The Atlantic: The Weaponization of Awkwardness

Consent, concession, the blurred lines between the two: The work of fiction, and the analysis of it, are each in their own ways deeply true. And they struck a cultural nerve this week—Dawson’s essay, titled “Bad Sex, or the Sex We Don’t Want but Have Anyway,” went viral along with Roupenian’s story—because they highlight, together, something that is widely recognized but rarely talked about: the version of sex that is bad not in a criminal sense, but in an emotional one. The kind that can happen, as Dawson suggested, partly as a result of cultural forces that exert themselves on women in particular: the demand that they be accommodating. That they be pleasing. That they capitulate to the feelings of others, and maintain a kind of sunny status quo—both in the immediate moment of a given social situation, and more broadly: Wait for the raise to be offered. Put in that extra minute of effort with the eye makeup. Nod. Smile. Once you’ve consented, don’t make things weird by saying, out loud, that you’ve changed your mind. “Cat Person,” on top of everything else, is an exploration of awkwardness as a form of social coercion; the conversation it sparked, accordingly, in “Bad Sex” and Facebook posts and essays and tweet threads, has been a consideration of that kind of awkwardness as a condition—and a chronic one.

That these conversations would be occasioned by a work of fiction is both ironic and revealing: The world itself, the one that is all too real, has long provided its own stories of perilous awkwardness. As revelations of sexual harassment and assault have come to light in recent months, awkwardness—and discomfort—and embarrassment—and, in general, Americans’ deeply ingrained impulse to avoid involvement in an Awkward Moment When—have also shown their darker sides. Harvey Weinstein, on the tape recorded by the model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez as part of a New York Police Department sting operation, told her: “Don’t embarrass me in the hotel.” And “Honey, don’t have a fight with me in the hallway.” And “Please, you’re making a big scene here. Please.” So many of the other men accused of predation, it has now become painfully clear, have in their own ways used those soft but crushing social pressures as weapons, both in the moments of abuse and beyond: Don’t be dramatic. Don’t make a scene. Please. [...]

No one knew what to say. It’s one of the simplest and most widespread mechanisms that helps open secrets to stay secret for so long: the impulse to avoid making scenes, to avoid making things weird. Women bear the brunt of these mandates; men, of course, experience them, too. The people around her, Wildman suggests, felt awkward talking about harassment; as a result, her claims about her own experience—and she herself—got ignored. Awkwardness became a cyclical force, weaponized not through malice, but through the convenient delusions of benign neglect. Here is Franklin Foer, the former editor of the New Republic—and now a national correspondent for The Atlantic—speaking, with admirable candor, about his reaction to hearing some of the comments Wieseltier seems to have made about women at the magazine: [...]

And Americans, in particular, have long written easiness and chattiness and pleasantry into our shared scripts. Many other cultures are perfectly content with moments of silence in the midst of a conversation; Americans, on the other hand—we who reflexively append awkward to silence—tend to rush to fill the void with idle, but blessedly voluminous, chit-chat. We have “real talk,” with the qualifier revealing as much as the conversation itself, and, relatedly, a deep and dedicated aversion to conducting what human-resources departments euphemize as “uncomfortable conversations.” Several years ago, The Atlantic coined the term phaking—and also dodge dialing, and also the cell phone side step—to describe the very common act of pretending to be on one’s phone to avoid in-person interaction with others. Urban Dictionary’s top definition of awkward explains the word as the situation in which “no one really knows what to say, or choose not to say anything.” It advises the reader, should she find herself in such a wretched circumstance: “Just back slowly away.”

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The California Sunday Magazine: She Didn't Say Yes, She Didn't Say No

DEBATE OVER the definitions of sexual consent and assault has been raging nationally for the better part of a decade. In 2014, California became the first state to mandate that universities receiving public funding use the “affirmative consent” standard in sexual misconduct hearings. Sometimes called “yes means yes,” it requires a sexual partner to obtain “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary” agreement at each stage of an intimate encounter. That is a dramatic break from the past, when until a person said stop (and sometimes not even then), anything was fair game. In separate legislation, any California school district with a health class is now required to include consent education. [...]

Men who receive some form of consent education from their colleges do understand the concept, at least in theory, according to Nicole Badera, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan. In interviews for a paper she presented earlier this year to the American Sociology Association, nearly all of her subjects could offer at least a rudimentary definition: both partners wanting to be doing what they’re doing. Yet when asked to describe their most recent sexual experiences in both a hookup and a relationship, they would expand their definition to encompass their behavior rather than acknowledge misconduct. Not a single student admitted to rape, not even the one whose girlfriend cried and begged for him to stop. [...]

FEW OF THE BOYS I met had ever had a substantive talk with their parents about sex, relationships, or consent. That’s typical, according to a survey of more than 3,000 high school students and young adults published earlier this year by the Making Caring Common project, which is part of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. More than 60 percent of respondents had never had a single conversation with their parents about how to be sure in advance that your partner wants to be — and is comfortable — having sex with you. A similar share had never been told about “the importance of not pressuring someone to have sex with you.” Other research has found that parents are vastly more likely to talk to their daughters about sexual readiness, contraception, and disease protection, perhaps because they believe girls are more vulnerable — emotionally as well as physically — to negative consequences. But that leaves boys to learn their behavior from one another.

