Mothers Who Really Work

The claim of often made, by both liberals and conservatives, that stay-at-home mothers work just as hard as women who work outside the home.

Bullshit.

The numbers don’t add up.

I worked full time for thirty years. During that time, I bore and and raised three daughters. I know how much work is required to raise children, to keep a house, and to work at a paying job.

If raising children and keeping the house clean is a full-time job, then I must have been working at two of them. Actually one and a half because my husband did his share of house maintenance and child raising, too. If your husband doesn’t, then you married the wrong man. But that’s another issue to be discussed at another time.

Raising children is a lot of work. No question about that. Housework is a lot less work.

Let’s break it down.

First, motherhood. Infants are rough. They need constant attention. Feeding, changing, crying. Night and day. Babies run mothers ragged. But they don’t have to be held all the time. Even when they’re not napping, you can get the housework done while they’re playing with their toes and watching the spiders spin webs on the ceiling. You can watch TV or read while nursing or holding the baby. It’s not like a mother never gets a moment to sit and rest.

They grow. Children are babies for only a couple of years. Toddlers are still a lot of work, but far less than babies. It’s quite possible to take care of one baby, one two-year-old, and one four-year-old at the same time and still get the basic housework done. Mothers have been doing that forever.

Then the children go to school. They start kindergarten at four or five years, depending on where you live. When the youngest starts kindergarten, you have half your day completely free. As well, by the time they’re that age, they’re watching TV, playing with toys, entertaining themselves. Taking care of three children is no longer a full-time job.

Every year, the children become less and less work. By the time they’re teenagers, they don’t want you around at all, except to drive them to their friends’ houses – a total of a couple of hours a week at most.

What about cooking, cleaning, and laundry?

Any woman who thinks that’s a full-time job either doesn’t know what “full-time” means or she’s the most inefficient worker ever.

Cleaning a fairly large house, including picking up, dusting, vacuuming, and cleaning the bathrooms takes four hours at most. Laundry is another four hours a week. Except that most of that time is spent waiting while the machines do the work. You can vacuum and clean bathrooms while the laundry is being done. Cooking on average is about an hour for supper and fifteen minutes each for breakfast and lunch. Another half hour to clean the kitchen and you’ve got two hours a day. Add another couple of hours to do the grocery shopping and you’re still spending less than twenty hours a week taking care of the house.

When most women stayed home, soap operas flourished, afternoon bridge clubs were commonplace, hobbies like sewing, knitting, painting, and gardening were all the rage.

The final con in the overworked housewife scam is to wait until the husband is at home to do most of the work. Because housewife hours are the most flexible in the workforce, the wife can relax during most of the day and then make a big show about working hard in the evenings and weekends. That way, she can nag and bully her husband about how he never helps out around the house. As though she’s rushing out to his office during the day to help him at his job.

After all, she’s not going to do the housework during the day when the kids are at school. That would totally wreck her leisure time.

Compare the work-at-home-is-so-hard mother with someone who had a real job outside the home. The mother and housewife has no boss walking into her office complaining about her work. She has no clients threatening to take their business elsewhere. She can’t be fired, demoted, or laid off. She never has to stand in front of a hostile crowd and present her ideas in public. She isn’t struggling against her co-workers for the next promotion. She never suffers an audit, performance review, or program evaluation. She never had to justify a five-year plan or compete for resources.

Housewife is the lowest pressure job anywhere. It was the easiest part of my working life.

As a married, working mother I had the luck to have a reasonable employer – the federal government – who gave me six months maternity leave after the birth of each child. Don’t envy that. Instead lobby the government, the unions, and everyone else within earshot to make your employer give you the same benefit. Our societies are rich enough to afford supporting working mothers properly.

As well, I put my children into daycare when I went back to work. By the time the third child was out of daycare, I’d paid over a hundred thousand dollars in daycare expenses. But I was still ahead financially. In the daycare decade I earned way more than it cost me.

