Glossing over a possible loss

John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee for president, has a 25-year-old daughter, Meghan McCain. She identifies as a Republican and is actively involved in politics.

Meghan McCain recently wrote an opinion column for the New York Daily News on the subject of homosexual marriage. I found it interesting because it set out so clearly the liberal way of treating these issues. According to Meghan, the ruling principle of society is equal freedom; therefore we must be equally free to choose to marry; therefore we must not discriminate against homosexuals when it comes to marriage.

This is what she has to say:

As I read the news about the recent advances of marriage equality across our country, I think it is easy for many to get distracted by the politics and rhetoric on this issue and lose sight of what is really at its heart: the equality of freedom.

No matter how politically charged the discussions about marriage equality may get, the question is really a simple one: Do the rights and privileges we offer citizens include everyone in our country, or only some of us?

I believe that allowing gays and lesbians the freedom to marry is an idea whose time has come ... For me, this is about treating all of my friends, and all of our brothers, sisters, children and grandchildren the same as I want to be treated. Equality under the law and personal freedoms are what make America the greatest country in the world, and they are core values that I hold as a Republican.

As I recently wrote after speaking at the Log Cabin Republican convention: "People may always have a difference of opinion . . . but championing a position that wants to treat people unequally isn't just un-Republican. At its fundamental core, it's un-American." I believe most Americans want our nation to succeed. Marriage equality moves us to a place where more of us can do a better job of taking care of our families.

Gays and lesbians are a vital part of our communities. They are doctors, teachers, firefighters, emergency personnel and neighbors. In this way, marriage equality is also about supporting good citizens and strengthening our communities. When a committed gay couple seeks to declare their love for one another and get married, the whole community benefits from the added stability and strength of that family. On top of that, we don't give up anything by sharing responsibilities and protections with those whom we love.

I don't intend to discuss the issue of homosexual marriage here. What I want to look at is the inadequacy of equal freedom as an organising principle of society. The argument I'll make is that equal freedom commits liberals to an overly limited and reductive view of politics.

The first question to ask is this: what do liberals mean by freedom? The answer is that they mean the freedom of an abstract individual to choose without impediment in any direction (as long as we don't directly harm the life or liberty of others). This, though, is not a true freedom. The reality is that we don't exist as abstract individuals. We exist as individuals who are invested with a concrete identity as men and women and as members of particular communities and traditions. We exist too as moral beings, concerned with issues of right and wrong.

Therefore, if we are to be free, it must be as men and women, as Americans, Australians or Japanese, and as moral beings. It is our freedom to live as our invested (or "encumbered") selves which is meaningful and signficant.

Why don't liberals recognise this? Whey don't they even register this as an issue? Well, if they did then they would have to abandon equal freedom as a single, reductive organising principle of society. They would have to recognise that there are other goods which exist prior to equal freedom, such as those relating to manhood and womanhood, to communal traditions, and to the pursuit of common, objective moral goods.

They don't want to go there.

And what about equality? What is the problem with this being an organising principle?

If freedom must be equal, then there must be no discrimination in how a society operates. The principle of non-discrimination becomes paramount, as it has in the West.

Well-intentioned liberals like Meghan McCain routinely assume that implementing this principle of non-discrimination will not have any negative consequences, that it will only strengthen society.

This is an assumption that she has to make. Once she has committed herself to a principle of equal freedom, she must then hopefully and willfully presume that there will be a positive outcome for society as a result.

If this weren't the case, if liberals like Meghan McCain really thought carefully about the likely effects of a non-discrimination principle, then they would have to think more concretely about the inner dynamics of social institutions, what is required to uphold them, the particular goods they embody, and how they fit within a larger framework.

Once you begin to examine things at this level, then you have to admit the possibility that some forms of discrimination (or differentiation) serve a reasonable purpose specific to a particular institution. The discrimination doesn't exist arbitrarily or as a consequence of ignorance, backwardness, prejudice or bigotry - the level of explanation generally preferred by liberals, who really don't want to delve into a deeper analysis, as they do not wish to think in ways that might undermine equal freedom as a simple and straightforward, albeit highly reductive, organising principle of society.

So how then should conservatives reply to the principle set out by Meghan McCain?

First, we should insist that freedom is not the only significant good. Western man traditionally took not only freedom as a good, but also virtue, love, courage, loyalty, piety and wisdom. There is no reason to reduce all goods to one single good.

Second, we should insist that freedom cannot be understood as abstracted individuals choosing in any direction without impediment (i.e. as radical personal autonomy). Freedom is only meaningful if it allows us to live our lives well as we really are, i.e. as our invested selves.

Third, equality must take into account the purpose and nature of social institutions, how they are constituted, what is necessary for their function, and the goods they embody. This will mean accepting, as necessary and legitimate, forms of social differentiation in which rates of participation in social institutions might vary, as might social roles and responsibilities.

So who is getting the axe?

This is Waleed Aly writing in the Melbourne Age a few months ago:

In a financial crisis the axe falls on those who have played the least part in its creation - women and migrants.

No clear, consistent ideological principle seems to explain this, which suggests it has just as much to do with the differing values we assign to people.

It is difficult to resist the suspicion that the key determinant of winners and losers in this crisis will not simply be sound policy. It will be social policy.

Waleed Aly's argument is that the decision to axe workers in a recession is not made on economic but on social grounds: those who are treated in society as lesser human beings are those who will lose their jobs.

Interesting then that axe has fallen most heavily, in the US at least, on blue collar male workers:

Rodney Ringler is an unemployed blue collar male without a college degree. He's hardly alone. Men like him have been the main victims of the current recession in the United States.

"I haven't worked since December of 2007, around the time this recession started," Ringler, a 49-year-old computer technician, said as he walked his dog in a Dallas suburb.

One statistic that stands out in America's recession-stung economy is the unemployment rate for adult men: in April for the second month in a row it surged ahead of the national average to 9.4 percent versus 8.9 percent for all workers. The jobless rate for adult women was 7.1 percent.

... "In the 2001 recession, 51 percent of all job losses were for men. It was evenly split. But in this recession 80 percent of the jobs that have been lost have been men's," said Andrew Sum, a labor economics professor at Northeastern University who has studied this issue in detail.

Men also incurred about 80 percent of the job losses in the 1990-91 recession ...

So by Waleed Aly's logic it is men, particularly blue collar men, who are treated as having lesser value. It is men who bore the brunt of job losses in the 1990-90 recession as well as the current one.

This completely upsets the image of society Waleed Aly was trying to convey. He wants us to accept the idea that white males are an oppressor class who have taken a privileged place in society, with a higher human value, at the expense of others - with this being a fundamental breach of human equality.

This image of the privileged oppressor male hides what has really been happening for several decades. Even in economic terms men have been losing ground, with the value of real wages for men declining since the 1970s:

The fact that American males without a college degree are especially vulnerable in this cycle point to more hard times ahead for the U.S. working class, which has endured stagnant and declining wages for the last three decades.

The skilled and semi-skilled jobs they traditionally held have been moving overseas to places like China and Vietnam. The jobs that remain pay less, amid declining union membership.

One study by Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution think-tank found median U.S. family income rose to $53,280 by the middle of this decade in 2004 dollars from $37,384 in 1964. But for males aged 30 to 39, average annual personal income fell from the mid-1970s by around $5,000 to $35,000.

