Blaming the Patriarchy for Autistic Children

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: There's a brief passage in Betty Friedan's landmark study of American housewives in the 1950s and '60s, The Feminine Mystique, where she discusses autism. She embraces the understanding of autism popular at the time, which posits that autism is an emotional disturbance arising from the relationship between mother and child. Yet she parts company from other popularizers of this theory by arguing that the confining, constricted nature of the housewife role distorts women's personalities and their relationships with their husbands and children, thereby making psychological problems more, not less, likely in the families where the mothers are full-time housewives.

She was, of course, massively wrong about autism, though I think her overall thesis about women's needs, and the failure of traditional gender roles to meet them, was (and is!) sound. The few paragraphs she devotes to autism aren't crucial to the points she makes in the rest of the book, and the psychogenic theory of autism is pretty much dead today, and hardly in need of aggressive debunking, but she talks about increasing prevalence of autism with an urgency similar to the "autism epidemic" fears of today.
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The Classic Text of the Modern Women's Movement which Exploded the Myth of THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE!

It's the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, and instead of talking about the book as a whole, or evaluating it in a modern context (as so many other people, far better informed than I, have already done), I am going to spotlight one small part in the book, where she talks about autism.

(If you've read the book, even recently, you might not even remember her talking about autism at all! The idea might even strike you as anachronistic, given that freaking out over an Autism Epidemic is so pervasive in our time. But it's in there --- it hit me with particular force because I am autistic, and the passage is the kind of thing it's not at all nice to read if you're reading it about yourself.)

If you haven't read this book, do, especially if you're interested in feminism or women's history. As profoundly limited in scope as it is (a quality it shares with the earlier, similar work by Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which also concerns itself with society's neglect of women's minds and non-reproductive capacities) --- the only women who show up in its pages are well-educated, middle-and-upper-class white women, who don't have to do hard, physical work (or much of any work) to survive, for whom work outside the home could be intellectually demanding and emotionally rewarding, instead of boring, exhausting, dangerous, soul-killing drudgery, and whose labor is only exploited within the home and never also outside it --- it's still valuable for its detailed enumeration of the psychological costs of limiting women's lives to marriage, home and family.

Off and on throughout the book, and in a more sustained fashion in Chapters Eleven and Twelve, Friedan talks about how, perversely, the 1950s and '60s funneling of women back into the full-time housewife role actually hurt family life and sexual relations. In Chapter Twelve, "Progressive Dehumanization," she describes a pattern she sees of women whose too-early entry into marriage and motherhood precluded their developing authentic selves of their own, and thus rendered them incapable of raising children with all the skills and character traits they needed to become independent, themselves.

(I am going to quote at some length from the chapter, so for readability's sake I'm going to do what I did in this post and not blockquote the entire thing, but instead draw lines above and below the quoted text to separate it from my own. Quotations within the quoted passage I will still blockquote).

Here she brings in autism as the logical endpoint of this Great Chain of Nonbeing, this "progressive dehumanization" as one psychologically stunted generation brings up another, even more psychologically stunted, to the point of being autistic.
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At its most extreme, this pattern of progressive dehumanization can be seen in the cases of schizophrenic children: "autistic" or "atypical" children, as they are sometimes called. I visisted a famous clinic which has been studying these children for almost twenty years. During this period, cases of these children, arrested at a very primitive, sub-infantile level, have seemed to some to be on the increase. The authorities differ as to the cause of this strange condition, and whether it is actually on the increase or only seems to be because it is now more often diagnosed. Until quite recently, most of these children were thought to be mentally retarded. But the condition is being seen more frequently now, in hospitals and clinics, by doctors and psychiatrists. And it is not the same as the irreversible, organic types of mental retardation. It can be treated, and sometimes cured.

These children often identify themselves with things, inanimate objects --- cars, radios, etc., or with animals --- pigs, dogs, cats. The crux of the problem seems to be that these children have not organized or developed strong enough selves to cope even with the child's reality; they live on the level of things or of instinctual biological impulse that has not been organized into human framework at all. As for the causes, the authorities felt they "must examine the personality of the mother, who is the medium through which the primitive infant transforms himself into a socialized human being."

At the clinic I visited (The James Jackson Putnam Children's Center in Boston) the workers were cautious about drawing conclusions about these profoundly disturbed children. But one of the doctors said, a bit impatiently, about the increasing stream of "missing egos, fragile egos, poorly developed selves" that he encountered --- "It's just the thing we've always known, that if the parent has a fragile ego, the child will."
Most of the mothers of the children who never developed a core of human self were "extremely immature individuals" themselves, though on the surface they "give the impression of being well-adjusted." They were very dependent on their own mothers, fled this dependency into early marriage, and "have struggled heroically to build and maintain the image they have created of a fine woman, wife and mother."

The need to be a mother, the hope and expectation that through this experience she may become a real person, capable of true emotions, is so desperate that of itself it may create anxiety, ambivalence, fear of failure. Because she is so barren of spontaneous manifestations of maternal feelings, she studies vigilantly all the new methods of upbringing and reads treatises about physical and mental hygiene. [This passage, along with the one a few paragraphs down, comes from Beata Rank (1949), "Adaptation of the Psychoanalytical Technique for the Treatment of Young Children with Atypical Development," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry*, Vol. 19, Issue 1, pp. 130-139]

Her omnipresent care of her child is based not on spontaneity but on following "the picture of what a good mother should be," in the hope that "through identification with the child, her own flesh and blood, she may experience vicariously the joys of real living, of genuine feeling."
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(Is anyone else starting to think of the evil Other Mother from "Coraline" yet?)
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And thus, the child is reduced from "passive inertia" to "screaming in the night" to non-humanness. "The passive child is less of a threat because he does not make exaggerated demands on the mother, who feels constantly in danger of revealing that emotionally she has little or nothing to offer, that she is a fraud." When she discovers that she cannot really find her own fulfillment through the child:

... she fights desperately for control, no longer of herself perhaps, but of the child. The struggles over toilet training and weaning are generally battles in which she tries to redeem herself. The child becomes the real victim --- victim of the mother's helplessness which, in turn, creates an aggression in her that mounts to destruction. The only way for the child to survive is to retreat, to withdraw, not only from the dangerous mother, but from the whole world as well.

And so he becomes a "thing," or an animal, or "a restless wanderer in search of no one and no place, weaving about the room, circling the walls as if they were bars he would break through."

In this clinic, the doctors were often able to trace a similar pattern back several generations. The dehumanization was indeed progressive.
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The first thing about this passage that jumps out at me is the objectification of the autistic children Friedan and her expert interlocutors are observing. 

It's just so explicit: autistic people are not human, we're not even conscious. We represent the endpoint of a multigenerational loss of humanity. It's kind of ironic and weird that a book whose aim is to prove that women's minds are more complex, capable of more and needing more, than the psych experts of the time thought possible, would make the same kind of categorical dismissal of the possibility of any inner life in another group of people.