Even so, for most of those years, the kids were only in the daycare for two hours a day. After kindergarten, they spent the bulk of the day in school and daycare only bridged the time between three when school ended and five when my workday ended. It’s not like the kids were living in daycare. Nor, if I had not been working, that I’d have been spending all day taking care of them.

So, between my husband and I, we worked at three jobs: my job, his job, and the domestic job. However you calculate it, that’s one more job than a family with a stay-at-home mother. That family works a total of two jobs: his job and the domestic job.

And I guarantee that my house is just as clean and my children are just as well-raised as anyone else’s.

That means that, no matter how you calculate it, the stay-at-home mother is working less than either my husband or me. Significantly less as the domestic job is the easiest and least time-consuming of the lot. So don’t tell me that women who never work outside the home are working as hard as I am.

I will never say that stay-at-home-mothers don’t work. Just that they aren’t working as hard as everyone thinks.

Yours, Ashley

The Balance of Power in Romantic Relationships

Two caveats before beginning:

First, I’m only going to speak to male-female romantic relationships from courtship through to old age. The power dynamics of single-gender relationships are undoubtedly different and I have no understanding of them.

Second, though I’m speaking in a positive tone, my opinions are based on casual observation of myself and what I have been told by others. They are not supported by proper scientific evidence. I am presenting hypotheses, not facts. But I do believe that what I am saying is true.

Here we go:

It’s a little misleading to talk about a balance of power in a romantic relationship. The power dynamic between a man and a woman shifts as the relationship develops. The balance is between the power held by one person and the ability of the lesser-powered person to tolerate it. If power of one is not balanced by an equal tolerance by the other, the relationship will break.

Romantic relationships begin shortly after puberty. On occasion, a romantic relationship may be an extension of a childhood friendship, but this is relatively rare.

At puberty, boys begin to be interested in girls. At first, the rule is look (discreetly) but don’t touch. This is imposed by cultural conventions in almost all societies. At some point, courtship begins. Men decide which women to court. Women decide whether to accept. Desirable women and men hold power over the less desirable. Less desirable men, rather than pursuing the less desirable women, are likely to wait for the field to start clearing out and see what choices remain to them.

Though the roles are different for men and women, each comes to the table with about the same power. This is the last time that the power will be balanced.

When young men and women pair off, the women have a slight power advantage. His sex drive is stronger than hers. She does wants sex, too, but she will decide whether to accomodate him or not because she is the partner who is risking the most, biologically. She is the one who could get impregnated and then dumped. And teenaged single mothers are not the most desirable commodity on the romance market.

The man’s only choices are to dance to her tune or dump her and keep looking. But the possibility of being dumped limits the woman’s power. The man has not invested much in the relationship at this stage. The cost of dumping her and moving on is relatively low.

After kissing comes marriage. Whether formalized legally or simply winging it common-law style, the marriage comes with a commitment by both partners to be faithful to each other. This increases the woman’s power over the man considerably. She now controls his entire sex life. But she better give him some satisfaction or he will leave. Few men will allow their wives to turn his vow of marriage into a vow of celibacy for long.

There is an old saw that a married couple will make love more often in the first year of their marriage than in all the remaining years of their married life combined. I doubt that that is true, but I don’t doubt that it is commonplace that the ardor in a great many marriages wanes as the anniversaries accumulate.

After marriage comes the baby carriage. A baby changes everything. The woman’s power in the relationship increases by an order of magnitude.

Now, if the man leaves the marriage, he will have to leave his children, too. Joint custody is fine in theory, but never works for long in practice. It’s a hopeless attempt to delay the inevitable and only serves to make a man feel better about abandoning his children. The mother will take the children. The father will get visitation. The mother will find another man. The new man will be the defacto father of the children. The biological father will be further and further marginalized.

Most men stay in their marriage while their children are young.

During this time, the mother not only has far more power than the man, she has an obvious way to wield it. She has children. Whatever she wants to do is “for the children.” New furniture? “The children have to grow up in a nice house.” Vacation in Hawaii? “The children will have a great experience.” New house? “The children should live close to a good school.” Mother-in-law wants to move in for a couple of months? “She’ll be helping with the children.”

