Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

From Pale over at A Creative Revolution, with a little help from her friends, Rev. PaperBoy and Alison at Creekside:

We need an independent G20 inquiry. Now.

No country for old-world men

Two weeks ago, Maria Shriver, in conjunction with the Center for American Progress, put out The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Changes Everything.

According to the CAP release, it is

a groundbreaking examination of how "women's changing roles are affecting our major societal institutions, from government and businesses to our faith communities." For the first time in American history, women are half of all U.S. workers and mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families. Considering that in 1967, women made up only one-third of all workers, this is a dramatic transformation that fundamentally changes how all Americans work and live, "not just women but also their families, their co-workers, their bosses, their faith institutions, and their communities." Unfortunately, America as a nation has not yet come to terms with what this means. "This report tries to chapter those things out and say all of these institutions have failed to adapt to this change that has happened, and that in order for them to survive and become smart about the American worker they must adapt and must change," Shriver said on NBC's Meet The Press yesterday. "Our policy landscape remains stuck in an idealized past," writes CAP President and CEO John Podesta in his preface to the report. "This report contemplates what a new America should look like after we finally embrace this important new dynamic in our lives and the changes it has caused in our homes and businesses."

Now, while the report deals with mostly US issues -- they have neither the healthcare nor paid maternity leaves we Canadian pinkos do -- there is some relevance to us here. For example, just like in the States, male-dominated jobs have been more affected by the recession than female-oriented jobs. 

That doesn't mean that women have escaped unscathed by the downturn. It's just that they didn't have as far to fall as do men. Except if they are in top executive jobs. There, women are crash landing

But, over all, women still suffer from ''shockingly high rates of poverty.''

Men still have many advantages and way better paycheques.

Men never get discriminated against for being fathers the way women do for being mothers, or having the potential to be mothers. While women may be graduating from law schools in equal or greater numbers than men, men have the major share of legal firm partnerships, for example. Although you'd never know that from the media.

Consider these words by The Nation's Katha Pollitt:

The gains of the last forty years--in political representation, reproductive rights, education, combating violence against women--would never have happened without the steady and massive increase in the number of working women and the transformative effects of all those paychecks. Some might be tempted to spin the magic 50 percent to suggest that feminism's job is done. First it was dead because it was a failure; now it's dead because it was such a success.

Maybe too much of a success. As Reihan Salam worries in his article "The Death of Macho," "The problem of macho run amok and excessively compensated is now giving way to macho unemployed and undirected--a different but possibly just as destructive phenomenon." If 78 percent of those who have lost their jobs in this recession are men, that must mean women's gains are coming at men's expense, right? Actually, no. Women may have a bigger slice of a shrunken pie, but because the labor force is still quite gender-segregated, mostly they are not competing with men for work. The top ten jobs for women are, in order, secretary, nurse, elementary- and middle-school teacher, cashier, retail salesperson, health aide, retail supervisor, waitress, bookkeeper and receptionist. Men have lost more jobs than women in the recession because the ax has fallen more sharply in heavily male fields like construction and manufacturing than in female ones like healthcare and clerical work. As economist Barbara Bergmann wrote in an unpublished letter to the New York Times, "An important reason for the failure to reduce the gap between women's and men's average wages is that little progress has been made in reducing gender segregation in jobs that do not require a college degree." Interestingly, according to the Wall Street Journal, on the professional end of the workforce, where men and women are more likely to have the same or similar jobs, as many women as men have been laid off.

The good news in all this, as Gloria Steinem points out, is that this economy-driven revolution in the workplace could result in a revolution at home.

Personally, I'm rooting for The Shriver Report to be right in its underlying assumption that government and business will have to adjust policies to meet women's needs as parents and workers in order to keep the economy going, and also that more men will get accustomed to women as indispensable co-workers and co-breadwinners, and thus increase their share of housework and childcare. Men will still have more to say about the success of this report than women do, so I recommend the essay, "Has a Man's World Become a Woman's Nation?" by sociologist Michael Kimmel. He offers a long list of benefits to men, women and children when fathers are egalitarian. It stretches from better sex for the parents to children who get along better with their peers and have more friends because they learn cooperation by doing housework with their fathers. This alone could be worth the price of admission.

