, but it’s hardly Belgium).

Ms. Magazine, in a global news round up, finds Kenya’s new constitution more women friendly than the previous version, and gives updates on a death sentence of stoning for adultery in Iran (for which you can sign a petition) and a report on gender benders in Sudan.

Rwanda is holding presidential elections today, amid criticism by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch of attacks on politicians and journalists prior to the polls. The Economist writes about President Paul Kagame under scrutiny. Thousands of Rwandans living in Uganda have came to a polling station to vote, as members of the Rwanda Diaspora around the world voted at their respective embassies a day ahead of the election in Rwanda. A twenty member team from the African Union is in Rwanda to observe the elections.

The UN plans to return its embassies and charitable organizations to Somalia in two months. The embassies and organizations have been based in Nairobi, capital of Kenya, since 1993.

Chris Blattman on Is aid depressing?

Charles E. Jackson on How Do Friends Know What They Know?

The Wall Street Journal has been doing an interesting series on What They Know. For instance, here’s an article on the holes in online anonymity, here’s one on stalking by cell phone, and here’s one on how to avoid prying eyes.

Marvin Ammori at Balkinization on Posting A Guide to the Network Neutrality Discussions at the FCC and About the Verizon/Google “Deal” on Net Neutrality (which may or may not come to pass, since the last word was that Google was denying it). See also Tim Wu’s Network Neutrality FAQ.

From the German business and finance magazine manager, an article about the reaction of German billionaires to the Gates and Buffett initiative to persuade other billionaires to join them in pledging to give away half their money, before or after they die, and an article on the hit the Greek retail trade is taking in the wake of the austerity measures. And a similar article in Der Spiegel about shops closing in Athens.

From the Greek news site in.gr, an article on how the new head of the organization of social security promises to crack down on tax evasion.

While I personally am expecting Vaughn Walker’s decision on Proposition 8 to get overturned on appeal (just on the general principle that the current Supreme Court has a conservative majority), I could prove wrong. Dahlia Lithwick argues that Vaughn Walker’s factual findings are both well reasoned and nicely tailored to influence swing vote Justice Kennedy, and Nate Silver argues that some intangibles might cause Kennedy to lean toward supporting same-sex marriage. Scott Lemieux still thinks Kennedy will probably come down against a right to same-sex marriage. Vikram Amar argues that the decisive battle may happen not in the Supreme Court, but in the Ninth Circuit, and also gives a reason for Walker’s stay of his own decision.

… California already saw firsthand in 2004 what happened when San Francisco began marrying gay and lesbian couples before the California Supreme Court’s recognition of a right to same-sex marriage. The result was, months later, those marriages were voided.

If licenses are issued based on Walker’s ruling, and the higher courts reverse Walker – a real possibility – then these interim marriages probably will be similarly undone….

Opinions on Gay Rights Vary a Lot by State, with majority support in several states. (The last poll result in California was a slender majority in favor of same-sex marriage, but a majority slim enough that it’s anyone’s guess whether Proposition 8 would win or lose if it were up for a vote today.)

Maybe I’m lucky I’m not all that pretty, given that I’m a computer professional. Pretty women face discrimination when applying for jobs that are considered masculine

Douglas Eby on Not Knowing – More Creativity.

An article in the New York Times on Battles Around Nation Over Proposed Mosques.

Ramadan begins tomorrow.

An article in the Economist on Defying gravity and history. Despite dire predictions of a repeat of the 1930s, trade is bouncing back.

Oxytocin increases trust, but only under certain conditions. And this is a good thing. Via Scarleteen’s Twitter feed.

Under Pressure: The Search for a Stress Vaccine.

Find Out Where You Can Recycle Rechargeable Batteries.

And a music video passed on by one of my cousins:

This will be one of those meandering posts where I try to figure out what I think about certain things, rather than the better organized sort where I’m already sure what my conclusions are. Here’s where I comment on several posts that are related only in the sense that they’re all somehow about sexual or romantic relationships. Let’s start with Jay’s account of how he found his ex-boy friend on Facebook, and his husband is just fine with that.