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Vox: Trumpism never existed. It was always just Trump.

Trumpism was made out of whole cloth, by his supporters and by his detractors, cobbled together from an amalgamation of The Art of the Deal and divinations of Trump’s innermost thoughts based on his staffing decisions and tweets. Trumpism was less an interpretation of another language than a wholly invented phrasebook for a language that was never real in the first place. Trump’s genius was in letting millions of people largely believe what they wanted to believe about his policies and preferences and refusing to get in the way. [...]

This is the reason why so many GOP members of Congress have voted with Trump in 2017: Not because they are supporting a Trumpian agenda, but because Trump has largely governed as a pretty standard conservative Republican. While conservative priorities — like deregulation and nominating conservative judges — have been more or less successfully brought to fruition, the last remaining fragment of “Trumpism” appears to be Donald Trump’s exceedingly pugnacious Twitter feed. [...]

“Trumpism” wasn’t an ideology. It was a means to an end, the promises one makes when trying to win an election, not change the face of politics. And only Trump could use it. Only Trump could tell Americans that America wasn’t great and be greeted with rapturous applause by those most in touch with their patriotism, though Roy Moore tried. Only Trump could make promises so grandiose that they exceeded the very boundaries of fact-checking.

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The Atlantic: The Growing Partisan Divide Over Feminism

At my request, researchers from the Schar School broke down the answers by party and gender. The results: Party mattered far more. Republican women in Alabama were only four points more likely than Republican men to believe Moore’s accusers. In fact, Republican women were 40 points less likely to believe Moore’s accusers than were Democratic men. All of which points to a truth insufficiently appreciated in this moment of sexual and political upheaval: It’s not gender that increasingly divides the two parties. It is feminism. [...]

In other words, Clinton, along with Donald Trump, has done for gender what Barack Obama did for race. Obama’s election, UCLA political scientist Michael Tesler has argued, pushed whites who exhibited more racial resentment into the Republican Party and whites who exhibited less into the Democratic Party. Something similar is now happening around gender. But what’s driving the polarization is less gender identity—do you identify as a man or a woman—than gender attitudes: Do you believe that women and men should be more equal. Democrats aren’t becoming the party of women. They’re becoming the party of feminists. [...]

But when it comes to the political reaction to sexual harassment, gender identity matters less and gender attitudes matter more. “A sizable minority of American women,” note Huddy and Willmann, “do not believe in the existence of gender discrimination, think that women who charge men with gender discrimination are trouble makers, and are inclined to side with a man accused of discriminatory behavior.” And Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy seems to have made these women more staunchly Republican. [...]

Feminist theorists have long sought to explain this. In a recent essay, Marcie Bianco of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University cited Simone de Beauvoir’s argument that women are more likely than other oppressed groups to defend the hierarchies that subjugate them. Women, de Beauvoir wrote, have “no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. … They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men—fathers or husbands—more firmly than they are to other women.” In her 1983 book, Right-Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin argued that female anti-feminism was an understandable, if tragic, strategy of self-protection. “A woman,” she wrote, “acquiesces to male authority in order to gain some protection from male violence. She conforms in order to be as safe as she can be.”

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Social Europe: Universal Basic Income: Definitions And Details

Rothstein correctly identifies as an advantage of such a reform that it ‘would force employers to create more acceptable and less demeaning types of work because people would not take jobs they consider unsatisfactory. Releasing people from the compulsion to have a paid job would, according to the proponents, also mean strengthening the voluntary/civil society sector and cultural life’. He equally correctly identifies as disadvantages that it ‘would be unsustainably expensive and would thereby jeopardize the state’s ability to maintain quality in public services such as healthcare, education and care of the elderly’, that it would lose political legitimacy, and that ‘people who can work [would] choose not to work’. [...]

So instead of a UBI scheme that pays £800 per month to every individual, and that abolishes means-tested benefits, let us instead pay £264 per month to every individual (with different amounts for children, young adults, and elderly people), and let us leave means-tested benefits in place and recalculate them on the basis that household members now receive UBIs. Instead of leaving undefined the funding method for a UK-based UBI, as Rothstein does, let us choose to fund it by abolishing the Income Tax Personal Allowance and the National Insurance Contribution (NIC) Primary Earnings Threshold (so that Income Tax and NICs are paid on all earned income), let us apply a flat rate NIC of 12% to all earned income (rather than the current two-tier 12% and 2% structure), and let us increase Income Tax rates by just 3%.

