Half the Sky

Sorry my “travel blog” degenerated into a political musings platform! I swear I didn't mean for this to happen. But here goes, more thoughts on feminism, etc.

The need for feminism comes in many different forms. The one I've mostly been thinking (and writing) about lately is the obligation of femininity kind of problem. Take a look at this great article, You Don't Have to Be Pretty.

“[A discussion about leggings] got me thinking about the pervasive idea that women owe it to onlookers to maintain a certain standard of decorativeness.

Now, this may seem strange from someone who writes about pretty dresses (mostly) every day, but: You Don't Have to Be Pretty. You don't owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don't owe it to your mother, you don't owe it to your children, you don't owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked "female".”

This is what I've been thinking about, because this is what I've been experiencing. For the first time in my 18 years of life, I feel like it was unfortunate to be born a girl. In the Bay Area, the way you dress is a free choice, even if you still are aware of social hierarchies (and jealous of the “popular girls”) and feel pressured to dress a certain way. But in France I really never felt like I had the choice. I know, it's not the Taliban. But social pressures are hard and important and matter a lot more than it seems like they should. So when people ostracize the poorly-dressed and ugly, you try your hardest not to be poorly-dressed and ugly, even if it's really not your cup of tea. This is not something that should happen. People have the right to not be interested in math and the right to not practice juggling as a hobby, and they aren't judged for these traits. You can even be a nerd and not like math. But for some reason, not liking fashion in certain cultures can come with other oddly unrelated assumptions: that you are antisocial (or socially inept), stupid (or nerdy, but not in-between), or come from a bad family, either too poor or too messed-up to dress well. It is for this reason that I've finally started sympathizing with feminism as a movement. I've never been against it, because I'm for equal rights of women. But I've never felt the need for it before, and thought it rather silly that people would get all up in arms about it. I viewed it as the equivalent of the Hispanics and blacks back home who sometimes discover in middle school that they can use their minority status to make the others (whites and Asians) feel uncomfortable: “Can I borrow a pencil?” “No, sorry.” “What, is it because I'm black?? Racist!”

People where I grew up are never shocked when teenagers express a wish never to get married or have kids. It's a typical “I'm going to have a big powerful career and do cool things with my life, instead of being boring suburban parents like my mom and dad” wish. But here, interestingly enough, I've been met time and time again with astonishment when I say I don't expect to get married or have kids. They usually don't understand at first, saying “Oh yes, a lot of people these days are skipping the getting-married step. It doesn't change anything except a few legal benefits, and then you don't have to go through with an outdated religious ceremony.” (Most of the French are extremely atheistic, except the old ones who are all Catholic.) So then I clarify: “No, no, I just don't think I'll end up spending my life with someone,” and they raise their eyebrows and say “Ah bon??” which means “Wait, really??”

So here there's a role to be filled: the Gender Roles that radical feminism likes to talk about but I had always rolled my eyes at, because when I was a little girl of course I could be an astronaut if I wanted to. French women are allowed to have any career they want – just so long as they stay feminine enough. They should like pretty clothes and strong men and want children. It's progressed a long way from the days when women couldn't vote, and it's much better than Afghanistan where women can be flogged and/or killed by the Taliban for leaving the house without a burqa. Which leads me to the second need for feminism:

My aunt Sara sent me a book called Half the Sky for my birthday, seeing that I was getting interested in feminism. This addresses the real live painful issues of feminism: the oppression in the Middle East, the human trafficking across Asia and Indonesia, and the maternal mortality rates and the lack of female education in Africa. It was a good book, well-researched and honest, and I recommend it. Here is my review of it, but it comes with a disclaimer: I have studied the subject much less than the authors have and am making only conjectures which should not be taken for the truth. If any of you are more enlightened than I am, please comment and tell me all about what I did wrong.

As far as oppression in the Middle East goes, I have nothing to say in defense of their culture. I don't know or understand the culture very well either, but it seems to me like it would be pretty terrible to be a woman living under the Taliban, and that this is just plain oppression of women by big bad evil people. This is one of the few real world instances where I don't see very many shades of gray – I can't really think of any possible way to sympathize with the Taliban.

