My favorite poet has a piece, "Albanian Virgin," in poemeleon's "Gender" issue. The poem (if I may defile it with Wikipedia links) concerns the "sworn virgin" custom in Albania in which a woman (for instance, a family's only child) lives her life with the social privileges of men in exchange for foreswearing sex. Checking my tags I find I've linked to this piece on the practice in the New York Times before.

Saturday!

* John Lanchester: More general conditions involving gender abnormality affect one in three thousand people – which, globally, is two million people. There are more human beings who are in some degree intersex than there are Botswanans. (via Vu)

* I have no idea what to think or say about Marge Simpson's Playboy spread.

* Regender.com swaps gendered language on websites. Here's my site regendered.

* And, in non-gender news, the Freakonomics folks are facing tons of criticism in the blogosphere over their new book, including Krugman, Brad DeLong, and a four-part series at Climate Progress. The authors have posted a response at the Freakonomics blog, but as Matt Yglesias and their own commenters note, it's fairly limp. I liked the first book, but it looks like I'll skip this one.

'Why Chicks Cry': an exhaustive look at sexism and romance comics from the 1950s and '60s. Via MeFi.

As a white dude from the suburbs my objective application of universal human reason is, of course, beyond reproach, and it admits to some abstract discomfort with affirmative action. It is, on the one hand, significantly under-responsive to class privilege, which seems in my experience to be more wide-ranging and pernicious than either race or gender privilege. Second, affirmative action is, I think, under-responsive to the passage of time, especially with regard to the timeline of its eventual elimination. Finally, I regret that policies that promote justice in the main across the population sometimes require arbitrary and unfair discrimination at the level of the individual, even, in boundary cases, rising themselves to the level of injustice.

Affirmative action, in other words, is not something you'd enact if you were designing a polity from scratch—but of course America was not designed from scratch. Less than fifty years from Jim Crow, we need it, at least for now, and probably for as long as any of us will be alive. But it is not uncomplicated or easy, and a subject about which reasonable people can certainly disagree.

All this is just prelude to a particular sort of outraged right-wing response to the Sonia Sotomayor appointment, the claim that she (in Michael Goldfarb's words) "has been the recipient of preferential treatment for most of her life" or that she has (in Fred Barnes's words) "benefited from affirmative action over the years tremendously." There is, it must be said, no evidence that either of these prejudiced, kneejerk assumptions is remotely accurate; it is the mere fact that Sotomayor is Latina that not only suggests the preferential treatment she must have received but, in fact, puts it beyond all possible dispute. As these pundits now cast about aimlessly looking for proof of what they assumed went without saying, it's worth wondering what else a valedictorian of her high school class who went on to graduate from Princeton summa cum laude, winning the prestigious Pyne Prize in the process, before heading off to Yale where she served as editor of the Law Review, before pursuing a distinguished career in law including high appointments from both Democratic and Republican presidents could possibly achieve before her accomplishments were allowed to speak for themselves.

Monday tidbits.

* Early polls out of the Senate race in Pennsylvania, post Specter-shuffle.

* An end to the Boston Globe? (UPDATE: No?)

* Bibles and scripts from your favorite TV shows: 1, 2. (Via Zack.)

* Condition your child the Darrow way. (Via Neil.)

Rumor has it that Kim McLane Wardlaw (9th Circuit) may be the front-runner for the Supreme Court. You know she'd be a good justice because she's got "law" in her name. But there's also a certain poetry in this, as she wrote the lower-court brief in the case that most recently highlighted the gender imbalance on the court, Redding v. Stafford, in which the 89%-male body held that it was no big deal for a thirteen-year-old girl to be subjected to sexual humiliation from school officials in an fruitless effort to find ibuprofen on her person.