According to research published by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, the effects of such a UBI scheme would be interestingly different from the effects of Rothstein’s. Far from being ‘unsustainably expensive’, it would require no additional public expenditure, and so would not affect expenditure on public services. Rothstein cannot show that his scheme would not impose significant losses on low-income households. This alternative scheme would not impose significant losses on these households, it would impose few losses on households in general, and it would still take a lot of households off some of our existing means-tested benefits. Rothstein cannot tell us how his scheme would redistribute disposable income, or how it would affect poverty or inequality indices. This alternative scheme would redistribute from rich to poor, it would reduce every poverty index and significantly reduce inequality. Rothstein tells us that his scheme would reduce the incentive to seek employment. This alternative scheme would reduce some important marginal deduction rates (or the rate at which additional earned income is reduced by taxation and the withdrawal of means-tested benefits) and it would therefore incentivize employment, self-employment, and new small businesses.

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Politico: Why Mario Draghi’s success could galvanize critics

According to the ECB’s new economic forecasts, released Thursday, inflation in the eurozone could reach 1.7 percent in 2020 — close to the central bank’s near 2 percent target that it has been trying in vain to reach since 2013. As other institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the OECD did in recent weeks, the ECB also upped its forecast for GDP growth in the eurozone to 2.3 percent next year and 1.9 percent in 2019.   [...]

But the ECB president, who has now entered the last two years of his mandate, could face in coming months the paradoxical situation of being criticized for pursuing policies that have succeeded — or are about to — to the point that his detractors want to stop them. [...]

But the hawkish wing of the governing council, led by German central bank chief Jens Weidmann, may seize on that as a proof that now is the time to get more aggressive in unwinding the loose-money policies with which Draghi has been associated ever since he took over in 2011. [...]

A major problem is that the ECB is running out of bonds to buy under the limits it set itself to avoid the type of “monetary financing” of governments banned by the eurozone’s founding treaty. To that effect, it cannot buy more than 33 percent of the debt of a given government — and never more than 33 percent of a specific bond issue.

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Quartz: India’s shocking income divide—charted

In 2014, for instance, the wealth possessed by the top 0.1% of India’s earning population grew at a faster pace compared to that held by 50% of the remaining population, according to the World Inequality Report 2018, released on Dec. 14. “This rising inequality trend is in contrast to the 30 years that followed the country’s independence in 1947, when income inequality was widely reduced and the incomes of the bottom 50% grew at a faster rate than the national average,” the report said.

However, led by privatisation, liberalisation, and disinvestment of the public sector over the years, the scenario has changed dramatically, said the report based on a study by economists Facundo Alvaredo, Thomas Piketty, Lucas Chancel, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman. In fact, inequality in India may be at its highest level since 1922 when the country introduced the income tax. [...]

The rise and the rise of a small pool of India’s uber rich population has worsened this divide. The ultra wealthy alone—comprising 1% of the country’s population—controlled about 23% of India’s total wealth in 2014. That’s almost four times the 6% of the riches they controlled in 1982-83. [...]

The following charts are instructive. The first shows the percentage of national wealth controlled by the top 10% of the population in 2016.

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Quartz: The EU institutions are unbelievably white. Brexit will make them even whiter

It has 24 official languages and its members are from 28 countries. Its LGBT group has more than 150 members—though you don’t have to be LGBT to join—and there’s been at least one transgender MEP. Women make up 37% of the EU parliament; it’s not 50%, but it’s well above the global average of 22.9% (pdf, p.6) and eclipsing the pitiful 19.6% in the US Congress.

But it’s blindingly white. Looking across the EU parliament’s amphitheater for non-white ethnicities is like playing a particularly tricky version of Where’s Waldo. And measuring the extent of the EU’s whiteness is yet another problem—the body does not collect data on employee ethnicity, which helps avoid accountability.

Just 17 out of Europe’s 751 parliament members are non-white, estimate Politico Europe and activist groups. That’s just over 2%. Of those 17, eight are British and bound to depart when the UK officially leaves in 2019. Across all the EU institutions, just 1% of employees are people of color, according to the European Network Against Racism. It’s not even possible to see how that compares with the continent’s diversity as a whole because, of the EU’s four biggest countries, only the UK counts those figures—France, Germany, and Italy do not.

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The Guardian: Most of the Brexit rebels are lawyers. Maybe experts are useful after all

The precise wording of it matters because the implications affect us all, and the rule of law is threatened by uncertain laws. As the House of Lords constitutional committee said in September: “The executive powers conferred by the bill are unprecedented and extraordinary and raise fundamental constitutional questions about the separation of powers between parliament and government.” [...]

On the face of it, clause 9 of the bill – the subject of the vote – was an extraordinary power grab. However ministers have sought to dress it up, the words contained a sweeping power which would hand the government the ability to legislate to implement any withdrawal agreement without any need for a further act of parliament. Worse still, the clause contains a “Henry VIII power” which means it can be relied on by ministers to amend or repeal provisions in acts of parliament – including the withdrawal bill itself. [...]

Grieve’s amendment was about legal process and proper order. Put another way, it was about the strength and stability of our laws, and our constitutional arrangements. It was about parliament having some say – even if not dramatic sway – while reducing the government’s power to do almost as it pleases. As the House of Lords constitutional committee pointed out, there is a need for “appropriate balance between the urgency required to ensure legal continuity and stability, and meaningful parliamentary scrutiny and control of the executive”.

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