Maybe it's not that weird. And the point she's trying to make --- that people who are shunted into parenthood without any opportunity to live their own lives, or find out what they really want (including whether they want to be parents!) tend to make poor parents --- is a valid one; it's just that autistic people are neither "dehumanized" nor the result of poor parenting. We're as fully human as anyone else.

Moving on: You can see Bruno Bettelheim's** "refrigerator mother" theory of autism supplying most of the basic theory here; it's just that Friedan is more sympathetic to the mothers than he is. Both writers (and Friedan was trained as a psychologist, too) think autism is a state of psychological emptiness (no self, no thoughts, no capacity to relate to others) caused by something going wrong in the mother/child relationship --- something the mother does wrong. Bettelheim thought children became autistic because their mothers rejected them --- at some level (whether they were aware of it or not) they "wish(ed) that (their) child(ren) should not exist." For Friedan, the problem starts earlier: the mothers' own emotional development is curtailed, because they never had a chance to do anything other than marry young and have children, so the mothers lean too hard on their young children for emotional support, which then stunts the children's emotional growth to an even greater extent. Mother and child are both victims, and the social order is to blame.

I see no difference at all between Friedan and Bettelheim in their degree of empathy for actual autistic children (and perish the thought that they might consider autistic adults): there is none. The whole point of both of their theories is that we are not people, we have no inner lives worth considering; they only differ on how we came to be that way. We represent the end stage of some pathology, whether it is social (patriarchy, in Friedan) or personal (refrigerator motherhood, in Bettelheim).

*Am I the only person who finds the term "orthopsychiatry" to be very creepy? It has a connotation of straightening, of bringing into line, that I don't think belongs in the mental-health profession. I know (partially from reading The Feminine Mystique itself, although The Organization Man and The Lonely Crowd also helped give me this impression) that that was indeed the aim of psychiatry in those days --- to bring people into line, to help them "adjust" --- but it still creeps me out a lot.

**Bettelheim isn't cited in any of the sections describing autism, probably because The Feminine Mystique predated his most famous work about autism, The Empty Fortress, by four years. But he had been running his Orthogenic School for "disturbed" children since the mid-1940s, and had written at least two things (an essay for Scientific American magazine, and an article about feral children, whom he believed were really autistic) about autism prior to The Feminine Mystique's publication in 1963. Bettelheim is quoted at length elsewhere in the chapter --- Friedan devotes a lot of space to his observations of his fellow prisoners in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. Also, William Long, who has written a series of articles on how various writers have understood autism throughout its history, believes that Bettelheim must have been popularizing his theories of autism long before he published The Empty Fortress, because Bernard Rimland criticizes Bettelheim and his "psychogenic" view of autism in his own book, Early Infantile Autism, published in 1964.

Women in Comics

Comics fan Elliott Brown recently posted a short article on Change.org criticizing DC Comics for putting its "New 52" universe-wide reboot almost exclusively in the hands of male writers and artists:

The number of women working for DC has been hovering around 10% for years -- similar to their adversary company, Marvel. But this September, DC will be rebooting its universe and giving its characters (and creative teams) an overhaul. Many of the characters that will be erased are female, which in and of itself is a tragedy, but in addition to that, what few female creators DC has employed will also be cut from the team. Only 2 out of 100-odd people DC employs as ongoing creators will be women: Gail Simone, who will be writing Batgirl, and Amy Reeder, who will be doing pencils on Batwoman.

That tally immediately made me wonder exactly how many women were currently writing or drawing for Marvel, and on which titles.

(I don't shun DC or anything --- I love, or am interested in, quite a few things they've done, especially under their "mature" label, Vertigo. And they've given us that classic of modern comics, Watchmen! But most of the comics I own are Marvel --- I'm an X-Men fan, and the X-Men have been around a lot longer, and racked up a lot more back issues, than most of what else I read.)

Anyway, Marvel isn't having any similar across-the-board relaunch, so it's going to be a bit harder to track down all of their series that are still going concerns.

Here's a list of recently- and soon-to-be-released titles featuring women writers and/or artists:

• Emma (a serialized adaptation of the Jane Austen novel of the same name) - written by Nancy Butler and drawn by Janet K. Lee


• X-23 - written by Marjorie M. Liu; #'s 3, 7, 10, 11 and 12 drawn by Sana Takeda


• Ultimate Fallout - #'s 2, 4 and 5 drawn by a team of artists including Sara Pichelli


• The Iron Age - # 2 co-written by Jen Van Meter; #3 co-written by Louise Simonson, cover art by Jelena Kevic Djurdjevic


• Hulk - #'s 37 and 38 drawn by Elena Casagrande


• Fear Itself: The Worthy - cover art on #1 by Jelena Kevic Djurdjevic


• Amazing Spider-Man - variant cover for #667 drawn by Stephanie Hans


• Mystic - cover art on #1 by Amanda Conner


• X-Factor - #'s 209, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 221, 223 and 224 drawn by Emanuela Lupacchino


• Spider-Girl - cover art on #8 by Jelena Kevic Djurdjevic


• Spider-Island: Cloak & Dagger - drawn by Emma Rios


• Anita Blake: Circus of the Damned (an adaptation of Laurell K. Hamilton's novel Circus of the Damned) - written by Laurell K. Hamilton and Jessica Ruffner


• Journey Into Mystery - #626 drawn by Stephanie Hans

That's thirteen titles out of 250 putting out new issues in July and August; what's more, only about half of them appear to have women artists involved in whole projects rather than just coming in to do a cover, or to pencil one or two issues in the regular artist's absence.

(Just doing covers, or hopping from series to series doing single issues here and there, isn't a bad thing --- some artists might even prefer it. For instance, Jelena Kevic Djurdjevic seems to specialize in covers. I just bemoan the fact that so few women are involved long-term because that means their creative visions are less likely to make a lasting impact on a series, or to shape the way characters and events develop.)

Making the Genes Fit: Genetic Explanations for Autism and Their Political Implications

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Political-science professor Kristin Bumiller has written another long article on the politics of autism; while her earlier article focused on the neurodiversity movement, this article is mostly about mainstream autism advocacy in the vein of Autism Speaks. In it, she argues that mainstream discourse about autism assumes that autism is a genetic condition, and that this assumption is insufficiently backed by evidence. She spends most of the article detailing the political implications of this assumption, which are 1) funnelling most activism on the part of families of autistic people into relatively narrow channels of corporate-philanthropic fundraising for biomedical autism-research initiatives, rather than calling for broader social changes that might benefit autistic people; and 2) making disability an individual, rather than a social, issue.