For the record, that last bit is what feminism is all about: egalitarianism of the sexes.

My Canada includes ...

THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED:

Yesterday's Canada Day column sure got some people worked up. 

You can tell by the comments on The Star's main web page. But you should see my email. Everything from high praise to low blows. I'm sure you can figure out why.

Here's the column, with some links and annotations.

My Canada includes:

Collective Bargaining: Yes, I know the strike by Toronto city workers means kids can't cool off in public pools, parents' best-laid summer child-care plans have gone awry and garbage bins are overflowing.

I feel your pain.

Just like most of you, I don't have 18 sick days a year to bank and cash out.

I also know that, without unions, many of us would be working in Dickensian conditions. 

How would you like to be a miner without a union ensuring that the company meets safety standards? Or a sweatshop worker without proper ventilation, light or even fire escapes?

Collective bargaining floats all our boats. Without it, there would be no minimum wage, no paid sick leave, no health and pension benefits, no vacations. Do you honestly believe workers would still get a fair break if the bottom liners had nothing to keep them in check?

It's not workers who drove us into this economic mess. Workers weren't paying themselves multi-million-dollar bonuses for running companies into the ground. In fact, as executive salaries were rising, workers' wages were falling.

This isn't the time to get rid of unions. This is the time to be strengthening them.

I am amazed by how many people resent unions. I wonder how many people realize, for example, that if it weren't for unions negotiating health benefits for their members, nobody would have health insurance today? Thank Tommy Douglas.

Collective bargaining is a human right.

Public Broadcasting: Fully funded public broadcasting is good for Canadian culture, which includes tens of thousands of workers who perform and produce programming.

It is also crucial in an era when private broadcasters fail to live up to their licence requirements to provide local news and other domestic content.

Greedy private broadcasters, who squat on the public airwaves, who benefit from tens of millions of cable subscription fees viewers are forced to pay, who buy US programming and shelve it just so their competition can't have it and who went on corporate shopping sprees while accumulating crushing debt loads are now crying the blues because they are having a few relatively lean years. This after decades of rolling in huge profits.

Well, boo-hoo-hoo. That's no excuse for not living up to the commitments they made for winning their licences.

Even more important, as much as I adore the Internet, it is no substitute for rigorous Canadian eyes and ears on all levels of government – as well as on Canadian corporations, which might otherwise rip off consumers while raping the environment.

CanWest Global and CTV give so much uncritical coverage to the Harper government that it is stunning complains aren't storming their signal towers. CTV might well have changed the course of history when it ran outtakes from an interview with former Liberal leader Stephan Dion, which made him seem like he couldn't understand English. The industry own standards council rapped the network for that.

Forget CTV and Global. They are beyond redemption, as they demonstrated during their campaign to make viewers pay for what they are now getting free – i.e. cable fees for local over-the-air stations.

CTV actually held open houses at its local stations, and got its on-air personalities to shill for these fees.

I'm talking CBC.

I'm talking excellent original and thought-provoking programming on CBC Radio's Ideas.

I'm also talking The National, which is now riddled with commercials and no longer has the weight or authority it used to have.

That's because, to sell ads, it has to produce eyeballs. That means more Michael Jackson, less Stephen Harper.

And that's not good for Canada.

I hate to say it but The National is too often pre-occupied with trivia. And CBC no longer has the resources to do consistent hard-hitting investigative journalism that answers to no advertisers.

Freedom of Expression: Excuse me but since when did the interests of Zionist lobby groups determine who or what Canadians can see and hear?

In recent months, to list just three examples, there have been concerted campaigns against the staging of Caryl Churchill's controversial Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza and an academic conference at York University where the so-called "one-state solution'' was to be discussed. We also saw British MP George Galloway be denied entry to the country for a speaking tour, just because he brought aid to bombed-out Gaza.

