Last year, Iran was terrorized by the serial murder of 21 women in prostitution, most of them in the Shi’ite holy city of Mashhad, over the course of 12 months. On July 26, 2001, the spider-killer Saeed Hanayi was finally arrested by Iranian police. He confessed to murdering 16 of the women and raping 13 of his victims before he killed them, and said he would have gladly murdered 150 if the police hadn’t stopped him. He was hanged for his crimes in April of this year.

The Iranian police, of course, were doing what they could to stand up for the victims of this slaughter. The day before Hanayi was arrested, with credible information that a gang had been involved in some of the crimes, police took decisive action to stop the slaughter. No, they didn’t arrest the suspected murderers; they arrested about 500 women in prostitution in Mashhad and threw them in prison [IranMania News]. On July 29, the followed it up by arresting 32 more in northwestern Iran.

Immediately after Hanayi’s arrest and confession, the religious conservatives who hold absolute power to direct the civil government, showed their commitment to humane government and women’s rights by writing in Jomhuri Eslami (which speaks for the religious ruler Ayatollah Khamenei): Who is to be judged in Mashhad? Those who look to eradicate the sickness or those who stand at the root of the corruption? That’s right: they stood by a serial murderer who had strangled 16 women, because he did not spill the blood of innocents.

Update: By a freak coincidence, today the Mashhad police decided to re-affirm their commitment to imprisoning and punishing women for trying to survive. They arrested 44 women in prostitution in a crackdown on vice in the holy city. Since the majority of the 148 people arrested are apparently men, it seems that the government is at least arresting pimps as well, which is better than we ordinarily do in the United States. But does the attention focus on the 104 men who are exploiting women whose only crime is trying to survive in hard economic times? Of course not. What’s important to the Iranian police is that:

The police are ready to pick up all street women and prostitutes in less than 72 hours across the country, he added.

On the other hand, apparently they couldn’t be bothered to pick up a serial murderer for over a year.

There are a few still in the Left who continue to believe that any regime which opposes American imperialism is, ipso facto, good, no matter what horrors it perpetrates against its own people. The poster-child for the sociopathic Left, for the past 25 years, has been the Islamic Revolution in Iran. I’ve even met male Leftists who claimed that the Islamic Revolution was a revolution for women’s rights. Well, look, it’s certainly true that the Shah’s blood-soaked tyranny in Iran was oppressive to women. However, this revolutionary Islamic Republic has a theocratic government which praises serial murderers of women in prostitution, and young women are burning themselves to death at increasing rates due out of poverty, desperation, and political oppression. It is high past time we asked: Whose Revolution was this? When women played a central role in the fight against the patriarchal tyranny of the Shah, was this what they were fighting for?

For further reading:

• The Real Spider Behind the Spider-Killings, Iran Bulletin Editorial
• GT 8/30/2001 Repression of Dissent in Iran
• GT 5/17/2001 Guardian Council of Iran Suppresses Women’s Presidential Bids
• Articles on Women in Iran in the Iran Bulletin
• Fighting His Revolution by Lilith Adler

Pretty much every time Wendy McElroy writes a column, you can expect three things.

1. Insightful and provocative analysis of the ways in which male-dominated, top-down patriarchal government hurts women
2. Lack of understanding of ways in which non-governmental power and hierarchy hurts women
3. Uncalled-for swipes at other feminists and failure to differentiate feminism from the male Left

Her column on Unlocking the Potential of America’s Pink Collar Workers is a classic example. Based in part around a response to Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, McElroy analyzes how the government works to create and shore up the walls around the pink collar ghetto by preventing women from getting ahead through legally imposed barriers to work and individual initiative. She has a lot of good points.