She introduces several concepts over the course of developing those themes: "geneticization" --- a process by which the preferred explanation for sickness and disability is that some people are genetically susceptible to certain illnesses; "genetic citizenship" --- an ethic of individual responsibility for health, and for knowledge of one's genetic predispositions; and "life optimization" --- a strategy for making the most of one's (or one's child's) life chances given a certain set of genetic predispositions. She makes the case that the latter two of these things are logical responses to a genetic understanding of disease and disability in a "neoliberal welfare state" like the U.S., but also that they are inherently coercive and inegalitarian.
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Looking through the online archive of the women's-studies journal Signs, I found another article on autism by the political scientist Kristin Bumiller. (I did a series of three posts a while back about her 2008 article "Quirky Citizens: Autism, Gender and Reimagining Disability," which I thought made a lot of really good points). The more recent article, published in the summer 2009 issue of Signs, is called "The Geneticization of Autism: From New Reproductive Technologies to the Conception of Genetic Normalcy."

That odd word, "geneticization," gives you a clue as to the article's main premise: it implies treating autism as if it were genetic when it may or may not really be genetic.

Here is how Bumiller introduces the term and relates it to autism:

The term "geneticization" refers to the growth of genetics as a means to account for and explain health and disease and the process by which biological conditions constitute social definitions of normality and abnormality (Lippman 1991, 18). Abby Lippman coined this term in a feminist analysis of the growing influence of genetic determinism on public policies and private practices regarding pregnancy and health care and to emphasize the gender, race, and class implications of this trend. In particular, Lippman identified the need to study how genetic interventions affect health management in a variety of economic and social contexts. Feminist scholars have been wary of the coercive and normalizing power of medical professionals, yet they have also demonstrated the complex implications of biomedical advances. As Donna Haraway has persuasively argued, it makes little sense to be "simply oppositional" in response to this new technological future because we are deeply implicated in scientific progress (Haraway 1997, 3).

The shift in the autism field was first generated by the efforts of parents with autistic children, who were responding to regressive beliefs within the medical field. The scientific and popularized explanation for autism prior to the 1980s perpetuated a theory that pathological mothering was at the root of the disorder. Bruno Bettelheim (1979) is especially noted by critics for his view that childhood disturbances associated with autism did not arise spontaneously but resulted from extremely abnormal mother-child relations. Bettelheim's understanding of the condition is drawn from the seminal work of Leo Kanner (1943), who distinguished autism from schizophrenia as an innate or inborn disturbance of affective contact but also thought that the notable coldness and formality of the parents usually had some effect on the development of the condition. The hypothesis that autism can be attributed to a general lack of maternal warmth is called the "refrigerator mother" theory of autism, and it did not come under direct attack until Bernard Rimland criticized it in his 1964 book Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implication for a Neural Theory of Behavior. Both a parent of a child with autism and trained as a physician, Rimland undertook scientific work and activism that played a central role in recasting autism as a medical condition with distinct psychological symptoms that could potentially be remediated through diet and other therapies. In an era when parents of children with disabilities were beginning to organize and seek legitimacy, parents of autistic children embraced new biological explanations.

She goes on to describe a gradual narrowing of focus from "biological" explanations to specifically genetic ones, starting when researchers conducting twin studies found a strong pattern of heritability in autism. Later research identified a "broad autism phenotype" in parents and siblings of autistic children*, which added to the impression that it runs in families. But research into specific genes has failed to find much --- many candidate genes have been found, but each one only accounts for a tiny fraction of cases of autism. However, this review on the genetics of autism, published this month in Genetics in Medicine, estimates the total proportion of autistic people who have one of the genetic variations discovered so far at about 25%, which is actually a decent-sized chunk. Couple that with the relative newness of microarray-based comparative genomic hybridization --- the technique responsible for turning up a lot of these candidate genes --- and you see that it might be a bit premature to declare genetic research moribund**.

Kristin Bumiller thinks the continued assumption that autism must be a genetic condition has persisted beyond what the available evidence argues for, and that the idea that it may have environmental triggers is dismissed too readily. (I think the issue of whether the case for a genetic basis for autism is overstated or not is a bit more complicated; see above paragraph).

I do not argue with her assessment of the different political implications of genetic vs. environmental causes of developmental disability; if the former idea (i.e., that it's genetic) is widely believed, then each citizen is responsible for knowing hir own genetic status and making whatever reproductive choices follow from that status, while, if autism and other developmental disabilities are thought to be triggered by some environmental contaminant, then the responsibility falls to the government to enact stricter controls on neurotoxic pollutants. (Both of these scenarios presume a social context whose primary emphasis is on preventing, rather than accommodating, disability. In a less ableist society, deciding whether or not to have children if you're a carrier of [whatever] genes would be much less fraught with emotion and social pressures, although I think we'd want to limit pollution even if we weren't constantly told that developmental disability is a tragic waste of life).

Bumiller calls the individual-responsibility scenario "genetic citizenship": you become a member of a community of people affected by a given genetic disease, and that community advocates for research funding and participates in studies to help speed the development of cures or therapies:

The concept of genetic citizenship has been introduced to describe individuals in the age of biomedicalization who engage in a new style of activism related to their inheritable identities and differential embodiment (Heath, Rapp, and Taussig 2004). This concept is most frequently applied to situations in which individuals and family members affected by a genetic disease come together and take an active role in fundraising, advocating, and influencing scientists in the hope of finding a cure. In the past decade numerous disease-specific advocacy organizations have exercised significant influence over research priorities, affected capital allocation, sponsored gene banks, and demanded collaboration in the pursuit of real progress for people living with genetic diseases (Terry et al. 2007). This participation also takes advantage of new networking opportunities created by the Internet and the emergence of virtual communities. These citizens are seen as having cast off the role of passive patients to become active consumers of health services. As collectivities they have strived to maximize their influence on the development of new science, technology, and medical knowledge (Rose 2007, 23).

Autism advocacy provides an important vantage point from which to evaluate the presumed desirability of genetic citizenship because its activism is complicated by intense controversies about the significance of the genetic link and about the social identities of autistics. With the expansion of biomedical research in the field, much autism advocacy has shifted from promoting the well-being of affected families and children to searching for a cure. These new organizations, now consolidated under the banner of Autism Speaks, primarily promote biomedical research and are modeled on other fundraising campaigns that draw attention to the plight of people who suffer from rare diseases. ...
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Prior studies of genetic citizenship have raised concerns about how the victories of new genetic movements may reflect a questionable convergence of individual interests and market forces and have noted how research priorities are driven by profit motives (Duster 2003a). Similar issues arise in the context of autism; much of this research is conducted in collaboration with high-profile genetic laboratories and large biotech corporations such as deCODE Genetics. This research is given priority despite uncertainty about whether and how genetic information will eventually be useful for pre- or postnatal genetic screening, diagnosis, or treatment methodologies. Both the irresolution about the potential benefits of genetic research and the oversimplifaction of its significance in the media diminish the power of consumers and the general public to either shift priorities or call for more transparency on the part of medical professionals. Moreover, the current focus on instrumental (and uncertain) goals rather than more broadly framed issues of social justice and welfare limits the role of disease-specific advocacy organizations in setting priorities (Stockdale 1999). Specifically in the case of autism awareness, it has been shown that since public discourse has focused on the medical paradigm --- particularly on efforts to find a cure --- there has been less focus on the rights and social welfare dimensions of the issue.

