Opinion
You won’t believe how Upworthy became the most cynical site on the Internet
Ah, Upworthy: an online beacon of earnestness and hope, a place where gentle souls find refuge against the casual horrors and bleak humor of the larger Web, a destination for anyone—no, please, come in, all are welcome—who wants to absorb bit of…
Affluenza: Just the latest excuse for the wealthy to do whatever they want
There are many reasons to feel disgust over a judge in a juvenile court in Fort Worth, Texas, sentencing 16-year-old Ethan Couch to 10 years of probation for killing four pedestrians and paralyzing his friend while driving drunk this summer.
Leading up to the tragedy that killed Breanna Mitchell (aged 24), Hollie Boyles (42) and Shelby Boyles (21) and Brian Jennings (43), Couch and a group of friends stole alcohol from a Walmart nearby. At the time of the crash, he was driving a pickup owned by Cleburne Sheet Metal, his father's company. Couch had seven passengers in his truck and a blood-alcohol content of 0.24, three times the legal limit in Texas. He also had valium in his system. Two of his passengers were severely injured, including Sergio Molina, who suffered brain damage that has left him with blinking as his only form of communication.
Couch has never denied that he was driving drunk that night, nor that he killed those people. Instead, the defense argued that Couch grew up in a family that was dysfunctional, in part because of its wealth, and that he deserved therapy, not incarceration.
During the court trial, the defense called psychologist G Dick Miller as main witness. He gave now-infamous testimony. Miller diagnosed Couch as suffering from "affluenza" where his parents' wealth fixed problems in their lives. Miller explained it this way:
The teen never learned to say that you're sorry if you hurt someone. If you hurt someone, you sent him money.
He said that Couch had an emotional age of 12 and that both of Couch's parents failed him. Miller continued:
He never learned that sometimes you don't get your way. He had the cars and he had the money. He had freedoms that no young man would be able to handle.
According to Miller, Couch was left to raise himself in a consequence-free environment. Miller advocated for Couch to receive therapy and cease contact with his parents.
The prosecutors had asked for Couch to receive 20 years in prison. Instead and as a result of the defense's argument, Judge Jean Boyd ordered Couch to a long-term, in-patient facility for therapy, no contact with his parents, and 10-years probation. His attorneys have stated that his parents have offered to pay for him to do his in-patient therapy at a center in Southern California that costs $450,000 a year. According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Judge Boyd said that "she is familiar with programs available in the Texas juvenile justice system and is aware that he might not get the kind of intensive therapy in a state-run program that he could receive at the California facility suggested by his attorneys. Boyd said she had sentenced other teens to state programs but they never actually got into those programs."
Ethan Couch, therefore, will spend no time behind bars for killing four people and paralyzing another despite admitting guilt and despite the fact that the diagnosis the defense centered their case around – that of "affluenza" – is not even recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as an actual mental illness. On top of it, it appears that the judge found therapy and probation to be valid because his parents could pay for an expensive center and that he would not have to rely on the state programs. In summary, Couch got off because he comes from a wealthy family.
But there is something else going on here. It matters that Judge Boyd saw Couch as someone that not only could be rehabilitated but whom it was worth it to rehabilitate. The vast majority of kids in the juvenile justice facilities are youth of color, with only 18% of the population described as "anglo" (compare that to the fact that 44% of Texas' population of 26 million is "white" according to the latest census; Couch is white). Only 14% have parents who are still married, 52% need treatment for a capital or seriously violent crime, 48% for mental illness, and 78% for drug and/or alcohol abuse. Other than being wealthy and white, Couch and his crime match the majority of offenders in juvenile justice facilities in Texas.
There is also the point that Judge Boyd believed that Couch's chance of good rehabilitation would be at a wealthy, private, out-of-state facility.This is especially striking in Texas, a state known much more for its ever-growing privatized prison-industrial complex than its compassion for prisoners. Just this year, the Texas legislature slashed the budget of the Texas Juvenile Justice Department by $23m (despite the state having a surplus of funds). There is also an on-going battle over the possible closure of one of its health facilities for mentally ill juvenile offenders, both because of years of violence and abuse as well as being far from treatment providers. The juvenile criminal system is bad enough that one writer at the Dallas Observer asked in response to this case, "Because we condemn everybody else's kid to violent prisons, does that mean it's unjust to let any one kid go?"
Many of these problems in treating the mental health of criminals are mirrored in the adult criminal population in Texas. A 2009 report from the University of Texas showed that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) had a total of 112 facilities, only four of which were for the psychiatric care of the prisoners. According to the TDCJ's 2012 statistical report, of the 152,000 prisoners "on hand", only 3,400 were in SAFPF, or a Substance Abuse Felony Punishment Facility which has an "intensive six-month therapeutic community program (nine-month program for offenders with special needs)". Of the 2,600 men in those facilities, 42% are white (pdf) despite accounting for just 30% (pdf) of the overall prison population.