I don’t know what I expected when I friended him, but it wasn’t what has developed over the last year. John and I have an ongoing Email conversation; we talk on the phone a few times a week; we check in with each other when we’re traveling. We’ve written volumes about what happened way back then – about the choices we made, the places we went, the ways in which we hurt each other and helped each other and taught each other and loved each other. We’ve dug up old photos and traded new ones. We’ve had lunch together, alone, and we’ve visited each other’s homes. We’ve even visited each other’s mothers, who both still live in the houses we grew up in. John’s mother started to cry when she saw me walk in the door. My mother keeps asking when he’s coming back to visit her again.

And many of my friends are astonished and skeptical. Not my husband – Sam is unconcerned – but my friends. I didn’t expect that, either. “Playing with fire”, they observe. “I could never do that”. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” “Are you still attracted to him?” Well, yes, actually, I am, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to end up in a hotel room together.

To me, reconnecting (in a platonic way) with exes on Facebook is the epitome of a “your mileage may vary” situation. Sometimes, it’s playing with fire. Sometimes, not so much. It depends on the exes involved, and their current relationships, and so on. Some people are friends far longer than they’re lovers (or far more friends than lovers all along), while with others, once the passion’s gone, it turns out there wasn’t much friendship there. Different people have different comfort levels with their spouses’ friendships with exes. Some people have always connected and reconnected with exes with no problems, while with others, I think I’ll borrow a passage in which Hugo Schwyzer describes his own experience.

I’ve become fairly rigid about my boundaries in recent years, largely because in my past I got into so much trouble for not being so. In my youth, I had plenty of “platonic” friendships with women that sizzled with barely unexpressed sexual tension. I figured that infidelity was an action, not a thought or a desire; I allowed myself to indulge in the narcissistic pleasure of these non-sexual (but tense) friendships for years. Another thing I did to harm all three of my previous wives was to maintain strong, ultimately inappropriate friendships with exes and other women with whom I had a “past.”

I’ve heard stories of exes reconnecting on Facebook that fall everywhere from fairly screaming to me “these people are playing with fire,” to sounding as if these people and their current loves are going to be just fine.

My hunch is that, if there’s a piece of general advice here, it has to do with the questions you need to ask, in setting your boundaries with people you may have slept with or loved or had a crush on in the past, and not necessarily with what the actual boundary should be. And also with the way you and your actual partner communicate about all the exes. I’d feel uneasy either telling people in the kind of relationship where all exes are kept at a distance, or people in the kind of relationship where some of their exes are close friends, that they’re doing it wrong. Unless I think I have a good enough feel for what’s going on in that particular relationship to say something about its danger signs (and the person I’m talking to is likely to be open to that sort of advice).

But how far does your mileage actually vary, when it comes to choices about sex? Here I turn to the next post, from Jaclyn Friedman, a post on Feministe that was later carried on Jezebel entitled My Sluthood, Myself, in which Jaclyn Friedman describes the benefits of embracing her own sluthood through a series of casual Craiglist encounters.

I’m telling you this because juries still think women who even look like they might possibly be sluts are “asking for it.” I’m telling you this because some people still think it’s OK to drive a teenage girl to suicide because she was probably a slut. I’m telling you this because our policymakers would rather girls get sometimes-fatal diseases than be perceived as condoning sluthood. I’m telling you this because it’s important for everyone to understand: Sluthood isn’t a disease, or a wrong path, or a trend that’s ruining our youth. It isn’t just for detached, unemotional women who “fuck like men,” (as if that actually meant something), consequences be damned. It isn’t ever inevitable that sluthood should inspire violence or shame. Sluthood isn’t just a choice we should let women make because women should be free to make even “bad” choices. It’s a choice we should all have access to because it has the potential to be liberating. Healing. Soul-fulfilling. I’m telling you this because sluthood saved me, in a small but life-altering way, and I want it to be available to you if you ever think it could save you, too. Or if you want it for any other reason at all. And because even if you don’t ever want sluthood for yourself, you’re going to be called upon to support a slut. I’m telling you this because when that happens, I want you to say yes.