So there are good and bad things about this trend toward people organizing and cooperating with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to raise money and set research priorities. People are able to find other people --- whole communities of people --- who share their circumstances, and can thus pool their knowledge, resources and coping skills in ways they couldn't before, when each person essentially had to work everything out for hirself. That's a good thing; it's also a good thing that people affected by various conditions have a way to tell the scientific and medical communities what they need most.

What's not so good is the fact that the "partnership" between grassroots advocacy groups and corporations is so lopsided; this restricts disease-based activism to the corporate-philanthropic model of fundraising for biomedical research, when it might include that and campaigns for social changes geared toward creating a healthier society.

The other things Bumiller thinks are bad about the "genetic citizenship" model are its tendencies to coerce people into making certain health and reproductive choices, to exacerbate social and economic inequalities, and to put a heavy burden of responsibility on women as guardians of their families' health:

[D]isability activists have illuminated the implications of wide-scale genetic screening for the devaluing of disabled lives, particularly as the lines between state policy and individual choice are becoming increasingly blurred. Despite the well-established obligation of physicians and genetic counselors to provide nondirective advice, studies have found that patients were given information that imposes professionals' views about the usefulness of genetic knowledge and the parental responsibility to promote fetal health (Rapp 1999). This research has shown that professionals effectively delivered the message that the only rational choice is to give birth to a "normal" child. Genetic testing is now understood as a necessary component of preventative public health programs, largely as a result of the trend toward universalized testing and mandatory screening of newborns (van den Daele 2006). This shift has transformed prenatal testing from an option individual women are given to lower their risk of having a child with a genetic defect to a system of reducing overall health problems in the population (Ward 2002). ...
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The research on prenatal counseling has also shown that professionals often frame genetic testing as necessary for socially responsible parenting. One study found that counselors presented prenatal testing as something women need in order to become good parents (Lippman 1991). In this sense, good parenting is about having the knowledge and resources provided by this testing and then following through in a socially responsible fashion. As genetic testing is fully incorporated as a standard of care for pregnant women, the act of refusal is no longer about the assumption of individual risk. Now, the noncompliant woman has failed to take advantage of an important opportunity to maximize the life chances of her child. Such actions are likely to be seen as contrary to good citizenship in an age of biopolitics, where the technologies of biomedicine have created a context in which "biology is not destiny, but opportunity" (Rose 2007, 51) and the desired course of action is to follow a strategy of life "optimization" (6). This strategy, according to Nikolas Rose, is "not eugenics but is shaped by forms of self-government imposed by the obligation of choice, the desire for self-fulfillment, and the wish of parents for the best lives for their children." He goes on to say that "its logics and its costs deserve analysis on their own terms" (69).

To see this as part of a new regime of choice is to fail to recognize the unintended consequences of life optimization in regard to the regulation of normalcy. A recent ethnographic study on the influence of new genetic knowledge on Belgian insurance companies aptly illustrates this dynamic at work. Ine Van Hoyweghen, Klasien Horstman, and Rita Schepers (2006) investigated how insurers take account of predictive medicine in the process of determining premiums. They describe the companies' decision making as a process of "making the normal deviant" because when insurers make judgments "the margin of being normal is actually quite small and the scope for deviation is quite wide" (Van Hoyweghen, Horstman, and Schepers 2006, 1229). They find that when insurers rate people with genetic predispositions they put extra emphasis on how they have managed their health. ... [I]nsurers impose a greater responsibility for optimally managing one's health on people with known risk factors. The authors' conclusions have serious implications for the social costs of life optimization: "Instead of a 'genetic determinism,' it seems more plausible that we are all subject to different levels of susceptibility. ... As a consequence, ... the individual's lifestyle habits, preventive initiatives and compliant behavior in relation to these susceptibilities could be stressed more" (Van Hoyweghen, Horstman, and Schepers 2006, 1233). The actuarial process imposes a norm that defines suitable lifestyles for people with risky genes. This creates an incentive system for genetic "deviants" to conform to normal expectations of proper lifestyles in order to satisfy social expectations.
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The concurrent forces of life optimization under conditions of biomedicalization and demands for personal responsibility in a neoliberal welfare regime make the determination of a disabled person's worthiness central to the process of gaining public health resources. The rights afforded to people with disabilities are more available to those who are good genetic citizens and can demonstrate their strict compliance with social norms. For example, special education provisions rely on eligibility and service determinations that are individualized and ad hoc rather than derived straightforwardly from medical diagnosis. As a consequence, parents with poor genetic literacy often have trouble convincing schools that their children's behavior is the result of a biological condition rather than their bad choices as parents. In social security disability determinations, each case is processed according to subjective criteria used to measure a person's ability to work. Studies show that success in claiming disability depends on a person's ability and willingness to persevere through the application process (Bilder and Mechanic 2003). Since most claims are routinely denied and these denials lead to a lengthy appeals process, only those who are unusually skilled at conveying medical knowledge, or at enlisting the assistance of medical professionals, are likely to have their applications eventually approved.

These systematic processes have the effect of distinguishing between disabled people who are at low risk and those who are at high risk for becoming dependent on the state. Social policies that rely on dividing people up according to risk groups also cut against the organic sense of solidarity that develops among people with disabilities (or among their advocates and caretakers). These systems of classification rely on distinctions that are often contrary to a dynamic and inclusive sense of citizenship among people with disabilities. The overall effect of a person's genetic status interacting with other forms of inequality is to create conditions of "cumulative social and economic disadvantage" and consequently to reduce opportunities to participate in civic life (Kelly 2002, 181).

I don't think Bumiller is endorsing any kind of conspiracy theory, or that she believes some secret cabal of biotechnology executives ever held a meeting and drew up a plan to seize control of the emerging wave of health activism. Similarly, I don't think she thinks doctors and genetic counselors are trying to "regulat[e] normalcy"; both of those things just happened, as new technologies and social movements were assimilated into a corporate-dominated, individualistic society. No human masterminds or conspiracies --- indeed, any planning or intention at all --- need ever be involved.

These are all the things I agreed with in Bumiller's article; there's also some stuff I have problems with (besides my differing assessment of the state of research into the genetics of autism), which I will write about in a later post.

Bumiller, K. (2009). The Geneticization of Autism: From New Reproductive Technologies to the Conception of Genetic Normalcy Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 34 (4), 875-899 DOI: 10.1086/597130


*Not everyone who studied relatives of autistic children found this broad autism phenotype --- this 1994 study of 44 families with multiple autistic children found that the non-autistic siblings did not display any noticeable autistic-like traits; "in the vast majority of cases, children [were] either clearly affected or clearly unaffected". But from what I can see, most of the studies published on this topic did find evidence of a broad autism phenotype, although positive results may be overrepresented among published papers just because positive results are more often published than negative results.