Adam Wolf, the ACLU lawyer who represents Redding, explains that “the Fourth Amendment does not countenance the rummaging on or around a 13-year-old girl’s naked body.” Wolf explains that he is arguing for a “two-step framework,” wherein schools can use a lower standard to search “backpacks, pencil cases, bookbags” but a higher standard when you “require a 13-year-old girl to take off her pants, her shirt, move around her bra so she reveals her breasts, and the same thing with her underpants to reveal her pelvic area.” This leads Justice Stephen Breyer to query whether this is all that different from asking Redding to “change into a swimming suit or your gym clothes,” because, “why is this a major thing to say strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym?”

This leads Ginsburg to sputter—in what I have come to think of as her Lilly Ledbetter voice—"what was done in the case … it wasn’t just that they were stripped to their underwear! They were asked to shake their bra out, to stretch the top of their pants and shake that out!” Nobody but Ginsburg seems to comprehend that the only locker rooms in which teenage girls strut around, bored but fabulous in their underwear, are to be found in porno movies. For the rest of us, the middle-school locker room was a place for hastily removing our bras without taking off our T-shirts.

More discussion on the very disappointing decision at Pandagon and The Paperback Museum.

Sunday morning politics linkdump. Sorry for all these linkdumps, by the way—it was a busy week. Next week should see a return to a little bit more sustained commentary (including the exciting return of debate liveblogging!).

* There have been some interesting debates about poll biases lately. Ron Fournier (grumble) at the AP covers a study that argues Obama would be further ahead were it not for racial animus, by as many as six points. FiveThirtyEight throws cold water on this, as well as looking closely at the possibility of a "cellphone effect" in the polls. If Obama does 2.8% better in polls that include cellphones, that suggests a shifting map like the one below, turning Virginia light-blue and strengthening small Dem leads in Ohio and Colorado.



* A study from political scientist Alan Abramowitz argues that Obama will win, when all is said and done, with 54% of the popular vote. That he's naively comparing historical models with this year's unprecedentedly diverse tickets in both camps shows how seriously we should take this analysis.

* A new PPP poll shows North Carolina tied. Other recent polls show South Carolina within six, West Virginia within four, and MontanVoteRonPaula within two.

* There's evidence of a "Palin effect" in Florida driving undecided voters to Obama.

* The Spine tries to get a handle on Obama's early-voting advantage, beginning as early as this Friday in Virginia. The second link has some stats of interest for Dukies and Durham residents:

In addition, more early-voting centers are being located at colleges and universities, a change that significantly affects student turnout. Students at the University of North Carolina and N.C. State were able to vote on campus throughout the two weeks leading up to North Carolina's primary contest in April. At Duke University, however, students had to make their way to voting sites in the city of Durham. While turnout for Durham County was 52% in the Democratic primary, only 11% of eligible Duke students voted. This fall, however, Duke will have its own early-voting center, open for business starting Oct. 16.

* The McCain camp has successfully demanded the VP debate rules be changed to protect Sarah Palin.

*Judge orders Cheney not to destroy his VP records.

* SNL mocked McCain this week. He also preemptively mocked himself with an article in Contingencies arguing (for reals) that "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation." Straight out of the Dept. of Bad Timing. Obama's already taken aim at this.

* Will Obama raise my taxes? A helpful widget.

* And American Stranger has a long post on ideology that seems to take as one starting point my post on Slavoj Žižek, Obama Supporter. Essentially Ryan takes aim at the various binds the Left finds itself in with regard to political action, and I largely agree with what he says—though I certainly hope I wasn't in mind as his example of sell-out "liberal 'pragmatism' a la The New Republic." My point, both in the earlier post and now in this one, is simply that the U.S. President has a tremendous ability to make life better or worse for real people with real lives, all over the world, many of whom (believe it or not!) do not have cushy long-term contracts with elite universities. Naderite "Oh, they're all the same!" negativity only makes sense to people who are inoculated by class and privilege from the consequences of that power.

The mere recognition that the perfect not be the enemy of the good doesn't quite throw my lot in with TNR, I don't think, and certainly not so long as we also keep in mind that the good not be the enemy of the better. Our discomfort with pragmatic compromises—and we should be discomforted by them, every time and in every case—isn't by itself a reason not to be pragmatic.