American men are now being paid significantly less than their fathers were. At the same time they have to put up with a hostile view that they are enjoying an unearned privilege which belongs to others.

CD of the Day, 5/28/09: The Layaways-The Space Between

For at least a couple of years now, I've been a regular reader of David Harrell's Digital Audio Insider blog. Although he posts somewhat infrequently (I can identify with that), he usually has an interesting take on the state of digital music and how it relates to independent bands. And his take comes from the fact he's a guitarist and lead vocalist for The Layaways, a Chicago indie pop band. Somehow in all this time reading his blog I never managed to listen to his band as it was one of those "I'll get around to it at some point" things. Well, the loss was mine as their latest disc, The Space Between, is about as melodic and hooky as indie pop can get.

If you want some touchstones for their sound, Spoon and Earlimart come to mind, with the former an apparent influence on opening track "Keep it to Yourself", at least in its spare, tough open. But then comes the chorus, and it's bright and melodic as any power pop can aspire to be (it also helps that Harrell and Mike Porter are warmer vocalists than Britt Daniel). "All Around the World" shares its title with an Oasis classic and shares the band's affinity for 60s pop as its jaunty beat and swirling chorus would make The Spongetones proud. The moody "January" recalls Joe Pernice as well as Colin Blunstone, and "Come Back Home" is where the Earlimart comparison comes into play. Another standout is the gentle "Too Little Too Late", a wonderful rainy day song. So don't make my mistake and put this one on layaway - get it on your music player of choice now.

CD Baby | MySpace | iTunes

mp3s:
All Around the World
Keep it to Yourself
Come Back Home

CD of the Day, 5/27/09: Tony Cox-Unpublished

If you've been asking yourself "Where can I find some classic 60s-styled British pop that has a timeless quality to it?", then Tony Cox has the answer. Unpublished is his debut album, and thankfully for us he actually did publish it. There is one twist here: although Cox wrote all the tracks and plays guitar and keyboards, the lead vocalist is Nigel Clark, not Cox. If that name sounds familiar, Clark is the onetime frontman of Dodgy, and released a quality solo disc in 2006 titled 21st Century Man.

"Sweet Elaine" and "Feel Real Love" open the disc in grand fashion, incorporating Northern Soul (dig those horns) and a Motown bassline, together with sunshine melodies. If you dug last year's Rinaldi Sings disc, stop reading this review and immediately go to the link below and order this one. "Jamelia" adds an insistent guitar hook to the mix while "Fallen" lays on the jangle. The midtempo "Chills" recalls Merseysiders like Peter & Gordon and Herman's Hermits, while "Say the Word" continues the 60s tour with some Beach Boys influence. The only question I have is how did "Life is Hardcore" end up on this disc? With its heavy synths it's about 20 years figuratively removed from the rest of the album. That minor quibble aside, Tony Cox has the Carnaby Street Album of 2009 on his hands. He may be retro, but he has the tunes.

CD Baby | MySpace | iTunes

Unpublished - Tony Cox

An argument which collapses standards

You may have read about Elizabeth Adeney, the 66-year-old single woman who is having a baby via IVF.

Andrew Bolt, the most right-wing of Australia's newspaper columnists, gave his opinion recently on whether she was doing the right thing.

Bolt believes that it's OK for people to take an interest in Elizabeth Adeney's choice, as we ought to care how children are raised:

... In Ms Adeney's case there are even more grounds to worry that her child will start with less than he or she deserves ... The child will know no father, for instance ... Nor will he or she have many relatives around, either, since Ms Adeney reportedly has no family in Britain ... Ms Adeny has been married only briefly, about 20 years ago. Does she really know what it's like to share a life, and does she understand how much of her own she will owe to her child?

This all sounds reasonable. The child will not have a father, and possibly won't even have a mother while it is still young. These are significant reasons for opposing Ms Adeney's choice.

But then Bolt shows why he is not really a conservative. He goes on to argue, on terrible grounds, that we should support 66-year-old women having children:

You see, so many children are indeed denied what they are owed, and not by mums past menopause.

I see hurt children whose dads have left and never call. Children whose mothers treat them as the foul shackles that kept them from soaring. Children who must daily witness their parents tearing into each other. Children treated as too much effort for the reward. Children who don't know which parent's house they'll get a welcome in from one day to the next.

Breaks your heart.

Here, though, is at least one child wanted so badly that her mother risks her body and the world's lectures just to have her. You could say the same of a child of lesbian mothers, too.

It's quite true, this child may soon be an orphan, far too young.

But what will that child cry then? That it was better never to have been born?

Or better to have been given life - and love? I think I know.

So it's all OK because:

1) There are families with younger mothers who don't treat their children well.

2) Elizabeth Adeney is going through a lot to have a child so must want one very badly.

3) The child will prefer to have been born, even to an older mother, than never born at all.

You could justify anything on these grounds. A father who goes around impregnating women and then absconding is justified. After all, the resulting children would rather they had been born than not, wouldn't they? And anyway, some families where the father actually sticks around are also dysfunctional, aren't they?

And what about a man who commits bigamy? He would have to want his wives and children really badly to put in the extra effort and expense required to run two households, wouldn't he? The children would rather they had been born than not at all, wouldn't they?

Each of Bolt's justifications is terribly wrong. It's not the strength of a want which makes it moral. Nor does the inevitable imperfection of an institution justify letting go of all standards. And the fact that it's preferable to have been born than not at all doesn't turn immoral decisions into moral ones.

By Bolt's reasoning, a young woman who chooses to have seven children by seven different fathers as a single mother living off welfare is ultimately morally justified.

Perhaps you think that Bolt is just trying to be a "compassionate conservative". But his arguments will only lead to more kids in the future having to deal with the absence of a parent, or living in poverty, or uncertain of their ancestry and identity.

What he could have argued, in order to be compassionate, is that we should be doing more to improve the chances of young people forming families in their 20s - rather than in their 60s. Family formation can be made either easier or more difficult for young people; I don't think there's any doubt that it's been made more difficult in recent decades.

If conservatives took the issue seriously we could win an audience from the many young people frustrated by the difficulties they now face in marrying and having children.

New Michael Carpenter album on the way!

Here's some good news to brighten up your back-to-work-from-a-long-holiday-weekend morning: Michael Carpenter is set to release his first solo album since 2004's Rolling Ball - and you won't have to wait long for it. Redemption #39 will be available on June 8 from the usual suspects (Not Lame, Kool Kat, Jam). Much as Carpenter has done with previous releases (such as Rolling Ball and the Supahip album), he'll be offering a limited edition bonus disc containing a stripped-down, acoustic version of the album, so get it early.

Here's a video for the album's opening track, "Can't Go Back":

Just who attacked the Indian student?

Early this month an Indian overseas student, Sourabh Sharma, was bashed and robbed on a Melbourne train.

Who was to blame? The Islamic Council of Victoria angrily denounced white racism against brown people as having motivated the attack. It was, fumed Nazeem Hussain, a director of the ICV, a continuing legacy of Australia's dark past:

The police need to acknowledge and loudly condemn racially targeted attacks on Indian international students.

Sourabh Sharma, an Indian international student, was travelling home on the train after a shift at KFC when he was brutally bashed and robbed by six people.

As the 21-year-old lay on the floor, being kicked in the head, face and ribs, his attackers screamed racial insults. They left him bleeding, broken-boned and crying on the floor of the train while other passengers watched and did nothing to intervene ...