About human trafficking: it is a terrible crime and ruins a lot of girls' lives. According to the book, in concrete numbers (not percentage of world population), the current world sex trafficking trade is about ten times bigger (in number of victims per year) than the entire African slave trade at its peak in the 1780s. No kidding. If you have ever been like me and said that we don't need feminism anymore, than this is your call to –

Wait. Wait a minute. Sex trafficking gets fixed by feminism? Okay, I think I just discovered what my problem with books like this is: of course being kidnapped to become a prostitute is horrible. And we should really do something about it, considering the size of the problem. But is this really a need for feminism, just like convincing the Republican party that we have the right to birth control? To me that sounds sort of like saying that murder is a respect problem, and we really need to teach our kids to respect other people more. Like, um, yes, I guess more feminism and more respect aren't really bad things... but are you sure that's the issue at hand? I'm sure pimps are quite aware that everything they're doing is against women's rights. But I doubt that they're being pimps because they don't think women are as fundamentally valuable, sentient, and worthy as men. They're doing it because they can, because they need (or want) the money, because they have kids to feed or a drug habit to nourish. One of the stories in Half the Sky is about a Cambodian girl who got kidnapped, prostituted, freed by the authors of the book, went back to the brothel because she couldn't overcome her meth addiction, and eventually ended up in a managerial role, breaking in the newly kidnapped girls. This sounds more like individual acts of desperation and not really like a lack of feminism in Indonesia.

So what is the problem? Poverty, mostly. These girls mostly get kidnapped (according to the book) with a promise of a job in a far-away city as a dishwasher or a waitress. They tearfully leave their parents, promising to come home richer, and then get whisked off to a foreign brothel where they can't speak the language and can't escape.

Fortunately, the authors recognized that. My favorite part of the book was about microfinance, which seems like a brilliant idea and gets pretty great results. The idea, highly simplified, is this: you lend someone a very small amount of money when they present you with a business plan. With their $5 they can go buy wool to make string and sell it to other village women. When the woman has earned $10, she can come back, pay back her loan, and borrow slightly more money to make her business bigger. It really is microfinance, increasing by a small amount each time just to start these women off, and once they get used to borrowing, working, selling, and paying back, they are good business women with a life plan ahead of them, while it cost almost nothing to get them on their feet. The “teach a (wo)man to fish” proverb seems appropriate here. They get more respect from their families and more control over the education and up-bringing of their children. It's good all around from the feminist perspective – the woman doesn't need to prostitute herself or try to find a job that will end in kidnapping and a brothel. She earns more and can feed and care for her children better. She has more say in family affairs, and may even send her daughters to school. But all this isn't actually in the name of feminism. It's just in the name of quality of life and raising people out of poverty.

Is this a problem? Not really, I guess. Whether you call it feminism or helping the poor, it's essentially the same thing. It's just being smart about it. The authors know that you aren't going to help women in the Middle East by denouncing Islam as a horrible religion. Instead you can help intellectualism win out over terrorists by making sure babies aren't iodine deficient. This was also pointed out by my favorite blogger (props):

Iodine deficiency decreases a child's IQ by ten to fifteen points, and cheap, simple iodine supplementation of pregnant women and children can completely reverse that! This is a huge deal in places like Afghanistan where a very large portion of the population is iodine deficient, and some biodeterminist historians have tried to explain the continuing problems of those areas, all the way up to its current problem with terrorists, with cognitive handicaps due to lack of iodine.

And in case you didn't realize just how enormous and important 10-15 IQ points is, because you probably didn't, he also says:

Most people don't have a good intuitive feel for IQ. Just to help calibrate how much you should care about these, each extra IQ point is associated with about a 2% increase in lifetime earnings and a 2% increase in worker productivity. A 15 to 20 point rise in IQ, which is a little more than you get from supplementing iodine in an iodine-deficient region, is associated with half the chance of living in poverty, going to prison, or being on welfare, and with only one-fifth the chance of dropping out of high-school ("associated with" does not mean "causes"). The average IQ of a janitor is 92, the average of a doctor is 120, and the average of a Nobel Prize winner is 144. Because of the way standard deviations work, raising IQ by 10 points (a little less than the size of the iodine effect) sextuples (multiplies by six) the chance of having IQ > 140 and therefore in Nobel Prize territory.

So my favorite blogger and the authors of Half the Sky should get together and talk about how iodine deficiency is a large contributing factor to terrorism and crazy Taliban-ism. So, helping problems in the Middle East? Let's just remember to keep our priorities in line, and fix people's iodine, nutrition, education, and see how far that goes to fixing the oppression of women.

The same thing goes for medical issues in Africa. It's horrific. It really is. But the authors admit it:

“...it's crucial to avoid exaggerated claims. In particular, advocates should be wary of repeating assertions that investing in maternal health is highly cost-effective. …the sad reality is that investments in maternal health are unlikely to be as cost-effective as other kinds of health work.

...As one leader in the development field said: 'Vaccines are cost-effective. Maternal health isn't.'”

I'm not against taking care of women dying in childbirth. But I'd like to suggest that it would be a better idea to start with what's easy and cost-effective: vaccines, education, and birth control. I'd also like to suggest that this, too, is not really about feminism. It's about poverty. Women aren't dying in childbirth because their husbands and fathers hate them. But right now in these areas, there's not enough money, not enough medical services, and not enough well-thought-out aid from developed countries.

