I blog mostly when things piss me off and I disagree with them. No one cares how much I love this, although I do feel very strongly about it. When I write about something, I attempt to present concrete, compelling evidence and arguments as to why I am right about it and someone or something else is wrong (see posts on healthcare, working mothers). While it's certainly not unbiased, I try not to present my thoughts in a vacuum.
This is, in part, why I blog pretty infrequently - I have to a) really feel annoyed about something, and b) feel like something is interesting enough that other people might care to read it. Without this latter criteria there would be a lot of posts about why jeans don't fit properly and why commuting sucks. So both these criteria in place, I spend a lot of time writing a post: the rage provides the motivation, I try to channel it into a more or less rational argument supporting my own position.
I'm going to switch it up today, leading with the rage more than usual, and going with an intimate letter format. It contains liberal use of strong language, so be warned. The topic, for a little background, is a case before the Supreme Court this week, Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. The crux of the case is that Hobby Lobby, a chain of craft stores, is refusing to provide healthcare coverage to their female employees - as required by the ACA - under the guise of religious freedom. The rationale is this: since the ACA requires free access to birth control and they believe some types of birth control to be too abortionesque, they argue that they shouldn't have to comply with the ACA at all. Which is federal law. In the country where they operate.
Dear Hobby Lobby,
I know you don't know me, but I'm writing to cordially recommend you go fuck yourself.
I mean that in the figurative colloquial sense, of course - you can't literally fuck yourself, because you aren't a person or individual, a fact that the courts seem to have conveniently ignored. You're a corporation which happens to be run by myopic, self-righteous individuals, who think that since they have a closely held belief, that they should have the right to make that belief manifest in the personal lives of their employees. It doesn't help that I disagree with your belief, but I want to stress: this is not the point. Whatever your beliefs, I really don't think you should be able to force your employees to act in accordance with them.
I also hate your insipid rhyming name and the fact that I have to hear it drip out of journalists' mouths constantly. But I digress - this isn't really the main reason I would like you to metaphorically self-fornicate as soon as possible.
I know that you fucking yourself would probably have little bearing on the case currently in front of the highest court of the land, but it might make me feel a little better, so I'm asking you to seriously consider it. I'm not sure how you go about actually but also merely metaphorically fucking yourself, but I think in light of the evidence I present below, you'll do the right thing and figure it out.
You see, the fact that you are even in the Supreme Court, batting your eyelashes naively while suggesting the personal religious convictions of your owners justify screwing over employees, and setting precedent for others to do the same, is deeply depressing. No matter what you believe, if the court rules for you, the outcome will be that you royally fuck over your female employees - and potentially, hardworking women all over the country who also happen to have nosy zealot asshats as employers. And also, your stupid fucking name. I know that wasn't really a sentence, but your name is the worst.
The backwards, employment-based healthcare system in the US has many flaws, one being the loophole through which you have leapt in an attempt to prevent your female employees from receiving basic preventative care. The fact that success in your endeavours would be hazardous to the health and well-being of over half the population is reason enough to suggest that you should, at the very least, fuck off, if not go full-bore and seriously go fuck yourself.
If endangering the health of American women isn't enough to convince you that you should, post-haste, fornicate yourself, consider the broader implications. Given that no particular religion is afforded special status over another in the United States (at least in theory), if you're successful, idiot zealots like yourself of all persuasions may come out of the woodwork.
Scientologists may suddenly have a good case for refusing to provide any coverage which pertains to mental health, religious vegans could refuse to cover vaccinations (they contain egg), and adherents of Sharia law (and I'm guessing, also many conservative Christians) could deny any housing benefits they provide to their employees if they were gay. And if we consider healthcare coverage as part of a general compensation package, what's to stop employers from refusing to provide full pay to individuals who engage in extra-curricular activities which give the employer some religious feels.
In particular light of these broad-reaching consequences, I think you'll agree you should not only go fuck yourself, but even consider additional, more drastic metaphorical action. For example, take a moment to bite me, or even eat shit.
Yours truly,
Me
Saturday, 29 March 2014
Saturday, 9 November 2013
Thank you, marriage
I'm glad I no longer have to date. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of perks to being single, and there's nothing wrong with not being in a relationship, but dating absolutely blows.
My husband Jamie and I are coming up on our three year anniversary of being married, and 6 years of being together. I'm not only glad to not be dating, but also very lucky to be with him. A couple weeks ago, Jamie came home from one of the schools where he teaches with this amazing gem, published in 1976.
Why, my stars, I do declare....
It's vaguely concerning that someone might have been using this to learn English even remotely recently. Ever, really. Not that I'm intimately familiar with the genre - I would venture to guess that 100% of it is horrible - but this is also especially hilarious. It consists of a 100 "likely" situations where one might meet women. I'll just choose a favourite and throw some gifs in there. I might make this a regular feature, because every one of these is laugh out loud ridiculous.
42. Special Delivery
When did you have your first taste of sex? Why it was probably playing "Post Office" at some party years and years ago.
Why, my stars, I do declare....
What? Apparently this was a thing. Sounds like it should have been called "Mononucleosis Office".
Let that be a clue to you. Return to the site of your earliest triumphs.
Oceanography camp? I think that would be weird.
Since you're not likely to be invited to many pre-teen parties, then I guess it's just the old U.S. Mail you should return to.
Veiled disappointment at no longer receiving invites 12-year-old's birthday parties, we can all relate, amirite??
There are always lots of girls at the post office, and it's really easy to meet them (considering how high postage rates are getting, this is probably a good place to meet someone rich).
Yeah, dummy, do the math: at $0.13 a letter, anyone who even goes into the Post Office is probably rolling in it. They could have ONES OF DOLLARS. But also might not.
Gather together some letters or packages you need to mail and head on down to ship them off.
Oh, ok, so I shouldn't just show up at the post office, park it in a corner, and watch the door. Got it. This is already illuminating.
When you're there, take your time.
Last time I was at a post office, there was no other option.
Get your stamps, ask some questions, look through the "Wanted Posters".
Gotta be sure no one made any phone calls to the police after you crashed that pre-teen party last weekend...
All the while keep an eagle eye out for pretty girls. When you see one, get ready. Wait until she's bought the stamps she needs...
If she came in to do something other than purchase stamps, ABORT.
...wait until she has gone to a side counter to lick them.
Oh boy.
Walk over to her, but don't blurt out something about licking - that'll come later.
Why am I not surprised you are already so sure you will blurt out something about licking later?
Instead, say:
THIS IS IT!
At the speed the mail is delivered these days, I feel like I should wish this letter "Bon voyage"
Hopefully she'll laugh,
Hope is a funny thing. 30% chance of this:
With a 70% chance of one of these:
...and then you can discuss the horrors of the U.S. Mails.
All the mails. The horror of every single one of those mails. Horrific.
Pretty soon you'll both be finished with your letters and you can start on each other.
...sending each other?
"Post Office" is one of the few games you played as a kid that you'll have no trouble remembering.
That month you had to take off school sleeping fifteen hours a day was unforgettable. Before that, you would actually look forward to your brief and fleeting late-morning affairs with Bob Barker.
Here's the original, in case you think this is so ridiculous I must have taken liberties with the transcription.
I wouldn't want to Rand Paul it, so here's a proper citation: Weber, E. (1976). 100 Best Opening Lines. New Jersey: Symphony Press.
And here's to 6 years of not dating, three years of marriage, two countries, and one miniature human.
Tuesday, 29 October 2013
The BFD about US Healthcare
I'd like to talk about healthcare. That's sort of like pregnancy, right? And by the way, obligatory disclaimer: I am not pregnant. I just refuse to relinquish my URL.
As an American who has lived abroad for almost 7 years now, I've been basking in some awesome socialised healthcare for awhile now. I am for it. I think it works, and I think it works really well. I think horror stories about waiting are anecdotal and isolated (I actually waited longer to see a doctor in the US, and I was well insured), and socialised healthcare is just something a civilised society should have. Moreover, if you're really so worried about waiting, there are parallel private systems in most countries with socialised healthcare, which are very affordable compared to American healthcare. Many of my European/from-anywhere-else-in-the-world friends don't get it - they don't understand how the US healthcare system works, why it's not more like healthcare in most of the rest of the first world, and what's so horrible about it. The why I don't so much understand, but the how and the horrible...Let me splain.
First, the US is not going to have a socialised system, well, maybe ever. For some reason I don't understand (probably because I'm a liberal and I haven't actually lived there for 7 years), people are terrified of socialised healthcare in the US. One lawmaker recently called even our measly reforms inching towards a more socialist style system "the worst thing to happen in American history," - not oh, slavery? Japanese Internment? I think even the cancellation of Arrested Development has a leg up here.
The way it works in the US is that healthcare costs are usually covered by insurance companies. You pay them, usually monthly, and then when you get sick, they pay for your care (ideally). You can purchase insurance on your own, but this is relatively rare and really expensive - usually it comes with your job. This is why a lot of Americans are insured and have access to great healthcare. If you have a very low income, are elderly, or are part of a certain group (like a child), you may be eligible for the closest thing we have to socialised care: Medicare or Medicaid. But, if you're suddenly unemployed or don't have a full-time gig which provides insurance, you're out of luck. Not much has changed with the new reforms, but they should make purchasing insurance on your own more affordable, and get rid of some of the more nefarious aspects of the system. I'll just detail what's so atrociously horrible about the way the US did it until very recently, and what's still very problematic even with the recent reform of US healthcare, known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
People are pissed about the ACA, important people like Suzanne Somers. She thinks it's socialised medicine, because she literally has no idea what that actually is. There are oh so many problems with the whole concept of this op-ed's existence, not to mention the op-ed itself, but her point is that she's pissed because it's socialised and LENIN! Churchill!(??)!!! I wish, but it's not. The US system is something else entirely.