I am another brown person. I can say unequivocally, on behalf of every other non-white person in the country, that hearing about racially motivated crimes frightens us.

To an aggressor bent on beating up a "fob" (fresh off the boat) or a "curry", it does not matter that I was born here, and that my parents came here long before the attacker was born ...

Last week, the Islamic Council of Victoria issued a media release noting that police had "failed to adequately address the cause of the attacks — which is racism".

In response, Superintendent Graham Kent lashed out at the council on 3AW, claiming the police were "disappointed" and that the statement was "uninformed".

... The police are charged with upholding the law and fighting crime, whatever its causes. There is little benefit in denying the existence of racist attitudes in our communities.

Sure, the question of racism is something that, as a society, we often feel uncomfortable confronting, given our dark past ...

Where have we seen police addressing the racist aggressors? ... there has been no real, tangible response to this pattern of violent racism. The police are not responsible for defeating the disease of racism by themselves — the problem falls on all of our shoulders, particularly those of our leaders.

But what we can demand from police is a loud, vehement condemnation of racial intolerance. Victoria Police should not hesitate to do this ...

... the Government, police and Connex need to begin a campaign to fight racial intolerance.

But was Sourabh Sharma a victim of white racism? The police didn't think so:

Det-Sen Constable Buttigieg said the thugs did abuse him [Sourabh] while they kicked him to the head and ribs although their primary motivation was robbery.

"I think there was a mention where there was a comment similar to `why don't you go home?' but there was nothing more," he said.

"I think the motivation would have been robbery."

Better evidence, though, comes from the CCTV footage. There are four attackers visible in the footage. Two have their faces uncovered. Here is a still image of one of the young men (in a green T-shirt) who attacked Sourabh Sharma:



He's certainly not white. In fact, he looks as if he could be South Asian. Here's an image of the second attacker:



He's certainly not Anglo and probably not European either. There is, in fact, no-one in the CCTV footage who can readily be identified as a white person:



So what is going on here? Why would white Australians and white society be condemned for something they appear to have had no part in?

I suspect the answer has to do with politics. There's a fashionable idea on the left that whites invented the concept of race in order to gain an unearned privilege by oppressing others. Therefore, whites are held to be uniquely guilty of preventing the emergence of human equality.

If you believe this theory then you will look for instances in which whites are the violent aggressors and non-whites are the oppressed victims. It is these cases which will seem to prove your point.

It's convenient for the Islamic Society to follow along. It means that they are assumed to be the aggrieved victims of discrimination seeking redress. It means too that the established society loses a sense of its own legitimacy and its own interests.

It's not difficult to challenge the filtered view of reality. The image of the white racist oppressor breaks down not only when the perpetrators can be shown to be non-white, as in the attack on Sourabh Sharma, but more so when the victims of such aggressive violent crimes are white.

Just today it was reported that a young Anglo-Australian man was stabbed to death in Melbourne by several Asian men. He had stepped in to defend someone they were trying to attack. Later on, the Asian men caught up with him at a convenience store and murdered him.

This is part of a pattern of recent street violence in Melbourne. The victims have been overwhelmingly young Anglo men, who have been either stabbed or bashed to death by gangs of men of some other ethnicity.

And if the pattern of street violence doesn't fit the theory? Do we then close our eyes to a part of reality to make the theory work or do we reject the theory as false, as being unreasonably biased against one group alone?

Jay Bennett, R.I.P.

It was with great sadness that moments ago I learned that Jay Bennett, formerly of Wilco, died today at the age of 45. Sadly, most people will end up remembering him as the "obnoxious" guy that Jeff Tweedy had to boot out of the band during the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sessions in 2001, courtesy of the documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. I'll remember him as a kind of mad pop genius, and I've always been of the opinion that Wilco went downhill after he was ousted from the band.

Bennett was an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, and he joined Wilco for their critically acclaimed 2nd album, Being There. But it was 1999's Summerteeth when Bennett really took over. Its swirling pop melodies and walls of sound were as much Bennett as they were Tweedy, and it stands as a pop masterpiece in my book (the lovely ballad "My Darling" was a Bennett composition, for one). And his stamp was all over the avant-garde sounds of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (he was sacked at the end of the recording sessions). I don't mean to belittle what Tweedy did on these albums, but without Bennett playing Lennon to his McCartney (or the other way around), neither of these discs would have been the classics they were. In 2002, Bennett teamed up with Edward Burch to release The Palace at 4AM, an overlooked gem that let him unleash his inner Jeff Lynne on a series of densely produced pop nuggets, the highlight of which is "Shakin' Sugar", an outtake from the YHF sessions also known as "Alone", and one of the best ELO songs Lynne (or Bleu in LEO) never wrote. Bennett wasn't the world's greatest singer, but he does a passable Elvis Costello on songs such as "Whispers and Screams" and "Puzzle Heart", while "Talk to Me" and "Drinking on Your Dime" are also standouts. His turn on another Wilco outtake, the aching ballad "Venus Stopped the Train", is also excellent. I can't find a Lala embed for it, but you can listen to it through Rhapsody here:

The Palace At 4am (Part 1) by Jay Bennett/Edward Burch

Bennett's solo career after Palace was kind of checkered. He released a couple of acoustic-based albums, which to me just weren't his metier. His 2007 release The Magnificent Defeat was a step back in the right direction, and he had a new album in the can before his death. Meanwhile, at least in my opinion, Wilco since he left has had a musically aimless and unfocused sound, and I haven't been much of a fan of A Ghost is Born or Sky Blue Sky, and what little I've heard of Wilco (The Album) isn't hearkening back to the glory days of turn-of-the-century Wilco. Meanwhile, Bennett in recent times has continued to come off as an unsympathetic character; his most recent stint in the news came from a lawsuit he filed against Tweedy regarding royalties from I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. But before anyone makes him out to be the 100% bad guy, remember that Tweedy has left quite a "body count" in his wake when it came to musical partnerships; aside from his acrimonious break with Jay Farrar in Uncle Tupelo, he's managed to purge everyone sans John Stirratt from the early days of Wilco, and until recently the band was a revolving door of supporting players.

Jay Bennett will be missed, but I'd already been missing him for years. Maybe in death he'll get the credit he was due in Wilco. Rest in peace, Jay.

Big Star Box Set on the Way!

Read all about it here.

And for all you BS fans out there (of which I count myself a big one, just note my email addy), make sure you bookmark Bruce Eaton's Big Star blog. I'm currently reading his Radio City book, about which I'll have more to say when I'm done, but you could do worse than picking up a copy in the meantime.

¿Por qué a los hombres no les gusta usar condón?

Hace tiempo que tengo la inquietud de tratar este tema y que es de gran interés para muchas mujeres (y también hombres). Después de buscar en internet he encontrado poca información útil sobre este tema y no he visto que en ninguna parte se mencionen los puntos que estoy por exponer a continuación, y los cuales me parecen de gran importancia para entender este fenómeno, así como el fallo de las campañas para promover su uso.

La circuncisión

Primero que nada, hay que entender que un hombre con circuncisión es sexualmente muy diferente a uno que no la tiene. Es lo que coloquialmente se dice "con capucha" (sin circuncisión) y "sin capucha" (con circuncisión). La manera de tener sexo, hacerle sexo oral, o incluso la manera en que se masturban es totalmente diferente, ya que la parte donde sienten el placer sexual esta físicamente ubicada en lugares distintos.

