I mailed this letter to Congressman Ackerman on January 3, 2011. I received a response via email on January 25, 2011.

Thank you for contacting me to express your support for the Stop Deceptive Advertising for Women’s Services Act, H.R. 5652. Like you, I firmly believe in a woman’s right to access sound and medically accurate information when making reproductive-health decisions.

If enacted, the Stop Deceptive Advertising for Women’s Services Act would direct the Federal Trade Commission to promulgate and enforce rules that prohibit crisis-pregnancy centers from deceptively advertising abortion services and providing inaccurate information about the physical and psychological risks and repercussions of abortion. This legislation seeks to prevent crisis-pregnancy centers from using misinformation and deceit as tools of persuasion.

My own view is that a woman has the right to make the choice to have an abortion privately, with the advice from objective medical professionals, her family, and her religious and personal advisors. It is critical that women have the most accurate information during this difficult decision-making process. I’m troubled by reports that certain crisis-pregnancy centers falsely advertise abortion services and provide untruthful information about reproductive health-care with the intention of manipulation. Should this legislation reach the floor during the 112th Congress, you can count on my support.

I appreciate your interest in this extremely sensitive issue. I hope that you will continue to share your views and concerns with me.

Sincerely

GARY L. ACKERMAN
Member of Congress

No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power – Tools For Leading An Unlimited Life
by Gloria Feldt

After hearing Gloria Feldt on the RH Reality Check podcast I decided to read this book. It’s not a typical feminist book, not theory, history or biography – Feldt lays out a solid plan for women to make their feminist values a part of their lives.

It has been said that reading gives women dangerous ideas, and this book certainly gave me a few. I’ve been telling people that “No Excuses” is my motto for 2011.

Very early in the book, Feldt tackles one of my favorite questions – why don’t more women run for office?The reasons are complicated and can easily be applied to any number of questions about why women have not achieved equality in a given field. But there are ways to work around whatever these obstacles are – be they lack of resources, or internalized sexism and self doubt. Women involved in Emily’s Listor The White House Project often say that given a man and a woman of equal qualifications, the man is more likely to take the initiative and run for office and the woman is more likely to say that she is unqualified. However, a survey of women politicans shows that women are more likely to run if someone asks them to than to spontaneously decide for themselves. Thus was born She Should Run a website where anyone can nominate and encourage women they know to run for office.

It’s interesting to speculate what the future would look like if more women took on positions of power in government and business. A study reported in Politico reported that women are more effective legislators than men. Feldt often references the 30% threshold – this is thought to be the number of women necessary in a leadership role in an organization when they can have a substantial impact. The US Congress is far away from this at 17% but many corporate boardrooms, and even the Supreme Court are trending in that direction.

Feldt also encourages women to apply these principles to their marriages and personal relationships with men if they feel they are being treated unfairly.

A lot of Feldt’s argument relies on a belief that all women share common goals and should work together to achieve them.

It’s heartbreaking to me that in our half-finished feminist revolution, women still tend to isolate themselves, to think that their problems are individual concerns that they must solve alone. We feel our lack of power to make change, because when one person tries to fight the system alone, she is, in fact, relatively powerless. It’s when we just think of ourselves as individuals rather than reaching out to our sisters and brothers that things are likely to stay the same for the next women that comes along. More than that, if we fail to recognize how our choices influence the world – either by reinforcing the status quo or challenging it – we’re doomed to live lives of diminished possibilities.

I can agree with that on paper. But sadly the feminist movement does have some history of racism, homophobia and classism in it’s past. Feldt does include women from a diversity of backgrounds as examples in her book. But I’m not sure what she would make of women who align themselves with all of the goals of feminism but refuse to take the label because of past wrongdoing. I do agree that some policies – equal pay, reproductive justice, and better daycare for example would benefit all women. But that has more to do with the systemic sexism/injustices (Patriarchy/Kyriarchy) that remain in our society than any inherent similarities that all women share. To argue otherwise would be arguing for a type of gender essentialism that I cannot accept.