But the woman who uses this power too much is sowing seeds that will yield bitter fruit in a few years because the children grow up.

At some point, the man will decide that his youngest child is independent. Maybe when it starts school, maybe when it reaches puberty, maybe when it celebrates sweet sixteen, or maybe when it moves out of the house. Different men have a different threshold.

But when that point is reached, the balance of power swings back to him hard, taking the women by surprise. The children are no longer holding the man in his marriage. The only reason to stay is if he wants to keep living with the woman who is now too old to be a mother.

Many men leave their wives at that point. Often they have been planning to leave for a long time, waiting until the youngest child reached some milestone. But they haven’t told their wives that they were counting down the years. As long as a man wants to remain the father of his children and is dependent on his wife for sex, he would be foolish to tell his wife that the day is coming when he walks out.

When the day comes, she is shocked.

He finds another woman and the rift is irreversible.

She is devastated.

In the minority of marriages where that does not happen – less than half of marriages in America survive till death does them part – the woman finds herself in an unfamiliar situation. For the first time since before her wedding, her man has the upper hand. She has to be nice to him again.

Real nice. Being single isn’t so bad for a fifty-year-old man but it’s hell for a fifty-year-old woman. And it gets worse every year. The pool of men who want to marry is small and shrinks fast.

First, men tend to mate with women who are younger than them. Second, older men die off faster than women. Third, older men are likely to not want to marry.

A surprising number of single men over the age of fifty become players. They don’t have to marry to have children because they’re no longer interested in becoming a father. Been there, done that. They have a large pool of women competing for their attention. They have more resources than when they were teenagers. Life is good.

The only reason that a man over the age of sixty would want to marry is to have a woman to look after him. Someone to nurse him in his old age. Not such an appealing life for a woman, but the competition for men is so intense among older women that it won’t be hard for him to find one who will take on the burden.

If the younger wife and mother is wise, she will anticipate the seismic power shift that is coming. Before her children reach the age when her husband considers them independent, she will start treating her husband good again.

She will watch for signs of her husband’s growing independence.

When a man who has been married for twenty years suddenly learns to cook and starts to do the laundry, that doesn’t mean that his wife has finally bullied him into submission, it means that he’s preparing to take care of himself without her.

When a man takes every opportunity to get out of the house – from volunteering to do the grocery shopping alone, to taking extra business trips, to spending time out of town taking care of his aging parents – he is giving a clear signal that he is trying on independence for size.

A woman may not mind. Some women have enjoyed their high-power motherhood years, have husbands who are not such a joy to have around, and don’t mind the prospect of being free of him. Some women find all the emotional support that they need from solidarity with other women who are in the same situation.

Fair enough.

But such a woman has to accept being alone most of the time. Going out with her friends every few days is not the same as having someone around all the time. No matter how poor a man their husband was, it is likely that the only full-time replacement that they will find is a cat. Or two. Or a dozen.

But they can take consolation in the fact that it’s easier to take care of a dozen cats than a seventy-year-old man with failing health.

It’s in the retirement years that feminist theories break on the hard shoals of reality. When you’re a young woman, it’s easy to talk about women’s power because you have plenty. When you’re a mother, it’s easy to bully your husband into agreeing with your feminist whims. Hopefully, when you’re retired and divorced, you’ll be a celebrity feminist who receives endless invitations to appear on television talk shows. Otherwise, you may find yourself regretting that you didn’t consider your husband’s feelings a little more sympathetically when you were married to him.

Women have choices as they grow older. But they should know what they face and understand the consequences of their choices over the long term. Then they can make the choices that will serve them best.

The shock of losing most of your power to your husband at the age of fifty can be devastating if you are not prepared for it.

Yours, Ashley

The World’s Worst Boss is You

What does a horrible boss do?

He belittles his employees. Never has a good word to say about them or their work. He calls them lazy, incompetent, and stupid. And not just to their face, but in public. He shouts his abuse to everyone who will listen.