Por ejemplo, alguien que tiene la circuncisión NUNCA te va a pedir que le dejes meter "nomás la puntita", mientras que alguien que no la tiene sí. ¿Pero por qué?

Veamos, alguien que no tiene circuncisión tiene su parte más sensible en el glande (la cabeza), mientras que alguien con circuncisión tiene la parte sensible debajo del glande ya que ésta parte se vuelve insensible al estar siempre en roce con la ropa (al no estar protegido por el prepucio).

Entonces veamos la diferencia:

Sin circuncisión

• Se excita al sentir presión en la cabeza
• La cabeza es la parte más sensible
• El sexo oral se le practica chupando la punta

Con circuncisión

• Se excita al sentir roce debajo de la cabeza
• La piel del tronco que está justo debajo de la cabeza es la parte más sensible
• El sexo oral se le practica lamiendo la piel que está debajo de la cabeza

El condón y la circuncisión

Para quienes no tiene circuncisión el uso del condón es más aceptable ya que las relaciones sexuales se sienten muy parecidas, pero para quien sí tiene circunsición, el utilizar condón reduce considerablemente la sensación de roce sobre la piel debajo del glande (al tener una capa de plástico encima).

Es por esto que los hombres con circuncisión suelen negarse mucho más a utilizar condón que quienes no la tienen (en lo general, igual pueden darse casos en lo que todo esto no aplique, cada ser humano es diferente).

El tamaño del pene y el condón

Este es otro punto crucial en el uso del condón. Y es que cuando el condón es más grande que el pene, también se reduce la sensibilidad. Esto sucede generalmente cuando el vendedor (o vendedora) le da un condón de mayor grosor al del tamaño del pene del comprador, ya sea que se equivoque o sencillamente le de el tamaño "estándar" y el comprador tenga un pene menor al promedio.

Aquí entra la parte cultural, ya que NINGUN hombre diría "necesito uno más chico" (aunque no conozca a la persona que se lo está vendiendo), ya que eso reduciría su "hombría".

Todo esto obviamente da como resultado experiencias poco satisfactorias para los hombres y los orillan a optar por la alternativa de no utilizar condón.

Soluciones

Claro que existen soluciones para todo esto. Desafortunadamente pocas medidas al respecto se han tomado y existe mucha desinformación. Veamos las alternativas.

-Para penes de menor tamaño. Aquí la solución ideal sería que en cualquier tienda o farmacia que venden condones SIEMPRE ofrezcan primero el de menor tamaño en existencia. Así, el hombre nunca tendrá que pedir uno más chico, y al contrario, se sentirá orgulloso cuando tenga que decir "¿no tienes uno más grande?". (y claro, también hay que garantizar un abastecimiento de condones de diferentes medidas en todos los establecimientos que éstos se comercialicen.)

Obviamente esto implicaría una gran campaña nacional o quizá establecer leyes que obliguen a los vendedores a tomar estas medidas.

De cualquier forma, esto no resuelve el problema de quienes tienen circuncisión.

-Para penes con circuncisión o más pequeños de lo normal. Esta alternativa aplicaría casi para la totalidad de los casos, sin importar si existe circuncisión, sin importar el tamaño, ni nada más: El condón femenino.

-Condones femeninos. Son mas grandes que los masculinos. Se ponen dentro de la vagina y sale una pequeña parte de ellos para proteger desde la entrada. La enorme ventaja es que no se "pegan" al pene masculino, sino a la vagina, por lo que el hombre tiene su pene totalmente descubierto y puede sentir esa sensación de roce con la piel (o con el látex) al momento de la penetración. Igual, si el pene es pequeño no hay ningún problema ya que la vagina continua con su tamaño normal y no hay esa sensación de espacio vacío, mas que la misma que se podría sentir sin utilizar el condón.

Conclusión

Para cualquier caso (al menos la gran mayoría) donde el hombre no quiera utilizar condón, la mejor alternativa son los condones femeninos. Desafortunadamente son más caros que los masculinos, su distribución es escasa, se comercializan muy poco, no se promocionan por televisión y existe mucha desinformación al respecto.

Esperemos que los gobiernos tomen cartas en el asunto y ayuden a prevenir la transmisión de enfermedades.

Mientras tanto si eres mujer lo que debes hacer es comprar condones femeninos si piensas que existe la posibilidad de que tengas sexo con cualquier hombre. Muy pocos se resistirán a él, a diferencia de los condones tradicionales. Además no tienes que pedir nada ni decirles que hagan nada. Tú te lo pones y ya, listo, que él haga lo que tenga que hacer.

Espero que esto sea de utilidad para todos los lectores y todas las lectoras de este blog.

An embarrassing stuff up by feminists

Late last year a feminist report into domestic violence made headlines across Australia. It was widely reported that 1 in 3 teenage Australian boys thought it OK to hit girls and that 1 in 3 Year 10 girls had experienced unwanted sex.

You can imagine what the feminist response was:

The statistics are appalling (there’s a surprise!), but it’s the attitudes that have me in despair, especially the attitudes of boys. The other beauty – 1 in 3 Australian boys think it’s okay to hit a girl.

These attitudes are strongest among 12 to 14 year old boys, which either suggests that older boys have grown up a little, and thought longer and harder about how to interact with girls, or that they have learned how to hide their attitudes, and come out with the socially acceptable platitudes.

I hope it’s the former, but given the incidence of rape and violence in our societies, I fear that it’s the latter. 1 in 3 year 10 girls (year 11 in NZ), that is, girls in their eleventh year of education, aged about 15 or 16, say that they have experienced unwanted sex. That would be rape, of course, but we daren’t use that word.

So one in three 15-year-old girls are being raped in Australia? Those who doubted such a claim were summarily dismissed:

Gringo: This is scary, although I thought it was interesting that the ABC article says that “these are attitudes that the youngest boys, boys from 12 to 14 show most strongly”. Does this suggest that attitudes change over time as the boys grow up begin to understand the world a bit more?

Deborah: I think it shows they learn to say the acceptable thing, given that the same survey shows that 1 in 3 year 10 girls say they have had ‘unwanted sex’.

Beppie: Ugh, how very depressing. I really don’t think I can bear to read the Sun Herald comment thread at the moment ... *sigh*

Rebekka: This makes me feel physically sick. Also, can I smack the idiots out there who claim we don’t need feminism any more?

Tigtog: Beppie, the comments are more about attacking the study as having an agenda against men and that the figures couldn’t possibly be really that high, there’s no defending of the idea that it’s ok to hit or force a woman to have sex.

Beppie: Ah, I see. I know from personal experience how hard many men find it to believe the stats pertaining to rape and other forms of violence against women.

But here's the fun bit. It turns out that the team headed by Dr Michael Flood made a very embarrassing mistake in their report on domestic violence. They misread the original research (National Crime Prevention study 2001). The research did not show 1 in 3 boys thinking it OK to hit girls, but 1 in 3 young people thinking it no big deal for girls to hit boys.

It was about boys being hit, not girls.

The ABC did at least issue a retraction:

On Monday November 17, 2008 ABC News carried stories reporting the findings of a study into the impact of violence on young people. The study was commissioned by the White Ribbon Foundation. It reported, in part, that “one in every three boys believe it is not a big deal to hit a girl".

The author of the report, Dr Michael Flood, has advised the ABC that this finding was in fact wrong. Dr Flood's team transposed information in compilation of that part of the report. The original report by the National Crime Prevention 2001 study upon which much of the White Ribbon report was is based made no reference to "boys hitting girls" In fact the report referred to "girls hitting boys".