Throwing John McCain and Sarah Palin into the briar patch.

Stay away from misogynist trash.

Friday leftovers.

* The director of a leading US cancer research institute has sent a memo to thousands of staff telling them to listen to Ze Frank and use a cell-phone headset (even if Salon is right and it won't really make you a safer driver).

* Hometown heroes Hurwitz and Hayden are writing another Harold & Kumar—which is a good thing, because it was always conceived as a trilogy. (I'm told they actually have nine H&K movies planned out, including the three prequels.)

I regret to admit I missed the second in theaters, but I plan to make up for that error when the DVD is released in just four days.

* Now that its competing Facebook application is up and running, Hasbro has renewed its lawsuit against the makers of Scrabulous. More at Slashdot, which notes: "EA's version has netted fewer than ten thousand players, versus Scrabulous' estimated 2.3 million." I still say they ought to just buy Scrabulous and be done with it.

* Math may be hard, but there's no gender difference in math performance, according to a new study in Science. Via MeFi, where the poster adds: "Bite me, Larry Summers."

* And the Edge of the American West continues to impress: here's a look back at the decision in United States of America v. Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States, handed down 24 years ago today.

* The minimum wage: a disgrace and a scandal.

Here is how the political and economic system has been ripping off workers. Once upon a time, if you worked hard and were productive, that translated directly into your paycheck. Not anymore. From 2000 to roughly 2007, productivity went up 20 percent -- while the median hourly wage was up 3 percent. My friend Joel Rogers,director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, made a stunning calculation not too long ago: Had wages tracked productivity as they have over the past 30 years, "median family income in the U.S. would be about $20,000 higher today than it is." Check this out: Taking into account productivity, the minimum wage should be $19.12 -- which would make it almost 50 percent above today's median wage (not to mention the pathetic $6.55).

That's right. The minimum wage should be more three times what it is today. At that level, you would make almost $40,000 a year. Not an outstanding amount given all the other costs and the likelihood that you would not be in a job with health care and a pension (that's another issue). But, beginning to be in the realm of respectable.

With the [Undisclosed Location]quinox behind us, we move into the Back Nine of my period of extremely intense summer employment. Here are a few links to properly mark this monumental occasion:

* Deconstructing Barry: an English professor reads Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father at TNR.

* History's most elaborate rick roll. Or was it this one at Shea Stadium?

* For centuries, in the closed-off and conservative society of rural northern Albania, swapping genders was considered a practical solution for a family with a shortage of men. Her father was killed in a blood feud, and there was no male heir. By custom, Ms. Keqi, now 78, took a vow of lifetime virginity. She lived as a man, the new patriarch, with all the swagger and trappings of male authority — including the obligation to avenge her father’s death.

* And once more, with feeling, the end of suburbia.

io9 has a sketch of what human colonists will have to wear on Mars. There are a lot of details here, but there's only one that the commenters seem to pay attention to. Can you guess which one?

She's really tall, doesn't have to wear a bra, and has some pretty awesome photosynthesis and water-reclaiming implants in her exosuit.

Evolutionary psychology as an academic movement is, what, a few decades old? At least. So how are they still getting away with just making stuff up?

For women throughout history (and prehistory), the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. Later in this talk we will ponder things like, why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things? But taking chances like that would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. They might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe.

For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities.

Where is the evidence that "women play it safe" while "men take risks," where is the evidence that this is genetically rather than culturally determined, and where is the evidence that this accounts for the supposed differences either in reproductive outcomes or general behavior? For that matter, how does he make the leap from "most men who ever lived do not have descendants who are alive today" to "the odds are you won't have children"? These aren't necessarily the same thing.

This is assuming that the DNA evidence even really says what he claims it says.

In short, surprise surprise, he's just spitballin' here.

Via MeFi (coded and run by a man! who reproduced!).