The lines that caught my eye here are “Sluthood isn’t just a choice we should let women make because women should be free to make even “bad” choices” and “even if you don’t ever want sluthood for yourself, you’re going to be called upon to support a slut.” Because they raise a question: What choices, actually, am I morally/ethically obliged to positively affirm as positive choices (for someone, if not for me), as opposed to simply accepting as choices people should be free to make even if they’re bad choices? To draw this out, I’ll imagine a set of choices that a person could make involving sex.

I could start by picturing these choices as if they were a single line, spanning a spectrum of how much you want your sexual activity tied to commitment and relationship. It might span from “I’m not even going to kiss until my wedding day” to “I routinely cruise for anonymous sex.” Probably many of us find the thought of some point on this continuum – perhaps even both ends of the continuum – viscerally unpleasant to imagine. Are all points on this continuum actually positive choices for someone? Do they all, if engaged in by consenting adults, deserve support, not just as “bad” choices that people should be free to make anyway, but as possibly liberating and positive choices?

Now let’s complicate the line by adding more options. Some might involve choices of a partner of whom someone else may disapprove (but with everyone being a consenting adult), perhaps interracial relationships or perhaps relationships where one person is barely legal and the other old enough to be the first one’s parent or grandparent. Some might involve different choices about how to handle attraction to your own sex. One person, perhaps, feels bound by Christian beliefs to stay celibate, another joins a program that offers to change his or her orientation to straight, a third looks for a gay-affirming church, and a fourth gives up on Christianity altogether precisely because of the sexual constraints of the church in which he or she was raised. Some might involve choices of what you do in bed, some might involve choices about how much care you take to protect yourself from STDs, and some might involve choices about when you are ready to have children. Some may involve having sex for pay, or paying someone else to have sex. Some might involve different boundaries about what you consider fidelity: Is porn a dealbreaker? What kinds of friendships with exes are you OK with? Have you agreed to be monogamous at all? Some might involve lifelong religious vows of abstinence, and others might involve never having sex because you’re simply asexual. But in all cases, everyone involved (well, except any children who may be born) is a consenting adult. Nearly all (everything except the choices involving sex for pay) are legal, and if you apply the “does not pick my pocket or break by leg” standard of libertarianism, you might well want all of them to be legal. But which of them are you bound to affirm as good choices?

I can imagine several answers, but they don’t entirely satisfy me.

First option: I ought to affirm anything consenting adults choose as a positive choice for them. This doesn’t satisfy me because I know that people make lots of choices that are lousy choices for them. I’ve done it. You’ve probably done it. Moreover, some choices may nearly always be lousy choices. Some choices may even always be lousy choices. Some choices don’t even seem possible to simultaneously affirm; while you may, in principle, both be able to support one person’s choice to save sex for marriage and another person’s choice to have tons of sex without any marriage plans, the choice to try to become ex-gay in practice depends on the belief that there’s something wrong with homosexuality.

Second option: I don’t have to affirm or support any of them. I might be obliged to leave them legal, since they don’t pick my pocket or break my leg, but neither do I pick anyone’s pocket or break anyone’s leg by believing their sexual choices to be bad choices. This one doesn’t entirely satisfy me either, because, though I certainly have the right to disapprove of any choices, at least some of the choices I’ve listed (such as, say, the choice to be in an interracial relationship) are ones where I’d think you wrong and bigoted if you object.

Third option: I owe your choices support, whether you’re choosing something I’d be willing to choose or not, if I can see that your choices are positive for you, and that other people’s condemnation does you harm. This comes closer to how I feel than the other two, but it’s still not quite the whole story, since I think there are at least some choices that should be presumed to be positive and deserving of support even if you don’t personally know anyone who’s made that choice.

To me, those would particularly be choices involving marriage, and the people you need to stand by in sickness and in health; “in sickness and in health” implies a need for social support, in the form of admission to that hospital bed, and time off from work, and the like. For that reason, as long as both people involved appear to be willingly making choices they’re happy about, I’d like the relationship to be presumed innocent, and the social support it gets to be as ungrudging as possible, unless one can come up with a really good reason to the contrary.