And what of the other claim, that 1 in 3 fifteen year-old girls have had unwanted sex. This is a case of some of the feminist commenters misreading Dr Flood's report. The actual statistic is that 30% of Year 10 girls who have had intercourse have had unwanted sex. 24% of Year 10 girls have had intercourse. Therefore, it is around 7% of year 10 girls who have had unwanted sex, not 1 in 3.

Note too that the girls were not just asked if they had unwanted sex because their partners pressured them into it. They were asked as well if they had unwanted sex because they were drunk or high or because their female friends pressured them into it. According to these criteria 23% of Year 10 boys also reported that they had unwanted sex - pretty much the same figure as the girls.

So it seems that the Herald Sun readers were absolutely right to think "that the figures couldn't possibly be that high". Their scepticism was fully justified.

They were also right to think that there was an anti-male agenda behind the figures. I've written about Dr Michael Flood before. He is someone who believes in patriarchy theory: the idea that masculinity is a false social construct created to assert an oppressive power over women. His view of masculinity is therefore intensely negative.

Dr Flood thinks that male identity is a dangerous thing to be suppressed:

We should be wary of approaches which appeal to men's sense of 'real' manhood ... These may intensify men's investment in male identity, and this is part of what keeps patriarchy in place (Stoltenberg, 1990). Such appeals are especially problematic if they suggest that there are particular qualities which are essentially or exclusively male. This simply reinforces notions of biological essentialism ... (Engaging Men, p.3)

He doesn't believe in the real existence of the categories of man and woman:

Nor should we take as given the categories "men" and "women". The binaries of male and female are socially produced ... (Between Men and Masculinity, p. 210)

And yet he is often cited as a leading expert on sexuality and gender. This is from the Melbourne Herald Sun just last week:

State schools will run courses on how to show respect for women ... The Education Department has commissioned a report from VicHealth on the best way to introduce the measures.

Report co-author Dr Michael Flood, a sexuality and gender expert from La Trobe University, said there were many options ...

Dr Flood doesn't even believe in the category of women and yet is writing a report on how to respect them.

When I was at uni there was a Michael Flood who was a socialist and a queer activist. I don't know if he's the same person as the Dr Michael Flood now being hired to lecture heterosexual men on their behaviour. Dr Flood did, it must be said, author the following research, celebrating the queering of straight men:

Bent straights: Diversity and flux among heterosexual men
Michael Flood
Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (ARCSHS) La Trobe University

New formations of sexuality are emerging among heterosexual men, informed by constructions of ‘queer’ and ‘metrosexual’ masculinities and other alternatives.

Some straight men express alliance with gay men or question the binary of heterosexual and homosexual, or proclaim themselves to be ‘wusses’ and ‘sissies’, or take up egalitarian or even subordinant roles in their heterosexual sexual relations, or adopt a feminised preoccupation with personal grooming.

Such developments signal a weakening of longstanding constructions of heterosexual masculinity, and there is significant diversity in the contemporary sexual cultures of young heterosexual men. Yet at the same time, many heterosexual men’s social and sexual relations with women are organised both by gendered power relations centred on male privilege and by homophobic and homosocial policing.

This could just be Dr Flood faithfully following liberal autonomy theory, in which we are supposed to be liberated from any unchosen form of sexuality, instead choosing for ourselves from a fluid and diverse range of options.

Or it could be Dr Flood attacking a traditional heterosexual masculinity because it's something he personally doesn't share.

Either way, the Herald Sun readers were right to suspect that his research reflected an anti-male agenda.

Stream the new Bleu album!

It doesn't hit the street until July 14, but you can stream the new Bleu album, A Watched Pot, at his official site. The album has been in the can for a couple of years now and is finally seeing the light of day. It's quite good, especially the anthemic "Go", and for those of you who loved his slower stuff on the LEO disc, "There's No Such Thing as Love" is a great Jeff Lynne-esque ballad.

(If you're wondering why there's a "parental advisory" sticker on the cover, just take a gander at one of the song titles.)

Wednesday Roundup.

Dion Read & The Afterthoughts-Be Here Right Now. Last year, Dion Read & Co. had one of the more promising debuts with their Shoes & Gloves EP. Now the Aussie piano power popper is back with his second EP, and it's another treat. Since it's de rigeur to compare piano power poppers to Ben Folds, let me analogize in this fashion: Read's new EP is to his last one what The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner was to Whatever and Ever Amen. For the Folds-unfamiliar, the new EP is more understated affair than the first, which doesn't mean it isn't fine in its own right. The title track is the peppiest of the bunch, while "The Blame" recalls Folds' "Don't Change Your Plans" from Messner. And the closer "Air Balloons" is a wonderful ballad that ranks up there with "Smoke" or "The Luckiest". Don't let this one be an afterthought.

CD Baby | MySpace | iTunes

Willie Nile-House of a Thousand Guitars. Nile is a veteran NYC rocker who could be called a rock'n'roll true believer. Equal parts Springsteen, Lou Reed and Bob Dylan, Nile falls more in the classic rock category than power pop, but he has a sound that should appeal to power poppers in any event (his "Asking Annie Out" from his 2006 comeback album Streets of New York is a power pop gem). I can't recommend all the songs here (especially "Now That The War is Over"), but the highlights are true highs: the stomping "Magdalena", the Beatlesque ballad "Her Love Falls Like Rain", and the rocking "Run" are worth an immediate listen below. And beware: the chorus of the anthemic "Little Light" will stick in your head for hours if you aren't careful.

CD Baby | MySpace | iTunes

Wiretree mp3

Last week, I mentioned that Wiretree had a new track out and that you could stream it at MySpace. Now you can download the mp3 of "Back in Town", courtesy of Austin Sound.

Austin Sound

Should we accept Catherine's new rules?

Let's return for a moment to the rugby sex scandal. Seven years ago Matthew Johns, a rugby league star, had group sex which he asserts was consensual. The young woman involved lodged a complaint five days later and says she has suffered significant psychological harm.

What does Catherine Deveny, the Age columnist, think about this? Apparently, she wants a morality in which men are held responsible for what happens, not women:

The now-even-greyer territory between power, responsibility, consent and vulnerability in sex needs to be negotiated. "No means no" suggests the question is simply one of yes or no, and that's a simplistic reaction to a complex question. Women's more assertive and comfortable attitude towards sex, combined with the impact of raunch culture, which has diminished the taboo and increased the accessibility of the sex industry, means it's time for a rethink.

Equally, the days when it was socially accepted that women were the gatekeepers of males' supposedly rampant and uncontrollable sexuality are, or should be, long gone. "Don't walk round in your nightie when Uncle Brian's here" - the subtext being that he can't control himself and nor is it his responsibility to do so - is just not good enough. Never was.

The nasty collision of hormones, egos, psyches and alcohol aired in this incident suggests to me that we need public awareness programs and perhaps a manual ...

It also suggests we need to rewrite the rules ... Rules that need to be enforced by shame. Their shame, not hers.

They may or may not have committed rape as the law understands it, but what they did amounts to spiritual rape. And for that they should be held truly accountable.

I agree with some of this. Yes, the fact of a woman consenting doesn't by itself make an act moral. Yes, men are responsible for controlling their impulses even when conditions make it difficult to do so.

