Saturday roundup

Egypt's judiciary is a joke.

Have you been wondering whether and how IAEA can verify the nuclear provisions of the Iran agreement? Read this.

There's a way to help Flint without creating new problems from plastic bottles.

There's a way to support sustainable palm oil.

Dudes: you don't need to eat meat.

Placebos are nothing to sneeze at.

This article on the normalization of violence against women and entitlement to women's bodies is excellent overall but also reminded me of RM. Particularly how he cried when I balked at the foot massage he tried to give me, as if I was the one who was supposed to feel bad.

Oh, shirtless shamers.

It's Single Ladies' week in honor of Rebecca Traister's new book on single women. Here are some excerpts from the first column.

Today’s women are, for the most part, not abstaining from or delaying marriage to prove a point about equality. They are doing it because they have internalized assumptions that just a half-century ago would have seemed radical: that it’s okay for them not to be married; that they are whole people able to live full professional, economic, social, sexual, and parental lives on their own if they don’t happen to meet a person to whom they want to legally bind themselves. The most radical of feminist ideas—the disestablishment of marriage — has been so widely embraced as to have become habit, drained of its political intent but ever-more potent insofar as it has refashioned the course of average female life...

Remaining unmarried through some portion of early adulthood, especially for college-educated women, is intimately linked with making money. The “Knot Yet Report,” published in 2013, revealed that a college-educated woman who delays marriage until her 30s will earn $18,000 more per year than an equivalently educated woman who marries in her 20s...

The notion that what the powerful, growing population of unmarried American women needs from the government is a husband (or a gynecologist, as was the case with one horrifying 2013 Koch-funded anti-Obamacare ad that featured a grotesque Uncle Sam popping up leeringly from a pelvic exam) is of course problematic. It reduces all relationships women have to marital, sexual, hetero ones and suggests that they are, by nature, dependent beings, in search of someone—if not a ­husband then an elected official or a set of public policies — to support or care for them.

Whether or not single women are looking for government to create a “hubby state” for them, what is certainly true is that their (white) male counterparts have long enjoyed the fruits of a related “wifey state,” in which the government has supported (white) male independence in a variety of ways. It’s hard for us to recognize this, since it has been the norm for so long — and here, it’s useful to recall Elizabeth Warren’s stirring “You didn’t build that” speech, in which she pointed out that “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.”

Men, especially married wealthy white men, have for generations relied on government assistance. It’s the government that has historically supported white men’s home and business ownership through grants, loans, incentives, and tax breaks. It has allowed them to accrue wealth and offered them shortcuts and bonuses for passing it down to their children. Government established white men’s right to vote, and thus exert control over the government, at the nation’s founding and has protected their enfranchisement since. It has also bolstered the economic and professional prospects of men by depressing the economic prospects of women. In other words, by failing to offer women equivalent economic and civic protections, thus helping to create conditions whereby they were forced to be dependent on those men, the government established a gendered class of laborers who took low-paying or unpaid jobs doing the domestic and child-care work that further enabled men to dominate public spheres.

 and the second:

For whatever reason, the most productive, passionate, and self-actualized people I knew (or admired from afar) had spent large portions of their lives alone. Women, in particular, seemed to blossom personally and professionally when their attentions were directed not toward their spouses or offspring, but themselves. For a certain type of creative, highly sensitive soul, I believed, singledom was a feature, not a bug.

What mustache? I don't even see a mustache, although I agree with the overall premise that women can be expected to look plastic rather than human, so much so that flickers of humanness can come through as flaws.

Humanities matter. I'm not just saying that because I took a lot of French literature and turned out okay.

Although it's hard to imagine not offering housing to a relative, Carolyn is spot on: the first rule of asking favors is being willing to take no for an answer. 

 

These pictures from space!