And then there are other questions: Suppose you do think someone’s choices are bad and foolish ones, what kinds of respect do you owe those choices anyway? For instance, maybe you think waiting to marry before you have your first kiss is just about the dumbest idea you’ve ever heard, but that the person who holds that boundary still deserves not to be harassed and pressured out of it. Or maybe you totally disagree with Jaclyn Friedman that casual sex can ever be a positive choice, but firmly agree with her that it’s wrong that

I’m telling you this because juries still think women who even look like they might possibly be sluts are “asking for it.” I’m telling you this because some people still think it’s OK to drive a teenage girl to suicide because she was probably a slut. I’m telling you this because our policymakers would rather girls get sometimes-fatal diseases than be perceived as condoning sluthood.

And, finally, if I say that my choices are making me happy, when is it OK for you to say I’m wrong, and that my choices aren’t making me happy? Never? Only directly to me, if you and I know each other well enough for me to offer that feedback, and I see the signs that you’re not as happy as you’re pretending? Or any time I think your argument is leading people astray? (Personally, I lean toward the second, “only directly to me, if you and I know each other well enough” option.)

And now come the final, totally unrelated post on which I want to comment, a post at a Psychology Today blog entitled Trading Roses for Weeds, that I found via a critique of the post at Jezebel. Psychology Today blogger Anastasia Harrell writes:

Your boyfriend makes fun of you for crying during The Notebook, even though you have already seen it twelve times. He criticizes your lack of culinary expertise (hey, even the great and powerful Paula Deen must have burned a few pots of spaghetti in her early years!). He even forces you to sit through both Transformers, (“No, no, I don’t think Megan Fox is hot. I’m just really into robots…”). Thinking back on the injustices we endure due to of our significant others, sensitivity always seems to be high on the list of attributes women find most attractive in a potential boyfriend. We say we want someone who surprises us with daisies just because it’s Tuesday, serenades us with his acoustic guitar, and bakes us brownies when we desperately need a chocolate fix. However, when brought face to face with a man who is truly devoted to romanticism, we quickly dismiss him. No longer considered swoon-worthy, his antics evoke discomfort and sheer terror in the hearts of women everywhere.

Naturally, I don’t recognize myself in this quote. My husband doesn’t make fun of me for crying over The Notebook, a movie I have never watched and haven’t the least desire to watch. He has shown no more interest in watching Transformers than I have in watching The Notebook. We’re both fine with the fact that he’s a better cook than I am. And when we admire hot actresses, we admire them together.

But most of all, the quote talks as if there’s one single thing called “romance” that we either crave or find terrifying, instead of various “romantic” things that people do, some of which we like and some of which fall flat. Do I really want “someone who surprises us with daisies just because it’s Tuesday, serenades us with his acoustic guitar, and bakes us brownies when we desperately need a chocolate fix”? Well, it’s hard to go wrong serenading me with your acoustic guitar. I love being serenaded, and I don’t much care whether you sing me “When I’m 64″ or “When You Are Old and Gray.” I’ve been charmed by “Like a Rolling Stone,” by “Four and Twenty Years Ago,” and by “Do me with your hot monkey love.” If someone, like the reality TV show contestant Anastasia Harrell describes, “performed an impromptu (off-key) serenade after a helicopter ride,” it’s very unlikely I’d be running for the exits because of the impromptu serenade.

But that doesn’t mean that I’d be charmed by the rest of the things he’s described as doing, and find them oh-so-romantic. Like Anna North at Jezebel, I don’t think being told I look imaginary sounds like all that charming a compliment, and having someone tattoo himself with my name before I’ve even indicated I like him sounds downright creepy, rather than romantic.

As for getting daisies just because it’s Tuesday, there are several gifts of flowers that I remember fondly. Not all of them are romantic; one is a bunch of roses that my parents brought me when I was four years old and miserable in the hospital (I remember Dad bringing the flowers and Mom bringing a book, but probably they both got both presents), and another is a flower picked for me by a five-year-old child. But some are; I got a couple of flowers from guys in college, that I loved and saved, and once, when I still worked swing shift and slept late, my husband slipped out in the morning for a bouquet of roses and brought it to me in bed. But I’ve also gotten tons of gifts of flowers about which I felt meh, carnations from merchants trying to sell me something or other. If I’m prepared to love you, I’ll love your flowers, but if not, you’re not guaranteed to get any mileage out of daises just because it’s Tuesday.

