I have kept my mouth shut about this…til now. But this is really the outside of enough, folks. I mean, come ON!

Study: Lack of breastfeeding costs lives, billions of dollars

(CNN) — If most new moms would breastfeed their babies for the first six months of life, it would save nearly 1,000 lives and billions of dollars each year,

Let me note now that I breastfed both my children til each one was a year old and breastfed exclusively through the first four months, so my absolute disgust with this article is in no way some kinda guilt-fueled defensive huffiness. I was a good little Mommie! I saved nearly 1,000 lives and billions of dollars each year! (I could use some of that money right now too, thanks–drop me an email, whoever is holding onto that?)

Dr. Melissa Bartick, one of the new study’s co-authors, says the vast majority of extra costs incurred each year could be saved “if 80 to 90 percent of women exclusively breastfed for as little as four months and if 90 percent of women would breastfeed some times until six months.”

Bartick and her co-author Arnold Reinhold found that most of the excess costs are due to premature deaths.

Oh good. Let’s examine these babies, heartlessly slaughtered by their mothers’ psychotic refusal to breastfeed! I mean, who knew…

Nearly all, 95 percent of these deaths, are attributed to three causes: sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS); necrotizing enterocolitis, seen primarily in preterm babies and in which the lining of the intestinal wall dies; and lower respiratory infections such as pneumonia.

Breastfeeding has been shown to reduce the risk of all of these

So, basically what we have here is:

1. Breastfeeding reduces the risk of SIDS.
2. Breastfeeding reduces the risk of either having a preterm baby or of that preterm baby dying of necrotizing enterocolitis.
3. Breastfeeding reduces the risk of a baby either catching a lower respiratory infection or of dying of a lower respiratory infection.

I like no. 1, because SIDS is defined as a syndrome marked by the sudden death of an infant that is unexpected by history and remains unexplained after a thorough forensic autopsy and a detailed death scene investigation. In other words, SIDS isn’t actually a cause of death–it’s a lack of knowledge of the cause of death even after an autopsy and death scene investigation. Back to SIDS:

Risk factors that are not causes of SIDS

The cause of SIDS is unknown. Any proposed causation factor must be either necessary and sufficient to cause SIDS by itself (as the rabies virus causes rabies) or necessary and insufficient to cause SIDS by itself (as the typhus bacillus may or may not cause typhoid, a la ‘Typhoid Mary’).

Although studies have identified risk factors for SIDS, such as putting infants to bed on their stomachs, there has been little understanding of the syndrome’s biological cause or potential causes. The frequency of SIDS appears to be a strong function of the infant’s sex, age and ethnicity, and the education and socio-economic-status of the infant’s parents.

Listed below are several risk factors associated with increased probability of the syndrome based on information available prior to this recent study.

Prenatal risks

* maternal nicotine use (tobacco or nicotine patch)
* inadequate prenatal care
* inadequate prenatal nutrition
* use of heroin, cocaine and other drugs
* subsequent births less than one year apart
* alcohol use
* infant being overweight
* mother being overweight
* Teen pregnancy (if the baby has a teen mother, it has a greater risk)
* infant’s sex (60% of SIDS cases occur in males)

Post-natal risks

* mold
* low birth weight
* exposure to tobacco smoke
* prone sleep position
* not breastfeeding
* elevated or reduced room temperature
* excess bedding, clothing, soft sleep surface and stuffed animals
* Co-sleeping with parents or other siblings may increase risk for SIDS, but the mechanism remains unclear
* infant’s age (incidence rises from zero at birth, is highest from two to four months, and declines towards zero at one year)
* premature birth (increases risk of SIDS death by about 4 times. In 1995-1998 the U.S. SIDS rate for 37–39 weeks of gestation was 0.73/1000; The SIDS rate for 28–31 weeks of gestation was 2.39/1000)
* anemia

Well, NOT BREASTFEEDING is in there…along with twenty other risk factors. But why let that stop us from making massive, sweeping general statements about the hordes of babies dying from SIDS caused by lack of breastfeeding?

On to no. 2…I really don’t think we can make a case that breastfeeding has much to do with whether or not your baby is premature, given that breastfeeding can’t start prior to birth, so I’m assuming that the study authors are saying that the preterm baby specifically dying of necrotizing enterocolitis is caused by a lack of breastfeeding. So let’s look at that.

Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is a medical condition primarily seen in premature infants, where portions of the bowel undergo necrosis (tissue death).

NEC has no definitive known cause.[3] An infectious agent has been suspected, as cluster outbreaks in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) have been seen, but no common organism has been identified.

Not breasfeeding probably swept through those particular NICU wards, like a fever of anti-sisterhood!

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is suspected for causing necrotising enterocolitis in premature infants and neutropaenic cancer patients,[often secondary to gut colonisation. A combination of intestinal flora, inherent weakness in the neonatal immune system, empirical antibiotic use for 5 days or more,alterations in mesenteric blood flow and milk feeding may be factors.

Ooh, there it is!

NEC is almost never seen in infants before oral feedings are initiated.