And Texas is just a microcosm of a larger problem throughout the US. Private prisons are growing, earning more and more money, and lobbying politicians to call for even more private prisons. Mass incarceration, of which the US is the global leader (pdf), is leading to more and more mentally ill people entering prison. It appears that only criminals like Couch – those who can afford to pay their way through expensive, private rehabilitation and therapy programs – have access to a system that has a chance of working in their favor. If judges know how poor the system is for the mentally ill, as Judge Boyd implies in her remarks regarding Texas, does that mean that they see the wealthy as more likely to be worthy of attempting true rehabilitation? Worse, does that mean even more lenient sentences for the rich?
Judge Boyd has now participated in the very cycle that she wants to break: instead of Couch having to face the tough consequences of the horrific crime he committed, his wealth has once again padded his way. She has reinforced the fact that being very wealthy and throwing money at a problem will allow you to avoid the punishments that your peers who do not have the same resources as you cannot.
Wealth literally bought this kid's way out of prison and into a facility that can help him. The tragedy this case highlights is all the children who cannot do that and will instead enter an ever-growing, ever-problematic US criminal system that will most likely fail them – and us.
Team Omidyar, World Police: eBay puts user data on a 'silver platter' for law enforcement
“We don’t believe the NSA has come near our data… We have a tremendous amount of thought and procedures and security around customer data.” – Devin Wenig, president, eBay Marketplace “Unlike other e-commerce…
That sound you hear is the shredding of the social contract
I met Supreme Court Justice William Brennan in 1987 when I was creating a series for public television called In Search of the Constitution, celebrating the bicentennial of our founding document. By then, he had served on the court longer than any of his colleagues and had written close to 500 majority opinions, many of them addressing fundamental questions of equality, voting rights, school segregation and — in New York Times v. Sullivan in particular — the defense of a free press.;
[Image credit: Hungry children in refugee camp, distribution of humanitarian food via Shutterstock.com]
If Nelson Mandela was not a saint, then who is a saint?
In many of the tributes paid in recent days to Nelson Mandela, it has been observed, approvingly, that he was no saint. Most know what it means, in ordinary language, to say of somebody with affection that he or she was not a saint. It suggests that…
[Image credit: Renata Sedmakova / Shutterstock.com]
Does art make kids smart?
Taking kids to the art museum can be a bit like offering kids a nutritious snack. You can sell the outing as good news/bad news. The good news is we’re leaving the house today. The bad news is we’re not going to the mall. (And as a parent you want to avoid the mall – and any other place – that has multiple branded items for sale.);
Creator of 'The Wire' says 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show.'
America is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy, its politics. There are definitely two Americas. I live in one, on one block in Baltimore that is part of the viable America, the America that is connected to its own economy, where there is a plausible future for the people born into it. About 20 blocks away is another America entirely. It's astonishing how little we have to do with each other, and yet we are living in such proximity.
There's no barbed wire around West Baltimore or around East Baltimore, around Pimlico, the areas in my city that have been utterly divorced from the American experience that I know. But there might as well be. We've somehow managed to march on to two separate futures and I think you're seeing this more and more in the west. I don't think it's unique to America.
I think we've perfected a lot of the tragedy and we're getting there faster than a lot of other places that may be a little more reasoned, but my dangerous idea kind of involves this fellow who got left by the wayside in the 20th century and seemed to be almost the butt end of the joke of the 20th century; a fellow named Karl Marx.
I'm not a Marxist in the sense that I don't think Marxism has a very specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it wasn't attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you might solve that.
You know if you've read Capital or if you've got the Cliff Notes, you know that his imaginings of how classical Marxism – of how his logic would work when applied – kind of devolve into such nonsense as the withering away of the state and platitudes like that. But he was really sharp about what goes wrong when capital wins unequivocally, when it gets everything it asks for.
That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.
We understand profit. In my country we measure things by profit. We listen to the Wall Street analysts. They tell us what we're supposed to do every quarter. The quarterly report is God. Turn to face God. Turn to face Mecca, you know. Did you make your number? Did you not make your number? Do you want your bonus? Do you not want your bonus?
And that notion that capital is the metric, that profit is the metric by which we're going to measure the health of our society is one of the fundamental mistakes of the last 30 years. I would date it in my country to about 1980 exactly, and it has triumphed.
Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism by the end of the 20th century and was predominant in all respects, but the great irony of it is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or philosophical perfection.
It's pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works because we don't let it work entirely. And that's a hard idea to think – that there isn't one single silver bullet that gets us out of the mess we've dug for ourselves. But man, we've dug a mess.