Nevertheless, I really did enjoy this book, and I have been recommending it to women that I know. I had never thought about power before. When my Political Science professors would mention it, my eyes would glaze over. It was too theoretical a concept for me to be bothered with. I am a pragmatist at heart and this book does compliment that tendency. Feldt takes great care to explain exactly what she means by power, and calls her definition “power to.” As in the power to make change – in opposition to “power over” which is about hierarchy. Even so, there were a few instances of woo I could have done without. For example, I still do not understand what Feldt means by “live unlimited.” Unlimited from what? Patriarchy? Internalized sexism? Generic self-doubt? Gravity? Thetans?

Without a basic understanding of the concepts of modern day feminism, the book does sound more like the Law of Attraction than a way to put theory into practice. Take for example the idea that “power must be claimed.” I understand it to mean that if I want to start a blog or a new business or run for Senate, no one will do it for me but myself. Anyone familiar with Feldt’s amazing record of activism will know what she means. Without this background, the concepts are much more nebulous. It is also for these reasons that I prefer the more specific terms autonomy and intention (which are used in the book sometimes) than power and live unlimited.

This book is fundamentally liberal. In that I mean that it takes the position that women can take actions to improve their lives and the lives of other women. This philosophy is one I am firmly on the side of, and I admire the steps Feldt has taken on twitter and via other media to reach out to younger feminists to spread her ideas.

“No Excuses” is extremely valuable because many women struggle with the idea that they are powerful or have autonomy I wonder how much has to do with the kinds of stereotype threat described in Delusions of Gender. It’s something I struggle with and is much easier to confront when thinking of it as a part of feminist activism that most women struggle with than a unique personal insecurity.

Feldt summed it up best when she wrote:

Today our challenge is to value ourselves and demand that others do, too.

Crisis pregnancy centers claim they exist to provide alternatives to abortion. At best, they can provide an adoption referral or offer a teddy bear and a few packs of diapers and formula for a pregnant woman too poor to afford them. At worst, they lie to make women think they aren’t as far along as they are – so they can run out the clock on how much time a woman has before she cannot have an abortion. Abortions get more expensive as time goes on, and it becomes more difficult to find a provider. They spread other misinformation like claiming there is a link between abortion and breast cancer, or that it often causes infertility or mental health problems.

If these organizations exist to convince people to “choose life” why would they advertise themselves to confuse people into thinking that they are an abortion provider? Many call themselves “clinics” when there are no doctors or nurses on staff, and some will list their centers under “Abortion Services” in the telephone book. Several states and local governments have passed ordinances like the agreement reached in New York, where centers are obligated to inform clients that the center does not provide abortion or birth control, that it is not a licensed medical facility, and that the pregnancy tests it provides are over-the-counter. Other centers have been forced to do the same via court order.

H.R. 5652, the Stop Deceptive Advertising for Women’s Services Act would put an end to these unfair practices. It’s sponsored by New York’s Carolyn Maloney and has 36 co-sponsors.
According to the Congressional Research Service, the bill:

Requires the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to: (1) promulgate rules prohibiting, as unfair and deceptive acts or practices, persons from advertising with the intent to deceptively create the impression that such persons provide abortion services if such persons do not provide such services; and (2) enforce violations of such rules as unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce. Read the rest of this entry »

Delusions of Gender

How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

By Cordelia Fine

The Female Brain

By Louann Brizendine

Just-so stories abound in our media about how women “naturally” talk too much, are over-emotional, bad at math, or just plain stupid. How much of it was earnest science badly reported and how much of it was just mean-spirited evolutionary psychology, I never knew. And somewhere, lurking in the darker corners of my brain was the thought that maybe it was all true; and grounded in strong, peer-reviewed science that was easily replicated. But when those doubts loomed, I would always stop myself – the difference between men and women on a genetic level is the difference between XX and XY. How could having a little more genetic material make me a stupid, frivolous, gold-digger compared to all the smart, serious, chivalrous men? It never made sense, but was that because I had a puny lady brain?

