Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Women's Lib

Is it possible to successfully liberate a group that does not want to be liberated?  History says no.

The classic example of this is the experience of T. E. Laurence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia.  In the run up to World War I Middle Eastern Arabs had been under the thumb of the Ottoman Empire for a long time.  As part of a plan to weaken an opponent Lawrence was sent by the British into the area to foment revolt.  He was spectacularly successful.  The 1962 film, "Lawrence of Arabia" does a reasonably accurate job of portraying events.  Lawrence himself penned a memoir called "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" that also covers this period.  Finally, there have since been a number of "revisionist" histories written about these events.  But in all cases the basics of the story remain the same.  And we are still dealing with the aftermath.

The liberation of the Arab peoples was not a spontaneous event initiated by the Arabs themselves.  The Ottoman empire was weak and Lawrence was able to cobble together enough support among various factions to stage some stunts.  The stunts were successful.  This generated more support and support from more factions.  Things escalated until the Ottoman Empire crumbled and the Arabs were liberated.

But by and large the Arabs had no skin in the game.  So we ended up with countries like Saudi Arabia.  It is run by the al Saud family and there is enough oil money around to buy off the opposition.  So it keeps rolling along like it's a real country.  But it has now been badly governed for nearly a century.  A country like Egypt should be a substantial regional power.  And at times in the past it has been.  But it is currently a mess.  And "currently a mess" is the best you can say about many Arab countries in the region.

As a counter example look at Cuba.  There we had an indigenous revolution.  We like to throw rocks at the Castro regime.  But it has delivered generally good governance for a half a century.  Cuba may be poor.  But it is one of the wealthiest Caribbean countries and its population is in many ways more healthy than that of the U. S. and way healthier than most of the populaces in the neighborhood.

And that brings us to the Women's Movement.  A case can be made that it has been going on for more than a century.  And that is certainly true if you look for instances of women playing an influential role in national policy.  Women are generally credited for civilizing the west, for actually taming the frontier.  In the bad old days, the story goes, it was all "wild west" with saloons and gunfights and what law and order there was came from the barrel of a Smith and Wesson or a Colt revolver.  But this perception is mostly the creation of "dime novels" and later movies and TV.

Lost in all this is the fact that many frontier towns had very restrictive gun laws.  And there were few if any actual "quick draw" shootouts on main street.  Cattle men were business men.  They wanted to transact their business safely and with some confidence that there was enough "law" around to ensure contracts to buy, sell, and ship cattle could be enforced.  Farmers saw things the same way.  They wanted to make sure that their land titles were upheld, that things like farm equipment could be procured from far away, and that their crops could be shipped to the big cities that were also far away, and that everyone paid what they owed.  Probably the most civilizing influence on the old west were the railroads.

So what were women up to during this period?  They had two main issues at the time:  the vote and prohibition.  They eventually got both.  They have now had the vote for over a hundred years.  Let's just assume that is a good thing and move on.  How about prohibition or temperance or whatever you want to call it?  The movement was definitely originated by women and largely driven forward by women.  There argument was simple.  "Men were beasts when under the influence of alcohol".  And an unspoken corollary was necessary.  "Men couldn't be trusted to moderate their drinking."

Everything would be so much better if men were deprived of the ability to get a drink.  And most bars and saloons were either the exclusive territory of men (ignoring the "saloon girl" staff and we all know what immoral hussies they were), or women had at best only very limited access to them.  It was therefore deemed important to close them down.  And even in the home, where the woman's touch was ever present, men drinking at home was also considered to be a big problem.  So the only truly effective solution was to shut production down.  And everybody knows that (with the exception of the afore mentioned hussies) women are always the soul of dignity and propriety.  So this drinking business is exclusively a men's problem.

Well women got their wish.  The whole country went dry.  And it got less civilized rather than more as a result.  Crime became rampant.  Everybody drank.  And they drank more than they had before prohibition.  And they switched from soft liquor like beer and wine to hard liquor like bathtub Gin.    And the money injected into the criminal element by prohibition unleashed a spectacular wave of lawlessness.  Everybody knew that everybody was being bought off.  So the reputation of the criminal justice system sank like a rock.  Prohibition was a spectacular failure.  It had exactly the opposite effect from that predicted by its proponents.

Does this mean that all women's ideas are dumb?  No!  But it means that women are like men.  They have some smart ideas and some dumb ideas.  Pay attention to whether the idea is smart or dumb not to whether men or women think it up.  So that's the historical perspective.  During this period the argument was about what was good for society as a whole.  It was not, or not primarily, about whether society treated women appropriately.  That argument started in the '60s and acquired the nickname "women's lib".  Hence the title of this post.

