Tag Archives: Cathy Young

Cathy Young on Tammy Bruce

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In an article for Reason magazine, Cathy Young does a nice job of exposing how little Tammy Bruce has changed in her transition from left wing feminist blowhard to right wing blowhard.

Young does an especially good job exposing Bruce’s blatant hypocrisies,

Probably the biggest contradiction is Bruce’s outrage at the left’s attempts to suppress politically incorrect speech and her long history of action that, to the untrained eye, might look like attempts to suppress politically incorrect speech. Bruce rails at the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) for its boycott of sponsors of Schlessinger’s television show; yet in 1990, she led NOW’s boycott against Knopf over Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho. In her 2001 book The New Thought Police, Bruce explains that this was different because she never asked Knopf to cancel publication of the book and only wanted to raise public awareness of its violent content. (Actually, GLAAD did not demand the cancellation of Schlessinger’s show, to the dismay of some gay activists.) Yet Bruce also boasts that partly due to her protest — which included such strong-arm tactics as encouraging people to flood Knopf’s inside phone numbers with phone calls — no similar books have been published since, and the editor of Ellis’ next novel censored a particularly violent scene.

Young also notes that Bruce was one of the feminist activists who targeted Holly Dunn’s hit song “Maybe I Mean Yes” and that Bruce congratulated Dunn when she self-censored herself by removing the show from her live set and asked radio stations to stop playing it.

Bruce occasionally comes up with some good observations, but for the most part she’s just another member of the Club of Blowhards from Anne Coulter to Al Franken who substitute bombastic extremist pronouncements for serious debate.

Source:

Tammy Bruce’s Journey. Cathy Young, Reason, August-September 2003.

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Is Male Promiscuity All In the Genes?

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There was a great hue and cry in August over a study purporting to offer further evidence for the claim that men are more promiscuous than women due to evolutionary reasons.

Evolutionary psychologist David Schmitt presented the results of a study of 16,000 individuals from around the world. Schmitt surveyed the study participants about their sexual preferences, including how many sexual partners they would like to have in the next month and over the next 10 years.

Men, on average, wanted 1.87 sexual partners in the next month and 5.95 over the next 10 years. Women, on average, said they wanted 0.78 sexual partners in the next month and 2.17 in the next 10 years.

Schmitt, with his evolutionary psychologist hat on, argues that this is proof that men’s preference for more sexual partners is therefore universal across cultures and reinforces the evolutionary psychology explanation of male promiscuity as a behavior that maximizes male reproductive fitness. Schmitt told the Washington Post,

This study provides the largest and most comprehensive test yet conducted on whether the sexes differ in the desire for sexual variety. The results are strong and conclusive — the sexes differ, and these differences appear to be universal.

Not so fast say those who believe that this preference may have more to do with differing social and cultural norms for men and women.

In the other corner is Ohio State University psychologist Terri Fisher who has done some fascinating studies of how men and women respond to surveys about sexual behavior differently based on the conditions and type of survey being administered. Here’s how the Washington Post summarizes some of her work,

Because of society’s double standard, Fisher said, women are hesitant to report their true sexual desires. In one study, she asked men and women to report whether they masturbated, watch soft-core pornography or hard-core pornography. Each “yes” got a point. She found, on average, that men scored 2.32 and women 0.89.

BUt she also found that women’s scores changed depending on how confident they were of remaining anonymous. In the study, both men and women had been told to hand their questionnaires to a researcher. But when women were told to deposit their answers in a locked box supervised by a researcher, their average score jumped to 1.53. And when the women took the test alone in a locked room and then deposited their answers in a locked box — ensuring privacy and anonymity — their score shot up further, to 2.04. The men’s answers did not change significantly, indicating they were less concerned about their opinions being discovered.

In an article for Reason magazine, Cathy Young noted that Fisher did, in fact, find anonymity affected men somewhat, but in a slightly different way. Young writes,

For men, the results were virtually the same regardless of the setting in which they answered the questionnaire — except that men reported losing their virginity at an earlier age hen they were not assured of anonymity. In other words, men’s and women’s reports of their sexual behavior are influenced by stereotypical social expectations. Surprise, surprise.