Take someone who has a more specific reason to be pissed about the ACA, beyond just being a bloviating retired actress. This woman is upset because her premiums are getting a lot higher as a result of the ACA. Premiums are the price you pay per month to an insurance company for them to pay your hospital or doctor's bills in the event that you get sick. These premiums are often paid by your employer, but if you pay them outright, they are hundreds of dollars per month. She likes her insurance plan now, wants to keep it, and doesn't understand why she has to get a new, more expensive plan. The reason is because her current plan doesn't conform the standards in the ACA, likely the standards that prevent them from refusing treatment for things like pre-existing conditions. I'm going to guess she wouldn't be such a staunch defender of this plan if she got seriously sick and they refused to pay for her care because they found out she didn't disclose a yeast infection from her carefree youth.
This would have been not only perfectly legal before the ACA, but common practice. It happened frequently because this was a great way for insurance companies to save, and therefore make, money: collect premiums like clockwork, and then when an expensive set of procedures comes along do your best to dig up a reason to not pay out. Oh, and don't even bother insuring people who may be sick to begin with. So, the rise in the cost of the plan is because the insurance company now knows they don't have this great money saving option. They are now anticipating costs they could realistically sidestep before, but they still have profit margins to protect. This is also why insurance companies were not so interested in the reform in the first place.
And let's really look at this for a second: what was happening in the "pre-existing condition" situation (that the ACA has thankfully addressed)? The healthcare system was gambling on people's wellbeing - and still does, to a certain extent. Before the pre-existing condition reforms of the ACA, they would lose such a bet, and often try to wriggle out of it anyway. Someone who had been sick before was more likely to get sick again, and therefore was just a bad bet to even make. Hopefully, this will no longer be as much of a problem. But the basics of how the system works remain, and in my opinion, are just plain awful.
The core of the problem is a mismatched set of motives between a sick person, and the profit motives of private hospitals or healthcare providers and insurance companies. In the US, when you are sick or injured, you go to your doctor or a hospital. Your immediate concern is, e.g., no longer vomitting, no longer bleeding, maybe something as simple as no longer feeling tired. Toward this goal, you do what your doctor tells you.
The problem is, in the US system, you and your direct healthcare provider may only have overlapping goals to a certain extent. Your single overarching goal is to get better. It's possible, if you're dealing with a particularly good doctor or nurse, that this is also their only goal. However, it's likely that they have a parallel goal of making as much money as is realistically possible, which involves charging you for as many procedures or goods as is possible. And you're going to be a great customer, because your health is on the line, and what do you know? You're not a doctor. But in the US system, this is not just a doctor's visit about someone who is sick, it's a transaction.
As an anecdote, a bad stomach bug my husband had was met in the US with about an hour long ER wait, blood tests, a stool sample test, consultations with tons of different staff members (who often had to be reminded of the problem) and a private room with a flat screen TV for a few hours while they ran the tests. In the UK, this would be a wait in the A&E (ER) of maybe an hour (though we never waited that long), followed by a 10-15 minute discussion with a single doctor about your symptoms, after which they would prescribe the same medicine that took a private room and a few hundred dollars worth of tests in the US.
I want to be clear that I don't mean to demean individual healthcare workers in the US; they are not cynical money-grubbing assholes. They are individuals who's livelihood should depend only on them performing well in the task of making people better - but actually, it also depends, sometimes crucially, on also bringing as much money into a hospital as possible. In an excellent story out in Time earlier this year, Steven Brill goes into this in detail for a particular hospital, exposing pressure from a corporate board for doctors to encourage certain types of procedures regardless of the medical need of patients. And doctors and nurses who outright refused in this case, were fired. It's not a stretch to assume that those who complied with gusto were rewarded, or at the very least got to keep their jobs. These are not bad people - but the system they're operating in often continually, and not always subtly, reminds them of the profit motive driving it.
So we have mismatch between goals of a patient and a healthcare provider, which is not ideal. This may not be the worst part of the problem; it's a mismatch that can have parallels in socialised systems, where providers are not only concerned with treating patients, but sometimes too concerned with keeping costs down (however, outcomes in such systems would indicate this is not actually a problem). Where the most problematic mismatch comes, I think, is between the profit motives of healthcare providers and insurance companies. Healthcare providers want to make as much money as possible off of an individual patient - but insurers want to pay out as little money as possible for each patient. Because insurers have thousands if not millions of patients, they can bargain with hospitals. They can negotiate the price of a particular "health product" because a hospital would rather receive at least some payment from the insurer for thousands of patients than risk losing the business of the insurer (and their thousands of patients) entirely.
However, an individual, walking into a hospital uninsured, receives the same treatment, but when it comes to billing, has absolutely no leverage. Brill's piece focuses on hospital "charge masters" - essentially their price list. His major point is that this list is completely disconnected from reality - meaning that our "market driven" healthcare is not even a real market. They have aspirin that's something like $2.50 per pill (take two! That'll be $5) - keeping in mind you can buy hundreds of pills of aspirin online or even at a pharmacy for less. You an imagine how this scales up for procedures like surgeries or scans. For the insurance companies, this price "wish list" is meaningless - they just shoot back with a lower price they're willing to pay. But for an uninsured individual? I hope that was the best aspirin you've ever had. Such a charge master model can actually keep costs down - if it's regulated. In Japan, for example, healthcare is not quite socialised (people are insured by companies like in the US), but the government fixes the rate of procedures to avoid this sort of problem.
The only way to avoid this within the system, as an uninsured or underinsured individual who might actually have to see/pay the bill direct from the charge master, would be to try and figure out when you can safely refuse treatment from your doctor. This conflicts directly with a patient's single overarching goal to no longer be sick, and to do so as soon as possible. Now patients have to simultaneously deal with the notion and anxiety of the cost of being better. Do I need this aspirin immediately (heart attack!) or can I wait until I can get home or run to a pharmacy later?
This may seem trivial for an aspirin, but is actually more important for something like a scan. A $2.50 aspirin may be annoying, but you can probably shell out for it if necessary. But a $5000 scan? How do you figure out if that is strictly necessary or if it's possible for them to effectively treat you without it? Is being $5000 in debt better or worse than knowing for sure you have a kidney stone? As an individual prior to actually being billed, the fact is you may even have a difficult job getting your doctor to tell you how much e.g., a scan, would cost. While you're supposed to be the valued "customer", this is often information that isn't even readily available. The notion of this is ridiculous - you are not a doctor, and shouldn't have to speculate about what procedures you really "want", because this is not a "marketplace" driven by the sort of consumer desire at work in the toy aisle at WalMart. Someone might be in pain, or dying.
The response to this from people who don't like the ACA is usually something along the lines of "Well, why do I have to subsidise someone else who's sick and can't afford their own care or insurance?" The first answer to this is that because if we don't take care of the sick who can't take care of themselves, they die. So that's the alternative, and we don't really approve of letting someone die of e.g., a treatable cancer, because they only make $30k a year working two part-time jobs. This often falls on deaf ears.
The second answer, and more pertinent one, is that we already do subsidise the sick who can't afford care, we're just doing it in an amazingly roundabout, super expensive way through ERs and hospitals rather than preventative care. People who have a nasty stomach bug in the ER still get treated, they just can't pay for it - but in the end, someone does (my husband had travel insurance, by the way). The prices of other "customers" rise. We spend almost 15% of our GDP on healthcare in the US. Countries like the UK where everyone is covered spend something like 8%. The ACA will hopefully bring our % of GDP expenditures down in the long run, but if they were really interested in keeping monthly costs down, the way to do this is a single payer system, i.e., Dr. Lenin and Friends Socialised Healthcare Funhouse (sign me up, by the way!). Opponents of the ACA usually think socialist healthcare is some sort of hellscape because of one story they read - but for every horror story of "I had to wait!" from a a socialist system, there were hundreds of thousands of Americans who before ACA had no realistic access to any healthcare at all. In other words, they could just go ahead and wait until they died.
So does it mean more money out of pocket in the immediate future for some people? Yeah, it does - but they also have the option of paying a tax instead of insuring themselves. Because the other way is not only financially unsustainable, but resulted in actual physical harm to those who couldn't get covered. Everyone who hates the ACA so much has yet to present any sort of viable alternative - unless they're dirty liberals like myself suggesting a single payer, socialist system - but by and large, it's a safe assumption that anyone who doesn't like ACA probably won't like an actual socialist system.
So that's how it is. Now go kiss your local socialist healthcare provider.
As an American who has lived abroad for almost 7 years now, I've been basking in some awesome socialised healthcare for awhile now. I am for it. I think it works, and I think it works really well. I think horror stories about waiting are anecdotal and isolated (I actually waited longer to see a doctor in the US, and I was well insured), and socialised healthcare is just something a civilised society should have. Moreover, if you're really so worried about waiting, there are parallel private systems in most countries with socialised healthcare, which are very affordable compared to American healthcare. Many of my European/from-anywhere-else-in-the-world friends don't get it - they don't understand how the US healthcare system works, why it's not more like healthcare in most of the rest of the first world, and what's so horrible about it. The why I don't so much understand, but the how and the horrible...Let me splain.