But look at the overall message here. Deveny doesn't at any stage suggest that women have a moral responsibility. All the shame and accountability is due to men and not to women. In fact, women who involve themselves in these situations are described positively by Deveny as having a "more assertive and comfortable attitude to sex".

So let's hear from one of these women. A reader of this site, Pat Hannagan, provided a link to a newspaper item on Charmyne Palavi, a rugby league groupie.

This is how she describes herself:

I'm no angel, but I've seen this game play out from both sides: first as the partner of a pro footballer for nine years, then as a single woman who can have sex whenever, with whomever, I choose.

What's important to her is that she is unimpeded in her sexual choices. She is therefore a liberal in believing that the higher good is to be liberated from impediments to her own will.

She goes on to describe the reality of encounters between footballers and groupies:

Group sex happens ... The reality is there are women out there who do hunt footballers down, are prepared to have sex with them in nightclub toilets.

Just as there are players who trawl Facebook and MySpace, who are more than willing to have sex with them.

Anyone who thinks the culture is going to change just because the story's out there however are kidding themselves.

I was messaging a young player, a Facebook friend, last week and asked what he was doing.

He replied: "Learning how to respect women. LOL (laugh out loud)."

I wrote back: "Yeah, and I'm still a virgin."

In a way, I feel sorry for the guys in this situation, but they should also be strong enough to say no.

... But just as the boys like being contacted by girls through Facebook, the girls use the information the players put on their pages to track them down.

They know where they go out after games, where they stay, when they are in town, with many booking themselves into the same hotels as the teams.

I can see how it would be tempting and flattering to the players, especially the young players, because they aren't used to that type of female adoration.

So the men do not respect the women who hunt them down for sex; Charmyne even feels sorry for the men, but still thinks that all the moral responsibility lies with them - they have to be strong enough to say no.

She then writes about an assault that she herself suffered:

But when it comes to sexual assault ALL men know what's right and what's wrong and if a girl is obviously drunk and trying to push them off, then it's assault.

I myself have been in this very same situation with a current NRL player and I can see how you get yourself into a situation that spirals out of control.

In my instance I was passing in and out of consciousness and didn't have the strength to push him off me.

She is right that she should not have been assaulted. But did her own behaviour contribute to the situation spiralling out of control? Is part of the moral equation women not getting paralytic drunk while hunting down footballers for sex?

What Charmyne goes on to tell us is that:

Unfortunately, we live in a society where women will always be shut down for the very characteristics men are revered for - being strong, opinionated, fearless and open about their sexuality.

People seem to be ignoring the bigger issue here while they look for someone to blame. That is - the disrespect for women inherent in the clubs.

So again the role of women is presented in positive terms ("fearless and open about their sexuality") while it is men who have to make changes ("disrespect for women").

It seems that the entire cure proposed by Charmyne is for men to respect the least respectable of women. Men are supposed to respect women whose lifestyle is to get drunk and have sex in toilets with strangers.

It's going to take a whole lot of "educaton" to turn that into reality. Especially when the men involved are young, drunken, impulsive, high-testosterone, aggressive football players.

Men are never going to respect football groupies.

We should reject the new rules of play suggested by Catherine Deveny and Charmyne. The problem is not only that the rules are unrealistic and won't work to prevent situations from "spiralling out of control".

The larger problem is that the new rules are one-sided. It is left to men to take moral responsibility, whilst women are encouraged to do as they will. We are supposed to accept that women can behave in any possible manner and not be judged for their behaviour and be shielded from any negative consequences of their own actions.

Men would be fools to allow women to assert this kind of irresponsible power over them. If it becomes a principle that men are always to blame morally, then we open up a form of social control over men - in any moral dispute, women will always have the upper hand.

If women want to exert an influence on us it should primarily be through closely connected personal relationships. This is not an option that is likely to appeal to women like Catherine Deveny or Charmyne; we should be wary of the alternatives they favour.

Incredible feminist claim finally declared bogus

On Friday the Melbourne Herald Sun again repeated one of the most incredible claims ever made by feminists:

Kiri Bear, from the Domestic Violence Resource Centre, said ... "Violence against women is the leading contributor to the burden of disease for women aged 15 to 44"

I've pointed out before how untruthful this claim is. Now Tim Harford, who presents a statistics programme on BBC radio, has looked at the numbers and confirmed the obvious: that the feminist statistic is, in his words, bogus.

You can listen to Tim Harford discuss the issue here (More or Less, Friday, 15 May 2009). The segment runs for the first 10 minutes of the programme.

He begins by replaying a claimed statement of "fact" from a BBC news bulletin in March:

For women aged between 15 and 44 it [domestic violence] is the biggest cause of mortality.

Harford wonders why such an astonishing statistic wasn't first checked for accuracy by the news service. He then points out that the BBC isn't alone in accepting the claim. The Kent police and the Guardian newspaper have also reported domestic violence to be the leading cause of death for women up to the age of 44.

Some groups have made a similar but milder claim, namely that domestic violence is the leading cause not of mortality but morbidity (disease). The Home Office, a Home Affairs select committee, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Ministry of Justice have all accepted the statistic as true.

Tim Harford then tells us (at 3:13 minutes into the show) that:

It's pretty common for a rogue statistic to spread and mutate like this, and the likely explanation is that people keep misquoting each other rather than going to a credible original source. That is what we did. We trawled through figures from the Office of National Statistics and it's clear that for England and Wales the 10 o'clock news statistic is, thankfully, false.

It turns out that cancer is the leading cause of death, by a long way, for women in the UK aged 15 to 44.

Harford then speaks with Dr Colin Mathers, a scientist responsible for statistics with the World Health Organisation, to find out about the global situation. He learns from Mathers that the leading cause of death globally for women aged 15 to 44 is HIV Aids, followed by tuberculosis and then suicide. Domestic violence does not make it into the top ten causes of death for women aged 15 to 44 globally.

Harford then asks Colin Mathers about morbidity. The leading problems for women around the world aged 15 to 44 in this area are depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

The next part of the discussion (7:00) is revealing. In 2005 the Home Office included the statistic about domestic violence being the leading cause of morbidity for women in an official report titled "Domestic Violence: a National Review". Harford contacted the Home Office to ask where they got the statistic from:

They gave us a statement in which they [the Home Office] said the statistic was used for illustrative purposes.

For illustrative purposes! As I've warned previously, always be careful when dealing with feminist statistics. They are often there for advocacy rather than accuracy.

The Home Office did point to a 1993 World Bank report as a source of the statistic. But this research was about the effect of both domestic violence and rape, which combined were held to be the sixth most important factor in morbidity, not the first.

Harford points out that there have been "multiple bouts of statistical inflation" in the way that the World Bank figures have subsequently been reported: morbidity has been inflated to mortality; sixth place has been inflated to first place; a world figure has been used without adjustment for a Western country like the UK; and a combined figure for both rape and domestic violence has been applied, without adjustment, to domestic violence alone.

We next hear a conversation between Harford and Professor Sylvia Walby of Lancaster University. Professor Walby is an expert on domestic violence statistics. She admits that there is no reliable data to measure the extent of domestic violence, as it has not been (until very recently) included in official crime reports. Researchers have to rely on "quite limited information" contained in crime surveys. Professor Walby's estimate of the extent of domestic violence is that it affects 3.4% of women a year.