I think Young is correct that there is likely some genetic-based variation between men and women as far as the number of sexual partners that they desire to have, but that, as she puts it, “there is no reason to believe that this legacy is impervious to social change.”

Sources:

Desire and DNA: Is Promiscuity Innate? Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post, August 1, 2003.

Look Who’s Cheating. Cathy Young, Reason, August 12, 2003.

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Free Clara Harris?

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A Texas jury earlier this year convicted Clara Harris of killing her husband after she caught him with another woman. Harris repeatedly drove over her husband with her car.

In a short article about the trial and conviction, Cathy Young noted that during a segment about the case on The O’Reilly Factor some women wrote in via e-mail to express their support for Harris. But, to my knowledge, no prominent feminists took the absurd route of defending Harris.

Not so, however, for those nutty right wingers at WorldNetDaily.Com where Editor and CEO Joseph Farah devoted an entire column to singing Harris’ praise and saying that, if there were any justice in the world, Harris would be set free. Farah wrote,

I say: Free Clara Harris. We need more women like her. Live like her.

. . .

People are no longer accountable to anyone. They don’t believe they are accountable to God. They don’t believe they are accountable to their spouses. And they don’t believe they are accountable to their children. They are not accountable to the state, as no-fault divorce laws have made certain.

. . .

If I were on that jury, I would find Clara Harris not guilty. After she was sprung, I’d give her a medal. She did the world a favor. She may have acted emotionally. She may be sorry for what she has done. But, frankly, she did the right thing. That creep deserved what he got.

In Harris’ case, fortunately, no one on the jury shared Farah’s views, but Young notes a Texas case where the jury did buy into this sort of ridiculous argument. In 1999 a jury convicted Jimmy Dean Watkins of murder after he shot and killed his estranged wife in front of his 10-year old son. But the jury sentenced him to just 10 years of parole after buying into his claim that he was acting on a sudden passion (even though Watkins had fled the scene after his gun jammed, then returned to fire the fatal shot after restoring his weapon to working condition).

Apparently a world in which men and women run around killing their philandering spouses without any sort of consequence may appeal to Farah, but Young is correct in noting that as much as we might sympathize with someone who commits a crime of passion, we should never allow that sympathy to be used as a justification for murder,

A certain measure of sympathy for people who commit crimes of passion is understandable. Many feminists have attributed this sympathy to the underlying belief that men “own” women; but they are wrong. Most of us can relate to feelings of anger, loss and betrayal caused by infidelity or rejection?in a way we cannot relate to the cold-blooded motives of someone who kills for greed. But we should never allow this emotional understanding to overshadow the horror of what happened to the victims.

Sources:

Free Clara Harris! Joseph Farah, WorldNetDaily.Com, January 30, 2003.

She Done Him Wrong: Cowboy law, sexism mix in wronged wife’s trial. Cathy Young, Reason, February 4, 2003.

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Cathy Young on Disparities in Punishing Male and Female Killers

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As usual, Cathy Young weighs in the July issue of Reason with an excellent examination of disparities in how male and female killers are treated by the American justice system.

Of particular interest is the fact that feminists almost never speak out about such disparities — in fact feminists have actively promoted the falsehood that a man who kills his partner receives only 2-6 years in jail on average compared to a woman who kills her partner who supposedly gets 15 to 20 years. In fact, as Young points out, studies find that men who kill their partners spend about 10 years longer in jail than do women who kill their partners.

As Young writes,

As a result, if a man commits a violent crime against a woman and gets off lightly, an outcry from women?s groups often follows. If it?s the other way round, the only vocal protests are likely to come from the victim?s family and from prosecutors.

The Working case [where a woman received a one day sentence for luring her estranged husband into an ambush and tried to murder him], like the Wagshall case, received minimal publicity. Imagine the reaction if a judge had said publicly that a man who had ambushed and shot his estranged wife should have been spared prison because he was depressed over the divorce.

Of course that would require a real commitment to sexual equality which, so far, many women’s groups are opposed to.