He doesn’t understand the work that his employees do. He won’t take the time to learn the first thing about their day-to-day work. He doesn’t even look at the amount of work they do in a day because he already knows that they don’t do enough.

He doesn’t want to pay them a fair or competitive wage. He begrudges every dollar that he has to pay because he’s certain that every dollar that comes out of his pocket is wasted. As far as he’s concerned, Ebenezer Scrooge paid Bob Cratchit way too much. He wouldn’t be happy even if his employees worked for free because he’d begrudge them the cost of rent for their cubicles and the pens and paper they wrote on.

You’d sure hate to work for a boss like that. You can’t imagine that you’d ever be a boss like that. But, if you’re like most Americans, you already are.

You don’t think you’re the boss of anyone?

Consider this: When you cast a vote for president, you are electing the chief executive of the civil service. When you cast a vote for your congressmen, you are electing the paymasters of the civil service. And, when you pay your taxes, you are paying the salaries of the civil service.

You, as a voter and taxpayer, are the ultimate boss of the civil service. And you, collectively, give direction to the civil service. By voting for one candidate or the other, you are voting for one style of management or the other. When you write a letter to your congressman or to the newspaper, or even when you talk to your friends over dinner, you are issuing instructions to the civil service.

More significantly, when you listen to a pundit on television or radio, when you buy a newspaper or magazine, you are not just listening to their words, you are endorsing their attitudes. The politiciens who ultimately manage the public service pay close attention to the news and commentary that you consume because that, next to polls, is their best indicator of why you vote the way you do.

You may think that you are powerless to make any change in the massive bureaucratic machinery of government. You are right that your vote is small and your voice is quiet. But you are wrong if you think that you have no power. The ultimate power over the government is you as a collective citizenry.

So, what kind of boss are you?

Do you know what your civil servants do for you? There’s an awful lot of them and they do an awful lot of different jobs. If you think that a civil servant is someone who sits in an office and processes forms all day, you are wrong most of the time. They are on boats patrolling the oceans, they are in laboratories testing drugs, and they are negotiating trade deals with foreign companies. The first man to walk on the moon was a government employee. as were the people who decided to create the Internet.

Do you go around saying that all those government employees are lazy, incompetent, and stupid? Do you believe that they are overpaid and don’t do anything useful? Do you turn on the television, hoping to hear yet another horror story about some hapless civil servant who made a mistake? Have you ever thought about the other two million civil servants who did not make a mistake yesterday? The ones who worked long hours for less pay than they would have made in private industry?

Less pay? Maybe. That’s a complicated subject but it boils down to a simple rule: The more difficult the job, the less the civil servant is payed compared to industry. Senior managers in the government get paid far less than managers in private companies who have the same size staffs and budgets. Medical doctors who work for the government get paid far less than medical doctors in private practice. The same for engineers, scientists, and most other professions requiring higher education. On the other hand, clerks and laborers are often paid more by the government.

Pay attention to the news. When you hear a story decrying the high salary of civil servants, either they’ll use clerks as an example, or they’ll be talking about a senior manager without citing private sector salaries as a comparison. They’ll never be talking about jet pilots, geologists, or veterinarians.

So, the next time you think about the civil service, you should take another minute to think about what kind of boss you are.

I’m willing to bet that you wouldn’t want to work for a boss like you.

Yours, Ashley

The Crowdsourced Literary Agent

One of the first and foremost functions of a literary agent is sorting through her slush pile – all those manuscripts that are sent to her, uninvited and unsolicited.

Literary agents hate reading through their slush piles for good reason. They’re filled with bad writing. When faced with a brimming email inbox, agents procrastinate for as long as possible, take care of all their more rewarding tasks first, go get another coffee, watch the latest episode of Downton Abbey, anything to avoid wading into the dreaded slush pile.

They demand that authors do as much of their work for them as they can. Authors must jump through hoops for the agent: write engaging query letters, provide synopses, send writing samples, anything that lets the agent reject the project without having to read the actual, probably dreadful manuscript.

Yet eventually they have to read authors’ works. They have no choice. Agents need to find the next King or Grisham or Patterson or Meyer. If they don’t find authors who sell, they won’t eat.