I read Louann Brizendine’s “The Female Brain” immediately before “Delusions of Gender.” It had been sitting on my bookshelf since it’s controversial publication. I read it first; knowing that it is one of the works Fine is highly critical of.

Brizendine acknowledges my quandary – if men and women have almost identical genetic makeup’s, how could our brains be so different as a result of biology alone? Her answer: hormones. The way I understood her hypothesis was that she saw men’s and women’s brains as computers with identical hard drive space and RAM. But estrogen and testosterone were like different operating systems – an iPhone and a Droid. This is a seductively simple point of view, and absurdities appear quickly. Brizendine actually suggests that women should schedule job interviews or oral exams on the days of their menstrual cycle when estrogen levels are highest because there is evidence that estrogen can increase verbal skills. When she also recommends not making important decisions while experiencing PMS or menstruation, it’s near impossible to take seriously.

Fine’s work is cut out for her as she proceeds to destroy Brizendine’s book and others like it (John Gray, etc). Her book is divided into three parts, “Half-Changed World, Half-Changed Minds”, “Neurosexism,” and “Recycling Gender.” She makes a convincing case that there is less evidence for hard wired sex based differences in behavior than most people think there is, and that actually there’s a lot of reasons to think men and women are similar in almost of the ways that the brain works.

It is common for parents to state that they know gender differences are real because although they have tried to be egalitarian, their little girl just loves her princess costume, and refuses to wear any color but pink. Fine questions the assumption that the parents are capable of bringing their children up in a world free of information about gender stereotypes. If all of the media they consume tells children how their gender is supposed to act, simply offering both a truck and a doll isn’t going to cut it. She then goes on to talk about how children, especially at preschool age, are trying to learn their place in the world. They don’t understand much about nationality, religion, or cliques. But they can latch on to the very salient gender stereotypes all around them.

The strongest evidence Fine presents for women’s intellectual equality with men are in the studies of what is called stereotype threat. The theory is that if you remind a person that they fit a stereotype of a person who is bad at the task at hand (math, for example) they will spend a lot of mental energy thinking about that fact rather than the actual task. One of the most shocking studies presented in “Delusions of Gender” was on this topic. The participants were enrolled in a calculus class. On average, the men and women had the same grades. In one group, the students were given a very difficult test and told that it was designed to try and find out what makes some people better at math than others. The average score was 19% correct for both genders. In the other group, students were told the same thing, but it was added that “despite testing on thousands of students, no gender difference had ever been found.” The women in this group scored a whopping 30% correct. If this evidence is to be believed, the amount of energy women spend trying to combat internalized sexism is tremendous. When these messages permeate our culture and our brains, they take so much away from our potential abilities. It may in fact be true that women have to work twice as hard to be considered half as good.

Finally, Fine makes the case that much neuroscience reporting is inaccurate, and favors studies that “prove” old tropes about gender to be true rather than communicating what was actually found. For example, women have a larger corpus collosum than men. (To the non-psychology majors reading: it’s the part of the brain in between the right and left hemispheres; what relays information back and forth.) This is said to explain things like why women are better at multi-tasking, and why men can’t talk about their feelings. The problem is that its simply not true; not only have fMRI imaging studies of the brain failed to show that women have more activity between hemispheres than men, but the fact is that if corpus collosum is correlated with anything it’s body size. People with larger bodies require slightly larger brains. “A large brain is simply not a smaller brain scaled up. Larger brains create different sorts of engineering problems and so – to minimize energy demands, wiring costs, communication times – there are physical reasons for different arrangements and different sized brains.” This is quite an important fact and it is routinely ignored.

Some reviewers on Amazon.com have criticized Fine’s sarcastic humor and at times downright flippant tone. I found her delightful. It can be tedious and overwhelming to realize that so much of what you have been taught is wrong. But Fine does it with style and is never tedious. One of my favorite parts was when she skewers those who spout sexist beliefs under the cover of “speaking truth to power.” Fine reigns them in and does the world a great public service.