Source:

License to Kill
Men and women, crime and punishment. Cathy Young, Reason, July 2002.

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Are Women Underrepresented In Medical Research?

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Feminists have long claimed that women were underrepresented in federally-funded medical research, but as the National Center for Policy Analysis recently pointed out, new information has punctured this claim as yet another myth.

Although the National Institutes of Health proclaimed in 1997 that “women were routinely excluded” from federally funded research, it recently retracted that claim because it wasn’t supported by the evidence.

NCPA points to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Sally Satel noting that in 1979, 268 of 293 NIH-funded clinical trials included female subjects, while in 1998 68 percent of subjects in all federally funded clinical trials were women.

When it comes to diseases such as cancer, women vastly outnumber men in clinical trials due to the vast overrepresentation of breast cancer research in such trials as compared to other forms of cancer. The NCPA cites Cathy Young, for example, as pointing out that from 1966 to 1986 there were more than three times as many clinical trials for breast cancer as there were for prostate cancer.

Source:

Women and Medical Research. National Center for Policy Analysis, March 21, 2001.

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Genetic Engineering and Abortion

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Cathy Young wrote an interesting analysis of the debate surrounding genetic engineering, Monkeying Around with the Self, for Reason magazine. Young basically argued that while we should not give in to the extreme opponents of genetic engineering, neither should we fail to realize that there are genuine moral quandaries raised by genetic engineering. But what intrigued me about the article was her discussion of recently announced plans to clone a human being.

Two Italian doctors, Panos Zavos and Severino Antinori — neither of whom are strangers to reproductive controversies — announced that they will attempt to create a viable cloned embryo and find a woman willing to bring the embryo to term.

Many people oppose such cloning, but mainly for reasons that are rooted in a misunderstanding of what cloning entails. Typically people think that a clone will be identical in every way to the donor of the genetic material, but in fact a cloned baby would be just another baby. There would not be anything more remarkable about a cloned baby than there would be about genetic twins who also share identical genetic material but are hardly exact copies of each other in terms of behavior, personality, etc.

There is one enormous problem with trying to clone a baby at this juncture, however. Scientists still are not very good at cloning animals. Most cloned animal embyros have so many birth defects that they spontaneously abort. Of the few that don’t spontaneously abort, a large percentage are still born or die within a few days after birth. Of those who don’t die shortly after birth, most have severe genetic defects including a tendency toward excessively large organs.

The number of cloned embryos who make it to relatively healthy living animals is exceedingly small. This is not much of an issue when dealing with animals, but presents a huge moral quandary when attempting to clone human beings. It strikes many people as morally repugnant to create a human being that is almost certain to have the sort of debilitating birth defects that are all but unprecedented in traditional sexual reproduction. Certainly sexual reproduction does carry such risks, but the odds of such a large collection of severe birth defects in one infant are almost negligible compared to the near certainty that a cloned infant would suffer from such defects.

As Young sums it up,

The real ethical problem of cloning, as REASON Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey argues, is that at present, mammals cloned from adult cells appear to be at a high risk for congenital abnormalities. It would be immoral to expose a human infant to such risks. But if the procedure is perfected in nonhuman mammals to the point of being safe, cloning won’t change the basic character of human beings.

I agree with Young’s view, but wonder what effect grappling with these ethical issues will have on the abortion debate.

At the heart of the pro-choice movement, especially the pro-abortion views of many radical feminists, is the view that people do not owe any moral obligations to fetuses. Want to abort a fetus in the 8th month? No problem. Smoke crack right up until the hour before you go into labor? Don’t you dare call that child abuse. Feminists and pro-choice advocates rise up to smack down any attempt to infer that people could possibly moral obligations to fetuses.

And yet if you agree with Young that it would be unethical to expose an infant to the sort of risks that cloning currently would entail, that view is completely incompatible with the claim that there are no moral duties toward fetuses. After all the clever opponent of abortion will ask, “If it’s unethical to create a fetus that likely has a lot of birth defects, why is it okay to turn around and kill that fetus on a whim?”