Now comes word that the only way the respected Al-Jazeera English news service, currently applying for TV distribution in Canada, can win the support of these same Jewish groups is to have them become consultants.

Journalistically speaking, that is hardly kosher.

Hoo-boy, did I hear about this one. The usual slurs of anti-Semitism, etc.

My answer? What part of this isn't true?

U.S. War Resisters: Canada's proudest moment this century was when it refused to join George W. Bush in his attack on Iraq.

Yet we deport Americans who didn't sign up to brutalize civilians.

If this, this and this don't count as brutalizing civilians, what does?

Those kids were hoodwinked, both by their government and its lapdog media, into thinking they were joining up to protect their country from terrorism and Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Rather than welcome them, we send them back over the border and to certain prison sentences.

That's not my Canada.

Is it yours?

So, here's the thing.

When former Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, the man who won the Nobel prize for inventing UN peacekeeping, came up with the red and white maple leaf flag, he envisioned it as the sort of flag that would not be associated with war.

Kind of like the way the Norwegian flag is today.

It no longer is the case. 

Here's the other thing.

When John Lennon and Yoko Ono chose Canada as the venue for their Give Peace a Chance bed-in in 1969, they did it in part because they considered this country as the embodiment of anti-war values.

It no longer is the case.

As I wrote on the wall at the Imagine exhibit at Montreal's Musee des Beaux-Arts, ''John Lennon would not recognize Stephen Harper's Canada.''

UPPITY WOMAN DATE (July 7/09): Marky Mark, with whom I used to spar on my old blog Azerbic during the Israel-Lebanon conflagration in 2006, has put up a blog post that says it all on the Zionist lobby question, which has exploded in the comments.

Here's an excerpt:

While I think Jewish community advocacy groups have the right to advocate for Israel, it has gotten to the point where it almost seems as if a response to a report from a human rights organization concerning Israel comes from B'nai Brith Canada before there is an official response from the Government of Israel. This makes no sense to me. Organizations created to serve the needs of Jewish Canadians should focus, first and foremost, on that mission.

Sure, most Jewish Canadians feel an affinity to Israel, consistent with connections felt by other "hyphenated" Canadians. All you have to do is watch a post-soccer tournament street party in Toronto to see that Jewish Canadians are not alone in that respect.

But Ms Zerbisias is correct in identifying that what local groups have been doing vis a vis Israel is clear-namely, endeavouring to shut down debate. I think this is wrong, as it is a debate in which Israel can more than hold its own, and I think it is catastrophic for Jewish Canadians because it puts "official" Jewish organizations at war (and one that is unnecessary) with leading progressive figures. And most important, it is morally wrong when it involves accusations of anti-Semitism where (as is almost always the case) that are unwarranted.

Thanks Mark. Who'da thunk, back in 2006, we'd have peace between you and me?

Breadwinners and losers

Last week, this post, about the U.S. stimulus plan billions were not all poured into the ground for male-oriented shovel-ready projects generated some heat. But then, the piece which it was all based on was a dishonest rant blaming feminists for just about every economic woe "burly'' American men face right now.

Here, also on the economy, is quite a different piece. Instead of setting men and women against each other, author Courtney Martin proposes ways that everybody can pull together and pull out of this financial mess.

But first, some men need to rethink their roles -- specifically, what it means to be a man. Too often, they think it would be emasculating to promote equal rights.

Men have a real stake in feminism, and no, it's not just getting laid more often.

For example, until men advocate for and take paternity leave in America's workplaces, women will always be viewed as "special" -- and not in a good way -- for taking time off after giving birth. The more men who "come out" at work as dedicated fathers, the more comfortable the next generation will be in advocating for family-friendly work policy. As Jeremy Adam Smith argues in his new book, The Daddy Shift, we need a "gradual movement away from a definition of fatherhood as pure breadwinning to one that encompasses capacity for both breadwinning and caretaking. … It is time for twenty-first century dads to go on the offensive." This overdue "daddy shift" will normalize the notion that all caregivers -- women and men -- have to juggle work demands and family responsibilities.