And here the argument was a simple one.  It can be summarized by a song from the 1946 Broadway musical "Annie Get your Gun".  The show featured a song called "Anything you can do".  Annie sang "Anything you can do, I can do better".  The "Annie" in question was Annie Oakley, a star of the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show that toured the country in the late 1800s.  Her contention was that she could do anything better than Frank Butler, a competitor.  By implication she was arguing that she as a woman was just as good at doing what needed to be done as he, as a man was, maybe better.  If men were first class citizens, and they were, then women deserved to also be first class citizens.

But is that true?  In at least one way it demonstrably is not.  Men are better at sports.  And success in sports generally depends on being stronger and faster.  There are lots of "strength" sports.  There is weight lifting, shot put, and even things like the pole vault that ultimately depend to a great extent on strength.  In no case are women competitive with men in a "head's up" competition in any of the sports that depend heavily on pure strength.

What about speed?  Well there is the hundred yard dash (or hundred meter dash, if you want to be part of the rest of the world).  Men are faster.  And there are innumerable variations (fencing anyone?) on this theme.  Men are faster in the other variations too.  But what about sports that require effort over a longer duration?

When money started flowing into women's sports a discussion arose to the effect that female physiology might be better suited than male physiology in the specific case of the marathon.  And initially there was some evidence to support this.  The finishing times of female marathoners initially started improving dramatically.  But then they plateaued at a level of performance substantially lower than that of comparable men.  Today many marathons are run each day.  And in a large number of these men and women compete on the same course at the same time.  And men perform better than women.

Well, what about a situation where raw ability is not enough?  "Smarts" is also involved.  A classic example of this situation is Tennis.  Positioning yourself on the court and knowing where to place your shots is absolutely critical to success.  Well there is an interesting example of a Tennis match between a man and a woman. And in this particular case the woman won.

In 1973 Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King squared off in "The Battle of the Sexes".  King won the match handily.  The match was played under standard professional tennis rules and both were professional tennis players.  So that means that at least when it comes to professional tennis "anything a man can do a woman can do better", right?  Well, not exactly.  In 1973 King was the top ranked female professional tennis player.  Riggs had held the top rank among men at one time.  But at the time of the match it had been more than twenty years since he had even competed as a pro.  So in actuality the match had been won by a first class female tennis player competing against a third class male tennis player.

Okay so maybe women bring something else to the table that qualifies them to be first class citizens.  That was the argument made by the "women's lib" movement.  And there is some support for the argument.  I note that today more women than men graduate each year from law school and more women than men pass the bar exam.  That is a substantial achievement.  There are more.  But what happened to women's lib?

Phyllis Schlafly happened.  The most important aim of the women's lib movement was to get the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, enacted into law.  And for a long time it looked like it would happen.  But it didn't.  And the opposition to the ERA was headed by Phyllis Schlafly.  And, to state the obvious (because something it is necessary to state the obvious), Phyllis Schlafly was a woman.  In fact she is the poster child for the "anything you can do" argument.

She proved herself to be extremely competent and effective.  She demonstrated that she "could do better" by actually doing better.  The ERA was defeated, although it came extremely close to being enacted.  And Schlafly was a major reason why it was defeated.  And there is absolutely no evidence that she was pressured or coerced or anything else.  It was obvious to everyone that she sincerely believed that the ERA was a bad idea.  And she demonstrably had the ability to come to her own conclusion based on her own analysis.

With Schlafly to point to as the as standard bearer for the anti ERA movement, opponents were able to successfully make the argument that a lot of women thought the ERA was a bad idea.  And if women, the group it was designed to benefit, thought it was a bad idea, it must be a bad idea.  That was the argument the anti-ERA people used to defeat it and they made it work for them.

So the whole "women's lib" thing and the whole ERA fight can now only be seen in the rear view mirror.  They are part of our historical legacy.  What's going on today?  Well we just finished up the latest round of the ERA battle and it was the recent Presidential Election.  Say what?

There has been a lot of bad analysis of why Clinton lost and why Trump won.  The official consensus is that the key demographic was working class white men in the rust belt states of the Midwest.  But they should not have mattered.  And the reason they shouldn't have mattered is because women represent 52% of the electorate.  They are a majority not a minority when it comes to who votes.  So, if women tilt heavily one way or the other, whichever way they tilt will determine outcome of the election.  And when it came to gender issues, this election featured the starkest contrast in history.

Hillary Clinton is a woman, a very accomplished woman.  And she has been promoting and supporting women's issues for her entire long political carrier.  Donald Trump was publically hostile to women for the entire duration of his campaign.  And he has no political carrier prior to running for the office of President of the United States.  Women are supposed to be the civilizers.  Trump ran an extremely uncivil campaign.  Clinton should have opened a wide lead on Trump from the time of the conventions and then maintained it through to the elections.  She did not.  And the reason she did not is because she was unable to open and maintain a wide lead among women.