Any answer to that question inevitably raises the spectre of potentiality. The reason it is unethical to intentionally create a human clone under current conditions is because the fetus will potentially be born with birth defects. But if people owe moral duties to potential persons, abortion gets ditched out the window since it presupposes that, in fact, we don’t have moral duties to potential persons (since every fertilized zygote is a potential person), unless someone wants to maintain that a fetus has an interest in not being born with birth defects but has no interest in being born, which seems bizarre on its face.

Although I am a supporter of abortion rights, both the standard legal and moral justifications of abortion remain extraordinarily deficient — which is why the pro-life movement is making strides while the pro-choice movement flounders.

Not that I have any great solution. I just wish abortion activists would sit down and actually think through these issues rather than simply launch ad hoc attacks that, taken together, don’t represent a consistent ethical position on abortion.

Sources:

Monkeying Around with the Self. Cathy Young, Reason, April 2001.

Baby cloning plans under fire. The BBC, March 10, 2001.

Human cloning: The ‘terrible odds’. Donald Bruce, The BBC, March 9, 2001.

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Cathy Young on Bush’s Ending Abortion Subsidies

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The National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood and the other usual suspects were outraged when, after only two days in office, George W. Bush issued an executive order blocking federal funds from going to international family planning groups that perform abortions or provide abortion counseling. But is supporting government-funded abortion really a consistent pro-choice position.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Cathy Young argues that federal funding for abortion is wrong “both as a matter of principle and as a matter of strategy.”

As Young writes,

The most powerful pro-choice argument is that a woman’s decision about something so personal as whether or not to bear a child should be free from governmental interference. A fundamental belief in individual rights has led a majority of Americans, however uncomfortably, to support legal abortion, at least in the early stages of pregnancy. But asking the government to finance abortion is a very different matter.

In fact it is absurd for pro-choice activists on the one hand to argue that an abortion is essentially a decision that must be solely left to a woman and her doctor, but then drag the rest of us along into the doctor’s room by demanding we open our wallets to subsidize other people’s choices.

If a woman wants to have an abortion, I have no problem whatsoever with that, but I do have a problem when NOW and Planned Parenthood says I should be required to pay for abortions.

This sort of hypocrisy highlights one of the main problems at the core of big government feminism. On the one hand we are told that women are independent and capable of making their own decisions, thank you very much. In the next breath, of course, NOW and others inform us that women’s independence can only exist so long as women have access to a whole bevy of government programs.

Which is it — are women independent creatures or are they wards of the state?

Personally, I don’t think Bush went far enough. He should have forbidden all federal funding of abortion, period. That’s the only consistent pro-choice position.

Source:

Choice Yes, Subsidy No. Cathy Young, The Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2001.

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Cathy Young on Women’s Studies Program

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Cathy Young wrote an excellent summary of the problem with women’s studies departments, Propaganda discredits value of women’s studies.

The bottom line: studies of sex and gender are indeed important, but are undermined by the explicit political agenda of many women’s studies departments. By limiting discourse to only one predtermined outcome — typically radical feminist in nature — women’s studies dpeartments today do as much to hid the reality of women’s lives as academia’s male-centered focus did for the first half of the 20th century.

“What’s wrong with women’s stuedies?” Young asks,

The courses, critics say, tend to stress political indoctrination and personal experiences rather than scholarship; dubioius tehories and facts are presetned as gospel; male villainy is endlessly preached; and young women are trained to regard themselves as perpetual victims.

Source:

Propaganda discredits value of women’s studies. Cathy Young, The Detroit News, November 10, 2000.

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Should Men Have A Right to Choose Too?

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Cathy Young has a very long, very well written piece in Salon.Com about an idea originally propounded by the men’s rights movement that is likely to be tested in courts within the decade — do men have unequal rights when it comes to issue of abortion that should be solved via a legal remedy?