First, the US is not going to have a socialised system, well, maybe ever. For some reason I don't understand (probably because I'm a liberal and I haven't actually lived there for 7 years), people are terrified of socialised healthcare in the US. One lawmaker recently called even our measly reforms inching towards a more socialist style system "the worst thing to happen in American history," - not oh, slavery? Japanese Internment? I think even the cancellation of Arrested Development has a leg up here.
The way it works in the US is that healthcare costs are usually covered by insurance companies. You pay them, usually monthly, and then when you get sick, they pay for your care (ideally). You can purchase insurance on your own, but this is relatively rare and really expensive - usually it comes with your job. This is why a lot of Americans are insured and have access to great healthcare. If you have a very low income, are elderly, or are part of a certain group (like a child), you may be eligible for the closest thing we have to socialised care: Medicare or Medicaid. But, if you're suddenly unemployed or don't have a full-time gig which provides insurance, you're out of luck. Not much has changed with the new reforms, but they should make purchasing insurance on your own more affordable, and get rid of some of the more nefarious aspects of the system. I'll just detail what's so atrociously horrible about the way the US did it until very recently, and what's still very problematic even with the recent reform of US healthcare, known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
People are pissed about the ACA, important people like Suzanne Somers. She thinks it's socialised medicine, because she literally has no idea what that actually is. There are oh so many problems with the whole concept of this op-ed's existence, not to mention the op-ed itself, but her point is that she's pissed because it's socialised and LENIN! Churchill!(??)!!! I wish, but it's not. The US system is something else entirely.
Take someone who has a more specific reason to be pissed about the ACA, beyond just being a bloviating retired actress. This woman is upset because her premiums are getting a lot higher as a result of the ACA. Premiums are the price you pay per month to an insurance company for them to pay your hospital or doctor's bills in the event that you get sick. These premiums are often paid by your employer, but if you pay them outright, they are hundreds of dollars per month. She likes her insurance plan now, wants to keep it, and doesn't understand why she has to get a new, more expensive plan. The reason is because her current plan doesn't conform the standards in the ACA, likely the standards that prevent them from refusing treatment for things like pre-existing conditions. I'm going to guess she wouldn't be such a staunch defender of this plan if she got seriously sick and they refused to pay for her care because they found out she didn't disclose a yeast infection from her carefree youth.
This would have been not only perfectly legal before the ACA, but common practice. It happened frequently because this was a great way for insurance companies to save, and therefore make, money: collect premiums like clockwork, and then when an expensive set of procedures comes along do your best to dig up a reason to not pay out. Oh, and don't even bother insuring people who may be sick to begin with. So, the rise in the cost of the plan is because the insurance company now knows they don't have this great money saving option. They are now anticipating costs they could realistically sidestep before, but they still have profit margins to protect. This is also why insurance companies were not so interested in the reform in the first place.
And let's really look at this for a second: what was happening in the "pre-existing condition" situation (that the ACA has thankfully addressed)? The healthcare system was gambling on people's wellbeing - and still does, to a certain extent. Before the pre-existing condition reforms of the ACA, they would lose such a bet, and often try to wriggle out of it anyway. Someone who had been sick before was more likely to get sick again, and therefore was just a bad bet to even make. Hopefully, this will no longer be as much of a problem. But the basics of how the system works remain, and in my opinion, are just plain awful.
The core of the problem is a mismatched set of motives between a sick person, and the profit motives of private hospitals or healthcare providers and insurance companies. In the US, when you are sick or injured, you go to your doctor or a hospital. Your immediate concern is, e.g., no longer vomitting, no longer bleeding, maybe something as simple as no longer feeling tired. Toward this goal, you do what your doctor tells you.
The problem is, in the US system, you and your direct healthcare provider may only have overlapping goals to a certain extent. Your single overarching goal is to get better. It's possible, if you're dealing with a particularly good doctor or nurse, that this is also their only goal. However, it's likely that they have a parallel goal of making as much money as is realistically possible, which involves charging you for as many procedures or goods as is possible. And you're going to be a great customer, because your health is on the line, and what do you know? You're not a doctor. But in the US system, this is not just a doctor's visit about someone who is sick, it's a transaction.
As an anecdote, a bad stomach bug my husband had was met in the US with about an hour long ER wait, blood tests, a stool sample test, consultations with tons of different staff members (who often had to be reminded of the problem) and a private room with a flat screen TV for a few hours while they ran the tests. In the UK, this would be a wait in the A&E (ER) of maybe an hour (though we never waited that long), followed by a 10-15 minute discussion with a single doctor about your symptoms, after which they would prescribe the same medicine that took a private room and a few hundred dollars worth of tests in the US.
I want to be clear that I don't mean to demean individual healthcare workers in the US; they are not cynical money-grubbing assholes. They are individuals who's livelihood should depend only on them performing well in the task of making people better - but actually, it also depends, sometimes crucially, on also bringing as much money into a hospital as possible. In an excellent story out in Time earlier this year, Steven Brill goes into this in detail for a particular hospital, exposing pressure from a corporate board for doctors to encourage certain types of procedures regardless of the medical need of patients. And doctors and nurses who outright refused in this case, were fired. It's not a stretch to assume that those who complied with gusto were rewarded, or at the very least got to keep their jobs. These are not bad people - but the system they're operating in often continually, and not always subtly, reminds them of the profit motive driving it.
So we have mismatch between goals of a patient and a healthcare provider, which is not ideal. This may not be the worst part of the problem; it's a mismatch that can have parallels in socialised systems, where providers are not only concerned with treating patients, but sometimes too concerned with keeping costs down (however, outcomes in such systems would indicate this is not actually a problem). Where the most problematic mismatch comes, I think, is between the profit motives of healthcare providers and insurance companies. Healthcare providers want to make as much money as possible off of an individual patient - but insurers want to pay out as little money as possible for each patient. Because insurers have thousands if not millions of patients, they can bargain with hospitals. They can negotiate the price of a particular "health product" because a hospital would rather receive at least some payment from the insurer for thousands of patients than risk losing the business of the insurer (and their thousands of patients) entirely.
However, an individual, walking into a hospital uninsured, receives the same treatment, but when it comes to billing, has absolutely no leverage. Brill's piece focuses on hospital "charge masters" - essentially their price list. His major point is that this list is completely disconnected from reality - meaning that our "market driven" healthcare is not even a real market. They have aspirin that's something like $2.50 per pill (take two! That'll be $5) - keeping in mind you can buy hundreds of pills of aspirin online or even at a pharmacy for less. You an imagine how this scales up for procedures like surgeries or scans. For the insurance companies, this price "wish list" is meaningless - they just shoot back with a lower price they're willing to pay. But for an uninsured individual? I hope that was the best aspirin you've ever had. Such a charge master model can actually keep costs down - if it's regulated. In Japan, for example, healthcare is not quite socialised (people are insured by companies like in the US), but the government fixes the rate of procedures to avoid this sort of problem.
The only way to avoid this within the system, as an uninsured or underinsured individual who might actually have to see/pay the bill direct from the charge master, would be to try and figure out when you can safely refuse treatment from your doctor. This conflicts directly with a patient's single overarching goal to no longer be sick, and to do so as soon as possible. Now patients have to simultaneously deal with the notion and anxiety of the cost of being better. Do I need this aspirin immediately (heart attack!) or can I wait until I can get home or run to a pharmacy later?
This may seem trivial for an aspirin, but is actually more important for something like a scan. A $2.50 aspirin may be annoying, but you can probably shell out for it if necessary. But a $5000 scan? How do you figure out if that is strictly necessary or if it's possible for them to effectively treat you without it? Is being $5000 in debt better or worse than knowing for sure you have a kidney stone? As an individual prior to actually being billed, the fact is you may even have a difficult job getting your doctor to tell you how much e.g., a scan, would cost. While you're supposed to be the valued "customer", this is often information that isn't even readily available. The notion of this is ridiculous - you are not a doctor, and shouldn't have to speculate about what procedures you really "want", because this is not a "marketplace" driven by the sort of consumer desire at work in the toy aisle at WalMart. Someone might be in pain, or dying.
The response to this from people who don't like the ACA is usually something along the lines of "Well, why do I have to subsidise someone else who's sick and can't afford their own care or insurance?" The first answer to this is that because if we don't take care of the sick who can't take care of themselves, they die. So that's the alternative, and we don't really approve of letting someone die of e.g., a treatable cancer, because they only make $30k a year working two part-time jobs. This often falls on deaf ears.
The second answer, and more pertinent one, is that we already do subsidise the sick who can't afford care, we're just doing it in an amazingly roundabout, super expensive way through ERs and hospitals rather than preventative care. People who have a nasty stomach bug in the ER still get treated, they just can't pay for it - but in the end, someone does (my husband had travel insurance, by the way). The prices of other "customers" rise. We spend almost 15% of our GDP on healthcare in the US. Countries like the UK where everyone is covered spend something like 8%. The ACA will hopefully bring our % of GDP expenditures down in the long run, but if they were really interested in keeping monthly costs down, the way to do this is a single payer system, i.e., Dr. Lenin and Friends Socialised Healthcare Funhouse (sign me up, by the way!). Opponents of the ACA usually think socialist healthcare is some sort of hellscape because of one story they read - but for every horror story of "I had to wait!" from a a socialist system, there were hundreds of thousands of Americans who before ACA had no realistic access to any healthcare at all. In other words, they could just go ahead and wait until they died.