**You could still criticize it on other grounds, from the potential for eugenic applications of genetic research to the questionable wisdom of using limited research funds to pursue such theoretical questions ("Where does autism come from?") rather than finding out what works to improve autistic people's lives and enable them to participate in society to a greater extent.

S. 987 Vote: More Proof that "Pro-Life" Isn't About Protecting Children

Clarissa and Anthony McCarthy (at Echidne's blog) have both written about the U.S. House of Representatives' failure to pass a bill that would help protect young girls around the world from being forced into marriage, often to much-older men who will abuse them, rape them and force them to bear children before they are full-grown.

The International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act of 2010, or S. 987, passed unanimously in the Senate and had lots of support in the House, to the extent that it looked like it was going to pass easily. (As it should, since it's one of civilized society's major duties to protect its most vulnerable members --- children being among them --- from exploitation and harm). But in the hours leading up to the House vote, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (a Republican from Florida) circulated a "Dear Colleagues" letter asking fellow Republicans not to vote for the bill, but instead to vote for an alternate version of it which she authored.

The full text of that letter is reproduced at the end of this post at RH Reality Check --- the gist of it is that Rep. Ros-Lehtinen believes that S. 987, as it was written, would cost too much, and that her own alternate bill would be cheaper to implement.

According to another Representative, Rep. Betty McCollum (a Democrat from Minnesota), there's no basis for this objection; she says the bill does not appropriate any new funds whatsoever. And, indeed, in my own perusal of the bill's full text (which is short), I could find no mention of money, or of things that cost money, like establishing new agencies, task forces or research initiatives. The text of the bill seemed to me to deal only in guidelines for allocating funding that already exists.

Anyway, hours after Ros-Lehtinen sent out her letter, just before the bill was to be voted on, Republican Majority Whip Eric Cantor sent out a "Whip Alert" (a short message telling rank-and-file party members what the party line is going to be) saying this:

Leadership and Ranking Member Ros-Lehtinen OPPOSE passage of S. 987, the International Child Marriage bill, because of cost and pro-life concerns.
...
S. 987 authorizes $108 million over 5 years without sufficient oversight of the taxpayers' money. According to the Congressional Research Service, there is no available, confirmed figure on how much taxpayer funding is already being used to fight child marriage in developing countries and this bill does not address that issue.
...
There are also concerns that funding will be directed to NGOs that perform abortions and [that] efforts to combat child marriage could be usurped as a way to overturn pro-life laws.

After receiving those two messages, almost all of the House Republicans (along with nine Democrats), did indeed vote "No" on S. 987. It still received a majority of votes --- 241 ayes and 166 nays --- but it wasn't a big enough majority to pass.

This is a truly mystifying outcome; not only does the bill not call for any new spending, it also doesn't say anything about abortion. On its face, this is actually a very pro-life bill: it protects children and aims to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Even Sen. Sam Brownback*, a very, very pro-life senator, not only voted for the Senate version of this bill, but he apparently worked very hard to get it passed, so important was it to his vision of a Culture of Life.

It looks to me like they derailed this important, necessary, moral bill out of sheer orneriness; non-cooperation for its own sake, and the consequences be damned.

*"God's Senator" --- many of whose policy positions I abhor, but whom I at least respect for being consistently pro-life, and having "pro-life" mean more than just "anti-abortion." He has written, sponsored and supported lots of humanitarian-aid legislation, and he's often willing to cross party lines to get that sort of thing done. I've voted for him as a Senator before for that reason, but after this session he's leaving the Senate to become Governor of Kansas. I do not think that will go well, at all.

Awesome Website: Take Back Halloween!

Suzie posted a link to this wonderful website today on Echidne's blog; the site is called Take Back Halloween!, and it's full of cool ideas for Halloween costumes based on powerful female figures from history and mythology.

(The name, Take Back Halloween!, refers to the current trend for women's Halloween costumes to be a "sexy" version of some generic category or character: I've blogged before about unimaginatively "sexy" superhero costumes. The ladies at Take Back Halloween! want to see more thoughtful, creative, personalized Halloween costumes; it's not sexiness per se but rather homogeneity and lack of imagination in Halloween costumes that they lament. See the Take Back Halloween! About page for more details.)

My favorite costume on that site, so far, is actually one that had occurred to me before as someone it would be cool, and relatively easy, to dress up as: the famous female pharaoh Hatshepsut. Here's what Take Back Halloween! says about her:

Hatshepsut (ca. 1508-1458 BCE) was an extremely successful pharaoh whose reign was full of accomplishments --- important trade missions, gorgeous architecture, a booming economy. But the thing she's most famous for, at least nowadays, is that she had herself depicted as male on her monuments. There she is, King Hatshepsut, striding across the ancient bas reliefs with her broad shoulders and her beard ... it's a little weird until you understand what's going on. The role of pharaoh was gendered male in ancient Egypt, and Hatshepsut was just assuming the badges of office. She wasn't pretending to be personally male, and the texts unmistakably refer to her as female: "she" is the beloved "daughter" of Amun, destined to rule, and so forth. But Egyptian iconography and religion called for the pharaoh to have a male form, and so Hatshepsut had herself depicted with beard, kilt, the whole bit.

Take Back Halloween! suggests a standard dime-store Egyptian Queen costume, with the stripey headdress of a pharaoh substituted for whatever crown the costume comes with.

My own idea, when I conceived of a Hatshepsut costume, was to dress as the masculinized "King Hatshepsut" character --- fake beard, stripey headdress, crook and flail, pleated linen kilt, boobs bound down with a strip of the same material I'd used for the kilt. (This would be, obviously, only practical if the weather was warm, or if I was going to wear it to a party or other indoor event. In Kansas, it is usually too cold at night in late October to be running around outside with that little clothing on).
I would also wear a cardboard cartouche around my neck on a string, with (if I could find them) the hieroglyphs spelling Hatshepsut's name painted on it.

Another thing I thought would be fun to add to this costume, to throw a little gamer-geekery into the mix, would be to wear shoes evoking the "Freudian slippers" card from Munchkin, which allow your character in that game to function as whatever gender you say they are, even both at the same time. I thought that would be particularly a propos for Hatshepsut, who is female, but yet also male in her role as Pharaoh.

They also have lots of ideas for mythological-character costumes, which is another area of geekery that is dear to my heart. I was actually just pondering the best way to make a Gorgon costume that wasn't just a bunch of rubber snakes braided into one's hair --- the Gorgons, depending on what version of the myth you're reading, might have talons of bronze, wings of gold, and tusks like a wild boar or hippopotamus, or they might just be scaly and dragonlike; either way, "normal-looking woman with snakes on her head" falls short of the level of fearsomeness required.

Unfortunately, their Medusa costume is just a snake wig and a coat. Blah.

But they've got an impressive array of ancient-goddess costume ideas: there's the winged Egyptian goddess Isis, the Mayan goddess Ix Chel, the Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu, and the Sumerian goddess Inanna. And those are only the goddesses I'd heard of before going to the site!