Another area in which men must and generally haven't stepped up to the plate is in advocating for less sexism in the media. When Bill O'Reilly called veteran White House Press Corps journalist Helen Thomas "the wicked witch of the east," where were her male peers to defend her right to be judged based on the quality of her work rather than the wrinkles on her face? And when David Letterman recently made an inappropriate joke about Sarah Palin's 14-year-old daughter Willow, Sean Hannity and a few other conservative pundits took it seriously, in order to claim that "Obama's surrogates" on the left only care about sexism against liberals. It wasn't a genuine stand against sexist commentary in the media; it was an attempt to score political points.

Why should men invest in this fight? Because until women are judged based on the quality of their work, not their conformity to gender stereotypes, men have no hope of being judged based on the full range of their humanity.

<SNIP>

Ultimately, so much of this comes down to framing. As long we use the language of "women's issues," we will be separate and unequal. But when we talk about worker's rights, health care, media integrity, and freedom from violence as quality-of-life issues, we will all become less endangered and more enlightened.

Which the point I was trying to make in that other post.

Handing a guy a shovel and a paycheque will not make this world a better place. Blaming feminists divides us instead of uniting us. If men and women have equal footing in the workplace, the home and the mediasphere, all our boats will float.

Incidentally, as recently-published research indicates, men with daughters understand that much more readily than do most  others.

And why is that? Because they come to recognize -- perhaps even resent -- how their daughters have fewer opportunities than their sons.

Burly men

''Mens Rights Now,'' whose handle always cracks me up, suggests somewhere in the comments on some other post that I blog this piece of propaganda by a right-wing think tank type for an ultra-conservative publication.

Well, you know how I just live to please guys like Men's Rights Now.

Anyhow, the piece is about how unemployed ''burly'' men in the US -- who, admittedly, have been hit hard by the decline in construction and manufacturing jobs -- are supposedly being shortchanged by some grand feminist conspiracy to keep them from benefiting from stimulus spending by President Barack Obama.

Seriously.

Never mind how the author cherry-picks statistics, and compares apples with oranges, to make it seem as if women are living high off the hog while men are on the bread lines. Never mind how women make up the bulk of the poor. Never mind how, except for right now, the unemployment rate for women is consistently higher than for men. Never mind how so many families are headed by women who have no fallback support. Never mind that most women struggle in part-time jobs that the author never mentions. Never mind that women are less like to qualify for unemployment benefits. Never mind how women make less. Never mind how, when the government bailed out the financial sector, it was men's jobs that were saved.

According to the author:

A "man-cession." That's what some economists are starting to call it. Of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men. Mark Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan, characterizes the recession as a "downturn" for women but a "catastrophe" for men.

Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care, which gained 588,000 jobs during the same period. Rescuing hundreds of thousands of unemployed crane operators, welders, production line managers, and machine setters was never going to be easy. But the concerted opposition of several powerful women's groups has made it all but impossible. Consider what just happened with the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Last November, President-elect Obama addressed the devastation in the construction and manufacturing industries by proposing an ambitious New Deal-like program to rebuild the nation's infrastructure. He called for a two-year "shovel ready" stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams and made reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy the goal of the legislation that would become the recovery act.

Women's groups were appalled. Grids? Dams? Opinion pieces immediately appeared in major newspapers with titles like "Where are the New Jobs for Women?" and "The Macho Stimulus Plan." A group of "notable feminist economists" circulated a petition that quickly garnered more than 600 signatures, calling on the president-elect to add projects in health, child care, education, and social services and to "institute apprenticeships" to train women for "at least one third" of the infrastructure jobs. At the same time, more than 1,000 feminist historians signed an open letter urging Obama not to favor a "heavily male-dominated field" like construction: "We need to rebuild not only concrete and steel bridges but also human bridges." As soon as these groups became aware of each other, they formed an anti-stimulus plan action group called WEAVE-- Women's Equality Adds Value to the Economy.