Lest we lose our comprehension entirely of the situation in our eagerness to obsess on breastfeeding as akin to the Ten Commandments, reread that sentence. In other words, the primary risk factor, hands down, for necrotizing enterocolitis, is being born before your digestive system has finished maturing. Period. Your mother’s tits or lack thereof were not even involved. Rinse, repeat–

But, to be fair:

Formula feeding increases the risk of NEC by tenfold compared to infants who are fed breastmilk alone.

For more clarity as to why this is:

Neonatologists at the University of Iowa NICU reported on the importance of providing small amounts of trophic oral feeds of human milk starting ASAP, while the infant is being primarily fed intravenously, in order to prime the immature gut to mature and become ready to receive greater oral intake (Ziegler and Carlson, J Matern Fetal Neonatal Med. 2009 Mar;22(3):191-7.) Human milk from a milk bank or donor can be used if mother’s milk is unavailable.

This is a medical treatment, not a lifestyle choice. This has absolutely zero to do with whether or not you started supplementing Junior’s breastmilk diet with pureed pear when he was three months old, nor even if the second you got Janey out of the hospital and home you popped a bottle of Similac into her little mouth. Neither baby is at any risk anymore of necrotizing enterocolitis

Moving on to no. 3, a quick review of the medical literature out there will quickly inform you that, by far, the greatest risk factor for both catching and dying of a lower respiratory tract infection as a baby is…you guessed it…being born prematurely. Which, as we’ve already demonstrated, doesn’t have shit to do with breastfeeding as it’s hard to wiggle a nipple up your cervix while gestating and even if you are a circus-grade contortionist and can manage it, you’re not producing milk and your fetus wants and needs said milk about as much as it wants and needs a cellphone or new car. Let me repeat: neonatal mortality (occurring within 28 days of birth) accounts for the great majority of baby deaths, and the leading cause of neonatal death is prematurity. So, basically, the deaths we are talking about preventing with breastfeeding are postneonatal (between 28 days after birth and one year).

I couldn’t find a US study concentrating specifically on postneonatals, breastfeeding and lower respiratory infection, but I did find a UK study, and their breastfeeding statistics seem similar to ours, so here are the numbers:

Seventy percent of infants were breastfed (ever), 34% received breast milk for at least 4 months, and 1.2% were exclusively breastfed for at least 6 months. By 8 months of age, 3.2% of infants had been hospitalized for lower respiratory tract infection.

Wow. 98.8% of the babies weren’t exclusively breastfed and 66% of them didn’t even get breast milk for at least 4 months! And…96.8% of them did not catch a lower respiratory tract infection.

Population-attributable fractions suggest that an estimated 27% of lower respiratory tract infection hospitalizations could have been prevented each month by exclusive breastfeeding and 25% by partial breastfeeding.

So, put another way–breastfeeding wouldn’t have prevented about three-quarters of the lower respiratory tract infections from occurring at all.

FEARMONGERING AND WOMAN-BLAMING–MY FAVORITES!

In conclusion, I would like to point out that indeed, there are some benefits to the health of your child if you choose to breastfeed some or all of the time. However, if you don’t, you are not costing society billions of dollars nor are you causing any babies, including your own, to die of anything at all. And everyone who says you are is full of shit. End message!

You are young and don’t want health insurance? You are starting up a small business and need to minimize expenses, and one way to do that is to forego health insurance? Tough. You have to pay $750 annually for the “privilege.” (Section 1501)

Freedoms being lost: The freedom to have me pay for your uninsured emergency room visits and your freedom to start up a business which can’t bring in enough revenue to cover a single annual expense of $750. Jesus wept!

You are young and healthy and want to pay for insurance that reflects that status? Tough. You’ll have to pay for premiums that cover not only you, but also the guy who smokes three packs a day, drink a gallon of whiskey and eats chicken fat off the floor. That’s because insurance companies will no longer be able to underwrite on the basis of a person’s health status. (Section 2701).

Freedoms being lost: The insurance companies’ freedom to deny coverage to anyone who isn’t young and healthy.

You would like to pay less in premiums by buying insurance with lifetime or annual limits on coverage? Tough. Health insurers will no longer be able to offer such policies, even if that is what customers prefer. (Section 2711).

Freedoms being lost: Your insurance company’s freedom to refuse to pay for you to be cured of most serious illnesses, such as cancer. You are also losing the freedom to have me pay for your uninsured emergency room visits during your downhill spiral. More Jesus tears!

Think you’d like a policy that is cheaper because it doesn’t cover preventive care or requires cost-sharing for such care? Tough. Health insurers will no longer be able to offer policies that do not cover preventive services or offer them with cost-sharing, even if that’s what the customer wants. (Section 2712).

Freedoms being lost: Your freedom to drive up my insurance premiums by needing a lot more expensive medical treatment for conditions that, had you used preventive care, could have been circumvented or caught far earlier in their much less expensive phases.