Finally, Tim Harford reveals that he was under pressure not to reveal the falseness of the feminist statistic:

Some of the people that we've talked to in the course of doing this piece have suggested that we shouldn't be questioning this rogue statistic even though it isn't true, we shouldn't be questioning it because domestic violence is such a serious problem.

In fact, there is good reason to question the statistic, apart from the fact that it isn't true. What kind of message does it send to young women when they are told that the greatest threat they face are their own "intimate partners"? Is this really going to foster the trust that is needed for young women to place themselves in a stable relationship with a man?

Why aren't women ever presented with a true statistic: that they are physically much safer when partnered than when single?

Men are not the greatest threat to women's health. It shows a remarkable disregard for men and for the truth to base domestic violence campaigns on such a claim. Tim Harford is to be congratulated for helping to set the record straight.

Absolute Powerpop on the Kindle.

For those of you out there with a Kindle, you can now subscribe to Absolute Powerpop for the Kindle at the low monthly price of $1.99:



It comes with a 14-day free trial.

Major label Friday.

Actually, "major label" is a bit of misnomer (these releases haven't been featured in your latest Best Buy ad), but these are well-known acts with big-time distribution, so we'll use that particular shorthand here. I've been meaning to weigh in on these three for a while, so better late than never:

Fastball-Little White Lies. Fastball needs no introduction to those who read this blog, so the operative question here is how does it stack up to the rest of their catalog? And the answer is "quite well". In fact, song for song this might be their best ever, even if there isn't a "The Way" or "Fire Escape" on here. Frontmen Tony Scalzo and Miles Zuniga team up for the effervescent "All I Was Looking for Was You, while Scalzo pens a sequel of sorts to "The Way" with "The Malcontent (The Modern World)" wondering if the former is "still saying anything to you" while lamenting the disposable pop that pushed "The Way" and its like off the radio at the turn of the century. Zuniga is the purer popper of the two and his highlight here is hyper-catchy "Mono to Stereo", which is right up there with classics of his like "Fire Escape" and "Airstream". A welcome return from these veteran Texas power poppers.

iTunes

Tinted Windows-Tinted Windows. Also getting a lot of publicity lately is power pop supergroup Tinted Windows, consisting of Taylor Hanson (from Hanson), Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne), James Iha (Smashing Pumpkins) and Bun E. Carlos (Cheap Trick). It doesn't get much better than that on paper, but on disc the whole is a bit less than the sum of its parts. Don't get me wrong - this is a fun, catchy power pop album. But it's fairly generic for the genre, although I can see this being the power pop album for people that aren't that big into power pop, given the names involved. "Kind of a Girl" is pretty catchy, with its "whoa-whoas" in the chorus, the Cheap Trick-esque power ballad "Back With You" and the driving "Without Live" are the highlights here.

iTunes

Superdrag-Industry Giants. When John Davis put an apparent end to Superdrag after becoming a born-again Christian in the wake of 2002's brilliant Last Call for Vitriol, it appeared that we'd never heard from them as a band again. But seven years later, Davis reformed the band and it seems as the goal here is to make up for the absence by rocking harder and louder than ever, no small feat for a band that was already one of the harder-rocking power pop bands around. Unfortunately, though, they've sacrificed some melody in the process, making Industry Giants an uneven affair. "Slow to Anger" demonstrates this right off the bat, a three-chord rant that's pretty hookless. The ship is righted a bit with the melancholy "Live and Breathe", recalling the Superdrag of Vitriol, and "I Only Want a Place to Stay" takes an equally satisfying less-is-more approach. But most of the rest of the disc comes up kind of short in the memorable melody department, making it a good candidate to cherry pick downloads from.

iTunes

Is consent enough?

Seven years ago Matthew Johns, a rugby star, and several other players had group sex with a 19-year-old woman. According to a work colleague, the woman boasted at first about what happened. Five days later, though, she told police she had been assaulted. The police investigated but found no evidence that there had been lack of consent.

The case has only now erupted into public view in Australia. Matthew Johns has been sacked from his media and coaching positions and has has been subjected to intense media criticism for his actions. It is being said that his career is over.

There's an important point to be made here. My concern isn't to defend Matthew Johns or other sports players. It's to highlight just how unworkable a liberal morality is.

In doing so, I'm going to draw on an excellent column by Andrew Bolt. I've criticised Bolt recently for his liberal attitude to ethnicity. His latest piece, though, is one of the best criticisms of liberal morality you're likely to read in the mainstream media.

First, I'll briefly summarise what I see as the problem. Liberal moderns have rejected the idea that certain actions are inherently moral or immoral. One reason for this is that they believe that individual autonomy is the highest good.

If we view certain actions as inherently immoral, and therefore not permissible, there is a restriction on our autonomy, on our power to act as we will (our "agency"). It is this restriction that liberals hold to be immoral.

Therefore, liberals tend to argue that actions are not inherently good or bad, and that we should "liberate" ourselves from old-fashioned "repressive" moral conventions.

Does this mean that anything goes? Not quite. Because "agency" is what matters, it is important to liberals that everyone consents to an action. So everything is permissible as long as there is consent.

But this hasn't worked out so well in practice. In the case of Matthew Johns, for example, the woman initially consented to what was likely to be an exploitative and degrading act - and unsurprisingly felt abused afterward.

So liberals have begun to emphasise not only consent but also respect. There is nothing that is inherently right or wrong, but we must show respect to others in our behaviour.

But this too has its problems. This is judging an action according to a subjective mental state. Let's say a man visits a prostitute. According to the liberal theory I've described, prostitution itself would not be considered inherently immoral. What would matter was whether the prostitute and client freely consented and whether they respected each other.

How do we know if they respected each other? If the man is courteous toward the prostitute is that enough? Perhaps on one visit the prostitute and client were in a fine mood and did feel a positive regard toward each other. But maybe on the next visit they were both grumpy and felt contempt toward each other. Is the first visit moral and the second one immoral?

And if it's argued that a prostitute and a client can't truly ever respect each other because of the nature of the act itself, then this is really a hidden way of asserting that prostitution is inherently (i.e. in its nature) wrong - something that would then contradict the liberal insistence that autonomy is the highest good.

Which brings me to Andrew Bolt's impressive criticism of Professor Catherine Lumby, an academic ethicist who was hired by the rugby league in 2004 to advise players on moral issues.

Professor Lumby took the fashionable liberal view that nothing is inherently wrong and that all that is required is consent:

ABC reporter: There have been stories of a culture of group sex in rugby league. What do you think of group sex? Do you think it's OK if it's consensual?

Lumby: Speaking as an academic, I think that there's no problem with any behaviour which is consensual in sexual terms.

Again, in 2004, when six rugby players were investigated for having had group sex with a young woman, Professor Lumby insisted that there was nothing inherently right or wrong in what had happened:

The idea that group sex is abhorrent is a very particular view. What matters is that we avoid asserting moral beliefs as moral truths.

Professor Lumby developed a policy for the rugby league which stated that what players really needed was:

ongoing education about how to negotiate sexual encounters in a way which ensures informed consent is always obtained.

Some players took this message to heart, even filming girls on their phones giving consent before the group sex sessions began.

Andrew Bolt does a good job of explaining why consent alone doesn't make an action moral:

The problem is that trusting to consent alone means - for a start - trusting that people are smart enough and strong enough to work out all by their uncertain selves what's good for them.