Romance, you see, really is one of those things where your mileage may vary. Faced with a man truly devoted to romanticism, I may love him or want to get away from him, depending on just what sort of romanticism he’s devoted to. I find my husband the most romantic guy I’ve ever dated, and I’m happy with that. But from the sounds of the reality star, and particularly the bit with the tattoo, I think I’d have dumped him.

Kenyans approved a new constitution in a referendum yesterday, in a landslide vote in which two thirds of the electorate voted YES (with only over 50% required to approve).

… The Yes campaign, led by President Kibaki, 79, and Prime Minister Raila Odinga, 65, had a disorganised start, although opinion polls consistently showed them leading.

The No group, led by several churches, a few dissident ministers, most notably Higher Education minister William Ruto, and former president Daniel arap Moi, 86, looked in good early form.

More impassioned, and exploiting the emotional issues of abortion, which it claimed (inaccurately) was being legalised by the proposed constitution through an ambiguous clause, and the fact the (Islamic family) kadhi courts had been retained, the No side was on message straight from when the whistle blew.

However, the document was loaded with too many attractive clauses to lose. Its bill of rights is easily the most ambitious in Africa. It dramatically reduces the power of the president, expands parliamentary oversight over the executive, and provides for dual citizenship….

While the No camp skipped a planned joint briefing with the Yes camp, “called to urge Kenyans to maintain peace during and after the referendum,” church leaders opposed to the new constitution had said in advance that they were prepared to accept the results of the referendum, and the de facto leader of the No camp has conceded defeat.

Bloggers on the new Kenyan constitution:

A summary by Kenyan blogger bankelele of the provisions of the new constitution.

Kenya’s referendum live updates from Global Voices.

Wanjiku’s Take writes

On the referendum day, the iHub was buzzing and there were more laptops than you can think, after all, there was proof that this was going to be a very tech day for the team monitoring via www.uchaguzi.co.ke

burekabisa.blogspot.com thinks that It’s The Media That Won It.

Well done to our media for the vigorous and positive campaign of backing the proposed draft constitution. The result is a thundering YES victory from the majority of Kenyans who voted overwhelmingly YES. As this famous front page from Britain’s biggest selling tabloid shows in 1992, The Sun helped the Tories to win. Well, I think in our case it’s the Media wot won it for all of us! Congrats!

The Godfather is proud of the vote.

Kenyans have today, 4th August 2010, risen to the occasion and shown the whole world that political maturity and level headed-ness can be real virtues and central fabric that hold a Nation together even when push comes to shove! The whole world waited and was almost certain that Kenya would boil over again at this crucial Decision making process but wapi? Kenyans trooped to polling centers countrywide a voted a resounding YES to pass a New Constitution. I hear Kibera residents, who in the 2007 regrettable election skirmishes uprooted the Kenya Uganda Railway in protest at the flawed election are today organizing themselves to wash that very Railway! lol (Twitter joke!)….

Harvest Tone blogs a Ghetto Radio account of Kenyan voters’ experiences.

Kenyan points of discord is jumping up and down for joy at the new constitution.

Drima the Sudanese Thinker shares a Youtube of a meeting of Muslim mystic An-Na’im with the Dalai Lama. An-Na’im is also a law professor at Emory University. Here is an article of his at the Huffington Post on Thomas Jefferson, Islam and the State.

On a gloomier note, 452 cases of polio have been confirmed in Tajikistan since February, a resurgence in a formerly polio free country that represents a major setback to the WHO’s effort to eliminate polio.

For much of the past decade, it appeared polio’s last stand would be in Africa and South Asia, which have borne the brunt of the viral disease in recent years. As recently as 2007, polio was restricted to just four nations. The roughly 600 cases so far this year are scattered across 16 countries.

Its arrival in Tajikistan and Russia, part of a region declared polio-free in 2002, illustrates the easy spread of germs in an era of global travel and the challenge of maintaining vigilance in impoverished regions.