If you are a physician and you don’t want the government looking over your shoulder? Tough. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to use your claims data to issue you reports that measure the resources you use, provide information on the quality of care you provide, and compare the resources you use to those used by other physicians. Of course, this will all be just for informational purposes. It’s not like the government will ever use it to intervene in your practice and patients’ care. Of course not. (Section 3003 (i))

Freedoms being lost: Your physician’s freedom to hide from you the quality of the care he provides and how much it tends to cost. I personally am going to miss the current system of finding a physician, which if I’m lucky can be based on a friend’s recommendation but is more often a total crapshoot based on geographic proximity to my home or workplace, where I get to test-drive him on my precious, one-and-only body.

You are a health insurer and you want to raise premiums to meet costs? Well, if that increase is deemed “unreasonable” by the Secretary of Health and Human Services it will be subject to review and can be denied. (Section 1003)

Freedoms being lost: Your insurance company’s freedom to jack up your rates without any explanation or justification. Jesus Tears Mark III!

The government will extract a fee of $6.7 billion annually from insurance companies. If you are an insurer, what you will pay depends on your share of net premiums plus 200% of your administrative costs. So, if your net premiums and administrative costs are equal to 10% of the total, you will pay 10% of $6.7 billion, or $670,000,000. In the reconciliation bill, the fee will start at $8 billion in 2014, $11.3 billion in 2015, $1.9 billion in 2017, and $14.3 billion in 2018 (Section 1406).Think you, as an insurance executive, know how to better spend that money? Tough.(Section 9010 (b) (1) (A and B).)

Freedoms being lost: Your insurance company’s freedom to funnel as much of their profits as possible into “administrative costs” rather than into your medical care.

You will have to pay an additional 0.5% payroll tax on any dollar you make over $250,000 if you file a joint return and $200,000 if you file an individual return. What? You think you know how to spend the money you earned better than the government? Tough. (Section 9015).
That amount will rise to a 3.8% tax if reconciliation passes. It will also apply to investment income, estates, and trusts. You think you know how to spend the money you earned better than the government? Like you need to ask. (Section 1402).

Freedoms being lost: For 98.5% of Americans, absolutely none.

Aww, that’s such a romantic pict–! hmm, wait. Isn’t that guy about twenty years older than that barely pubescent girl..? I mean, I can see some serious crepe-like flesh going on under that manly-man jawline there–oh, well, it’s not like even the most superficial perusal of internet porn won’t immediately inform you that “barely legal” is an overwhelmingly common male fanta–uh, wait again. Is that hairy old dude that sweet little sex kitten is being manfully embraced by HER DAD–?

Now, now, maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe this is really meant to portray the pure innocence and beauty of the father-daughter bond, and I just have a dirty, corrupt mind. I’m sure another picture from the very same photo shoot will absolutely clear up any doubt I could possibly have about the theme of this particular series of Miley and Billy Ray Cyrus publicity photos–

Yep, that definitely cleared that up.

But this is old news! The new news is that the sexualization of children shown above is apparently way, way too subtle. The message has not been gotten across, dammit! And Billy Ray Cyrus clearly ain’t gonna let that happen. You know, he has another daughter, and to eliminate the confusing nature of using the daughter that might have actually entered puberty sometime around the date of the photo shoot, this one is clearly nowhere near even the beginnings of sexual maturation.

Because 9-year-olds need a sexy line of lingerie!

..little 9-year-old Noah Cyrus is set to become a lingerie model.

She’ll be teaming up with her pint-sized best friend Emily Grace to launch a children’s lingerie collection for ‘Ohh! La, La! Couture’.

The company’s website describes The Emily Grace Collection as having a “trendy, sweet, yet edgy feel, reminiscent of Emily’s true personality.”

Emily’s collection will appeal not just to little girls – the line also has an exclusive Teen Collection available to a size 14.

Goodness, I suspect you’re right about that. This collection won’t just appeal to little girls.

NEW ORLEANS – A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have. Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.

“There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage,” Bardwell said. “I think those children suffer and I won’t help put them through it.”

Yep, children from those marriages, even the ones that don’t last, I mean it’s not like they could e-v-e-r grow up to become President of the United Sta—

“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”

Mostly I think of “piles and piles” as describing my laundry. And did he seriously just brag about letting black people use his bathroom..?

I sure love living in “post-racial” America!

I love Banned Books Week! Some of my favorite books of all time are banned books…I mean, check out this list of classics! Admittedly, a lot of the banning action took place decades ago, but lest anyone think we’ve relaxed our deathgrip on the minds of our children in this new millenium, here are a nice collection of more recent incidents to sneer at:

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Sallinger: Removed by a Dorchester District 2 school board member in Summerville, SC (2001) because it “is a filthy, filthy book.”

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck*: Banned from the George County, Miss. schools (2002) because of profanity.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: Challenged in Foley, Alabama (2000) because of the depictions of “orgies, self-flogging, suicide” and characters who show “contempt for religion, marriage, and the family.” The book was removed from the library, pending review.

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Burned in Alamagordo, N. Mex. (2001) outside Christ Community Church along with other Tolkien novels as satanic.