Agents are literary prospectors who have to wallow through a sea of muck to find the rare nugget of pure gold.

But ereader technology is changing everything. The marginal cost of publishing an ebook is essentially zero so authors can publish themselves. They no longer have to query an agent. They can submit their manuscript directly to Smashwords and Amazon and be published without any human intervention. And it doesn’t cost the author a single penny.

This changes the nature of published works in a number of ways. The most important of which is that the collection of ebooks available from a major publisher is not equivalent to the traditional publisher’s catalog. It is equivalent to the traditional agent’s slush pile.

Not only is there no guarantee that the ebook is professionally written and competently edited, I can personally guarantee that the overwhelming majority of the ebooks that are self-published on Smashwords or Amazon are not worth reading.

But some are gems. And anyone who wants to read good books is going to have to find the few rare gems in that massive heap of junk.

The reader is force to act as a literary agent faced with the world’s biggest slush pile.

Ebook publishers are struggling to find a way to enable readers to fulfil the agents’ function.

The first step and simplest is to allow their customers to sort books by the number of sales or downloads. Presumably the better books sell more and the junk hardly sells at all.

This is the best indicator, but not perfect. Books which have a compelling, professionally designed cover and an enticing blurb will be viewed and purchased more often than a book with an amateurish, mis-designed cover and a dull description.

The next step is to allow customers to read the first part of a book before they commit to purchasing it. If an author’s writing is trite, ungrammatical, and laden with typos, the customer will see this in a few minutes and avoid purchasing the book.

Notice that both of these presentations of the book are exactly what authors previously sent to agents. The blurb is equivalent to the cover letter and the sample pages are sample pages. That’s more than a clue that the reader is now being asked to serve as her own agent faced with a slush pile.

The third step is allowing readers to rate and comment on books that they have read. All major ebook publishers allow online reader comments, ratings, and reviews.

In my experience, about one in a thousand readers takes the time and effort to write a review. Better stories earn a somewhat higher ratio of reviewers to readers, worse stories, a smaller ratio.

Reader reviews should be the best indicator of great books, but the process has a few problems.

First, unscrupulous authors can salt their reviews the same way that unscrupulous prospectors used to salt their worthless claims by planting a few gold nuggets before selling them to the suckers. The best books get reviewed about a dozen times on Smashwords. When you find a book that has been reviewed more than fifty times and every review gives it the highest rating, you don’t have to be a genius to know that, not only is the author faking his own reviews, he’s not even smart enough to do it in a believable way.

Second, a lot of readers are not good literary critics. They may write a scathing review because they found a typo on the fifteenth page and were so offended that they stopped reading right then and there. They may be looking for erotic stimulation and, if they haven’t got off by the third page, they damn the book for being useless. Or, in the other direction, they may be so in love with the Twilight series that they’ll give five stars to the worst written dreck in the pile only because the protagonists remind them of Edward and Bella. Where’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer when you really need her?

All of these innovations that allow readers to act as amateur literary agents are necessary and work in the right direction. But they are not sufficient to save an avid reader from spending too much time wading through the slush pile and not enough time curled up with a good writer.

The most recent innovation is Goodreads which tries to promote personal recommendations as a step above anonymous reviews. Good try but keeping active on Goodreads requires more work than I’m willing to devote to finding a good book.

One promise that I can make is that we will soon see yet another innovation in crowdsourcing the function of the literary agent. And there will be another one after that.

Technology is a genie that can never be stuffed back into it’s bottle. Self-published ebooks are not a fad. The technology is simply too powerful to fade away. Not only are ebooks here to stay but they will increase in prominence and importance every year for the foreseeable future. And traditional publishing will slowly become less and less economically viable.

Technological innovations that let readers serve as crowdsourced literary agents will proceed apace because there is such a clear and obvious need for it.

Change for the better is inevitable. We need only wait to see how the world solves the problem of crowdsourcing the literary agent’s most important function.