So does it mean more money out of pocket in the immediate future for some people? Yeah, it does - but they also have the option of paying a tax instead of insuring themselves. Because the other way is not only financially unsustainable, but resulted in actual physical harm to those who couldn't get covered. Everyone who hates the ACA so much has yet to present any sort of viable alternative - unless they're dirty liberals like myself suggesting a single payer, socialist system - but by and large, it's a safe assumption that anyone who doesn't like ACA probably won't like an actual socialist system.
So that's how it is. Now go kiss your local socialist healthcare provider.
Tuesday, 21 May 2013
I'm too sexy for my job
In case you hadn't heard, I'd like to introduce you to the worst brand of humble bragging ever: the "my (assumed) unusual level of attractiveness is a burden" kind. First it was Samantha Brick, whose inept attempts at self-examination and pretending to type were cringeworthy.
If you haven't already read her best treatise on herself (there are many), I highly recommend it. The gist of it is this: being beautiful has its perks (and I am beautiful, by the way), but it's a curse, because other ladies hate me and assume I will steal their husbands. It's worth reading for a genuine laugh out loud, because she essentially obnoxiously complains about how obnoxious she is as a person, and then concludes, without a shred of irony, that people dislike her because of her looks. Its actually an excellent example of the old adage "correlation does not equal causation" on a micro scale. You may be beautiful. People may not like you; they may be ladies, and they may even feel like you're preying on their husbands. But perhaps there's a third variable here: you're a self-involved douchecanoe with a horrible personality.
Anyway, this is apparently becoming a trend (more details on that in a bit), and I will henceforth call this particular high-art of trolling "bricking". While I don't think we've seen the back of it, no one could ever do it as well as Samantha Brick did, and she deserves to be verbed for this. It's practically performance art. The latest brick comes from Laura Fernee. Laura was boldly doing smart important things like science until her attractiveness became so problematic in her work environment that she had to quit, and she is now proudly supported by her parents, who will pay her no matter how beautiful she is! And as with the original bricker, the Daily Mail has done a bang-up job profiling Fernee.
There are two major problems with bricking: one is a lack of self and social awareness on the part of the bricker, and the other is the dismal, myopic responses from brickees. Both are symptomatic of a complete lack of awareness of an issue I think is quite obviously central to feminism: women aren't so keen on being constantly evaluated as objects of (un)attractiveness before and above all of their other qualities.
First, brickers, especially like Fernee, missed a gigantic boat that's been making runs back and forth over the river of social consciousness for decades now: it's called sexual harassment. Fernie is not plaugued with an overabundance of attractiveness, her co-workers were plagued with a lack of modern workplace etiquette. She's making a horrible attribution error in terms of what the problem is here. It is not her attractiveness, it is the fact that any aspect of her appearance has anything to do with her work as a research scientist.
What I want for her to have done rather than quit is to have filed a formal complaint about the comments and actions that made her uncomfortable, which somehow magically led to the other adults in her workplace being like "Oh dude, sorry, I didn't realise that was making you wildly uncomfortable and giving you anxiety attacks about coming in to work, I'll cut that shit out". And then they all went out to beers and everything was cool! But because this is never how sexual harassment claims pan out, I can understand why she just quit. It would have been great if she then used this as a springboard to go on talkshows and discuss how sexual harassment is epidemic, and the systems in place for dealing with it are not only inadequate, but often implicitly punish the complainant or harassee, and this needs to be changed. Failing that, the best course of action would have been to not open her gob about how beautiful she is, or at least just not talk to the Daily Mail (but I guess it wouldn't have been a proper brick otherwise).
One probable reason she didn't take the "publicise my sexual harassment" route is because talk shows would not have given a shit, which is just another symptom of the problem. No one cares about the narrative that describes the actual problem. A vain-sounding woman who we can talk to and maybe, if we're lucky, take down a few notches, but at least tear into on the internet? Sign me up! Someone moaning about being sexually harassed to the point where they felt they had to quit their job, while whoever was harassing them just keeps on keepin' on? Who cares. I suppose Fernee's forthcoming book will have more insight, but based on what she's said so far, she frames the entire problem in terms of herself (or maybe perhaps just jobs in general? Apparently after this one experience, a job is "no longer for her"). But she never frames it in terms of the workplace where she experienced what was most definitely harassment, and apparently no one has told her that not all workplaces are like this. The whole thing is just sad - the fact that somehow this is about her (what kind of job was it? how much does she spend on clothes?), and not about the situation, is what makes it so painful to watch.
Which brings me to the other sort of watching bricking brings about, the meta kind of watching: the reading the comments kind of watching. And this is where the audience to all this bricking, quite predictably, misses the point entirely. The most common response is "You're not even attractive anyway!" Oh, CHILDREN. What is wrong with you? The point is it doesn't matter how attractive they are, because their attractiveness only matters insofar is it's declaration amounts to wearing a sandwich sign saying "Warning: Self-Involved". What makes Brick's original article cringe-worthy is not that she's no Cindy Crawford, it's that she sounds like the most obnoxious person you've never met. It's laughable because she's somehow missing the obvious fact that people probably don't like her because she's awful, not because she has pretty hair (whether or not she actually has pretty hair).
In Fernee's case, these same sorts of comments feel even more like plain mudslinging. Not because Fernee is more or less attractive than Brick, but because she's not nearly as loathesome in her attitude. She seems more blissfully naive about the actual problems at hand than self-pitying; she seems to genuinely feel like there is something wrong about her preventing her from holding down a job. She's wrong and kind of dumb for thinking that, but bricking feels a lot more sad and a lot less hilarious on her than it does on the original Brick.
Anyway, I'm sure the Daily Mail will continue to lead the world in brick-laying. They should really find a he-brick, I'd love to see how that plays out.
 |
| What the fuck is the internet? |
If you haven't already read her best treatise on herself (there are many), I highly recommend it. The gist of it is this: being beautiful has its perks (and I am beautiful, by the way), but it's a curse, because other ladies hate me and assume I will steal their husbands. It's worth reading for a genuine laugh out loud, because she essentially obnoxiously complains about how obnoxious she is as a person, and then concludes, without a shred of irony, that people dislike her because of her looks. Its actually an excellent example of the old adage "correlation does not equal causation" on a micro scale. You may be beautiful. People may not like you; they may be ladies, and they may even feel like you're preying on their husbands. But perhaps there's a third variable here: you're a self-involved douchecanoe with a horrible personality.
Anyway, this is apparently becoming a trend (more details on that in a bit), and I will henceforth call this particular high-art of trolling "bricking". While I don't think we've seen the back of it, no one could ever do it as well as Samantha Brick did, and she deserves to be verbed for this. It's practically performance art. The latest brick comes from Laura Fernee. Laura was boldly doing smart important things like science until her attractiveness became so problematic in her work environment that she had to quit, and she is now proudly supported by her parents, who will pay her no matter how beautiful she is! And as with the original bricker, the Daily Mail has done a bang-up job profiling Fernee.
 |
| Right Said Fernee |
There are two major problems with bricking: one is a lack of self and social awareness on the part of the bricker, and the other is the dismal, myopic responses from brickees. Both are symptomatic of a complete lack of awareness of an issue I think is quite obviously central to feminism: women aren't so keen on being constantly evaluated as objects of (un)attractiveness before and above all of their other qualities.
First, brickers, especially like Fernee, missed a gigantic boat that's been making runs back and forth over the river of social consciousness for decades now: it's called sexual harassment. Fernie is not plaugued with an overabundance of attractiveness, her co-workers were plagued with a lack of modern workplace etiquette. She's making a horrible attribution error in terms of what the problem is here. It is not her attractiveness, it is the fact that any aspect of her appearance has anything to do with her work as a research scientist.
What I want for her to have done rather than quit is to have filed a formal complaint about the comments and actions that made her uncomfortable, which somehow magically led to the other adults in her workplace being like "Oh dude, sorry, I didn't realise that was making you wildly uncomfortable and giving you anxiety attacks about coming in to work, I'll cut that shit out". And then they all went out to beers and everything was cool! But because this is never how sexual harassment claims pan out, I can understand why she just quit. It would have been great if she then used this as a springboard to go on talkshows and discuss how sexual harassment is epidemic, and the systems in place for dealing with it are not only inadequate, but often implicitly punish the complainant or harassee, and this needs to be changed. Failing that, the best course of action would have been to not open her gob about how beautiful she is, or at least just not talk to the Daily Mail (but I guess it wouldn't have been a proper brick otherwise).