If you’re interested in the most up-to-date reporting on the 2008 open season on communication of unapproved ideas, the American Library Association puts out a yearly list of the books that are challenged, restricted, removed or banned–see if your favorites are on there too!

Leaving you with the bittersweet taste of irony, from January of this year. Enjoy!

*I might sympathize with an attempt to ban it from required reading lists–yes, it was on mine in high school–based on the fact that it sucks ass and there are at least one hundred more interesting and compelling novels that could immediately and happily replace it…but no, I have to defend John Steinbeck’s biggest load of crap evar based on principle. A shame, but there you have it.

I haven’t marched on the Mall since 2004–you know I’m gonna be there! Let’s have a show of support, folks!

“Wow,” said the doctor.

That’s not what I expect a doctor to say while peering into my ear, of all places. “What?” I asked.

“You have really heavy scarring in there,” she said cheerily. “You must have had a ton of untreated ear infections as a child!”

Had I? I remembered being sick a lot, and there had been times of excruciating ear pain—“Oh?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I’m surprised you don’t have any hearing loss, or balance or vertigo issues. The scarring’s so bad, the cilia in your inner ear, you know—probably not too many of those left.”

Goodness, that explained a lot…I left the doctor’s office feeling kind of dazed. All my life I’ve suffered awful, debilitating motion sickness—even as an adult, after most other people I knew outgrew getting carsick in the back seat on the way to Grandma’s house, I never did. Over the years I’d become the master of what little I could do to mitigate it and also of hiding it from others (to a point—my face turning greenish-white wasn’t something I could ever manage to hide, but luckily that degree of nausea takes hours of continuous motion to achieve and I avoid hours of it whenever possible). My first husband was remarkably unkind about it, insisting it was all in my head and cutting me no slack whatsoever over it in the apparent belief that if it wasn’t coddled, I’d snap out of it.

(Needless to say, that never did work…all it did was make me feel unloved and violently nauseated, as opposed to just violently nauseated. Oh, well.)

When I started junior high, we had a gymnastics section in PE class. How it worked out for the boys I don’t know, but it was a real class divider for the girls. See, girls from nice families got gymnastics classes and gymnastics camps as a matter of course, usually for several years in earlier childhood—us poor girls? Not so much. And there it was, laid out for all to see. And for me, it’d always been even worse—your average poor girl had usually figured out on her own how to do a simple cartwheel as part of the normal childhood process. Sadly, not I—I could never manage one; not because I lacked athleticism, I was always a fast runner and a good catcher, for instance—but because I lacked balance. The very worst, most humiliating part of the gymnastics section, of course, was the balance beam. I couldn’t even get up on the goddamn thing. I mean it—as part of even the simplest routine, we had to do a running mount of some description. I could jump up to it, but I couldn’t catch my balance once up there. I fell off. Immediately and inevitably, every single time. I wasn’t normally a laughingstock—at that time I was generally considered a nice, quiet, smart girl in the semi-official peer rankings—but even the kindest of the other girls couldn’t help letting a few giggles escape whenever it was my turn to give it a try.

Years later, during my first Army physical, the medic informed me that I had significant high-frequency hearing loss. I remember staring at him in surprise and saying, Huh? I hadn’t noticed—“Well, you’re probably used to it,” he said. “You’ve probably had it for years. But it does prevent you from being qualified for some military jobs, so I gotta make a note of it in your records—sorry!”

Well, at least I finally knew why…

…and, about four years ago, one of my best friend’s sisters died from a brain tumor. She died because, among other things, she couldn’t afford chemotherapy to the tune of $5000 a month, and neither could the rest of her extended family, though everyone chipped in for as long as they could. She died because the tumor made it impossible for her to work (it first made itself known by giving her a seizure in her boss’s office), so she lost her job and the health insurance that came with it, and was unable to get any other health insurance because her tumor was a “pre-existing condition.” She wasn’t able to get Medicaid because her husband was employed. But if he quit his job so she could get it, then he and she and their three children wouldn’t have been able to live at all—no money, no home, no food, no clothing—

So she died, literally in my friend’s arms, weighing about 70 pounds, suffering from senile dementia at the age of 39, incontinent and in agony. She left two daughters and a son, ages 18, 16 and 13, behind, and a husband who became a widower at 45.

So these reasons, among others, are why I think it’s really hysterical when people start shrieking about how the government is trying to take away your health care choices! and shouldn’t it be between your doctor and you..!? This is not to pooh-pooh all their concerns; some of them are legitimate—it’s impossible not to be continually horrified at the ever-increasing monster that is the federal budget deficit, for instance. But there seems to be an amazing ignorance of the fact that many of their fellow Americans currently have only the choice of permanent physical disability or death, and the only decision their doctor is willing to make is to refuse them treatment of any description. Or perhaps it’s only indifference—which doesn’t incline me towards extending any sympathy in return, eh? I do wonder which one it is, at times. I hope it’s not the latter.

See, this is one of the biggest reasons I don’t listen to Ann Coulter.