... even though she consented to the sex - or didn't object - the woman was still left feeling so "useless", so "worthless" and so "really small" that her life collapsed ... She can't forgive Johns and the other men: "If I had a gun I'd shoot them right now. I hate them, they're disgusting ..." she said.

...But bad judgment is not the only problem with insisting only on “consent”, not morality.

Consent also means it’s every man for himself. That you can do whatever you can force some silly or intimidated woman to agree to, however much it will hurt them.

If this teenager consented to group sex, there was nothing more for Johns and his mates to know. Indeed, none seemed to think they had a duty to protect this young woman from what degraded them all.

She agreed. End of questions. But it hasn’t been the end of the regretting.

That’s what Lumby’s fashionable morality never factored in - the weakness and stupidity of people. Their impulsiveness. Inexperience. The way their judgment gets washed away by booze, or lost in the crowd.

For a Lumby, even a young NRL buck in a bedroom with a naked girl and his mates is a perfectly rational moral agent. And the girl, too.

For a Lumby, the idea that such flighty people be handed moral rules worked out over centuries of collective mistakes and regrets is almost an insult - a crime against freedom.

“Morality is a blueprint for living that someone hands to you,” she’s tut-tutted. But “ethics is a zone we all enter when we find ourselves, by choice or necessity, negotiating those rules”.

Negotiating, in this case, until someone says “yes” to group sex.

Well, a girl in Christchurch did say “yes” when morality would have shouted that she say “no”.

See her crying now. See Johns weeping, too, on A Current Affair, having heard the “yes” that a Lumby once swore was all he’d need to keep him safe.

I think Bolt is spot on in the entire column. It's a genuinely conservative line of thought on morality presented to millions of readers. However, I would make one criticism of Bolt's position.

Andrew Bolt doesn't consider why Professor Lumby (and most of the commentators at his own blog) believe what they do.

If he did, he would be forced to confront an unpalatable truth: that Professor Lumby has applied principles that Bolt himself believes in to the sphere of morality.

Professor Lumby believes that autonomy is the highest good: that what matters is that we aren't constrained by things we can't choose for ourselves as individuals. She applies this principle quite logically to morality. For instance, she once declared French writer Catherine Millet's promiscuity to be admirable because it demonstrated "a sense of self which is quite independent of social norms".

Andrew Bolt likewise is a liberal in his first principles. He once criticised the Australian Football League for being over-regulated; he described his ideal society in comparison as,

a field in which anyone can play anything they like, as long as they don't hurt anyone else.

This is not a call to follow the good, or even to recognise that an objective good exists; instead, the good is doing as you will without impediment. It's not that far removed, in principle, from Professor Lumby's assumption that there is no objective good to follow, but that what matters is what we will as autonomous agents.

Similarly, Andrew Bolt once wrote that the great thing, the thing to celebrate about immigration, was that ethnicity could be made not to matter, so that,

a Zambian can captain the wallabies [the national rugby team]

The source of such an idea is once again autonomy theory. Just as autonomy theory insists that we should not be impeded in our self-determination by an objective morality, so too does it claim that we should not be constrained in creating who we are by an unchosen ethnicity. Transcending ethnicity becomes a moral good rather than an alienating loss.

That's why Andrew Bolt has repeatedly criticised Aborigines for holding to a distinct ethnic identity. Bolt has told them they should instead follow,

The humanist idea that we are all individuals, free to make our own identities as equal members of the human race

Free to make our own identities. Autonomy (determining our own self) is held here by Bolt to be the highest good when it comes to ethnicity, just as it is for Professor Lumby when it comes to morality.

So Bolt is conservative only in the sense that he doesn't follow a liberal principle all the way down the line. He draws back at the idea that morality is determined by consent alone.

The job of attacking consistently at the root of the problem - at liberal first principles - will have to be done by others.

Odds and Ends.

* Longtime AbPow favorite Wiretree has a new track up on their MySpace, "Back in Town", from their forthcoming album due later this year. Check it out.

* BrownLine Fiasco is now known as HiFi Superstar. They have a new MySpace page up as well.

Going backwards

One of the most significant measures in this year's Federal Budget is the increase in the retirement age from 65 to 67.

I can remember when it was assumed that people would increasingly work less and have more leisure time. Some people even panicked that there would be too little work for people to do.

The assumption was a reasonable one given the long-term trend. Back in 1900 around 85% of 65-year-old men were still working. That percentage dropped in a very even line during the course of the twentieth century, so that in 1980 only about 10% of 65-year-old men were still working.

In my profession, teaching, there was even a retirement scheme that kicked in just before the age of 55.

During the same decades the number of hours worked per week also gradually fell. In 1913 the benchmark was a 49 hour week; by 1947 it was 40 hours; and by the early 1980s, a 38 hour week was the general standard. However, by 2001 the average working week had crept back up to 46 hours.

Real wages also grew quickly and steadily after WWII but the growth peaked in 1974. There is some variation in how wages growth is reported since then, but one demographer, Andrew Beveridge, has charted median wages in America for those in their 20s and found that while the female wage has remained steady, the median male wage has declined since 1970.

There is a political dimension to this. Liberalism has failed in many important respects, but for a period of time it succeeded in increasing the amount of leisure time and real wages for the average person. Each new generation of young people could expect to experience an improvement in the material conditions of life compared to the parents' generation.

This just doesn't seem now to be the case. A baby boomer man could raise a family of three or four on his own wage and still pay off his mortgage and invest in shares and property. Although this is still not an impossible scenario, it's more common for both the husband and wife to work, to raise only one or two children, and to find it difficult to repay the mortgage let alone to invest as successfully as their parents.

The rise in the retirement age from 65 to 67 fits the pattern of a decline in the material conditions of life.

I doubt if this will lead too many people to reconsider their allegiance to liberalism. The sense of decline, though, might help to dissolve a naive faith in liberalism as a source of material progress.

CD of the Day, 5/11/09: Vegas With Randolph-Vegas With Randolph

Vegas With Randolph is a band from the Washington DC area (not Las Vegas) that's fronted by John Ratts and Eric Kern, who have been writing songs (500 of 'em, according to their notes) since high school. They've been playing the songs on their debut album for several years now, and it shows as they've honed a pop delight here. Reminiscent at times of other multi-fronted power pop groups (Fastball, Sloan) as well as Willie Wisely and Fountains of Wayne, the result is a left-field surprise that deserves attention in the power pop community.

Normally, I'll start a review with the first track because usually in power pop, the goal is the catch the listener's ear right away. But I'm going to start at the end here, with VWR's ambitious "Longplay" suite - six mini-songs woven together. While not quite Side 2 of Abbey Road, it compares favorably with last year's Lannie Flowers disc as well as the last two from Sloan. "Got to Have Your Love" and in particular, "Dreams of the Night" are highlights of the suite, reminding me of Eric Carmen and Paul McCartney.

As for the proper tracks, there are plenty of standouts. "Be the One", with its playful piano backing, channels the 50s through the 70s, "Milky Way Girl" sounds like it was recorded by a skinny-tie late 70s/early 80s power pop band, "When" recalls The Tomorrows & The Roswells, and if Noel Gallagher ever wrote a song about the French Revolution, "Versailles" would be it. Elsewhere "Arizona Blue" is a first-class ballad, and "Buses, Trains & Planes" answers the musical question "what would Fountains of Wayne & Belle and Sebastian sound like if they collaborated?". As you can tell by now, this one touches all the power pop bases, so listen below and you'll find something you like.

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