One probable reason she didn't take the "publicise my sexual harassment" route is because talk shows would not have given a shit, which is just another symptom of the problem. No one cares about the narrative that describes the actual problem. A vain-sounding woman who we can talk to and maybe, if we're lucky, take down a few notches, but at least tear into on the internet? Sign me up! Someone moaning about being sexually harassed to the point where they felt they had to quit their job, while whoever was harassing them just keeps on keepin' on? Who cares. I suppose Fernee's forthcoming book will have more insight, but based on what she's said so far, she frames the entire problem in terms of herself (or maybe perhaps just jobs in general? Apparently after this one experience, a job is "no longer for her"). But she never frames it in terms of the workplace where she experienced what was most definitely harassment, and apparently no one has told her that not all workplaces are like this. The whole thing is just sad - the fact that somehow this is about her (what kind of job was it? how much does she spend on clothes?), and not about the situation, is what makes it so painful to watch.
Which brings me to the other sort of watching bricking brings about, the meta kind of watching: the reading the comments kind of watching. And this is where the audience to all this bricking, quite predictably, misses the point entirely. The most common response is "You're not even attractive anyway!" Oh, CHILDREN. What is wrong with you? The point is it doesn't matter how attractive they are, because their attractiveness only matters insofar is it's declaration amounts to wearing a sandwich sign saying "Warning: Self-Involved". What makes Brick's original article cringe-worthy is not that she's no Cindy Crawford, it's that she sounds like the most obnoxious person you've never met. It's laughable because she's somehow missing the obvious fact that people probably don't like her because she's awful, not because she has pretty hair (whether or not she actually has pretty hair).
In Fernee's case, these same sorts of comments feel even more like plain mudslinging. Not because Fernee is more or less attractive than Brick, but because she's not nearly as loathesome in her attitude. She seems more blissfully naive about the actual problems at hand than self-pitying; she seems to genuinely feel like there is something wrong about her preventing her from holding down a job. She's wrong and kind of dumb for thinking that, but bricking feels a lot more sad and a lot less hilarious on her than it does on the original Brick.
Anyway, I'm sure the Daily Mail will continue to lead the world in brick-laying. They should really find a he-brick, I'd love to see how that plays out.
Saturday, 23 March 2013
The working mother
Well, it looks like it's that time again, when people on the teevee gather to decide what makes someone a feminist. The decisive trait du jour is something near and dear to my heart: working mothers.
I've been watching this discussion from the sidelines since it was brought to the fore by Anne-Marie Slaughter's article in the Atlantic, about how women can't have it all. This same thesis is essentially being re-hashed in a more recent article for New York magazine called The Feminist Housewife, which is being billed as an antidote to Sheryl Sandberg's book Lean In, which urges women to be more assertive in the workplace.
I may be particularly prone to feeling persecuted in this debate, as a working mother myself, and as the child of an incredibly successful working mother. So I'll state that outright as a caveat. But the takeaway from this debate seems to be "Working mother bad! Working mother selfish!" While working mothers are given voice in the debate, they're on the defensive.
There are two major problems with the current debate. First, it's spurred on almost entirely on anecdotal evidence, and that anecdotal evidence happens to be especially terrible. Second, the debate is actually entirely fake anyway, and ignores the major reasons why most mothers work in the first place. I'll start with the older Atlantic piece by Ann-Marie Slaughter, since it's what brought this issue (back) to the fore in the last year.
Essentially, the central thesis of the famous Atlantic piece is: "I, Ann-Marie Slaughter, found it really difficult to work in a top position at the state department with two teenage sons while they were living some 300 miles from where I actually had to work. Therefore, being a very successful woman with a demanding job and also a mother is virtually impossible." Read: I found my incredibly idiosyncratic situation stressful and difficult, so it must be that any situation that is even superficially similar (in other words, involving a human female who works outside the home and has reproduced), is also stressful and difficult to the point of being impossible.
And this anecdotal evidence is awful. Slaughter's central argument from the piece:
The minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be.
Sounds reasonable. Except the "typical for the vast majority" part. Slaughter was working for the state department, based in Washington, while basing her family in Trenton, NJ. That's about a three hour commute each way, and that's being generous about Amtrak's efficiency. Slaughter explains that she commuted on Mondays and returned home on Fridays. For two years. To be entirely away from your family for five days a week some 50 or so weeks of the year is not "typical" by any stretch of the imagination. Elsewhere in the article she contrasts herself with a colleague who moved her family to Washington, only to have her husband commute to California. And she had a much easier time, and begged Slaughter not to write that it was impossible! No mention of how her husband felt about the 6-7 hour commute by plane, however.
The minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be.
Sounds reasonable. Except the "typical for the vast majority" part. Slaughter was working for the state department, based in Washington, while basing her family in Trenton, NJ. That's about a three hour commute each way, and that's being generous about Amtrak's efficiency. Slaughter explains that she commuted on Mondays and returned home on Fridays. For two years. To be entirely away from your family for five days a week some 50 or so weeks of the year is not "typical" by any stretch of the imagination. Elsewhere in the article she contrasts herself with a colleague who moved her family to Washington, only to have her husband commute to California. And she had a much easier time, and begged Slaughter not to write that it was impossible! No mention of how her husband felt about the 6-7 hour commute by plane, however.
Although I would still say it's terribly argued, Slaughter's point is actually very subtle, compared to the fanfare it got as a treatise about how women can't work and have a family simultaneously. One can't work at the state department and be home by 5:30 for dinner. Institutions in Washington need to be more flexible about people with families. And this is important, especially since Washington is a major locus of power in the United States. But an argument against working mothers generally - this falls far short of that. Even so, Slaughter specifically dismisses this notion, asserting that anyone who says they wouldn't generalise from her experience is "condescending". The piece would have been far more powerful if it focused on how power is distributed in Washington specifically, and how issues of family affect this. Instead, it was titled "Why women still can't have it all," full stop.
The newest iteration of this, and a far, far more annoying one at that, is Lisa Miller's article The Feminist Housewife.
Miller interviewed three whole women for the piece (two of whom, by the way, have since said they felt that Miller misrepresented them and their views). I could comment on almost every sentence in Miller's article and tear it apart, but I'll try to focus on a few things. The first thing that jumps out is the most garbage argument I've ever heard for why women should stay home:
Miller interviewed three whole women for the piece (two of whom, by the way, have since said they felt that Miller misrepresented them and their views). I could comment on almost every sentence in Miller's article and tear it apart, but I'll try to focus on a few things. The first thing that jumps out is the most garbage argument I've ever heard for why women should stay home:
Girls play with dolls from childhood, so 'women are raised from the get-go to raise children successfully. When we are moms, we have a better toolbox.' Women, [Kelly, one of the women profiled] believes, are conditioned to be more patient with children, to be better multitaskers, to be more tolerant of the quotidian grind of playdates and temper tantrums.
First of all, the notion that playing with dolls somehow prepares you to raise children successfully is a fucking joke, and is insulting to boot . Raising children is unrealted to playing with dolls aside from the likely number of heads and limbs per torso. Playing with dolls prepares you to raise children like playing with toy trucks prepares you to be a long-haul ice-road trucker: it doesn't.
The second part is less incendiary, but includes a key phrase: Women are conditioned to be more patient with children. I wouldn't necessarily disagree with this (despite having several bits of anectdotal evidence to the contrary), but where I break from Miller (and possibly Kelly, depending on how drastically Miller twisted her words), is what we might do with this "fact". To her, somehow, the logical conclusion is that women should care for all the children. To me, the logical conclusion is that we should try to spread some of that sweet, sweet conditioning around to men so we can distribute this responsibility more evenly.
The second part is less incendiary, but includes a key phrase: Women are conditioned to be more patient with children. I wouldn't necessarily disagree with this (despite having several bits of anectdotal evidence to the contrary), but where I break from Miller (and possibly Kelly, depending on how drastically Miller twisted her words), is what we might do with this "fact". To her, somehow, the logical conclusion is that women should care for all the children. To me, the logical conclusion is that we should try to spread some of that sweet, sweet conditioning around to men so we can distribute this responsibility more evenly.
Miller seems to be trying to create a piece where she defends the choice of women who stay home (against who, I'm still not sure - my best guess from reading it is Betty Friedan? A powerful straw woman). Perhaps worthwhile pursuit, but unfortunately, she can't seem to do this without tearing down women who do work:
Home, to these women, is more than a place to watch TV at the end of the day and motherhood more than a partial identity. It is a demanding, full-time endeavor, requiring all of their creativity, energy, and ingenuity.
This handily misses the entire point of everything. The precise reason that it is difficult to be a working parent is that home is more than a place to watch TV, and motherhood more than a partial identity even when you work full time. It remains a demanding, full-time endeavour, still requiring a tremendous amount of creativity, energy, and ingenuity. Can stay-at home mothers do more Pinterest activities with their kids? Probably. But to argue, even implicitly, that this makes the home of a working mother less of a home, and motherhood less of a feature of her identity, is entirely unecessary to do in defending the plight of stay-at-home moms. It's an elementary school-level argument tactic, and it fails. "You don't like my skirt? Oh yeah? Well, I don't like your skirt!" Your opponent remains in a state of disliking your skirt, and you lose.
Another major failing which threads through both Slaughter and Miller's pieces is that they fail to address accurately why women "choose" to work outside the home. The entire debate, in their eyes, is predicated upon the assumption that women work outside the home because Betty Friedan said so, or maybe because it just fufils their wildest dreams, and doing your dreams is what life is all about!