Feminism is a concept of developed countries, more or less. So maybe the whole concept smells a bit ridiculous to me just because it's not really priority #1. If we start with what's relatively easy-to-fix and start in on the iodine deficiency and poverty, we pile on the birth control and sexual education, the general education, and cheap and easy miracle medicines like vaccines, water filters, and penicillin, we'll already have gone a very long way toward improving the quality of life of women (and men, and non-binary folks!) in Africa. Society drifts steadily left, and it seems to me that ending the oppression of women is a very natural step that comes with improved quality of life. Once you stop scrabbling in the dust to leave your mark on the planet before you die, you can start having dreams – ambitions! Women with careers! But when most of Africa is oppressed (by their poverty), it seems silly to me to talk about feminism as a problem in Africa, even though feminism isn't a bad thing.

But there is one other problem that does seem much more suited to the feminist movement: the rapes that appear to be commonplace in Africa. Half the Sky describes the really horrific and very common African medical problem, fistulas. A fistula is a hole in the birth canal that is caused either by rapes (more common when the rape is conducted with another object, such as a broom handle) or by unsuccessful births. The fistula patient then leaks her wastes constantly, and the smell and unpleasantness of this condition lead many families to drive her away. “The fistula patient is the modern-day leper,” says Ruth Kennedy (quoted in Half the Sky). Most fistula patients are girls who did not succeed in giving birth because they were too young, and their pelvises were not yet large enough to let the baby pass through. This can happen either if the girl is raped, or if she's married off too young. (Or if she's in a consenting relationship, although of course that raises the question of what the age of consent should be.) The root problem here is clearly a feminist one: somehow, we need to find a way to discourage rape, specifically in African cultures. Somehow, we need to convince African families to give up more of the few resources they have to girls' education and protecting their daughters. Poverty and crime are very strongly linked, even when the crime is not money-related. But I don't think rape, unlike prostitution, should be explained by poverty. Prostitution happens because no one has enough money (either the sex worker or the pimp or both), but rape isn't profitable. (Note: I am not saying prostitutes can't be raped, but I am making the distinction here because the root of one is poverty and the root of the other is a cultural problem.)

How do we make people respect women more? How can we decrease rapes, either in Africa, where it's badly needed, or even in “civilized” countries like the US and France, where it's also badly needed?

There have been some lovely anti-rape campaigns, but do they work? I haven't found any research on this. Please let me know if you find any. But half of changing societal norms is just complaining about it a lot, as far as I know. Women complained a lot about not getting to vote, and eventually public opinion swayed over to their side and they got it. (I should get a prize for the world's most over-simplified history lesson.) Blacks complained about getting treated badly until eventually people said “You know what? I guess that is kind of terrible.” And now LGBTs and their allies are complaining about not having equal rights, and by now nine states have legalized same-sex marriage, and my high school's homecoming king last year was gay, and maybe we'll even get around to accepting the LGBTIQQA folks as well. So I don't know what works and what doesn't. I don't know if the media works, or if reducing poverty works, or just complaining a lot works, or even if sexual education works (there's a chapter on sex ed in Half the Sky – it appears to be controversial, while general education for girls is quite successful). The one problem described in the book that I truly believe to be a feminist issue is the one problem that we have no idea how to approach. So... don't stop complaining. Keep being feminist, because as far as I know, that works as well as anything.

There's nothing wrong with a little feminism to try to reduce the number of rapes, convince the Republican party that we have the right to birth control, or discourage the idea of gender roles and the obligation of looking nice. But I'm slightly concerned that selling Half the Sky as a book on feminism is actually beside the point: it's mostly about poverty. I don't want people to donate money to sex ed if it turns out iodine tablets are hugely more effective and cheaper. That's all. There's nothing wrong with feminism, but third world countries have bigger problems.

What I may have forgotten to mention is that I really appreciated this book partly because (unlike other books that talk about how horrible the world is), it actually offered real solutions that seem to be particularly effective, such as microfinance, milking the Flynn Effect for all it's worth including my pet favorites, iodine and nutrition, and direct, effective charities. The last chapter is entitled “What You Can Do,” which is a go-forth-and-change-the-world sentiment that I appreciate.

In the meantime, don't forget to donate to charities that attack what is most important. According to GiveWell.org, the most effective charities this year are the Against Malaria Foundation, GiveDirectly, and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, which you can also read about here: www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities.

I have a lot of things I need to blog about and not enough time to do it, but next up is an update on my ski trip, a post entirely about charity (and why the penny is useless), and a post about optimism (and why I think feminists often over-react, because people aren't intentionally mean).