After the second world war, the west emerged with the American economy coming out of its wartime extravagance, emerging as the best product. It was the best product. It worked the best. It was demonstrating its might not only in terms of what it did during the war but in terms of just how facile it was in creating mass wealth.
Plus, it provided a lot more freedom and was doing the one thing that guaranteed that the 20th century was going to be – and forgive the jingoistic sound of this – the American century.
It took a working class that had no discretionary income at the beginning of the century, which was working on subsistence wages. It turned it into a consumer class that not only had money to buy all the stuff that they needed to live but enough to buy a bunch of shit that they wanted but didn't need, and that was the engine that drove us.
It wasn't just that we could supply stuff, or that we had the factories or know-how or capital, it was that we created our own demand and started exporting that demand throughout the west. And the standard of living made it possible to manufacture stuff at an incredible rate and sell it.
And how did we do that? We did that by not giving in to either side. That was the new deal. That was the great society. That was all of that argument about collective bargaining and union wages and it was an argument that meant neither side gets to win.
Labour doesn't get to win all its arguments, capital doesn't get to. But it's in the tension, it's in the actual fight between the two, that capitalism actually becomes functional, that it becomes something that every stratum in society has a stake in, that they all share.
The unions actually mattered. The unions were part of the equation. It didn't matter that they won all the time, it didn't matter that they lost all the time, it just mattered that they had to win some of the time and they had to put up a fight and they had to argue for the demand and the equation and for the idea that workers were not worth less, they were worth more.
Ultimately we abandoned that and believed in the idea of trickle-down and the idea of the market economy and the market knows best, to the point where now libertarianism in my country is actually being taken seriously as an intelligent mode of political thought. It's astonishing to me. But it is. People are saying I don't need anything but my own ability to earn a profit. I'm not connected to society. I don't care how the road got built, I don't care where the firefighter comes from, I don't care who educates the kids other than my kids. I am me. It's the triumph of the self. I am me, hear me roar.
That we've gotten to this point is astonishing to me because basically in winning its victory, in seeing that Wall come down and seeing the former Stalinist state's journey towards our way of thinking in terms of markets or being vulnerable, you would have thought that we would have learned what works. Instead we've descended into what can only be described as greed. This is just greed. This is an inability to see that we're all connected, that the idea of two Americas is implausible, or two Australias, or two Spains or two Frances.
Societies are exactly what they sound like. If everybody is invested and if everyone just believes that they have "some", it doesn't mean that everybody's going to get the same amount. It doesn't mean there aren't going to be people who are the venture capitalists who stand to make the most. It's not each according to their needs or anything that is purely Marxist, but it is that everybody feels as if, if the society succeeds, I succeed, I don't get left behind. And there isn't a society in the west now, right now, that is able to sustain that for all of its population.
And so in my country you're seeing a horror show. You're seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you're seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You're seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we've put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.
We have become something other than what we claim for the American dream and all because of our inability to basically share, to even contemplate a socialist impulse.
Socialism is a dirty word in my country. I have to give that disclaimer at the beginning of every speech, "Oh by the way I'm not a Marxist you know". I lived through the 20th century. I don't believe that a state-run economy can be as viable as market capitalism in producing mass wealth. I don't.
I'm utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument's over. But the idea that it's not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn't going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that's astonishing to me.
And so capitalism is about to seize defeat from the jaws of victory all by its own hand. That's the astonishing end of this story, unless we reverse course. Unless we take into consideration, if not the remedies of Marx then the diagnosis, because he saw what would happen if capital triumphed unequivocally, if it got everything it wanted.
And one of the things that capital would want unequivocally and for certain is the diminishment of labour. They would want labour to be diminished because labour's a cost. And if labour is diminished, let's translate that: in human terms, it means human beings are worth less.
From this moment forward unless we reverse course, the average human being is worth less on planet Earth. Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is capitalism.
Mistaking capitalism for a blueprint as to how to build a society strikes me as a really dangerous idea in a bad way. Capitalism is a remarkable engine again for producing wealth. It's a great tool to have in your toolbox if you're trying to build a society and have that society advance. You wouldn't want to go forward at this point without it. But it's not a blueprint for how to build the just society. There are other metrics besides that quarterly profit report.
The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?
If you watched the debacle that was, and is, the fight over something as basic as public health policy in my country over the last couple of years, imagine the ineffectiveness that Americans are going to offer the world when it comes to something really complicated like global warming. We can't even get healthcare for our citizens on a basic level. And the argument comes down to: "Goddamn this socialist president. Does he think I'm going to pay to keep other people healthy? That's socialism you know. HMO [health-maintenance organisation] contract. Motherfucker."
What do you think group health insurance is? You know you ask these guys, "Do you have group health insurance where you …?" "Oh yeah, I get …" you know, "my law firm …" So when you get sick you're able to afford the treatment.