But this "choice" is a distinct priveledge, and it's one I think most women don't have. I can't find any hard data on this - I think it's a study that needs to be done - but I don't think most women go to work outside the home primarily because they can't abide the thought of staying home with some boring toddlers, or because they're ardent fans of Betty Friedan, as Miller suggests. They do it because they have to. Likewise, I'm sure my husband is not alone (especially in this economy), in recently having no choice but to stay home: what money he could make teaching English without a steady contract couldn't cover the cost of daycare. To put it bluntly: it's about money, stupid. In a couple (we won't even touch on the fact that most single parents are women), a woman staying home means forgoing an entire income, an issue Miller tries to address with impressive myopia:
Last summer, when her husband, Alvin, a management consultant, took a new position requiring more travel, [Kelly] made a decision. They would live off his low-six-figure income, and she would quit her job running a program for at-risk kids in a public school to stay home full time...Her sacrifice of a salary tightened the Makinos’ upper-middle-class budget, but the subversion of her personal drive pays them back in ways Kelly believes are priceless
A low six-figure income, and the sacrifice of a second salary which "tightened" their budget. A priceless decision! Miller ignores that for many, many women and families, a decision like this would not "tighten" their budget; it could remove the roof from over their head or the food from their table. To the mothers in these families, it's not simply about sitting down and introspecting about whether they want to have a career or a family - what's best for me and my family in the abstract emotional sense? It's about lining up the cost of daycare below their salary and subtracting it. When they come out with a positive number that they can tack onto their rent, electricity, or grocery bills, it's time to go to work no matter what they want. Later, Miller tries to gloss this over again, arguing that such a choice used to be the province of women whose partners made over $100k, but now extends even to women whose partners make between $75k and and $100k! It's catching on like wildfire...in the upper middle class. This, by the way, was what was so infuriating about the Ann Romney debacle last year. Yes, being a stay at home mother is definitely a job. But the point is that Ann Romney never had to work outside the home - she had the luxury of being able to choose to stay home (and I'm doubting that Ann Romney was doing the tasks involved in stay-at-home mothering without some help in her cavernous mansion...but I digress...).
Most of Miller's treatment of the financials involved in staying at home ignores the rather vast section of the working mother population that doesn't have a choice. Likewise, I'm sure a lot of stay at home mothers don't have a choice either. It's as if we're out to dinner and Miller says, "Steak or the chicken? The steak is local and will probably be better." Steak, I say! The problem is the steak is $200, everything else is $20, and I only have $30. Miller may have really sold this stay-at-home mother gig, but for most of our diners, it's simply not an option. I'm not saying we should demonise women who do have the choice and don't choose to stay at home, clearly. But the problem is that the entire debate centres on arguing for which of these choices is best, and rarely acknowledges that in reality, the sort of choice lauded by Miller is not actually a choice available to most working mothers.
The largest problem with this debate is that a handful of highly specific personal stories can't really inform complex debates like this all on their own. For that, you need actual empirical research using large samples of women to draw conclusions about what might be going on in the minds of working mothers (and non-working mothers). To be perfectly clear, Ann-Marie Slaughter and the two women interviewed by Lisa Miller for the New York piece do not constitute a large sample. When researchers do look at large samples, the actual results on this highlight how important the issue of choice is.
From an admittedly rather superficial reading of the scholarly literature (although I would argue I googled it for two seconds in a way that Lisa Miller didn't bother to do), the data says that it's not about making one specific choice over the other, but about being able to make the choice you want. A study by Glenys Parry shows that the attitudes women have towards working mothers affects their satisfaction with either working or staying at home. In other words, if you want to be a stay at home mother and you are, you're happier. If you want to be a working mother and you are, you're happier. Another series of studies shows that attitudes in traditionally male-dominated professions can lead to increased anxiety in women working in said professions - not the professions themselves. So the answer is not "stay at home," and it's also not "work full time," it's "do what you want."
And as far as I know, the actual feminist argument has always been that women should do whatever the fuck they want. I never got the impression that second-wave feminism was about creating an army of forced labor outside the home. It was about allowing women the choice to work outside the home if that's what they wanted to do - and prior to the 60s and 70s, this was not a realistic choice. This line that stay-at-home mothers are demonised in the same way that working mothers are seems mostly fabricated to me. Not that they haven't been misunderstood - the notion that staying at home and caring for children and a household is a cushy job, for example, is just wrong - especially if you're not Ann Romney. The ideal would be that neither the choice to work or stay at home would be met with such judgement.
Instead, the focus needs to shift to actually creating a series of choices - that exist in reality, not just in Lisa Miller's head - between work, family, and both. Moreover, in the true spirit of feminism, this choice should be extended to both men and women. According to Miller, if my son plays with enough dolls he'll be well-trained and highly disposed to full-time childcare. He should be able to choose to do that, and have that be a perfectly acceptable and normal choice. As Joanna Coles points out, the term "working father" is non-existent - yet there are billions of them. Instead of wringing our hands about what we think is better for a mother to do with her family - home or work? - we should follow the research that says families are happier and healthier when parents have a choice about how they divide and manage their time.
In my opinion, how we do this should not be about women, but about families. Maternal leave is an antiquated concept (though less antiquated than the notion that women should get no time off at all when having a child, as is the case in many situations in the US) - parental leave should be the norm. In Sweden, and hopefully soon in the UK, a certain amount of leave is given to the parents. They can divvy it up between them however they see fit. Daycare should never cost more or as much as a single individual can make in a given year. In other words, my solution would be to socialise the hell out of a bunch of institutions to provide better support for families, and thus, for mothers and fathers - working or not.
Some would argue this is not the best solution, but the point is that this is the type of solution we should be seeking. We should be arguing about how we can protect and ensure the choices of parents, mothers and fathers alike, rather than ignoring reality and crawling back to the comforting imagery of the 1950s housewife. And in the meantime, since this choice doesn't actually exist for most mothers, let's just cool it on demonising however they manage to run their family.
Sunday, 16 December 2012
On Children's Cartoons
So, yes, it's been almost a year. You don't care, do you? Of course not. Ruaridh is rapidly approaching the 18 month mark. As a quick update, I've mostly been frantically finishing my PhD while teaching 10 or so hours a week. It was punishing. I submitted my PhD in early November, and I have my viva in January. That should be interesting, considering a great portion of the 300 some-odd pages were written while high on sleep deprivation and god knows what hormones. For the most part, Jamie has valiantly played stay-at-home Dad. Ruaridh's first word was "Daddy", and he's quickly adding to the ol' vocabulary arsenal. Also (side note) I got a job in Rome, so we're packing up our lives into 10-11 boxes as best we can, and shipping them off to Italy before Christmas. This is a fantastic and dream-fufilling idea in as many ways as it's a terrible one, so the sum game is more or less like moving across Edinburgh which we might have done anyway. This is what I tell myself. But I digress...
This post isn't going to be much about Ruaridh, because what is there to say? I mean, clearly, there's so much. He's obscenely cute; it's almost offensive (as I typed that, he just farted! So cute/offensive!). He's a genius. He's going to change the world. His hair is very soft. His toes are adorable. And so on. The point is, there's a lot to say, but I realise that very little of it is actually interesting. So instead, I'm going to talk about something we've only very recently used to distract him: CARTOONS.
I get off a tiny bit on the perceived pretentiousness of the "OH, we don't have a TV..." statement. Which I say for effect sometimes. And this is true for us. And I do say it, but usually in jest, because: it's 2012. This may have meant something 10-15 years ago, but it's meaningless now. We have a computer (in fact, several), so not having a TV is not some righteous decision (in fact, for us, it was a financial one). We may not have a TV, but we certainly have TV in the abstract. The Internet is the technical term, I believe.
Ruaridh loves cartoons. They transfix him. And cartoons do this uniquely - he is not nearly as happy to watch boring adult shows. Nature documentaries (like The Life of Birds and The Life of Mammals - I SALUTE YOU, Sir David Attenborough! God I love that man.) fall somewhere in between cartoons and mundane, dialogue-driven adult dramas on the 18-month old transfixion scale. Sitting him in front of some cartoons for a bit makes my life loads easier, there's no question. He also verges on looking like a zombie while he's watching them and I feel a little bad...but he's so engaged. Anyway, there are loads of debates on "screen time" etc, and many would argue my 18 month old should be watching nothing at all beyond treasure baskets. They can argue that elsewhere: I'm still firmly in the "is your kid alive? congrats!" school, which says that you should do what you need to do to get by. This is a long game - I don't have the short game to deprive my child of the screen entirely. I need to put on some cartoons so I can have some coffee and get some things done. Part of this is the me needing coffee, but part of it is the family needing things done. Sue me (don't bother though; I'm sort of poor).
Anyway, inevitably, sometimes, I watch these things with him, as well I should: should I subject my child's eye and earballs to something I refuse to view? Probably not. This is why Barney is never, ever, ever on. That shit is torture. What we have viewed is Dora the Explorer, The Hive, Special Agent Oso and Rugrats. Dora the Explorer and The Hive I'm not sure about, Special Agent Oso I hate, and Rugrats is the friggin best. Detailed reviews of Dora, The Hive, and Oso are below. Rugrats will get it's own post later, because it is a special level of genius requiring a good deal of consideration. Keep in mind I've watched about a single episode of each of these, essentially providing the most comprehensive reviews possible.