(wtf? How did Ann Coulter get involved in this? you might ask. Well–)

Ann has made a career out of, among other things, trashing feminism. The last time I paid any attention to much of anything she had to say was one of the first times I ever paid any attention to her at all–basically I got to the point where she was saying that women needed to get out of public discourse, particularly political public discourse, because they weren’t suited to it and had been screwing everything up in it for decades. Once I heard her say that, I translated it to mean that there was no point in listening to her discourse publicly anymore, particularly politically–I mean, she’s a woman herself. And I never argue with other people who tell me not to listen to themselves, eh?

Generally I am underwhelmed by women who globally trash feminism. Not that being a self-identified feminist has a hell of a lot of meaning these days–given that Sarah Palin, Maureen Dowd, Catherine MacKinnon and Wendy McElroy all insist that they are feminists, I’m not sure exactly what assumptions about them we’re supposed to be making based on that. So, when women state that they have a problem with specific so-called feminists or specific schools of self-identified feminist thought, THAT I have no problem empathizing with. However–

The third and last session at Sex 2.0 that I attended was the following:

Revisiting Naked on the Internet

My book Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing In On Internet Sexploration was published by Seal Press in 2007. This session will include a panel with some of the women I interviewed for the book; we will discuss what has changed and stayed the same in past two years. Questions include: How has the sense of community in online sexual networks changed since 2007? How have new technologies, applications, and websites (like Tumblr and Twitter) shifted the ways we think about sex online? How have shifts in law enforcement like crackdowns on online prostitution, arrests of teens for making child porn, and the obscenity trials of pornographers affected sex online?

There were four session leaders present–one was the author of the book referenced above and the other three were women that, as she said, she had interviewed for it. I hadn’t read the book, so I was a little worried going into the session that I would have absolutely no idea what was going on. However, I needn’t have worried–they didn’t really discuss the fine details of the book. One thing that did come up, though, was feminism–almost the very first time I’d even heard the word mentioned since I’d arrived at the conference.

Three of the session leaders self-identified as feminists; the fourth did not. Specifically, she self-identified as most definitely not a feminist, and her reasoning was more or less as follows:

“Because, you know, people kept using the word ‘feminist’ as a synonym for ‘awesome.’ (giggle!) Like, I’m a militant awesome-ist!”

Oh, boy. How, er, rebellious of you to so boldly reject feminism. That’s so rare in mainstream society. Especially those icky, oogy second wavers. Really they’re probably all worried that you’re fucking their husbands–! (Direct quote from someone in an earlier session–I couldn’t say if it was the same stellar intellect or not, I did not take special note of the speaker at the time.)

Yes, let’s all hate us on some second-wave feminists. I mean, who needs all this crap: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination in employment on the basis of sex? The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission? Executive Order 11375, that expanded President Lyndon Johnson’s affirmative action policy of 1965 to cover discrimination based on gender? The EEOC ruling that sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal, that opened the way for women to apply for higher-paying jobs that were previously only open to men? No-fault divorce? Community property laws? Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co, which prevented employers from changing the job titles of women workers in order to pay them less than men? Eisenstadt v. Baird, where the Supreme Court ruled that the right to privacy includes an unmarried person’s right to use contraceptives? Title IX of the Education Amendments that bans sex discrimination in schools? Roe vs. Wade? The Equal Credit Opportunity Act, prohibiting discrimination in consumer credit practices on the basis of sex? Corning Glass Works v. Brennan, forcing employers to cease justifying paying women lower wages because that is what they traditionally received under the “going market rate?” Marital rape laws? The Pregnancy Discrimination Act?

One thing I have to give Ann–she did say that when she proposed taking the vote away from women, she meant herself too. I suppose, if she were actually serious, one would have to respect her consistency and lack of hypocrisy in that one area (she still hasn’t shut up and gotten back into the kitchen, though, which leaves her open to remarks of her display of at least a tad bit of hypocritical behavior on all other fronts). So, you bold brave anti-feminist ladies! tell ya what–

You reject, and cease taking advantage of, all that feminism has enabled you personally to take advantage of. I have a nice starter list above, and that’s only the benefits reaped from the sweat, blood and tears of the second-wave feminists–I haven’t even listed what the third-wavers have achieved. You do that, and then at least you’ll stop looking and sounding like a raving hypocrite, and not a very bright one at that. Then, after you’ve lived that life for a year or so, we’ll talk again–and if you’re still giggling over the awfulness that is feminists, then I’ll have to suck it up and admit that there really must be something to the anti-feminist life that I’ve simply overlooked, and I will be absolutely willing to learn what that is at your feet.

Or, if you have a specific problem with specific feminists, or specific feminist schools of thought, you can articulate that–I know, I know, but that requires thought and effort–just like it does for anyone to refrain from making blanket statements condemning a whole swathe of a specific subgroup of humanity–can’t imagine where else or for whom that problem might come up, can you?