The treatment comes because you have enough people in your law firm so you're able to get health insurance enough for them to stay healthy. So the actuarial tables work and all of you, when you do get sick, are able to have the resources there to get better because you're relying on the idea of the group. Yeah. And they nod their heads, and you go "Brother, that's socialism. You know it is."
And ... you know when you say, OK, we're going to do what we're doing for your law firm but we're going to do it for 300 million Americans and we're going to make it affordable for everybody that way. And yes, it means that you're going to be paying for the other guys in the society, the same way you pay for the other guys in the law firm … Their eyes glaze. You know they don't want to hear it. It's too much. Too much to contemplate the idea that the whole country might be actually connected.
So I'm astonished that at this late date I'm standing here and saying we might want to go back for this guy Marx that we were laughing at, if not for his prescriptions, then at least for his depiction of what is possible if you don't mitigate the authority of capitalism, if you don't embrace some other values for human endeavour.
And that's what The Wire was about basically, it was about people who were worth less and who were no longer necessary, as maybe 10 or 15% of my country is no longer necessary to the operation of the economy. It was about them trying to solve, for lack of a better term, an existential crisis. In their irrelevance, their economic irrelevance, they were nonetheless still on the ground occupying this place called Baltimore and they were going to have to endure somehow.
That's the great horror show. What are we going to do with all these people that we've managed to marginalise? It was kind of interesting when it was only race, when you could do this on the basis of people's racial fears and it was just the black and brown people in American cities who had the higher rates of unemployment and the higher rates of addiction and were marginalised and had the shitty school systems and the lack of opportunity.
And kind of interesting in this last recession to see the economy shrug and start to throw white middle-class people into the same boat, so that they became vulnerable to the drug war, say from methamphetamine, or they became unable to qualify for college loans. And all of a sudden a certain faith in the economic engine and the economic authority of Wall Street and market logic started to fall away from people. And they realised it's not just about race, it's about something even more terrifying. It's about class. Are you at the top of the wave or are you at the bottom?
So how does it get better? In 1932, it got better because they dealt the cards again and there was a communal logic that said nobody's going to get left behind. We're going to figure this out. We're going to get the banks open. From the depths of that depression a social compact was made between worker, between labour and capital that actually allowed people to have some hope.
We're either going to do that in some practical way when things get bad enough or we're going to keep going the way we're going, at which point there's going to be enough people standing on the outside of this mess that somebody's going to pick up a brick, because you know when people get to the end there's always the brick. I hope we go for the first option but I'm losing faith.
The other thing that was there in 1932 that isn't there now is that some element of the popular will could be expressed through the electoral process in my country.
The last job of capitalism – having won all the battles against labour, having acquired the ultimate authority, almost the ultimate moral authority over what's a good idea or what's not, or what's valued and what's not – the last journey for capital in my country has been to buy the electoral process, the one venue for reform that remained to Americans.
Right now capital has effectively purchased the government, and you witnessed it again with the healthcare debacle in terms of the $450m that was heaved into Congress, the most broken part of my government, in order that the popular will never actually emerged in any of that legislative process.
So I don't know what we do if we can't actually control the representative government that we claim will manifest the popular will. Even if we all start having the same sentiments that I'm arguing for now, I'm not sure we can effect them any more in the same way that we could at the rise of the Great Depression, so maybe it will be the brick. But I hope not.
David Simon is an American author and journalist and was the executive producer of The Wire. This is an edited extract of a talk delivered at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney.
[Screencap of Simon at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas via YouTube]
It's time for brain science to ditch the 'Venus vs. Mars' cliche
Reports trumpeting basic differences between male and female brains are biological determinism at its most trivial, says the science writer of the year
As hardy perennials go, there is little to beat that science hacks' favourite: the hard-wiring of male and female brains. For more than 30 years, I have seen a stream of tales about gender differences in brain structure under headlines that assure me that from birth men are innately more rational and better at map-reading than women, who are emotional, empathetic multi-taskers, useless at telling jokes. I am from Mars, apparently, while the ladies in my life are from Venus.
And there are no signs that this flow is drying up, with last week witnessing publication of a particularly lurid example of the genre. Writing in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia revealed they had used a technique called diffusion tensor imaging to show that the neurons in men's brains are connected to each other in a very different way from neurons in women's brains.
This point was even illustrated by the team, led by Professor Ragini Verma, with a helpful diagram. A male brain was depicted with its main connections – coloured blue, needless to say – running from the front to the back. Connections within cranial hemispheres were strong, but connections between the two hemispheres were weak. By contrast, the female brain had thick connections running from side to side with strong links between the two hemispheres.
"These maps show us a stark difference in the architecture of the human brain that helps provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks and women at others," said Verma.
