Today I Learned...

Feminism is a very broad term. Every time I start trying to describe how broad I freeze up, because I know I'm only familiar with the kinds you find on the internet, which is not perfectly represented, and even then I'm much more familiar with some parts than others. Mostly the parts that are relevant to me, like consent culture and paying highly educated women more money.

Feminists make fun of the term "I'm not a feminist, but...", implying that the speakers want the benefits of feminism without the social cost of admitting it. My own mother said I was spitting on the back of Susan B. Anthony when I (age 14) said I wasn't a feminist. This only makes sense if you consider feminism synonymous with equal rights and opportunities for women. That's a pretty bold claim to make. A lot of poor and non-white women have criticized feminism/The Feminist Movement for focusing exclusively on the problems of upper middle class white women (e.g. the leaky pipeline in academia) while ignoring problems affecting them (e.g. the mistreatment of pregnant women in prison). At times their goals can be actively contradictory because their situations are so different- rich white women are denied sterilization they request while poor black women are sterilized without their knowledge. When these women refuse to identify as feminists, they're not saying they're okay with the status quo, they're not failing to give Susan B. Anthony her due, they're just refusing to pretend that TFM is working for them. Which is probably why mainstream feminists get so upset about it.*

That is a really charged example, but there are lots of other ways that people can disagree about what counts as "advocating for women". I wish I was informed enough and clever enough to point out ways this is happening that no one else has thought of, but I'm a dilettante with a lot of privilege, so I can't. The ways I can think of are things other people have already pointed out: the second wave fought for the right to say no to sex, the third is fighting for the right to say yes. People are simultaneously fighting for the right to have children (and have the costs of those children subsidized by other people**) and fighting the stigma against childlessness. The second wave fought to get women into corporate jobs, parts of the third are fighting for greater respect for the work of childrearing. None of these are strictly opposed, but supporting one without hurting the other requires an inconvenient level of nuance.

Ultimately the question is: do we want the same world we have now, except without gender based-proscriptions, or do we want a different world, and if so, which one? If feminism were strictly about equality, than success would be black women being discriminated against exactly the same as black men, and racism itself would be orthogonal. I of course think racism is bad and being racist makes you a bad person***, but it's not clear to me it should make you a bad feminist. Feminism is not a synonym for good things.

The Feminist Movement seems to be a lot of more socialist than I am, and finds severe income inequality in and of itself problematic. I believe that income inequality is often symptomatic of a problem, and extreme poverty is a problem, but do not care if some people make truly ridiculous amounts of money in a fair system. And while I think gender-based discrimination is morally wrong, I dislike a lot of anti-discrimination laws on both practical and moral grounds. I should be able to disagree about means without feminists accusing me of secretly hating women or not caring about discrimination.****

I wish Lean In had taken a little bit wider view and discussed the work system as a whole. I think the live-to-work mindset is hurting women and men both. I really wish Sandberg had talked about why she finds striving for the top so rewarding, instead of taking it as a given. As I was typing this a friend sent me a link to The Messy Link Between Slavery and Modern Management and before I finished the description I dismissed it as "that's not fair to tar trade by mutual agreement with the same brush as slavery, just because the same tool can make both better." It took me a few minutes to question "why is maximizing number of widgets the goal?". I know why it's the goal of any given company, but how did the system end up that way? I have this nagging feelings that there are systems where that wouldn't be the case, but I can't conceive of them any more than a fish can conceive of brachiation.

If I have a point, it's that I wish more people questioned more assumptions, and I wish that was decoupled from the feminist movement. I may even wish there wasn't A Feminist Movement, but that feminist was an adjective applied to other movements, like socialism and anarchism and especially libertarianism and/or free market socialism, whichever one I end up going with.

*I tried to find good blog posts to demonstrate this. The first page of results for "feminism racist" is exclusively white feminists and mainstream news, plus one by a PUA. The white bloggers linked to black bloggers: almost all of their blogs were either gone or restricted access. Part of this is that I still pine for 2007 and have failed to adapt to a post-twitter world, but part is that race and gender bloggers have a frighteningly high burnout rate.

**My belief is that once the kid is here, it's a defenseless person and society does have an obligation to give in a decent shot at life. But I'm very uncomfortable with that framed as the right of the mother to have as many children as she wants, regardless of her ability to take care of them.