Now, although this story is American, it has some relevance here in that Canadian men have also suffered in the job market -- although our government completely ignored what women said about so-called ''shovel ready'' projects.

I won't bother to eviscerate the entire piece, despite the easy pickings. I will point out however that these evil feminists were not conspiring to take away jobs from men, but to ensure that money went to families for such things as, horrors, health care and food. They also thought it would be only fair that, since women's tax dollars were going into this (and so much has been lost by the macho men on Wall Street), that it would be a good opportunity to even out some of the incredible inequalities that persist in the trades.

Here's a summary of what WEAVE wanted:

No. 1: Affirmative action plans:
These ensure that women and people of color are actually hired and trained for public-sector jobs. In the years since Bush took office, the number of federal contracts has risen sixfold. Spending has also gone way up, to almost $368 billion currently from $209 billion in 2000. Staff to monitor these contracts at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, meanwhile, dropped. In his inaugural address Obama talked about government conducting its business in the "light of day" and on his first working day in office he emphasized financial transparency. Government contracts are the place to put those sentiments into action.

No. 2: Infrastructure projects:
In 2003 only 4 percent of the roughly 400,000 registered apprentices were women. Scholars with expertise in these matters must be brought to the policy table so this gross discrepancy can be fixed. This is critical because while women hold 10 percent of construction jobs, most--5.8 percent--work in offices where wages are about 16 percent lower. Unless the Labor Department recommits to workplace integration--by gender and race--the jobs that pay a truly livable wage will not benefit women or people of color in proportion to their presence in the labor force.

No. 3: Spending on health care, child care, education and social services:
This spending both provides jobs to women and provides services needed by all families. The fastest-growing segment of the homeless population is families. Forty percent of requests for emergency shelter come from families. More than 85 percent of homeless families are headed by a lone parent, and most are women.

Now, while it's true that WEAVE pushed for more jobs for women in the trades, it also recognized that people were in serious trouble:

Overall, two-thirds of the stimulus program will go toward tax cuts, relief for state budgets and direct payments to the unemployed and others hurt by the recession, part of the administration's desire to provide immediate fiscal relief. Much smaller pieces of the pie will be allocated for weatherization, affordable housing and other projects designed to create jobs.

John Husing, a Southern California economist, said keeping teachers and police officers employed should help prevent the recession from getting worse. But he said the stimulus package would have improved communities' ability to grow over the long haul if it had dedicated more money to public works.

While billions of dollars eventually will flow to infrastructure projects, Democrats who crafted the package say they directed most of it to existing government programs such as Medicaid and education to prevent state economies from slipping even more. One goal was to help fill state budget gaps, keeping teachers and others employed while strengthening the social safety net.

Let's be clear about one thing: A bunch of feminist economists, no matter how smart, are not going to divert gabillions of dollars in government spending away from men just because they hate them.

Which is what this ridiculous piece insinuates.

The truth is, when you look at who wrote it, who paid her, and where her piece was published, the truth emerges.

Any money that doesn't go to business is baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.

Any money that goes to the public sector is feminist-driven socialism.

Talk about shovel ready.

Happy Men's Rights Now?

Making money while making time

Well, you can't fault these ladies for their entrepreneurial spirit.

In today's Village Voice, a story of a new sort-of-dating, sort-of-escort agency run by three girlfriends who needed to pay their rent in New York City:

Cara, April, and Julie, three 26-year-old friends—who, for privacy and safety reasons, prefer to use their agency-related pseudonyms and not their real names in this story—all found themselves unemployed victims of the bad economy at the end of last year. Cara, who has short-cropped hair, sharp blue eyes, and a background in social work, was laid off on November 4 after working on a state senate campaign. April, a tall, lanky brunette with a button nose and wide-set eyes, had just finished a stint in the art department of a cable-TV show. And Julie, a slender woman with an unruly mop of brown curls, had just returned from a two-year stint in the Peace Corps in Eastern Europe and couldn't find a job.