Link Roundup: Fat Is a Feminist Issue Edition

Within the last week or so, there's been a spate of really good feminist blogging about intersections between feminism and fat acceptance.

From Feministe, three guest posts: one by Atheling, who blogs at This Wicked Day, about similarities between slut-shaming and fat-shaming; one by zuzu, who used to be a Feministe contributor and now writes mostly at her own blog, Kindly Póg Mo Thóin, that deals with how fat-shaming health alarmism actually harms fat people's health, both by keeping them out of doctors' offices and by leading doctors to look no further than their patients' BMIs to explain their various health problems; and one by Spilt Milk (who writes an eponymous blog) about how body-shaming permeates mother-daughter relationships and how fat acceptance is radical because it's based on kindness and, well, acceptance, first of yourself and then of others.

There's also this terrific post by Meowser at Fat Fu, which contrasts the reasonable things fat-acceptance advocates are actually saying with the raving denialism everyone else seems to hear:

We say, "Weight is, for the most part, not a very good proxy for health, and there are much better ones, like socioeconomic status." They hear, "Being dozens of pounds over (or under) your baseline weight is just ginchy for you, and your doctor should never bring it up ever." ...

We say, "What causes people to weigh what they do is complex and multifactorial, and varies a lot from one person to another - and you can't tell what people's habits are from their pants size." They hear, "Weight is purely inherited and has nothing whatsoever to do with behavior." ...
...
We say, "Hounding kids about their weight is not likely to result in happier or healthier kids OR adults, for the most part." They hear, "We don't care if all the children lose their toes to dry gangrene by the time they're 12, as long as we can eat all the baby-flavored donuts we want."

Finally, there's this post by Aunt B at Tiny Cat Pants. She talks about two important things that often go unacknowledged in discussions about fat, public health and how U.S. society has changed: first, the class aspects of sitting around waxing oracular about why Those People are so fat and what they must be doing wrong ...

... [W]e talk about obese people having no self-control or being too stupid to know what to put in their bodies or lacking access to experts who could tell them what to do with themselves; the narrative is all about how obese people put all kinds of things in their bodies because they're too stupid (or uneducated to know better) and they thus have really negative life outcomes. Now, read that same sentence and swap out "obese" for "poor."

It works just the same.

I find that interesting. In both cases, it's about a group that has too many people in it, who need education and expertise and guidance, and who are deemed failures or troublemakers if they resist efforts from the outside to improve them.

The word "class" doesn't quite fit, but I think it has to do with demanding people want to strive to remove evidence of what has been deemed their shitty circumstances. Yes, of course, you will be punished for striving. But you will be punished worse for not striving.

It's almost as if the obese/the poor, by their very existence, insult their "betters" by not recognizing and properly responding to their "betters'" expertise on how best to live life.

... and, later, about implicit sexism in how most people --- even most feminists --- talk about fat:

Is it really not clear to feminists how the "obesity epidemic" is about reasserting the right to police women's bodies? Except now, we're doing it for your health!When people talk wistfully about how "nobody cooks at home anymore" who do you think that "nobody" used to be? When people talk about how kids don't get the same free rein of the neighborhoods they used to have, who is the unspoken monitor of all that free time?

Who has, supposedly, fallen down on the job causing us all to be fat?

Spilt Milk also addresses the mother-blaming aspect of obesity panic in her post --- she describes the double bind mothers find themselves in where, if a daughter develops an eating disorder, it's the mother's fault for being too uptight about food and teaching the daughter to hate her body, while, at the same time, if the children are fat, the mother is blamed for being too lazy to cook healthy food and make sure her children get enough exercise!

EDIT: Radical feminist blogger The Bearded Lady has also written two recent posts on fat acceptance: one --- like zuzu's that I linked earlier --- about fat women and doctors, and how doctors both miss underlying conditions that need treatment because they think fat people just need to lose weight, and also how doctors will see a fat woman's fatness as so dangerous, so unhealthy, that they will prescribe extremely aggressive measures to get them to lose weight. Her other entry is about her personal journey toward fat acceptance, and how for her, accepting her body came as part of her radical feminism, and her rejection of heterosexuality:

[A]lthough I had previously strenuously denied any connection between hating my body and wanting men to like me, when I stopped wanting men to like me, I stopped hating my body. Not immediately, in a flash of insight, but gradually, over time, I realised that I was looking at myself in the mirror and not thinking 'ugly' -- not thinking anything at all, really, just looking for toothpaste on my chin or whatever.

Hating my body/self was, for me, expressed not only in extreme dieting and thinking myself deeply ugly, inside and out. I also hated my body by allowing men to use it, by letting men fuck me, when I (the tiny little voice inside me that was barely allowed to speak) knew that I was being violated and used. It was a joyful moment when I realised I could just stop.

I especially liked that entry of hers, because it's probably the closest any other woman has come to describing a relationship to her body, and to the concept of "attractiveness" and whether one possesses it or not, that resembles mine. It's not a total match, and some things are actually very different between the two of us --- I never went through a period of intense dieting and *wanting* to be thin and conventionally attractive like she did, for instance --- the end state she describes is very close to what I have, and it entails a rejection of beauty and attractiveness rather than the reclamation of those things that seems to be a lot more common for large women who learn to love their bodies. I might write more about how that came about for me later, but for now I was just really happy to see someone else articulate these feelings that I also have, and have struggled to characterize accurately.

Things You Don't See Every Day: Discussion of Sexism in Superhero Comics

I was really pleasantly surprised when I was given Classic X-Men #34 as a gift recently; besides the conclusion to an exciting story arc (which I had anticipated), the issue also included this little gem of a backup story written by Ann Nocenti and drawn by John Bolton.
Ann Nocenti frequently wrote the backup stories for the Classic X-Men series --- that series consists of reprints from an earlier run of Uncanny X-Men paired with new stories that are usually vignettes focusing on aspects of one particular character's personality. This story, which ran in June of 1989, features villains Emma Frost (the White Queen of the Hellfire Club) and Jason Wyngarde (Mastermind, also Black King of the Hellfire Club), and, caught between them, a hapless cocktail waitress who works at the Hellfire Club.

It begins with the waitress trying to serve drinks to Jason Wyngarde, who leers at her in a particularly unsettling manner:

(If you can't read the text, the topmost inset panel shows a scary-looking guy in Victorian garb staring at the body of a young woman wearing black lingerie and thigh-high boots, thinking: "How vulnerable and exposed she is. And the way she allows me to just openly stare at her! It's so base it embarrasses me!" The girl speaks to him, saying, "Will there be anything else, Mr. Wyngarde?" When he doesn't answer, she keeps trying: "Sir? Sir?" but still can't wrest any acknowledgement from him.)

Shaken, the waitress retreats to the women's dressing room, where she bumps into Emma Frost, who is changing into her uniform. The waitress starts to talk to Emma about Wyngarde, hoping to find an empathetic listener in another woman:

(Dialogue balloons say: "Oh, Miss Frost! Don't you just hate wearing these outfits?")