Dora the Explorer
Man, I dunno. On the one hand: Adventures! Bilingualism! Code switching! Yes! On the other hand, who do you think you're talking to, Dora? Who taught you to pause for such unusual and unnerving lengths of time after you ask questions? Why do you blink at the creepiest possible times? Exactly how hard are you tripping at any given moment? Do you suffer from acute short-term memory loss? Because we literally just looked at the map. There are only three things on it. And there's only actually one route. Also, Map, as a person, is a patronizing asshole. It's just his tone of voice. And the backpack? The backpack.
Why does he have a teacup and saucer? Are they wrapped? How are they not broken with all the jostling? Does he have tea? Why does he have a jack-in-the-box? Do kids even know what that is anymore? And I just feel bad for Swiper. I don't think Dora's really made an effort to understand him. His swiping is a call for help. I'm conflicted.
The Hive
Overall, this show is innocuous. It's a bee named Buzzbee who does some really boring everyday stuff with the help of his neighbours. There's a queen bee, and she's a woman of the people: when Buzzbee's penchant for jumping in puddles of mud obscures a sign which inadvertently leads to the Queen's motorcade getting stuck in said mud, she pushes her own Rolls out of the mud! Charming! His mom is too nice and her sector of the hive is too clean (three kids and it looks like that all the time? I don't buy it), but this is TV and I can forgive that. I was mostly opinionless until I saw Buzzbee's sister.
She's a girl cause of the bow! And...pink eyelids! Eyelashes! Whatever, sure. Boring. Pink. We get it. Fine. But look at her feet:
She's wearing HEELS. A child bee, who doesn't even have feet (not even legs!), is wearing tiny heels just so we know this bee is a real lady. Call me a humourless feminist, but I'm not on board. Call me an entomologist, because bees don't have fucking feet. WHY. Why. Why.
Special Agent Oso
What the hell is this. So first of all, far as I can tell, the premise here is that an insane bear thinks he needs to help children with everyday tasks. Oso the bear works for UNIQUE, which stands for The United Network of Quite Unusual Events, and when said events occur, he helps children deal with them. Well, nice. Good. Okay. Except these events are not unusual, they're ridiculous everyday tasks that sweet lord I hope most kids have their parents or other adults teach them how to do, because this bear is useless.
The episode which I saw involved Oso helping a child to wash his hands. This might not seem so bad on the face of it. Kids might not know when to wash their hands, they might not understand why it's important. This bears (get it? BEARS?? see what I did there?) mentioning. However, this is not what Oso does. A kid is playing outside, is called in for dinner. He stares at his filthy hands. His dad says "you have to go wash your hands before dinner". This kid is on board. He runs to the bathroom to wash his hands, pulls up the step stool to the sink. And then, he FREEZES. Literally, he says "WHAT DO I DO??" How is this the point of confusion? You know it involves the bathroom and the sink, and clearly know what the sink is and that you need to reach it, but everything beyond that is what, a blur?
So anyway, this is a "Quite Unusual Event" apparently, so Oso to the rescue! Oso comes in to help this kid wash his hands. A painful step by step explanation of turning on water and dispensing soap follows. Apparently Oso has no idea how to dispense soap, and so fills half the room with bubbles. Useless. You're here to help solve a simple task and you don't even know how to execute it. Somehow, Oso and the kid get through this, at which point Oso instructs the kid to wash his hands for fifteen seconds. Just rub your hands together and count to fifteen. So, the kid knows how to count to fifteen but doesn't know how to use a sink and has no idea what soap is? What the eff is going on?
In sum, I find this show extraordinarily patronizing and Oso is an idiot who can't use soap and should be fired. Especially in this economy. Find a smarter fake bear.
It's not all so dismal and/or confusing: there's Rugrats which is genius delivered in approximately 10 minute vignettes with intermittent shots of pure elegance in the form of Deedee's hair.
More on this next time!
This post isn't going to be much about Ruaridh, because what is there to say? I mean, clearly, there's so much. He's obscenely cute; it's almost offensive (as I typed that, he just farted! So cute/offensive!). He's a genius. He's going to change the world. His hair is very soft. His toes are adorable. And so on. The point is, there's a lot to say, but I realise that very little of it is actually interesting. So instead, I'm going to talk about something we've only very recently used to distract him: CARTOONS.
I get off a tiny bit on the perceived pretentiousness of the "OH, we don't have a TV..." statement. Which I say for effect sometimes. And this is true for us. And I do say it, but usually in jest, because: it's 2012. This may have meant something 10-15 years ago, but it's meaningless now. We have a computer (in fact, several), so not having a TV is not some righteous decision (in fact, for us, it was a financial one). We may not have a TV, but we certainly have TV in the abstract. The Internet is the technical term, I believe.
Ruaridh loves cartoons. They transfix him. And cartoons do this uniquely - he is not nearly as happy to watch boring adult shows. Nature documentaries (like The Life of Birds and The Life of Mammals - I SALUTE YOU, Sir David Attenborough! God I love that man.) fall somewhere in between cartoons and mundane, dialogue-driven adult dramas on the 18-month old transfixion scale. Sitting him in front of some cartoons for a bit makes my life loads easier, there's no question. He also verges on looking like a zombie while he's watching them and I feel a little bad...but he's so engaged. Anyway, there are loads of debates on "screen time" etc, and many would argue my 18 month old should be watching nothing at all beyond treasure baskets. They can argue that elsewhere: I'm still firmly in the "is your kid alive? congrats!" school, which says that you should do what you need to do to get by. This is a long game - I don't have the short game to deprive my child of the screen entirely. I need to put on some cartoons so I can have some coffee and get some things done. Part of this is the me needing coffee, but part of it is the family needing things done. Sue me (don't bother though; I'm sort of poor).
Anyway, inevitably, sometimes, I watch these things with him, as well I should: should I subject my child's eye and earballs to something I refuse to view? Probably not. This is why Barney is never, ever, ever on. That shit is torture. What we have viewed is Dora the Explorer, The Hive, Special Agent Oso and Rugrats. Dora the Explorer and The Hive I'm not sure about, Special Agent Oso I hate, and Rugrats is the friggin best. Detailed reviews of Dora, The Hive, and Oso are below. Rugrats will get it's own post later, because it is a special level of genius requiring a good deal of consideration. Keep in mind I've watched about a single episode of each of these, essentially providing the most comprehensive reviews possible.
Dora the Explorer
Man, I dunno. On the one hand: Adventures! Bilingualism! Code switching! Yes! On the other hand, who do you think you're talking to, Dora? Who taught you to pause for such unusual and unnerving lengths of time after you ask questions? Why do you blink at the creepiest possible times? Exactly how hard are you tripping at any given moment? Do you suffer from acute short-term memory loss? Because we literally just looked at the map. There are only three things on it. And there's only actually one route. Also, Map, as a person, is a patronizing asshole. It's just his tone of voice. And the backpack? The backpack.
Why does he have a teacup and saucer? Are they wrapped? How are they not broken with all the jostling? Does he have tea? Why does he have a jack-in-the-box? Do kids even know what that is anymore? And I just feel bad for Swiper. I don't think Dora's really made an effort to understand him. His swiping is a call for help. I'm conflicted.
The Hive
Overall, this show is innocuous. It's a bee named Buzzbee who does some really boring everyday stuff with the help of his neighbours. There's a queen bee, and she's a woman of the people: when Buzzbee's penchant for jumping in puddles of mud obscures a sign which inadvertently leads to the Queen's motorcade getting stuck in said mud, she pushes her own Rolls out of the mud! Charming! His mom is too nice and her sector of the hive is too clean (three kids and it looks like that all the time? I don't buy it), but this is TV and I can forgive that. I was mostly opinionless until I saw Buzzbee's sister.
She's a girl cause of the bow! And...pink eyelids! Eyelashes! Whatever, sure. Boring. Pink. We get it. Fine. But look at her feet:
She's wearing HEELS. A child bee, who doesn't even have feet (not even legs!), is wearing tiny heels just so we know this bee is a real lady. Call me a humourless feminist, but I'm not on board. Call me an entomologist, because bees don't have fucking feet. WHY. Why. Why.
Special Agent Oso
What the hell is this. So first of all, far as I can tell, the premise here is that an insane bear thinks he needs to help children with everyday tasks. Oso the bear works for UNIQUE, which stands for The United Network of Quite Unusual Events, and when said events occur, he helps children deal with them. Well, nice. Good. Okay. Except these events are not unusual, they're ridiculous everyday tasks that sweet lord I hope most kids have their parents or other adults teach them how to do, because this bear is useless.
The episode which I saw involved Oso helping a child to wash his hands. This might not seem so bad on the face of it. Kids might not know when to wash their hands, they might not understand why it's important. This bears (get it? BEARS?? see what I did there?) mentioning. However, this is not what Oso does. A kid is playing outside, is called in for dinner. He stares at his filthy hands. His dad says "you have to go wash your hands before dinner". This kid is on board. He runs to the bathroom to wash his hands, pulls up the step stool to the sink. And then, he FREEZES. Literally, he says "WHAT DO I DO??" How is this the point of confusion? You know it involves the bathroom and the sink, and clearly know what the sink is and that you need to reach it, but everything beyond that is what, a blur?