…only with feminism can a conference that specifically celebrates feminism in its general description, openly slam feminism. sigh

That is the title of her biography, written by one of her ex-adherents who also happened to be the wife of a man Ayn had a long-term affair with–given all that, one would expect the tone of the book to be rather more unsympathetic than otherwise. However, that’s not really the case. I read it over a decade ago for a college class–the one and only women studies course I ever took required us to choose and write an in-depth paper about an influential woman of the first half of the twentieth century. I chose Ayn Rand, for three reasons: first, because she fit the criteria as presented; second, because I have a rebellious streak and knew full well that we were expected to choose a feminist, regardless of what the criteria explicitly stated; and third, because I was genuinely interested in the woman behind Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

On CNN this morning, I caught sight of the following headline:

‘Atlas Shrugged’ author sees resurgence

This struck me as a little odd, since I know Ayn’s been dead for several years now. What, is she seeing it from Heaven? (An even odder idea, given the virulence of her atheism.) But it isn’t the first time I’ve been reminded of Ayn recently–she’s been resurrected quite often lately, both by conservative types who are threatening to “go on strike” a la John Galt and by liberals who regularly mock both her admirers and her concepts, at least as they understand her concepts, which is usually poorly. (I won’t speak much to the whole “go on strike” routine the previously mentioned spoiled-rich poseurs are engaging in, other than to say it likely would have cracked Ayn up no end.)

Now, Ayn was no great fiction writer. She had her moments, especially humorous ones–but for the most part, her novel writing skills just ain’t there. She liked to give speeches–loved to give speeches, really, really long ones–! And, as anyone who writes fiction knows, one of the cardinal rules is to show, not tell, as much as possible, and Ayn never showed it if she could tell it, and tell it in excruciating detail. On those less frequent occasions when she did decide to show, she clearly felt that there was far too much of a chance that simply showing just wasn’t going to get her extremely important point across clearly enough. Suffice it to say that she injected enough symbolism into her showing scenes to fell an ox, and with about as much subtlety. She was also fond of eroticizing rape, which I suspect stemmed from a strong personal yearning to be a femme fatale. She seemed to figure that the pinnacle of sexual tension and excitement was some guy wanting you so badly that he couldn’t stop himself from ripping your clothes off (literally!) and that you would be so thrilled by this unmistakeable tribute to your irresistible attractiveness that all other considerations would pall. And beyond the desire to be incredibly physically attractive, she obviously, badly wanted to meet a man, a male, that she could genuinely consider superior to herself–she just as obviously never did, but if she’d managed to do so, she clearly imagined the experience to be so overwhelming that her only option would be to fling herself at his feet and become his slave. (Had she actually met such a man at some point, I think she’d have figured out fairly quickly that abject servitude to him was no more fun than abject servitude to anyone else is–it’s a shame she didn’t, it might have resulted in some more interesting writing.)

While researching her, I also stumbled across her testimony before HUAC (the House of Un-American Activities Committee, which amusingly sounds much more like a group of subversive Satanists than what it really was, which was a nasty part of the McCarthy era) in the late 1940′s. The University of Maryland has a lot of great goverment stuff in its archives, unsurprisingly given it’s geographic location, so I got to read the original transcripts on microfiche. It was depressing, though not completely without justification. Ayn had a pretty bad time of it in Russia before she managed to defect–given that, her virulence towards Communism and supporters of Communism is more understandable than some other people’s. It also makes her knee-jerk revulsion towards governmental controls on private citizen’s finances more understandable–but I was very sorry to learn that she’d gotten involved at all. Who wouldn’t be?

All those caveats aside, though, it was very good for me to read her stuff when I did, which was first in my early- to mid-twenties. I had been raised in a very liberal fashion, politically-speaking, yet I wasn’t comfortable with some aspects of my core beliefs–but I didn’t really know how to articulate that discomfort. I certainly wasn’t drawn to the Republican mantra of how feminists and welfare queens (a) lived high on the hog and (b) were responsible for the decline of the high morality of our civilization–I already knew that was total bullshit, having lived much more intimately with, er, welfare queens and feminists in their actual melieu than any of those self-same Republicans ever had. But I also wasn’t satisfied entirely with the black-and-white presentation of oppressor/oppressee–see, I’d had little contact for most of my life at that time with those liberal demons, the Rich Old White Men. However, I’d suffered plenty at the hands of my supposed fellow victims–far more than I could relate to any suffering I hadn’t yet had at the hands of the ROWM brigade. Liberals were happy to address the gendered motivated aspect of my suffering, and I could resonate with that–but what about all the rest? They were ominously silent.

What was the rest of my suffering? Well, for one thing, I (like Ayn) was very bright. I had always been very bright, noticeably bright–I came to expect, every time I had a new teacher, the half-suppressed choking as he or she went over my very first reading test for placement in each class, and of course the inevitable IQ testing in the counsellor’s office that followed. Interestingly enough, that never did result in a swelled head–I was the only child, for a very long time, in a family of unusually bright adults, and I spent my childhood not realizing that a child can’t be expected to read, write, or figure at the same skill level as not only adults, but very smart adults. I remember always feeling bad whenever I lost a game of Risk to my mother, uncle and grandfather–I didn’t realize that of course a six-year-old is going to lose to those people! It was actually wildly impressive that I could compete with them on any really equal footing at all–but then, as I said, I didn’t understand that. So I never really knew how smart I was, compared to the mean, til high school.