The response of the press was predictable. Once again scientists had "proved" that from birth men have brains which are hardwired to give us better spatial skills, to leave us bereft of empathy for others, and to make us run, like mascara, at the first hint of emotion. Equally, the team had provided an explanation for the "fact" that women cannot use corkscrews or park cars but can remember names and faces better than males. It is all written in our neurons at birth.
As I have said, I have read this sort of thing before. I didn't believe it then and I don't believe it now. It is biological determinism at its silly, trivial worst. Yes, men and women probably do have differently wired brains, but there is little convincing evidence to suggest these variations are caused by anything other than cultural factors. Males develop improved spatial skills not because of an innate superiority but because they are expected and encouraged to be strong at sport, which requires expertise at catching and throwing. Similarly, it is anticipated that girls will be more emotional and talkative, and so their verbal skills are emphasised by teachers and parents. As the years pass, these different lifestyles produce variations in brain wiring – which is a lot more plastic than most biological determinists realise. This possibility was simply not addressed by Verma and her team.
Equally, when gender differences are uncovered by researchers they are frequently found to be trivial, a point made by Robert Plomin, a professor of behavioural genetics at London's Institute of Psychiatry, whose studies have found that a mere 3% of the variation in young children's verbal development is due to their gender. "If you map the distribution of scores for verbal skills of boys and of girls, you get two graphs that overlap so much you would need a very fine pencil indeed to show the difference between them. Yet people ignore this huge similarity between boys and girls and instead exaggerate wildly the tiny difference between them. It drives me wild."
I should make it clear that Plomin made that remark three years ago when I last wrote about the issue of gender and brain wiring. It was not my first incursion, I should stress. Indeed, I have returned to the subject – which is an intriguing, important one – on a number of occasions over the years as neurological studies have been hyped in the media, often by the scientists who carried them out. It has taken a great deal of effort by other researchers to put the issue in proper perspective.
A major problem is the lack of consistent work in the field, a point stressed to me in 2005 – during an earlier outbreak of brain-gender difference stories – by Professor Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College London, and author of Y: The Descent of Men. "Researching my book, I discovered there was no consensus at all about the science [of gender and brain structure]," he told me. "There were studies that said completely contradictory things about male and female brains. That means you can pick whatever study you like and build a thesis around it. The whole field is like that. It is very subjective. That doesn't mean there are no differences between the brains of the sexes, but we should take care not to exaggerate them."
Needless to say that is not what has happened over the years. Indeed, this has become a topic whose coverage has been typified mainly by flaky claims, wild hyperbole and sexism. It is all very depressing. The question is: why has this happened? Why is there such divergence in explanations for the differences in mental abilities that we observe in men and women? And why do so many people want to exaggerate them so badly?
The first issue is the easier to answer. The field suffers because it is bedevilled by its extraordinary complexity. The human brain is a vast, convoluted edifice and scientists are only now beginning to develop adequate tools to explore it. The use of diffusion tensor imaging by Verma's team was an important breakthrough, it should be noted. The trouble is, once more, those involved were rash in their interpretations of their own work.
"This study contains some important data but it has been badly overhyped and the authors must take some of the blame," says Professor Dorothy Bishop, of Oxford University. "They talk as if there is a typical male and a typical female brain – they even provide a diagram – but they ignore the fact that there is a great deal of variation within the sexes in terms of brain structure. You simply cannot say there is a male brain and a female brain."
Even more critical is Marco Catani, of London's Institute of Psychiatry. "The study's main conclusions about possible cognitive differences between males and females are not supported by the findings of the study. A link between anatomical differences and cognitive functions should be demonstrated and the authors have not done so. They simply have no idea of how these differences in anatomy translate into cognitive attitudes. So the main conclusion of the study is purely speculative."
The study is also unclear how differences in brain architecture between the sexes arose in the first place, a point raised by Michael Bloomfield of the MRC's Clinical Science Centre. "An obvious possibility is that male hormones like testosterone and female hormones like oestrogen have different effects on the brain. A more subtle possibility is that bringing a child up in a particular gender could affect how our brains are wired."
In fact, Verma's results showed that the neuronal connectivity differences between the sexes increased with the age of her subjects. Such a finding is entirely consistent with the idea that cultural factors are driving changes in the brain's wiring. The longer we live, the more our intellectual biases are exaggerated and intensified by our culture, with cumulative effects on our neurons. In other words, the intellectual differences we observe between the sexes are not the result of different genetic birthrights but are a consequence of what we expect a boy or a girl to be.