With the extra time on their hands and funds running low, the girls formed a little support group based out of April's Gramercy apartment, where, over coffee or wine, depending on the time of day, the three trawled Craigslist job postings together. Initially, they only searched in the "nonprofit" and "art/media/design" sections. But soon, desperation and curiosity led them to the murkier world of "et cetera" listings, where they learned that, aside from appeals to become egg donors, there were people offering to pay women $200 to tickle them or to see them in a pair of nylons.

And then one of the women—no one remembers which of the three—pointed out how brilliant it would be if they could get men to pay to go out with them. Both Cara and April had recently been denied food stamps, and they joked about how being paid to be taken out to dinner every night would be a great way to cut down on food costs. Behind the laughter, there was a thread of seriousness: What if?

What if indeed?

After all, there are lots of lonely men out there who would love to have the company of a smart, sophisticated woman but who would balk at the ideal of going with a call girl, despite the fact that many such sex workers are smart, sophisticated professionals who work as pros.

And these three friends were already going out on some pretty lousy dates.

So that's how the awkwardly-named Austen's Janes Agency was born. For $60 an hour, men can hire one of these three women for an afternoon at the baseball game or a night at the opera.

Strictly hands off, of course.

As one of the principals informs the Voice reporter:

"It is similar to a strip club, [in which] a man pays for, as Chris Rock reminds us, 'nothing,' but they get a beautiful woman to pay attention to them and act as if they are the center of the world when they need the attention," she wrote in an e-mail. "Women are often objectified in regular life—now we are finally getting paid for it without contracting any life-threatening diseases!"

Which is kind of amusing since, no matter what you call it, you're still selling yourself, right?

This fine distinction is one reason why I support the decriminalization of prostitution. I mean it's just a matter of degrees between this, sex work, and meeting via Craigslist or LavaLife and hooking up (with or without dinner).

Why get all moralistic about the contractual paying for sex part?

And for the record? I bet if some men started a service like this, it would do even better. I know lots of single professional women who always need presentable escorts for weddings and bar mitzvahs, office functions and charity events. The gay guy friends don't always cut it.

Madonna can't adopt them all

This can't be good:

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 1 (IPS) - The spreading global financial crisis is threatening to undermine another one of the U.N.'s major development and health goals: family planning.

United Nations officials are expressing fears that planned funding for reproductive health services may fall short of its target.

According to the latest figures released here, international donor assistance to population activities continued to increase over the years - 7.4 billion dollars in 2006 rising to about 8.1 billion dollars in 2007.

The projected funding for 2008 and 2009 was estimated at about 11.1 and 11.2 billion dollars, respectively.

"However, given the current global financial crisis, it is not certain whether donors will live up to their expected future commitments and continue to increase funding levels as they have done in the past few years," says a new report released to coincide with a weeklong session of the U.N. Commission on Population and Development (CPD).

It is possible that the final figures for 2008 and 2009 "will show decreases in levels of funding for population assistance," the study cautions.

<SNIP>

Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), told IPS that the funding gap for reproductive health, especially family planning, needs to be urgently addressed to ensure progress.

She pointed out that donor assistance for family planning alone - as a percentage of all population assistance - has decreased from 55 percent in 1995, totaling 723 million dollars, to a mere five percent in 2007, totaling only 338 million dollars.

"If not reversed, the low funding for international family planning threatens to derail our collective efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals," Obaid said.

"We will not eradicate extreme poverty, hunger and inequality, and achieve the other Millennium Development Goals, unless greater attention is paid to population issues and more resources are devoted to women's empowerment and reproductive health, including maternal health care and family planning," she added.

Currently, there are about 200 million women in the developing world with unmet needs for effective contraception, with the highest unmet needs being in Africa.

"Now is the time to re-energise voluntary family planning. There is no investment in development that costs so little and brings benefits that are so far-reaching and enormous," Obaid declared.

Funny how there's always money for weapons but, when it comes to family planning, which could ease the strain on resources -- and hence mitigate conflict -- funding shrivels up.