*** to the extent that being bad person is a thing, which it mostly isn't, and it's even less rarely a helpful framework, but I really want to risk condoning racism and it makes for a really nice parallel sentence structure

****Something no one has said to me personally, but is often said about people with similar beliefs. People who may well be acting in bad faith, but the idea that someone could believe in gender equality but think preserving the right to free association and the commerce clause was more important than the marginal benefit from this particular law is never even considered.

Commitment to free speech is measured by tolerance for speech you don't like. Otherwise, you're making a merits based argument. That is why I respect reddit's reluctance to shut down even really vile subreddits, like /r/jailbait (sexual photos of 16 and 17 year olds, culled from the girls' own social media pages) and /r/creepshots (surreptitiously taken photo of adult women in taken in public, including but not limited to upskirts). I don't like these forums existing, but as long a the law protects them, it will protect unpopular things I care about too.

Violentacrez, the founder of /r/jailbait and rescuer of /r/creepshot was recently* outed. And if those were his only crimes, that would make me really uncomfortable, because there are legitimate uses for anonymity, not everyone agrees that they are legitimate, and I want the cultural norm to support anonymity as part of supporting free speech.* But violentacrez did not limit himself to providing immoral jerkoff material: he founded a number of subreddits, including /r/chokeabitch, /r/rapebait, and /r/niggerjailbait, explicitly for the purpose of pissing people off.

This strikes me as different, and not worthy of protection. Deliberately pissing people off is a violation of a social contact. One with fewer consequences than upskirts, but specifically targeted at the same norms that support anonymity. Deliberately pissing people off is the opposite of supporting free exchange of ideas. Moreover, it punctures the argument that you need to protect this ugly speech in order to protect good speech. He can't argue "this doesn't affect anyone else" because that's the goal, and he can't argue "I'm advocating for political change that I would face persecution for" (which, yes, would protect speech by NAMBLA, although of course not actions). He just wants to piss people off.

So that's one violation of the social contract. But there's something more than that. I've played D&D games where the GM would let players decide whether or not their character was killable- some people got attached and found death disruptive, others enjoyed the risk. The one time we had PVP, it was between a killable and unkillable player, and the unkillable player temporarily flipped her kill switch because otherwise it was just unfair. This guy is trying to hurt people without taking damage in return. If he cared about the topic you could "win" by arguing with facts. If he wanted to do his thing without interference he would not deliberately attract attention. But there is no inalienable right sniping.

*relative to when I wrote this, which was months ago.

*For example, gay, kinky, or poly people may wish to be able to look for partners, or advocate for their right to do the same, without their families or jobs finding out. I think this is a legitimate use of anonymity even though it could be trivialized "just sex".

When libertarians talk about drug policy, they tend to talk about the damage done to people who did nothing wrong. The wrong house raids are especially for this, because everyone can imagine themselves sitting at home not using drugs, but you can also get a lot of mileage out of pretty, well-employed white people who smoke pot, or poor POC suffering for family members' crimes. We use these because it's easier to see the damage done by the drug war without the compounding variables. But that doesn't make it right to use those weapons against mediocre human beings. Petty thieves, deadbeat dads, people who hurt people all deserve to be punished for their specific crimes. It is still morally wrong and damaging to society to execute a no-knock warrants, use flash grenades, and kill pets in search of their drugs.

Similarly, I think when abortion access advocates say "but rape victims", what they mean is "here is the case with the fewest compounding variables. Surely, after stripping out the variable of sex, you can see that forcing someone to undergo a pregnancy and then either raise a child or leave them to be raised by someone else is wrong. And once we've established that, you can see that sex really has nothing to do with it." But what anti-abortion advocates hear is "we're conceding that not carrying a pregnancy is a privilege to be earned through good behavior. Let's debate what you have to do to earn it."

This is what I think about when I read articles like this and this. Pregnancy and childbirth are not just uncomfortable and painful, they are not just risky in some abstract sense of the word. The carry with them the serious chance of permanent damage to a woman's body. And not just "ha ha, women care about being fat" consequences either.* Painful sex for the rest of her life is the least of consequences mentioned in that NYT blog post (read the comments). This is why I was most disturbed not by Todd Akin's ignorance of basic biology, but by the sentence

“But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.”

because it completely ignored the existence of the woman who wanted the abortion. She just wasn't there.

*Although, I think it is 1. legitimate to wrestle with a fundamental change in your body and the lack of control it implies, 2. naive to think that women who become less conventionally hot don't suffer for it, and 3. misogynistic to shame women for noticing that.