Why so many people should be so desperate to ignore or obscure this fact is a very different issue. In the end, I suspect it depends on whether you believe our fates are sealed at birth or if you think that it is a key part of human nature to be able to display a plasticity in behaviour and in ways of thinking in the face of altered circumstance. My money is very much on the latter.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
[Image credit: Couple fighting and dressed for a night out via Shutterstock.com]
The naked truth: Hollywood still treats its women as second class citizens
Research shows female stars are paid less, have fewer lines and spend more time with their clothes off than men
By Monday morning, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the sci-fi adventure thriller starring Jennifer Lawrence, will have taken close to half a billion dollars in global ticket sales. A female-led blockbuster is rare in any year, and all the more so in one marked by box-office disappointments and industry turmoil.
Nevertheless the film's success is likely to intensify rather than diminish calls for greater sexual equality in film. For despite the success of women-led films such as The Hunger Games and Cate Blanchett's Oscar-tipped performance in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, or directors like Kathryn Bigelow and writers such as Lena Dunham – and most recently the taboo-busting French lesbian romance Blue Is the Warmest Colour – Hollywood remains stubbornly set in its ways regarding sexual equality.
The New York Film Academy has published a remarkably comprehensive study that demonstrates just that: enduring disparities are revealed in the number of speaking parts given to men and women; the relative number of roles requiring full or partial nudity also shows a stark difference; and the sexual divide in offscreen jobs and the gulf in earnings between male and female actors is laid bare.
In publishing the survey, the academy called for a discussion about why, when women comprise half of ticket-buyers and nearly half of directors entered at this year's Sundance Film Festival, their numbers fall away dramatically at the top end of the industry. "By shedding light on gender inequality in film, we hope to start a discussion about what can be done to increase women's exposure and power in big-budget films," its publishers state.
Examining the top 500 films from 2007 to 2012, the survey found one third of speaking parts are filled by women and only 10% of films are equally balanced in terms of roles. The average ratio of male to female actors is 2.25 to 1.
"Like in any big industry, change takes time," points out Dr Martha M Lauzen, executive director, Centre for the Study of Women in Television, Film & New Media at San Diego state university, California, whose research forms the basis of the academy study. "The film industry doesn't exist in a bubble. It's part of a larger society that tends to have biases and prejudices."
According to Lauzen, women comprised 18% of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinema- tographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films in 2012 – an improvement of only 1% since 1998. Counting directors alone, women accounted for only 9% – the same figure as in 1998. Lauzen says it is relevant to compare the number of women in positions of power in film, onscreen or off, to the number of women in leadership positions in Fortune 500 companies. "All of these are highly coveted, high-status positions – and when you're talking about those kinds of positions, they remain dominated by men."
The most surprising thing, Lauzen says, is the apparent lack of change. "A filmgoer might reference Hunger Games and think things must be OK. It's easy to be misled by a few high-profile cases. But you have to do the count; and the numbers show we're not seeing any change." According to Forbes, the 10 highest-paid actresses made a collective $181m (£110m) versus $465m made by the top 10 male actors. At last year's Academy Awards, 140 men were nominated compared with 35 women. There were no female nominees in directing, cinematography, writing or in several other categories.
When it comes to the silver screen itself the results of Lauzen's research are even more stark: 29% of women in the top 500 films wore sexually revealing clothes compared with only 7% of men; 26% of actresses appear partially naked, compared with 9% of men, and the percentage of teenage females depicted with some nudity has risen by a third since 2007. While those figures may be skewed by one film alone (Harmony Korine's hit teenage skin celebration Spring Breakers) the overall pattern of sex bias is unmistakable.
The casting of 50 Shades of Grey has been dogged by the reluctance among a series of potential male leads (including British hunk Charlie Hunnam, who accepted the part before dropping out over "scheduling conflicts") to get their kit off in a three-movie deal. At the same time, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, the stars of Blue Is the Warmest Colour, who were jointly awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, have spoken of their embarrassment at the excessive attention paid to the 20 minutes of sex in the three-hour movie. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis likened director Abdellatif Kechiche's filming to pornography. "Women tend be younger and are still expected to adhere to a higher standard of appearance," says Lauzen, whose studies have found filmgoers are more likely to know the marital status of a female character and occupation of a male. All of this feeds into stereotypes about the important parts of identity. For women, that is to be very young and look a certain way."
In her acceptance speech for an award for excellence in film, at Women in Film LA's annual Crystal+Lucy awards in June, actress Laura Linney witheringly described the overwhelmingly male ambience in the US film industry. When she first started, she said, she was astonished at the "enormous amount of time" men spent discussing the colour of her hair – a process that became "absurd and a complete waste of time".
"I soon realised that for the most part I was surrounded by men. As an actress in film, it is very easy to become isolated just due to the ratio of gender inequality that exists. Rarely do you have a scene with other women, very few women are on the crew, and what few female executives arrive tend to keep to themselves."