As Feministing points out:

$100 million of funding for international family planning results in:

• 3.6 million more contraceptive users
• 2.1 million unintended pregnancies avoided
• 825,000 fewer abortions
• 970,000 fewer unplanned births
• 70,000 infant deaths averted
• 4,000 maternal lives saved

Investing in these programs saves the U.S. government a great deal in more costly foreign aid programs down the road.  With 200 million women worldwide who wish to avoid or delay pregnancy but lack access to modern methods of contraception and half a million dying every year from pregnancy related causes, the time is now.

Write to your MPs and tell them you want Canada to support family planning, not war.

(Photo: South Africa-Canada.Com)

Budget cuts

Looks like the plunging U.S. economy has led to trimming in places between the pockets as opposed to ... oh you'll figure it out:

"Why are we suddenly having an explosion in guys asking for vasectomies?" This is a question Dr. Steven Jones' staff asks him a lot lately, the Cleveland Urologist told CNN. Dr. Marc Goldstein, a New York-based urologist in practice for over thirty years, told the network, "I have never seen anything like this. When things started to go south in the stock market, then the vasectomy consults went north." The folks over at vasectomy.com no doubt were pleased for snagging that most awesome domain name. Little did they know a bad economy would provide their payday; the number of appointment requests through their site spiked 30 percent in January.

It's not just men who are suddenly concerned about their family's future. Consumers are spending more money on all types of contraceptives, according to the Nielson Company. Indeed, the embrace of family planning appears to be a critical step in financial planning. Nielson said sales of over-the-counter contraceptives jumped a dazzling 10.2 percent in the first two months of the year. The company reports that, while other retail sales slip, condom sales jumped up 5% in the fourth quarter of 2008 and 6% in January, compared with the same time periods last year. Sales of Essure, a non-invasive, irreversible birth control method for women were up also, 28% over last year's sales.

Vasectomies are a relatively inexpensive, quick and non-invasive (as in surgical) way to prevent pregnancy. Much easier than sterilizing women, and almost as fail-safe.

Might as well take precautions.

If you're too broke to go out, and your cable gets cut off, there's not much else to do, now is there?

Lapdance of luxury

Yesterday, a friend and I drove by what is probably Toronto's landmark ''gentlemen's club'' and got into a debate over whether the financial meltdown is good or bad for the business. We've seen conflicting reports.

My theory is, a beer or two at a strip joint, especially those that offer cheap meals to bring in the customers, has got to be a lower-cost way of, um, getting that loving feeling than hitting the ''massage'' parlours or hiring ''escorts.''

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the sex trade, as long as sex workers have the right to ply their trade safely. Too many don't, risking rape, robbery, exploitation, eviction and worse. Of course, this is not exactly what I would like to see women doing but I can't deny that many are in the game because they actually enjoy it.If there's a market for it, and everybody involved is a consenting adult, well, why not?

Especially since this is an area where there is no gender pay gap.

But I digress.

Today frequent commenter MensRightsNow drew this story to my attention:

The tough job market is prompting a growing number of women across the country to dance in strip clubs, appear in adult movies or pose for magazines like Hustler.

Employers across the adult entertainment industry say they're seeing an influx of applications from women who, like Brown, are attracted by the promise of flexible schedules and fast cash. Many have college degrees and held white-collar jobs until the economy soured.

"You're seeing a lot more beautiful women who are eligible to do so many other things," said Gus Poulos, general manager of New York City's Sin City gentleman's club. He said he got 85 responses in just one day to a recent job posting on Craigslist.

It's too bad women who might otherwise never dream of going into a peeler palace feel they have to strip to make ends meet. But, since women are already poorly paid, and with so many in the tanking retail sector, I suppose they need to supplement their income in some way.

I just wonder how long the customers will have the cold hard cash to make it worthwhile.

 In this economy, "desperate measures are becoming far more acceptable," said Jonathan Alpert, a New York City-based psychotherapist who's had clients who worked in adult entertainment.

For some, dancing is temporary, a way to pay for college loans or other bills. Others say they've found their niche.