I really, really want to play Anno 2070. It's a combination city builder/real time strategy set in Waterworld, and I love all of those things. The reviews are terrific. Unfortunately, it ships with horrible DRM. Not that they advertise that on the box, but it's published by Ubisoft, which is one of the worst publishers for restrictive, dangerous DRM, which I know because I spend about as much time studying the business of video games as I do actually playing them. But, there is hope! An earlier game in the series, Anno 1404/Dawn of Discovery, got even better reviews, and is old enough that it Ubisoft could have taken the malware out of it. 30 minutes of investigation later, I still can't tell if that's true.

It is almost certainly true that the physical disks now ship without DRM, but the physical disks only go up to Windows Vista, and I use 7. Amazon offers the game for download, but it is impossible to determine what DRM it has. Based on the comments, it definitely ships with a less restrictive form than it used to, but there is maybe still some? And it might still create vulnerabilities in my computer? I have no idea. I go to Ubisoft's website to investigate, where I find that Anno 1404 is too old for them to list it in their catalogue, but they do have a Deep Ocean expansion pack for Anno 2070. I'm a sucker for anything set in the deep ocean (fuck you, I loved Deep Blue Sea), so this just made me angrier.

So half an hour later I still don't know if I can safely install a game. I only got that far because I was waiting for my code to compile and I think this is kind of fun. If I had to do this for every game I bought, I'd buy substantially fewer games, which I assume game developers and publishers are against. You might expect me to make an anti-DRM argument from this, but everyone has already heard that. What I want to talk about is what this says about government intervention.

I was discussing libertarianism with a friend recently, and said that whatever the current ideal level of regulation (either through mandatory labeling, or outright banning or mandating certain things) was, the derivative was negative, because the internet made it easier to get the relevant information. She countered with "decision fatigue", and I had to concede the point. Not just because of the risk people will make the wrong decision while tired, but because of the heuristics they'll use instead. Faced with that many decisions, people will default to white lists (which is in fact what I do with Ubi games- I'll only buy them when they're on GOG.com, which is always and forever DRM free). Any new product/company/idea now has to prove that it's worth the investigation costs, which reduces innovation and privileges big companies over smaller ones. I like innovation and most of my policy positions depend on low-friction markets, so this is pretty bad for me. And there you have the libertarian argument for things like food safety regulations and building codes: the trust gained from them is a public good whose worth outweighs the cost.

Now, I think our current set of regulations has gone past the point where they are helpful. Keeping rat shit out of my food is great, I will determine if my beef stew is beefy enough, thank you. And this leaves me with concerns about regulatory agencies, such as "what happens when they solve the rat shit problem? Will they congratulate themselves and sign up for job training services, or will they start making up rules about insufficiently beefy beef stew? And despite being the motivating example, I don't think Congress understands video games enough to usefully regulate them. But clearly regulation has its uses.

Everything I know about the new potential prophylactic HIV cocktail I learned from this Savage Love Podcast. I'm very willing to believe that Dan Savage (or his doctor co-host) did not deliver a full and accurate reporting of the research. But my thoughts on the topic are so general I'm prepared to plunge in without learning more.

The reported efficacy is 40-60%, with perfect use. Let's pretend everyone uses it perfectly: that's still not high enough to produce herd immunity. Herd immunity is when you've manipulated the environment (through preventatives or treatment or simply sufficient numbers of the susceptible people) such that the average infected person infects fewer than one person. The disease can't propagate at that point. From a public health standard, it's herd immunity or nothing: anything else is nice for the individual but irrelevant.

But everyone won't use it perfectly. People don't take drugs perfectly even when they're immediately helpful. A preventative drug with nasty like effects (which this is) is going to have severe compliance problems.

Some people are arguing we shouldn't release the drug because it will give people a false sense of security and decrease condom use. I don't care. Adults get to make their own choices even when they're stupid. What concerns me is that intermittent use of preventatives against an entity that can evolve is the perfect way to evolve resistance. You couldn't design a better way to create drug-resistant AIDS if you wanted to.

I think the FDA has no business telling people what drugs they can or cannot take and does a lot of harm in trying. But that's for things affecting individuals. Antibiotics and antivirals are public goods, and degrading their efficacy for a small chance at dodging HIV is exactly the sort of thing government should prevent.