(Dialogue: "Isn't it all so sexist? I mean, shouldn't we protest, on principle? It's our skills, as servants, that should count, not how we look. I mean, am I right?")
(Waitress: "Shouldn't we stick together, as women, and refuse to dress like this?" Emma Frost: "What are you babbling about?")

This other woman being Emma Frost, however, no such consolation is forthcoming.

("Who do you take me for? Just another servant girl?") ("I am the White Queen! Yes, you wear that outfit, and men look at you, and it cheapens you.")
("But when I wear it, it cheapens them. Let me explain a few things about sexism, girl. It's all in what you use it for!") --- I like the appalled look on the waitress's face when she hears this. It's clear that what Emma is saying is blowing her mind, but the nuances of her reaction are left unclear. I prefer to imagine her thinking something like, "You are soooo deep in denial it's making me dizzy."

("... But it's really about personal domination. My clothes are my battle armor! I dress to go to war! My looks and body are weapons on par with a man's fists.")

("There is no such thing as sexism, unless you give them that power!")

To illustrate her highly personalized philosophy of female empowerment, Emma Frost sallies forth to confront the man whose churlish behavior inspired the whole discussion. She sits down opposite him, placing herself in the position of an equal, a competitor, rather than a servant, and plays a brutal, high-stakes game of psychic chess with him.

Neither character emerges from the battle unscathed: Emma manages to impale Wyngarde on his own spear, but in doing so she sustains enough damage to shatter her psionic self. Yet she doesn't, won't, and can't leave the table --- the combat means too much to her, even if it may ultimately kill her.

The point I see Nocenti making here is this: trying to fight sexism by making it work for you --- in Emma's case, embodying perfectly the patriarchal conception of the femme fatale --- is a sucker's game. No woman can do it well enough, and even if she could, the game is still ultimately rigged against her.

Totally Unexpected Gender and Disability Awesomeness from Larry Niven

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This is a review of hard-science-fiction writer Larry Niven's 1983 novel The Integral Trees. The book is excellent in the ways I've come to expect excellence from Niven --- imaginative world-building, exciting plot, clever application of physics and engineering principles --- but it also surprised me by being a lot better than his books usually are at characterization, particularly its representations of women. It also astonished me by having about half of its main characters --- including one who I consider the novel's most heroic character --- be people with disabilities. In fleshing out these characters, Niven manages to avoid "supercrip" and "bitter, angry cripple" stereotypes, and also to show the role that environment plays in disabling or empowering people with disabilities.
________________________________


Like a lot of science-fiction writers of his generation, Larry Niven is sexist. While this does annoy me when it shows up in his work, I also find enough to like in his writing to keep reading him.

(With Niven, the thing that makes me consider myself a fan is the hugely imaginative worldbuilding, backed up with just enough real-world physics to make you suspect that whatever fantastical setup you're reading about might actually be possible).

The Niven book I've read most recently, The Integral Trees (first written in 1983), met my expectations in the originality and skilled, thoughtful realization of its central concept --- a "world" lacking a planet, composed instead of a huge gas torus surrounding a neutron star, which itself orbits another star --- and greatly exceeded them in its rendering of female and disabled characters.

First of all, The Integral Trees surprised me just by having lots of major characters with disabilities, as this is not a thing that happens very much at all in science fiction*.

The plot revolves around a small party of nine people, sent on a reconnaissance mission up the trunk of the enormous floating tree that houses their village to look for potential sites to build a new village, as food is becoming scarce at the old location. (They depend on what blows by them on air currents, along with what little they find growing on the tree itself, for food. While a little gardening is possible on the tree, there's not enough of anything resembling soil in this airy world to support self-sufficient farming communities). Because the village's Chairman is pessimistic about their chances of survival, the scouting party is sent out less as a serious attempt to re-establish the village than as a pretext for getting rid of everyone the Chairman considers a useless eater.

Accordingly, the scouting party is composed of a pretty unlikely bunch of heroes: aside from the leader, who is a skilled hunter who's been exiled for mostly political/interpersonal reasons, most of the intrepid explorers are people with disabilities.

In this passage, the main character, Gavving, surveys his comrades-to-be:

The Grad had long been Gavving's friend, but he wasn't much of a hunter. And Merril? Merril would have been a big woman if her tiny, twisted legs had matched her torso. Her long fingers were callused, her arms were long and strong; and why not? She used them for everything, even walking. She clung to the wicker wall of the Commons, impassive, waiting.

One-legged Jiovan stood beside her, with a hand in the branchlets to hold him balanced. Gavving could remember Jiovan as an agile, reckless hunter. Then something had attacked him, something he would never describe. Jiovan had returned, barely alive, with ribs broken and his left leg torn away, the stump tourniquetted with his line. Four years later the old wounds still hurt him constantly, and he never let anyone forget it.

Glory was a big-boned, homely woman, middle-aged, with no children. Her clumsiness had given her an unwanted fame. She blamed Harp the teller for that, and not without justice. There was the tale of the turkey cage; and he told another regarding the pink scar that ran down her right leg, gained when she was still involved in cooking duties.

The hate in Alfin's eyes recalled the time she'd clouted him across the ear with a branchwood beam; but it spoke more of Alfin's tendency to hold grudges. Gardener, garbage man, funeral director ... he was no hunter, let alone an explorer, but he was here. No wonder he'd looked bereaved.

Glory waited cross-legged, eyes downcast. Alfin watched her with smoldering hate. Merril seemed impassive, relaxed, but Jiovan was muttering steadily under his breath.

These, his companions?

Jiovan has one leg; Merril has none and walks on her hands. Glory is so clumsy she's exempted from most everyday physical tasks that villagers normally share. Alfin, the middle-aged and misanthropic village gardener, has a terrible fear of heights that makes it extremely hard for him to climb. The other four characters --- Clave, Gavving, Jayan and Jinny --- are able-bodied.

I thought the characters of Alfin and Merril, and how they changed --- became more or less able as their environments changed --- worked surprisingly well as illustrations of the social model of disability.

For instance, as the scouting party gets further and further away from their village, which is at one of the ends ("tufts") of the free-floating giant tree they live on, they also move toward the center of the tree, where the "tides" (forces analogous to gravity --- see here for a more detailed explanation) get weaker, until movement becomes so effortless that Merril and Jiovan no longer have to work harder than everyone else to cover the same distances; it's as easy for them to flit around in near-free-fall conditions as it is for the characters with two working legs to do so.

Merril takes particular joy in this development:

... Gavving heard Merril shout, "Who needs legs?"

She was holding herself an arm's-length from the bark by a one-handed grip. He shouted down. "Merril? Are you all right?"

"I feel wonderful!" She let go and began to fall and reached out and caught herself. "The Grad was right! We can fly!"

Gavving crawled toward her. Jinny was already below her, pounding in a spike. When Gavving reached them, Jayan was using the spike for support, with her line ready in her other hand. They pulled Merril back against the tree.