The success of individual women in film, whether Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games, Cate Blanchett or Kathryn Bigelow, is often treated as a sign of progress, when, according to Lauzen and other critics, they are the exceptions that prove the rule. "The Hunger Games is just one film," says Lauzen. "The same thing happened when Bridesmaids came out, or when Kathryn Bigelow won her Oscar. People start talking about a 'Bridesmaids effect' or a 'Bigelow effect' – that these high-profile successes would radiate an effect to other women in the business."
But, she says, that's not the case. "Kathryn Bigelow's success may have helped her, but it didn't change the world because attitudes about gender or race or age are held on a very deep level. Old habits die hard. One of the reasons we haven't seen much change, is that it's not seen as a problem by people in positions of power – even by some women. Unless you perceive something as a problem you're not going to fix it."
No, Daily Mail: Humans did not come from outer space or from monkeys f*cking pigs
For some reason, the Daily Mail in the last couple of weeks is doing its utmost to make two self-published fantasies by a couple of marginal cranks sound like legitimate dispatches from the world of science.
Well, it's pretty obvious what the reason is. Pseudoscience sells.
The first salvo arrived on November 14, when a ludicrous self-published book with a cover that looks like it was made on MS Paint was treated like a startling new advance in biology. Humans are not from Earth was written, the Mail says, by a "U.S. ecologist" by the name of Ellis Silver.
Now, there's this stuff called "DNA" that we share with every other living thing on the planet which makes it pointless to examine the silly idea in this book -- that human beings were suddenly dropped off here from another solar system just a few tens of thousands of years ago. This "theory" is supported with an amateur scientist's litany of puzzlements -- why do humans sunburn? Why do our backs seem so poorly adapted for the way we live? Why are the heads of babies so large and make childbirth so difficult? It's the usual stuff that sends your garden variety crank looking for spectacularly bad answers.
There's a reason a book like this was self-published by someone no one has ever heard of.
And there's a funny thing about the way the Mail refers to him. In newspaper style, it's rare to refer to someone as "Dr." and yet in this story the Mail refers to him as "Dr. Ellis" no less than ten times. (And why "Dr. Ellis" as opposed to "Dr. Silver"? One can only wonder.)
It's the sure sign of a newspaper straining to lend credibility to someone it actually knows nothing about.
Silver's Twitter account hasn't been active in two years, but it lists him as "an ecological consultant" from Madison, Wisconsin. A brief description Ellis wrote about himself in 2008 says that he was "an eco consultant, better living evangelist, and writer, originally from Madison, Wisconsin, but currently living in England. Ellis is the author of two guidebooks on eco solutions, to be published shortly. A website is under construction."
We're still waiting for his website, but we're sure it will be a doozy.
Seven of the eight tweets that Silver put out before his account went dormant all promoted a vanity publishing site, "ideas4writers," which Ellis also used to publish his book.
Any newspaper editor will assure you that silly books published through vanity sites arrive in the mail every day. Promoting a book like this, and straining to make it seem legitimate, is pretty much the opposite of a newspaper's role.
But the Daily Mail was only getting warmed up.
Today, it is promoting an entirely different theory for the ascent of man.
This time, a writer comes up with his own puzzlements about odd human traits -- hairless skin, a protruding nose, heavy eyelashes and the like -- and rather than conclude that we're space aliens dropped off after a trip from another planet, he says we're the result of monkeys fucking pigs several million years ago.
Right off the bat, the Mail pretends that this theorist -- with the unlikely name of Eugene McCarthy -- is "of the University of Georgia."
That would seem to suggest that Mr. McCarthy is on the faculty of that august academy, wouldn't you agree?
But looking at McCarthy's website, he makes it clear that he took a degree from the university and taught there at one time, as grad students typically do. But the university's website doesn't currently list him on the faculty. He also explains that he had some success writing about hybrid bird species, but once he turned to mammals he ran into trouble with a university press, and he found solace publishing from his own website.
As in the previous story, the Mail is title-happy, and Eugene is referred to as "Dr. McCarthy" no less than eight times.
Well-known biologist and blogger Professor PZ Myers, who actually is OF the University of Minnesota-Morris, skillfully took apart McCarthy's ideas in a recent blog post. Even if monkeys and pigs somehow found reason to produce and raise human babies in some bizarre sub-Saharan sex orgy, there's a major problem preventing their hybrid offspring from surviving -- namely, that chimps have 48 chromosomes and pigs have only 38.
The Mail does refer to the drubbing that Myers gave the "Monkey-Fucking-A-Pig hypothesis," but called Myers "impudent," and Myers -- who not only has a PhD but actually teaches at a university -- does not get the "Dr." treatment.
We know it's probably futile to point out the intellectually dishonest practices of a news organ its own readers refer to as the "Daily Fail." But if we don't do it, who will?
[IMAGE: From a YouTube video of a monkey riding a pig.]