If I had to guess how it’s going to happen, I’d start by taking a close look at how Twitter trending works to direct and focus the public’s attention and extrapolate from that.

Yours, Ashley

Confessions of an Uneducated Person

For the most part, I am an uneducated person.

My friends would be shocked to hear me say that because they know that I was a full-time university student for ten years. I spent four years earning a B.A., two years earning a M.A. at another university, and an additional four years earning a Ph.D. at a third university. 

Furthermore, during a long career as a government scientist, I have published in psychology, engineering, computer science, and fine art journals. And in some of the strangest conference proceedings that you can imagine.

Yet I am utterly sincere when I say that I am uneducated because I am uneducated in almost all academic subjects. I have never passed a single course in economics, political science, ecology, meteorology, astronomy, latin, greek, or a countless number of other subjects.

I was blessed with a broad-based undergraduate education at Revelle College at the University of California, San Diego. That school is almost unique in requiring that every one of their graduates pass two years filled with survey courses that cover fine art, world literature, philosophy, world history, calculus, physics, physical chemistry, organic chemistry, biology, at least one social science. And students must demonstrate in an oral exam that they have learned a foreign language. Being forced to sample all those subjects gave me a rich taste of education that has served me well, but it falls far short of instilling expertise in any of those subjects.

In short, my undergraduate education made me aware of exactly how uneducated I really am. And that, more than any specific knowledge that I retained, is what has served me best in my career.

Graduate school, of course, does instill expertise in exactly one subject – in my case, experimental psychology – but leaves the student entirely uneducated in every other subject.

So, if ten years of full-time study in world-class universities has left me mostly uneducated, why did I bother?

The first, and obvious reason for going to university, is that it gave me a good job. Armed with my Ph.D., I was able to get hired into a post-doctoral position in a federal government laboratory and that evolved into a real, pensionable career.

The second, almost equally obvious reason for going to university, is that it gave me some concrete skills. I can write grammatically. I can design experiments and field studies. I can conduct statistical analyses. Do not underestimate the importance of these skills in the work-a-day world. You would be surprised how many of your colleagues have difficulty writing a professional-sounding memo or understanding the results of a survey.

A third reason for going to university is to acquire abstract skills that are even more useful and important than concrete skills in reading, writing, and math.

The first abstract skill is an improved ability to learn. Having learned a lot in one area, I can apply the same process to a new area of study. I can read a textbook, journal article, or, more commonly these days, Wikipedia entry and understand it. I have never taken an engineering course, but I can read engineering journals, understand what they are saying, more or less, and comment on them. I have done the same with computer science. And with visual art history.

The second abstract skill is the development of critical thinking. Some things are true and some things are not. Critical thinking is simply being able to decide whether you should believe a statement or not; and knowing that you have a reasonable basis for making that decision. “Going with your gut” is not critical thinking. Believing something because an authority said so is not critical thinking. Critical thinking requires collecting evidence, weighting it, and combining it in a logical chain to reach a conclusion. It takes a lot more work than simply believing any old thing that you want to believe.

The fourth reason for going to university is to gain confidence in intellectual discussions. When, over dinner, I meet a professor who is an expert in the history of the American Constitution, I do not feel intimidated. That means that I do not have to pretend that I know anything about the topic. It’s liberating to never have to try to fake it. I can hold my head high and say that I don’t know the first thing about the history of the American Constitution and I can encourage him to tell me all about how President Lincoln expanded the powers of the presidency at the beginning of the Civil War. I love meeting people who are world-class experts in the areas in which I have no education whatsoever and letting them teach me as much as I can learn. And that doesn’t mean only university professors. I am just as eager to let a carpenter tell me how to build a wall or a gardner tell me how to trim a hedge.

I am sufficiently educated to know that I am completely uneducated in most subjects. There is tremendous power in knowing how ignorant I am and in being able to admit my ignorance in public.

Yours, Ashley

 

What Rush LImbaugh Said

“What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic] who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex — what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.” -Rush Limbaugh, 29 February 2012

And what is the Republican response?

“I’ll just say this, which is, it’s not the language I would have used.” Mitt Romney, 1 March 2012.