So anyway, this is a "Quite Unusual Event" apparently, so Oso to the rescue! Oso comes in to help this kid wash his hands. A painful step by step explanation of turning on water and dispensing soap follows. Apparently Oso has no idea how to dispense soap, and so fills half the room with bubbles. Useless. You're here to help solve a simple task and you don't even know how to execute it. Somehow, Oso and the kid get through this, at which point Oso instructs the kid to wash his hands for fifteen seconds. Just rub your hands together and count to fifteen. So, the kid knows how to count to fifteen but doesn't know how to use a sink and has no idea what soap is? What the eff is going on?
 |
| Oso's approach to brushing eyes, er...teeth. |
In sum, I find this show extraordinarily patronizing and Oso is an idiot who can't use soap and should be fired. Especially in this economy. Find a smarter fake bear.
It's not all so dismal and/or confusing: there's Rugrats which is genius delivered in approximately 10 minute vignettes with intermittent shots of pure elegance in the form of Deedee's hair.
More on this next time!
Saturday, 4 February 2012
Six Months (and some change) on...
So now is when, after a few entries, this turns into a parenting blog. I know I said I wouldn't be like this, but things have changed. I don't know if anyone has ever said this about having children before, but it changes you. As a mother, trust me: it changes EVERYTHING. You see, I now have a six month old son (we went with Ruaridh, by the way) and I am an expert in all matters related to child rearing.
The unconditionally joyful experience of raising an innocent and beautiful child, who is blessed to receive a shower of wisdom accumulated in the 68 years between my husband and I, is too much to keep to myself. I recommend you send this blog to anyone who is about to have children, so they can feed off of my experience and nourish their own arsenal of future parenting techniques. Perhaps, maybe, they can dream of reaching the nexus of parenting excellence that I live with every day. It's my cross to bear, to share this unmitigated joy and expertise, to make sure that every child is given a chance at the loving, supportive, consistent, organic, peaceful, smoke-free, gender-neutral, hygenic existence Ruaridh enjoys every day.
HAHAHAHAHA. Just kidding y'all. This is where I bitch a about the perpetually scrambling shitshow that is my life as a parent. I believe the technical term is flying by the seat of one's pants. Welcome back, dear reader.
Obviously, there's been a six month absence here. I would say it's because I've been busy, but that would be lie telling. I've been on maternity leave for most of that time, and while I would certainly describe parenthood as full, busy is entirely the wrong word. I've been fucking tired. Friggin exhausted. I just didn't feel like it. When not occupied with my expert parenting (and related duties), other activities have previously taken precedence. Eating. Sleeping (sweet, delicious sleeping...). Putting a bra on. Staring aimlessly into space. Facebooking. Election watching (speaking of: the Republican primaries are fabulously entertaining). Bathing. Sewing octopus costumes. What have you.
Anyway, who cares what I was doing in my spare time? I seriously doubt I have enough readers that this was even missed, although I will concede the last entry ended on a bit of a cliffhanger. I'll pick up where I left off and give an update of the remainder of the labour as well as a brief rundown of each month. Then, I'll promise to update soon and see you in ten years.
The Labour
Well, first pains started in earnest on a Sunday evening, and Ruaridh was born at about 1am on a Wednesday. Sorry, let me put that differently: it was a long fucking time. Labour did stall for most of the day on Monday, so I shouldn't really count that. Even so, that puts the labour at around 30 hours.
If anyone who is planning on having children is reading this, let me clarify the goal of emphasizing how little I enjoyed labour: it's not meant to scare. Number one, I did ask the midwives, and I was told my experience was on the long end of the spectrum, and while it didn't involve any major trauma, it wasn't without a hitch for me or Ruaridh. So first off, it wasn't exactly typical - I've asked some recent mothers I know, and it runs the gamut from 3 hours to scary emergency cesarean to elective cesearean. Second, the point here is more for me to whine and moan about things I don't like, and this is pretty high on the list.
Long story short(ish?), I spent about 8 hours in the pool to find I was not dilating as quickly as I would have liked, and was getting increasingly uncomfortable. I asked for some heroin (they call it diamorphine for some reason), and got it not long after, but this meant I could no longer be in the pool. A strange distortion of time and space later (which turned out to be about 5 hours) and it was time to push. I did that for a little over two hours, which is way too long to be doing that, before Ruaridh was finally born at 12:45am on Wednesday, July 27th. He was 7lbs 9oz, full head of hair, and objectively cute. I had some toast and went to sleep.
I woke a couple hours later with mild chest pains, turns out, I had punctured a lung pushing. Aside from the pain, which was discomfiting but not that bad (felt like after you go on a long run when it's super cold), the air escaping through my lungs was trapped under my skin so it felt like bubble wrap all over my face. Everyone loves bubble wrap! Anyway, this little hitch meant problems starting breastfeeding, leading to janudice for the little man and an almost week long stay in the hospital (I had a window! But it looked out on a concrete roof.)
Month One
Got home and my parents (now formally Nainey and Poppop) were there a couple days later to visit for the month - a serious blessing to have that sort of help around. We were out and about a lot, visiting some sights and going to restaurants, and Ruaridh was a trooper. He did a lot of sleeping, but only in relatively short bursts, as I had to wake him for feeds every three hours because of the jaundice. I thought he just looked tanned, but in retrospect he looked like an oompa loompa.
I had never considered the implications of waking up every three hours for about 40 minutes - and I'm glad I didn't. It sucked so much you shouldn't even think about it until you have to do it. When you do have to do it, you should think about the fact that for the majority of your life, the experience of sleeping that little will be naught but a memory. Breastfeeding is really hard, but also by far the easiest way to go - or was for me. I went in multiple mind circles trying to avoid waking up so often until the flowchart below eventually took shape in my head.
I thought about switching to formula before realising that would involve not only waking up but getting up, and also sterilising things a lot more. It's such a harried time, whatever works. I want to bitchslap the type of person who judges someone for formula feeding (read: I want to judge this judgy woman). Is your baby alive? CONGRATS! Carry on.
Month Two
Settled into a fairly regular routine that involved a bit of crafting, going out for walks, staring lovingly into Ruaridh's peaceful visage...ah fuck it I have no idea. I don't really remember. I was tired. He was small and cute. Here's a picture.
Month Three
I dressed Ruaridh up as an octopus. This is all you need to know (Four words: mother. of. the. year.)
Month Four
There were a few freak nights in here where Ruaridh slept for about 8 straight hours. It was a terrible tease. Ruaridh started doing more smiling, and even the occasional laugh. Mostly, we just hung around and anxiously awaited the arrival of honorary Aunties Sara and Julia towards the end of the month.
Also, Ruaridh finally got some facial hair. I was beginning to worry about what the other kids would say about his pathetic peach fuzz. Late bloomer I guess.
Month Five
Ruaridh finally got to feel real freedom as he touched down on American soil for the first time. As we landed, his clothing went all stars and stripes and somehow a tiny flag and a McDonalds bag appeared in his hand. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera. So, you'll have to use your mind's eye for this month, with the exception of this picture stolen from Keelin.
Jamie wasn't able to join us for the first couple weeks, so Auntie Keelin was on hand to help out. It was a whirlwind. We saw Nainey and Poppop in Charleston, with a brief visit from Great Nainey, Uncle Jason, Aunt Jan and cousin Sean. Then we headed to DC to see Karen and Liz, then to NY to where we picked up Jamie. We saw Aunt Eileen, Uncle Nick and cousins Lisa, Tad, Margot and Lucy, with a quick stopover to see Uncle Paul, Aunt Peggy and cousins Kitty, Zul, Kieran and Skye. We also got to meet up with tons of friends - Gareth, Lottie and Iori from Edinburgh, a quick visit with Billy, and dinner with Stephen, Matt, Lee, and Julia - and had a few pleasant subway rides. More than once Ruaridh was millimeters from sucking on a subway pole. He's lucky to be alive.
From there we headed to Maine, where Ruaridh finally got acquainted with his Parkhurst cousins, Bronwyn and Fionn - and had his first tastes of rice cereal. We had an excellent Christmas filled with delicious food, great family, and copious amounts of trashy American television. We rang in the New Year at the Dickson household in Moodiesburn. It was lovely and quiet and great to see Granny, Grandpa, Auntie Claire and cousins Conor, Katie, Sarah and Anna.
Month Six
This past month I've tried to go back to work (emphasis on tried)...Ruaridh is now mostly on either formula or solids, and has been home with Dad most of the time. He's a big fan of the beard, and can't get enough of Jamie's guitar playing. He loves all sorts of foods now (avocado, broccoli, beetroot, turnip, parsnip, carrot, potato, sweet potato, edamame, pear, blueberry, to name a few), and though he has no teeth yet, he's starting to look really interested in picking things up and eating them. He rolls from front to back and back to front, but mostly the former, as he's not that keen on being on his belly. He moves, but it's a back shuffle. He can almost sit up on his own, and I think he'll skip crawling and go straight to butt shuffling.
We're in month 7 just now (As in, he's techincally 6 and a half months), and he's making more and more consonant sounds and a lot of farting noises with his mouth (and his butt, but that's not as impressive). It's pretty hilarious. Overall, he has a wonderful disposition and of course I adore him. I just wish he could sleep for 12 straight hours and use the toilet. But he's sleeping for longer stretches and...well, no progress on the toilet. Baby steps, as they say.
So, I will try to update about our adventures more regularly, I hope approximately monthly, and we'll have videos and pictures and me whining and all that jazz.
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