Walmart on Black Friday: Scenes from the apocalypse
A Sheriff's department in western Virginia confirms this morning that a scuffle over a parking spot at a Walmart in Tazewell County resulted in a stabbing, which is, of course, how we know that the holiday shopping season is upon us.
We're collecting videos and tweets of the Black Friday madness this morning.
We'll begin in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, which experienced a stampede for savings!
This video has been popular this morning, showing a manic shopper pushing through a crowd like a fullback sniffing the end zone...
Here's a scuffle over something -- tablets? -- which results in an arrest that a Walmart employee doesn't want filmed...
And here's a frenzy over some Rachael Ray cookware in Tennessee...
Things were going great for Amy...
Not only is Walmart practically empty, there is SO MUCH STUFF left! Kind of shocked.
— Amy Zeigler (@AmyZig) November 29, 2013But not so well for this guy...
Went to walmart for nothing...... Fuck...
— Layno (@TheMainEvent13) November 29, 2013Aw, mom...
Mom called me and woke me up and had me drive to Walmart because the grill she bought was too big to fit in her car
— Ty (@Ty_Sager) November 29, 2013A satisfied customer!
Me & @ATV_LIFE450 stood in line at Walmart for 3 tvs for 6 hours. It was totally worth it tho.
— Morgan Renee (@Its_MW_Bro) November 29, 2013Now this sounds like an odd special...
This Walmart is advertising $9.99 iPads to anyone who throws their baby into a snakepit.
— dulcetry (@dulcetry) November 29, 2013No idea.
WALMART SMELLS LIKE BREAKFAST.
— Katievw (@katieveegee) November 29, 2013Score!
i swear my mommy is the best she got us the last tv at Walmart ! merry tristmas to us
— Ororo Munroe (@yosoyklee) November 29, 2013Maranda's going in!
About to go into Walmart, pray for me.
— Maranda Phillips (@Marannddaa) November 29, 2013Hang in there, Kaylyn...
Going on 3 hours in line for iPhone. Walmart get your crap together, I should not be besties with the strangers in line #Survivin
— Kaylyn Popp (@kaylynpopp) November 29, 2013Now, now, Darth...
I wish my wife was off today so we could go judge assholes at walmart
— Darth BUCN (@LRNeuby) November 29, 2013Getting teased...
They are laughing at me bc I went to Walmart last night and only bought pajamas and socks. Lol.
— Traycee (@traycee30) November 29, 2013Madness in Quincy...
Now that's a sister...
Been standing at Walmart for two hours for my brother to get a phone... #thestruggleisreal #BlackFriday
— Emily Poe (@em_poe) November 29, 2013And amid the madness, life goes on...
That awkward moment when you see your ex's parents at Walmart and you look like you just rolled out of bed.
— Shayna Bess (@sheelah_beach) November 29, 2013A shopper scoffs...
Just overheard two co-workers agreeing together that "how can you not love Wal-Mart?!" Barf. I can think of every reason under the sun.
— El Gev (@inactivedesert) November 29, 2013Hold it together, Jerod...
Going on 3 hours of waiting at Walmart for my Iphone upgrade. :(
#BlackFriday #soomanybetterwaystospendmytime!
— Jerod Keyes (@jerodkeyes) November 29, 2013Carmen's life will never be the same...
All I came for was this, walmart you ruined my day and my nephews Christmas I hope you're happy
— Carmen Alvarado (@AvocadoCarmen) November 29, 2013And some were inspired...
i start a business, make it a walmart-like store or something
— Griz (@YoungGreeezy) November 29, 2013Injured in the line of duty...
Officer suffers broken wrist as he brakes up brawl between two men at S. Calif Wal-Mart store https://t.co/rndJi7Qs1M
— Ventura County Star (@vcstar) November 29, 2013Someone forgot what day it is...
Last time I ever go into walmart early to get milk.
— Nicccc (@niccystevens) November 29, 2013The irony...
Just got into a fight jockeying for position to try and film a Walmart fight
— Anthony Lima (@AnthonyLimaFAN) November 29, 2013Good old dad...
My sister was crying cause she wanted to go Black Friday shopping so my dad took her to Walmart and told her to pick out anything she wants
— Taylor Peace (@Taylor_Peace9) November 29, 2013Victory tastes so sweet!
Just made some awesome waffles with my $4.50 waffle iron, courtesy of walmart's #BlackFriday.
— Jessica Montgomery (@jessamonty) November 29, 2013Aw dad, not here...
No dad your not allow to just start singing in walmart
— Emily Traynor (@emilyytraynor) November 29, 2013But think of the savings!
Man I really spent 365.76 at walmart last night !!! Wow lol
— Beautiful 3 (@ItsDeejYaBish_) November 29, 2013
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