Really, Mitt? You don’t think the logic was wrong? What language would you have used to claim that Ms. Fluke was asking to be paid for sex?

“He’s being absurd, but that’s, you know, an entertainer can be absurd.” Rick Santorum, 1 March 2012

Really, Rick? You think that an entertainer can say anything he likes if he calls it a joke? What do you think about rape jokes? Do you find blackface minstrels acceptable because they’re just entertainers?

Then Limbaugh began losing advertisers. Hit in the pocketbook, he “apologized” a few days later by saying, ”My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir.”

Today, I heard Republicans on the radio trying to dismiss this “tempest in a teacup” by saying that Limbaugh used the wrong words.

Sorry. Limbaugh didn’t “choose the wrong word” as Romney implies. As you can see from the entire quote above, he presented his full argument for calling Ms. Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute”.

Is this the “logic” of the modern conservative? First for Limbaugh to completely mis-represent Ms. Fluke’s discussion of the medical uses of the pill as asking for taxpayers to subsidize her sex life; then his apologists to mis-represent what Limbaugh said by claiming that is was just “a word”? 

And his speech wasn’t just an absurd joke as Rick Santorum would have us believe. It’s an indication of his underlying attitude toward women. If Santorum finds Limbaugh’s speech entertaining, that says as much about Santorum’s attitudes as Limbaugh’s.

Conservatives seem to be unable to say, straight out, that this buffoon does not speak for them. What’s that all about? Are they really so afraid of Rush and his dittoheads that they can’t say, flat out, that their view of the world is different than Rush Limbaugh’s?

Conservatives roast President Obama for having attended a church whose pastor once made an anti-American comment, for having socialized with a man who, in his youth, had radical connections. Yet they expect to be given a free pass when they allow a racist, misogynist, drug-addicted clown claim to be their public voice for twenty-five years.

It’s time for American conservatives to grow a backbone, stand up, and tell us what they really think. Because, if they don’t, conservative media clowns on Fox News and talk radio will fill the vacuum with nonsense that appeals to no one but the narrowest and most ignorant segment of the public. And no one ever got voted into office by the most fanatic ten percent of the population. Not in a democracy.

Yours, Ashley

Who’s the Real Doctor?

A great many people in this country, if not most, believe that physicians are the “real” doctors and that academics are pretenders.

The opposite is true.

The word “doctor” is derived from the latin word,  docere, meaning to teach. It has nothing to do with medicine, specifically. The word “doctor” was first used in the English language over seven  hundred years ago as an honorific for theologians who were licensed to teach theology.

As the university system developed in Europe, graduates in theology, law, and medicine were all considered doctors. As theology was generalized to philosophy and philosophy ramified into a broad diversity of fields of study in the arts and sciences, people who obtained the highest level of education with the intention of conducting research and teaching were granted doctoral degrees and called doctors.

Today, in many countries, such as Great Britain, the typical medical practitioner does not have a doctorate degree. They are well educated in medicine, for sure, having completed about as many years of university and having obtained as many university degrees as people with doctorates in philosophy. But in Great Britain and many commonwealth countries, the standard degree for a medical practitioner is a baccalaureate in medicine and surgery (MBBS) , not a doctorate in medicine (MD). In those countries, only people who intend to conduct medical research or teach at the university level go the extra distance to earn their M.D. Nevertheless, it is proper and respectful to call a physician with an MBBS “doctor” in those countries, consistent with international use.

In the other direction, lawyers are typically granted a J.D. degree – a doctorate in law – when they graduate from law school. This tradition extends back to Medieval times. Thus, it would be technically correct to call lawyers “doctor”, but is never done in most countries.

So the next time someone is introduced as “Doctor Smith” and you find out that she has a Ph.D. in history rather than a medical degree, don’t think of them as a “pretend doctor”, think of yourself as a participant in a thousand-year-old tradition of giving respect to people who have dedicated years of their life to the pursuit of knowledge.

A tradition that has served our culture very well, indeed.

Yours, Ashley