Oh, but high school. I had it figured out at that point. And I was pretty pissed off about it, too. I remember sitting in German class and listening to lots of the other kids talking about college. It was so hard to decide which one to attend! Mom wanted them to go here but Dad wanted them to go there but they had really heard that here was the total party university–oh, those children of privilege!

Another class I had back then was Expository Writing. I did not want to take it, but I needed four full years of English, and it was convenient to my open time slot for an elective course. I hated that class. Not because I didn’t love writing–I did love to write, and clearly still do (or I wouldn’t be here). However, I simply could not relate to the teacher. He had us spend the first five minutes of every class writing in a journal, just stream-of-consciousness, to various pieces of music he would put on–I have no idea what that type of music is called, but it consisted of vaguely ocean-y sounds–I think it was supposed to be soothing. All it was, was irritating. I didn’t need that sort of exercise to allow me to practice putting my thoughts on paper. I excelled at putting my thoughts on paper. I also had no desire to share a single personal thought with some guy I barely knew. I found it invasive, boring and silly. I suspect I didn’t hide that very well–let’s just say that he and I started off on the wrong foot, very early on in our relationship.

This guy, I think, was of the politically liberal persuasion. He certainly liked to go on and on at times about some home for mentally challenged kids he volunteered at–he often had an anecdote, or wanted to share some kid’s achievement or other, or related it to some story we were reading as part of the coursework. And boy howdy, I got sick of hearing about it. Between having to listen to other kids complain about the multitude of higher learning choices available to them and how they really wanted to go where they’d have the most fun, and listening to Mr. Whateverhisnamewas rhapsodize about the massive, plush facilities dedicated to teaching some other kids with severe mental impairments how to bake a cookie, I seriously began to wonder why I was so worthless and undeserving. Nobody, not the government, not the schools, not private charities or individual doners, and certainly not my family, was forking over the $$$ to see that I got any opportunities. Quite the opposite–any job I had, my family snatched up the paycheck as soon as I got it home and dumped it into the grocery-and-gas budget. There were either no gifted school programs or practically none–but money for the mentally handicapped abounded. And why was I being punished by the government because my dad worked like a dog..? We made too much money for any kind of assistance whatsoever–not medical, not educational, not housing, nothing–but we didn’t make enough money to provide those things for ourselves, either. And instead of being mentally handicapped, I was the opposite. I didn’t feel like that made me more deserving than someone who was handicapped, but I couldn’t for the life of me understand why it made me less so.

This is why I sneer at conservatives and their “bootstraps.” They certainly don’t make their own children rely on their “bootstraps,” and I can assure them, it ain’t because their kids are smarter or harder-working than I was. It’s funny really (once you get over being too mad about it to think straight) because they like to pretend that they do–a previous long-term relationship (we’ll call him “F,”) certainly a child of privilege, was extraordinarily and loudly proud that he’d “made all his money himself, nobody had ever just given him any of it.” He utterly failed to realize that his supportive family environment, healthy food and living habits of his childhood, his parents’ pickup of his college tab and their welcoming of him back home after college so that he could live rent-and-food free to save up for his first home, and his sister’s “in” with the director at the company he got his first job at, were the props that had enabled him to “make all that money himself” at all.

But Ayn helped me learn to also sneer at liberals and, as she put it, the luxury of their pity, that you pay for. They pitied the mentally handicapped, and so agitated for big bucks to be poured into educational resources for them. But they had no interest at all in the unusually bright. Because that is not pitiable, it is not worth a share of the pooled government resources. They pitied the homeless and third-generation welfare families and agitated for big bucks to be poured into them as well–but they had no pity for the working poor. When I was a kid, I was madly jealous of my friends whose families were on welfare because they got to get braces, and go to the doctor when they were sick, and eat lunch every day at school, and live in a nice trailer with wall-to-wall carpet and air conditioning–yes, I was jealous of living in trailers. They were much nicer than anywhere we ever lived, honestly. I didn’t have any of that stuff because my dad worked too hard at his miserable, crappy, blue-collar job. Somehow that made his daughter less deserving of medical and dental care, regular meals and a decent roof over her head?

And Ayn helped me free myself of my own family. My mother, in particular, who took every penny I ever made when I lived at home, thereby making it impossible for me to ever save up a dime for anything. And after I left home, suctioned up as much of my paycheck as I was able to send her. In return, she doled out emotional support…in a niggardly, grudging fashion–and of course I was aware of that. In an effort to show her that she didn’t have to be nice to me to get money, I ended up just giving her money, a lot of it! And asking nothing in return, which I think in the back of my head I believed would free her from feeling obligated to love me and would then result in a more natural expression of the same. (Yes, I know. Please, don’t mock the naivete. Keep in mind how young I was when all this was unfolding.) My mother, who on my eighteenth birthday told me she hoped I didn’t think I could just sit around at home being supported all day–I had better have some kind of plan, or else–! I was just telling my ex-husband the other day (who grew up in even poorer circumstances than I did) how funny it was that she felt the need to say that to me, who had been working and feeding cash into the family coffer since I was thirteen years old. (My ex-husband’s father put him to work on farms around the same age, and he got the same speech from him at age eighteen, so he understands how funny that was. Not.)