She didn't resist. She crowed, "Gavving, why do we live in the tuft? There's food here, and water, and who needs legs? Let's stay. ... I've eaten enough foliage to last me the rest of my life! But if anyone else wants it, we'll send down someone with legs."

Eventually, the tree they've been living on splits apart, and they have to jump out into the empty sky; into free-fall. There, Merril thrives even more. The group faces all sorts of terrible dangers --- they're accosted by raiders from a hostile neighboring tribe right before the tree splits; their leader, Clave, is gravely injured; when they make their way into a huge free-floating "jungle" of diffuse, mosslike airborne vegetation, they're attacked and captured first by the jungle's giant-sized inhabitants and later by slave hunters in a spaceship --- and consistently Merril's bravery, determination and resourcefulness help get the group out of trouble.

The book is a bit less consistently successful in its portrayal of (non-disabled) female characters: yes, there are a lot more women in The Integral Trees than there are in most Niven books, and they do all sorts of cool things --- there's a female naval officer and scientist-in-training among the technologically advanced people who trawl the jungle for slaves; among the people living in the jungle, women fight alongside men as soldiers, and most of the people Merril, Clave, Gavving et al. end up helping to fight the slavers are female; and finally, much earlier in the book, the tribe living on the opposite tuft of the tree from Gavving's village employ all-female hunting parties (the hunting party that accosts the protagonists right before the tree breaks apart even includes a trans woman) --- but there's still a lot of sexual objectification of female characters. The worst offenders in this regard are Jayan and Jinny, the twenty-year-old, identical twin girlfriends of alpha-male scouting-party leader Clave. (That's why Clave was sentenced to lead this wild-goose-chase: he had been married to the daughter of the village chairman, but she was apparently such a nagging shrew that he couldn't stand to live with her, so he left her and took two younger, prettier, nicer more compliant girls to replace her).

*A notable exception to this rule would be the subgenre of science fiction set post-nuclear-apocalypse, usually written during the '50s and early '60s, at the height of the Cold War. With those, you usually see lots of characters with congenital disabilities or deformities, always attributed to fallout from the bombings. These characters are rarely treated as fully human, though --- their disabilities make them monstrous and Other in their authors' eyes.

Modern Morality Tales

Poor Sandra Bullock.

First, her triumph over winning a Best Actress Oscar gets cut short in one of the cruelest ways possible --- she discovers that her husband is cheating on her, and also that he might be a neo-Nazi, or at least think neo-Nazism is funny or ironic rather than horrible --- and then, this being a backlash era and all, some supercilious op-ed columnist sees fit to use her personal tragedy as a cautionary tale to shame women for daring to have a life beyond their marriages.

There has also been the barrage of relentless, super-exploitative media coverage that never fails to compound the sense that one's life is spinning horribly out of control.

(Here are some sample magazine covers):

And then, the feminists get in on the act! Feminists! The ones who are supposed to have her back, or at least who might be expected not to blame a woman for her husband's failings? Well, they don't seem to be extending that courtesy to Sandra Bullock.

Here's Kate Harding, who is normally spot-on in her analyses and who, until now, has scrupulously avoided blaming victims, writing for Jezebel:

If there's been a bright side for Sandra Bullock during this bizarrely long spell of public interest in her dickwad husband, it's that her own reputation has mostly been spared. But can it survive the Nazi picture?


More to the point, should it?

Don't get me wrong: I am in no way suggesting that a wife is responsible for her husband's behavior. I'm not even saying Bullock must have known; just as it's possible for women not to realize their husbands are cheating or married to other people or, say, responsible for multiple murders, it's surely possible to miss the signs that your partner is, if not an active neo-Nazi, the kind of twisted asswipe who finds humor in taking photos that suggest that he is. But at some point, don't you have to wonder?

...

I'm all for giving celebrities their privacy amid salacious gossip and personal turmoil, but since Bullock clearly knows all about that photo and the other accusations now, I can't figure out why we haven't heard from her yet. This is not the kind of thing you let slide, even if all you want to do, quite understandably, is hide out and lick your wounds. Perhaps she's just taking her time crafting a blistering statement denouncing [Jesse] James' apparent anti-Semitism, avowing her unfortunate but total ignorance of it and announcing the imminent divorce. But if that's not out by tomorrow? Something's seriously fucked up here. Remaining silent at this point is such an inexplicable career move --- questions of human decency aside --- I can't quite believe we haven't seen such a statement already. And I really can't believe there aren't more people making noise about it yet.

...

I wonder if similar feelings [of liking/sympathizing with Sandra Bullock] are driving the trend toward demonizing James --- quite deservedly, it seems --- while letting Bullock off the hook for marrying what appears to be a world class asshole. I mean, world class. Jezzies, being the brilliant, skeptical and deliciously unmerciful bunch you are, have already been discussing the possibility that Bullock knew exactly who she married and somehow didn't think the Nazi thing was a dealbreaker. But so far, most folks are curiously silent on the topic. The dominant narrative over the last few weeks --- save for a bit of crapola about how powerful women drive their emasculated men to cheat --- has been that Bullock is a victim who will and should come through this unfortunate episode with her dignity, career and tremendous likeability intact. Because unlike James, she did nothing wrong.

And you know, I like that narrative almost as much as I like Sandra Bullock, in theory; I like that for once, most people seem more inclined to call a douche a douche than speculate about what (beyond stupidity and hubris) would cause a man to step out on his beautiful, talented wife. And because I really like the idea of doing tequila shots and singing along to classic rock with Sandy B. at a dive bar somewhere --- even though I will almost certainly never meet her, she couldn't really hang anonymously like that, and I can't stomach tequila --- I'd really prefer not to consider another obvious angle on Jesse James' overwhelming jackholery in the context of his marriage: the whole "birds of a feather" thing.

So I can certainly understand why people are reluctant to say, "Hey, is it just me, or have we reached the point where it's reasonable to wonder if Sandra Bullock kinda digs the Nazi scene herself?"

But, you know... is it just me, or have we reached that point?

Despite a whole lot of hedging, these passages keep coming back to two points that I think are sexist: 1) Sandra Bullock has a special responsibility to repudiate, denounce, or otherwise publicly air her opinions on neo-Nazism because her husband, who has already demonstrated a capacity and willingness to hide things from her, might be a neo-Nazi; and 2) Sandra Bullock either knew her husband had neo-Nazi proclivities, and tacitly approves, or she is guilty of unusual obtuseness for failing to suspect it.


Ginmar calls this a resurrection of the "angel of the hearth" stereotype, and I think she's right.

Because women are supposed to be the ones who "civilize" brutal men, whenever a man with a wife or girlfriend does something wrong, people also look to blame the woman. Even when she had absolutely nothing to do with whatever it was he did, and when she was probably just as much in the dark about it as everyone else. She's been neglecting her womanly duties by failing to improve her husband or boyfriend's moral character, so she must be a Bad Woman!




More evidence that becoming a feminist doesn't make all your internalized sexism and misogyny magically go "poof."