Dancers at the upscale Rick's Caberet clubs in New York City and Miami can make $100,000 to $300,000 a year – in cash – even with the economic downturn, club spokesman Allan Priaulx said.

Priaulx said 20 to 30 women a week are applying for jobs at the New York club, double the number of a year ago.

Still, analysts say, the industry isn't immune to the economic recession. Business is down an estimated 30 percent across all segments, including adult films, gentleman's clubs, magazines and novelty shops, said Paul Fishbein, president of AVN Media Network, an adult entertainment company that has a widely distributed trade publication and an award show.

"In the past, people have said this industry is recession-proof," said Eric Wold, director of research for financial services firm Merriman Curhan Ford. "I definitely don't see that; maybe recession-resistant."

Young women financing their education this way is not new.

What is new is the reported competition for these jobs.

Looks like a buyers' market.

Will that be a Robertson or an Allen, Ma'am?

Via Pogge, comes Dr. Dawg's analysis of how the Cons are nailing women to the fiscal wall with  their destruction of pay equity rights.

(My take on this from last Thursday is here.)

Dawg, being more expert on matters of labour than I, has a list of all the problems with this legislation. Here's a sampling:

    * The new legislation doesn't even mention "pay equity," but introduces the term "equitable compensation," whose meaning in law is uncertain. This is no accident.

    * It adds "market forces" to the equation--the very forces that helped to create pay inequity in the first place.

    * Rather than permitting the comparison of jobs within the entire public service, the new law will restrict job comparisons to specific job classes* and "job groups," the latter to be defined by regulation. The government can, by regulation once again, restrict the comparator jobs upon which compensation assessment can be based (s.4[5] d). In other words--it's a fixed race.

    * A "female predominant" group will now have to be comprised of at least 70% women. Under the current rules, there are ten "female predominant" groups in the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the largest federal public sector union. This would cut that number down to five at a stroke. Of the 2,963 information services workers, for example, 2039 are women--68.8% of the group. With the passage of this law, they would have no right to claim pay equity.

Yet, on the eve of International Women's Day, just like I wrote the other day, the Cons Women's Rights Talking Barbie Helena Guergis spoke to the UN Committee of the Status of Women about how wonderful her government is to us lady workers.

Here's Dammit Janet on that.

And here's the news release put out yesterday by reps of Canadian women's groups and labour unions who can recognize a screwdriver when they see one. 

NEW YORK, NY, March 6 /CNW Telbec/ - Representatives of women's groups
and labour unions gathered at the United Nations yesterday, to announce that
they will be filing a complaint against the Harper government with the UN
Commission on the Status of Women. The complaint condemns the Canadian
government for rushing controversial pay equity legislation through
Parliament, which will make it extremely difficult for women in the federal
public sector to demand equal pay for work of equal value.
   

The "notice of communication" to the UN was signed by representatives of
more than 40 organizations, including the Public Service Alliance of Canada,
the Syndicat de la fonction publique du Québec, the Canadian Federation of
Nurses Unions and the Feminist Alliance for International Action.
   

In addition to criticizing the pay equity "poison pill" in the Budget
Implementation Act, it also takes aim at the 2009 federal budget for failing
to fix the employment insurance system during a time of economic crisis.
   

As it stands, only one third of unemployed women in Canada can access EI
and even when they do, their EI benefits are often too low to both pay the
rent and feed the kids.
   

"We just heard Helena Guergis speak to the UN Committee of the Status of
Women, touting the Harper government's supposed record on women's rights. It's
appalling that she would set foot on an international stage to make claims
about women's equality while the government is in the midst of implementing
policies that are trampling women's equality rights at home," said Patty
Ducharme, PSAC's National Executive Vice President.
   

The signatories to the "notice of communication" will work together in
the coming weeks to formalize their complaint and submit it to the United
Nations.
   

"We will not sit back and watch as our government retreats from its
international obligations and undermines women's equality rights," said Robyn
Benson, Regional Executive Vice-President, responsible for women's issues at
PSAC.

Ah yes, the New Conservatives. Your family friendly government serving you better.