In Atlas Shrugged, there’s a scene where one of the main characters is facing arrest, and he goes home to his family before going on the lam. His family (mother and brother) have lived with him all his adult life and he has supported them uncomplainingly; when he gets home, they both start in on him, begging him to cooperate with the authorities and turn himself in and give them whatever money he has on him so they can survive while he’s in prison. He tells them he has no money, all his assets have been frozen–I can’t find my copy of the book, so I’m going to have to quote this from memory, and I’m sure I’m not getting it perfectly right. But this is the gist:

“If you really cared about me,” Hank said, “you’d be urging me to run, and helping me do it all you could.”
His mother stared at him, then screamed, “But what will we do without you? We need you!”
“Well then,” Hank said. “You should have known how to value me before.”

That really resonated with me. Why do I owe my hard work and life’s blood to people who have made it clear that all I am is a way for them to avoid having to work hard themselves at anything, people who clearly don’t value me, the individual, at all? In the political sense, of course, that’s a conservative argument. Their fallacy is that they are utterly unable to distinguish (willfully, I suspect) the difference between can’t work hard and won’t work hard, nor are they able to comprehend the poisonous atmosphere that children in won’t work hard families are brought up. Children believe what their parents teach them, and when your childhood is a monotonous litany of we’re doomed from the start nothing we do makes a difference they’re all out to get us anyway so we may as well sit here til we rot because That’s Just The Unfairness and Injustice of the Universe—you will internalize that to some degree. To escape it, you usually must be willing to sever all ties with your family…and most people aren’t willing to do that, and many people are incapable of doing that. It is very difficult to become an orphan by choice. Very difficult. Or, as more commonly is the case, you can keep ties with your family and endure their resentment and jealousy and self-centeredness day in and day out, in exchange for which you get to feed them a steady supply of your income.

I don’t extend that argument to the population at large. I extend it only to my family, whose circumstances I know very intimately, intimately enough that I can safely and freely say that they won’t work hard (excluding my poor beleagered dad, of course, who passed away two years ago, I should mention), and therefore they don’t deserve what I have gotten by being willing to work hard. Sorry.

All these other people who are chanting and quoting Ayn–if they did read her books, they missed a lot of the message, and that goes double for the dude currently running the Ayn Rand institute–

“So many people see the parallels with actually what’s going on, with the government taking over the banks, with the government kind of taking over the automobile industry, a president who fires the CEO of a major American corporation. These are the kind of things that come out of ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ ” Brook said.

People are idiots. In Atlas Shrugged, the government takes over healthy, productive, afloat companies and gives the money gained to inefficient, corrupt companies. What’s actually going on in our country is that the government is taking over inefficient, corrupt companies and leaving healthy, productive, afloat companies alone. Now, Ayn would have hated the takeovers even of the former–she believed in letting companies that couldn’t make it on their own merits collapse–but the people who are moaning about and drawing tight-lipped parallels to Atlas Shrugged are frequently the same people who are eagerly accepting the government bailouts funded by taxpayer money. As Jon Stewart so pithily said, “Yeah, man, Wall Street is mad as hell! And they’re not gonna take it anymore! Unless by ‘it’ you mean 2 trillion dollars in their own bailout money! That, they will take!”

So, Ayn was personally effed up in multiple areas (sexuality, the complexities of national and global economics, etc.) and often a tedious fiction writer–but she did have some things of value to say. It’s a real shame that nobody ever dwells on those, and the people who do spend time dwelling on her at all, either dwell on her flaws or on whatever misunderstanding of what she said happens to suit their agenda. But I don’t suppose that makes her any different from a lot of other well-known writers—it’s just a shame she’s not around to add her voice to the chorus any longer.

So then, wherefore this?

A quick glossary:

• Great War On Terror = “Overseas Contingency Operations”
• Terrorism = “Man-caused Disasters”
• Toxic Assets = “Legacy Assets”

Okay, “Legacy Assets” does sound better than “Toxic Assets”. Well done, Team Obama! High fives all around.

But WTF is up with “Overseas Contingency Operations”? How the heck is will.i.am supposed to make an inspirational song out of that mouthful of marbles?

See, when Bush was prez, all the branding and rebranding was about fist-pumping, chest-thumping straight-shooting. Crusades, Shock and Awe, With Us or Against Us, Axes of Evil, Freedom Fighting, Dead or Alive, all that jazz.

Has his advertising team gone on vacation? Language like “Overseas Contingency Operations” is what you’d use to cover something up– that’s no way to sell a multiple-front war! Where’s Obama’s pride? Why, it’s almost like he wants to keep on doing all of the same profitably genocidal things Bush took so much pride in, but he just doesn’t want people to figure it out!

Oh, wait…