78uuu lumière des étoiles

Dusty:Starlight:Culture



differences
2008-02-18   6:47 p.m.

Saturday night we went to Maxwell's to see two weird bands from Jersey City that should be way more successful than they are. I got hit on by an older version of a guy my friend had a thang with a few months back. In fact, he looked so much like said guy, we started referring to him as "Old ____" (name withheld cause she'd get mad if I didn't). 'Twas weird. But I have to admire his a)circuitous method of finding out my relationship status and b)his keeping up the pretense of being interested in my study of NGOs and impressions of the Jersey City arts scene despite realizing he wouldn't be sleeping with me. Cheers, Old _____.

Of course his gentlemanly approach did not appease my husband, who ranged from being amused at Old _____'s attempts to being pissy that his wife got hit on. We were a few beers in, so I understand this broad range of emotions, as I've experienced the same myself. Oh Jersey-in-close-proximity-to-Manhattan, when will you cease to yield such bountiful harvest? It's impossible not to have fun round here.

Today I wrote about the UN's Optional Protocol for CEDAW and decided it's still not enough to keep the Masaai from forcing 12 year old girls into marrying 50 year old men, or to make Jordan drop the damn exemption that ensures light sentencing for women who are killed by their husbands.
And yet the Optional Protocol is the sort of tool that exacerbates people's fears of the erosion of the sovereign state, which is primarily the reason people refuse to implement/enforce/ratify/support HR treaties coming out of the UN or whatever like CEDAW. So the resistance and backlash grows, but without any advancement for the efforts. So is it even worth it? (yes.) But how to demonstrate that? rrr.

And speaking of tools, I found this guy's rant about CEDAW creating a "feminist military" that "attempts to pay women equally" or whatever (for the job they're already doing in the army, btw), AWESOME. I think the world he describes post-ratification of CEDAW (the US remains the only industrialized nation that won't ratify- so embarrassing) sounds great, though to him it's clearly the third realm of hell. Aren't value differentials interesting?

Here's something else fun: Georgia's Green County has decided to enforce sex-segregation in schools, by their own explanation to improve crappy test scores and prevent teen pregnancy. (And regarding that last one, I'm betting that when kids are engaging in unprotected sex, it's not on school grounds. Are we gonna segregate the Denny's parking lot and the town park, too?) About the test score thing, what do we think? Watching the CNN coverage of the story today, I heard administrators defending this decision by saying "girls tend to do better when X" and "boys tend to do better when Y". Sometimes this sex-differential logic is applied to women I'm studying - be they Engineering faculty or poor women in rural Latin America - by otherwise progressive scholars, and I still don't know how I feel about it. Isn't it a bit essentialist to speak in these terms? And how can we know what women really "do" if our entire perception of them is rooted in/tainted by masculine or patriarchal parameters anyway? Still, sometimes that differential logic is tempting, and it's not as if there are NO physiological differences...

Yeah.