She ultimately won the women's vote by 54% to 41%, a 13 point spread.  But that was not enough.  And the reason is simple.  Trump won Republican women by 89% to 8%.  He did only slightly better with Republican men, winning that group by 90% to 6%.  Trump's success with Republican women is perhaps explainable but not to me.  So I'm not even going to try.  But among Independent women Clinton only beat Trump by only 4 points (47% to 43%).  She should have beat him by 20, 30, 40 points.  Together, Independents and Republicans represent 64% of the vote so the big margins Clinton ran up among Democrats, both men and women, was enough to win her the popular vote by a substantial margin but not enough to win her the Electoral College vote.

The only conclusion I can derive from all this is that about half of all women and almost all of Republican women think women are and deserve to be second class citizens.  Phyllis Schlafly was an active Republican.  Republicans are pretty evenly split between men and women.  Republican men constituted 17% of all Presidential voters while Republican women constituted 16%.  On women's issues like equal pay, access to health care, education, etc., we see a consistent pattern of Democrats being in favor of the "pro-woman" side of the issue and Republicans being in favor of the "anti-woman" side of the issue.

If you are pro-woman you should be a Democrat and not a Republican.  But there are a lot of Republican women.  The only conclusion to be drawn is that many women are opposed to the pro-woman agenda.  And that leads directly to the conclusion that many women believe that women should be treated as inferior to men, that they should be treated as second class citizens.

Now let me address the intimidation factor.  Men are stronger than women.  In a physical confrontation women are correct to be fearful of men and to act accordingly.  But women have been voting for a hundred years.  And ballots are cast in secret.  A woman who is feeling intimidated can tell her husband or boyfriend or whoever that she voted one way while actually voting the other way.  This will keep her safe because there is no way whoever she is afraid of can find out what she actually did.  And women are in the best position to know whether they are being intimidated rather than being given an equal shot.

Then there is the communication problem.  It is hard for an oppressed minority to throw off their shackles.  (The argument here is not that women are actually an oppressed minority but that due to intimidation they act like an oppressed minority.)  Spontaneous revolts without any organization are only possible in a fantasy world.  In the real world revolutions need competent leadership.   And developing and maintaining competent leadership requires secure communication.  The 1960 film "Spartacus" chronicles a failed revolt.  Roman slaves revolted but the Roman government had successfully disrupted communication and was quick to identify and kill potential leaders.  As a result, the "Spartacus" revolt ultimately failed.

An example of a successful revolt is the Solidarity led revolt in Poland in the late '80s.  Here a key factor was the ability of the Catholic Church to facilitate communication out of view of the government.  This allowed the leadership of the Solidarity union to morph into the leadership of the revolution.  Communication allowed the movement to organize.  But it also allowed a diverse group of people to evaluate potential leaders and pick the ones with skill and talent.  And the revolution succeeded.

So is the women's movement more like Roman slaves or like Poland in the '80s?  On paper it is the former.  Everything is out in the open to see, right?  While this is theoretically true it is false from a practical point of view.  It's not whether communications channels can be monitored.  It's whether they actually are monitored.  The religious right has been a political force for a long time now.  Theoretically their means of communication can be monitored.  But in actual fact they usually are not monitored.  So they have been able to repeatedly spring surprises like their impact on the results in the 2004 Presidential election.

Women have had their own channels of communication for more than a hundred years.  Ladies magazines are as old as the hills.  Ladies' Home Journal started publishing in 1883.  Magazines like Vogue and Cosmopolitan have been around for ages.  Ms Magazine, the bible for the original woman's lib movement, has been around since 1972 and is still around.  Then there are the daytime TV shows.  There is "The View" and "The Chew" and many others.  Before them there was "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and before that there was "The Phil Donahue" show.  All these and many more provide a communications conduit for women to communicate with women.  And while in theory all of them can be monitored in fact they are not monitored for political content.

So women had the power.  They could communicate reasonably securely.  The facts were easily accessible.  And yet they chose to vote for Trump in large numbers.  Apparently Trump saying about women that "you can do anything" to them including "grab them by the pussy" was not enough to cause them to change their vote, a vote they would be casting in complete anonymity.  So I'm done.  If women think so little of women why should I as a man think any better of them?  So from here on out women are going to have to demonstrate to me that they really believe they belong among the ranks of first class citizens before I lift a finger.

As I have tried to demonstrate this is not something that can be fixed from outside.  I as a man have tried to be helpful in the past.  But that's all over now.  Women need to fix this problem women have.  And they need to do it all by themselves.  They need to put skin in the game, a lot of skin in the game.  Until they step up second class citizens they are and second class citizens they shall remain.  Or maybe Phyllis Schlafly actually had it right all along and women always were and should always remain second class citizens.