The basic argument simply turns pro-choice argument on its head. If women should be able to have control over entering in to parental obligations, why not men as well? The idea seems inane at first, but most of the arguments against it, in one way or another, rely on claims that abortion rights activists already say are preposterous when used by pro-lifers. Typically feminists reply that if men don’t want to have to pay child support they should keep their pants on, which is a crude version of an early argument against abortion — if women don’t want to get pregnant, they shouldn’t sleep around. As Young notes, there is a “willingness to liberate women but not men from the unwanted consequences of sex…”

Young quotes from a Planned Parenthood pamphlet, “9 Reasons Why Abortions Are Legal,” which says, in part,

At the most basic level, the abortion issue is not really about abortion. … Should women make their own decisions about family, career and how to live their lives? Or should government do that for them? Do women have the option of deciding when or whether to have children?

Young essentially wants to know that if they are serious about the rhetoric, why shouldn’t men have the same opportunities. And if not, why not?

Most people of the folks who support the so-called men’s right to choose typically have some scheme whereby either parent is able to forego parental obligations — women can obviously abort a fetus as a remedy, and typically the remedy for men would be to renounce parental obligations during the pregnancy.

Does this sort of thinking make sense? Up to a point there are some important insights to be taken away from this sort of argument, but ultimately it has no chance of being accepted by courts and is suspect morally. The problem for feminists, however, is that the reason most people will find the men’s right to choose arguments fallacious is the persistent sexual stereotypes which see men as economic providers for children. The idea of father simply being able to renounce their parental obligations is probably revolting non-feminists and feminists alike (who, when contemplating it, might get a hint of how pro-lifers feel about the idea of a woman being able to abort a fetus) largely because of expectations society has of fathers.

Personally I think that’s, on balance, a very good thing. Besides technological solutions on the horizon such as the male birth control pill are likely to put men and women on more equal technological footing when it comes to controlling reproduction, and a massive change of the sort proposed by those advocating for a man’s right to choose would be a very bad idea.

On the other hand there is a subset of cases of forced fatherhood which Young cites which probably does deserve additional looking into. Namely, how should the law handle the responsibilities of a man when he is forced into being a father thanks to nonconsensual sexual activity?

Young finds a couple of doozies that are stunning. In one case a woman seeking to get pregnant took advantage of a male co-worker who had passed out drunk at a party, and subsequently bragged to friends that she saved a trip to the sperm bank. In another, a woman had oral sex with a man and requested he use a condom. Afterward, unbeknownst to him, she used a syringe to retrieve semen and inseminate herself. In both cases, the mothers sued for and won child support payments from the involuntary father.

And of course there was a much-reported case of a woman convicted of statutory rape for having sex with a 12 year-old. Even though the state concurred that this was in fact a criminal sexual act, the young boy was forced to pay child support when he was 18.

Some sort of legal remedy is in order for those sorts of bizarre cases, but otherwise dramatic legal changes in the way parental obligations are established would be a very bad idea.

Source:

A man’s right to choose. Cathy Young, Salon.Com, October 19, 2000.

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Cathy Young on Women’s Health

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Some days I think I could just replace this web site with a page saying “go read Cathy Young.” She really hits her stride in a Salon.Com article, Medical gender wars, which deflates a lot of the myths put out by individuals and groups that the medical establishment fails women due to sexism (the “patriarchal medicine” myth).

Young really drives home the hypocrisy of this claim in that activists can’t even decide amongst themselves whether a given health care approach is good or bad for women, leading to a damned if you do, damned if you don’t result.

What’s more, with some activists, “patriarchal medicine” can’t win no matter what it does. First, male doctors are accused of doing too many hysterectomies and gratuitously cutting up women’s bodies. (While hysterectomies are far more common in the U.S. than in Western Europe, this difference seems to reflect less gender bias than the overall scalpel-happy attitude of American physicians; it is just as stark with regard to male-specific surgical procedures like prostatectomy.) As a result, HMOs try to curb questionable hysterectomies and are accused of denying care to women. First, a highly politicized breast cancer movement claims that a terrible disease that affects only women has been neglected. Then, in 1999, a women’s health exhibit at the Maryland Science Center blames our society’s fixation on breasts as a “symbol of women’s sexual desirability” for a disproportionate focus on breast cancer to the exclusion of some other diseases that pose a greater threat to women.

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