On the negative side, she also just ignores the degree to which historical power and hierarchy outside of government also constrains low-income women. Her flippant dismissal of sexual harassment law is an obvious example—yes, investing economic resources into creating a workplace more free of sexual harassment does cost money and work that could be otherwise spent. But that doesn’t mean that if you stopped spending that money, women would suddenly flood into the workplace. The new jobs that were created would predominantly be filled by men—since sexual harassment is most prevalent in workplaces where most of the workers are men—and women would be driven out and kept out of these workplaces because of the fact that, well, sexual harassment is rampant in the workplace.

Similarly, although McElroy appreciates that Ehrenreich is in touch with the realities facing working-class women, she accuses her of allowing moral squeamishness to get in the way of seeing real solutions. For example, McElroy writes:

And, yet, after working as a cleaning woman for her book, Ehrenreich, in an article in Harper’s magazine, asked readers not to hire maids. Almost everyone complains about violent video games, but paid housecleaning has the same consequence-abolishing effect. … A servant economy breeds callousness, she wrote.

So to protect the moral sensibilities of the middle class, Ehrenreich wants people to unemploy poor women who are working to feed their children. Instead of honest work she would offer these women a more humane welfare system.

But wait, that’s not what Ehrenreich said. She doesn’t want women who are working in domestic labor to be unemployed and put on welfare. She’s saying that there’s a real, pernicious, political cause and effect in the employment of low-income women as domestic servants, and the callousness and dehumanization of women in poverty that it breeds in the rich (in Nickel and Dimed, she details how bosses made sure to rotate employees at each house and minimize contact between clients and workers, so that individuals never emerge as sympathetic persons in the eyes of clients, and how workers would be on the point of passing out because of company rules that no food or water pass a maid’s mouth while she was in a client’s house).

McElroy should understand that Ehrenreich is calling here for a reinvestment of economic energies: so that the upper-class people do their own cleaning, and invest their money into other enterprises, and open up opportunities to work for lower-income women other than cleaning up after the rich while having most of your labor going to pay the salary of a shitty, exploitative boss.

McElroy also accuses middle-class feminists of pushing for laws which constrain women from entering the workplace as employees or entrepreneurs. She claims that Most feminist policies harm the very women they should be protecting — pink-collar workers — and the solutions they offer to poor women are part of what is creating their poverty. But this just ain’t true. It’s true of the male Left, which has long favored so-called protective labor legislation which simply cuts women out of numerous sectors of the workforce which the male-dominated AFL-line labor movment thought was too dangerous (and too lucrative) for women. But second-wave feminists fought these restrictions, often at great cost to their former alliances with the labor movement. They’ve fought to decriminalize prostitution, so that women are not thrown in prison for doing what they need to do in order to survive. McElroy asserts that feminists never seem to call for less government regulation, especially in the workplace. But in fact, although feminists have fought for many rules on workplace standards, just as often they have fought against sexist legislation which cuts women out of economic opportunities in order to protect them.

Where McElroy’s column is at its best, however, and Ehrenreich’s book is at its weakest, is on the issue of barriers which constrain women’s initiative to the boss-dominated world of the Pink Collar ghetto labor marketplace. Ludicrous government-imposed barriers against so much as starting a hair-braiding business out of your own home (or selling garden vegetables out of your truck) establish a system in which you either rent your labor out to a (usually male) boss, or else you starve. Is it any surprise that when the victims of this economic ghettoization don’t have other options, bosses can afford to pay them so little?

So what must we do? It is way, way past time to get the government out of centralized command-and-control which restricts capital to those who are already economically and politically well-connected.

• Abolish business licensing fees. $100 makes no difference to Starbucks, but a lot more to someone just starting a new food co-op or taxi service.

• Ditch the arcane, massive, and hyper-bureaucratic zoning laws which favor sprawled-out cities with big centralized stores, and which criminalize working out of your own home

• Loosen the government-supported stranglehold of big banks on capital. Loosen the regulatory reins on credit unions and microfinance institutions, so that affordable, worker-friendly banking is available to more people in more communities

• Finally, drop the current welfare-to-work welfare deform program. We no longer have a welfare system, but rather a government-sponsored temp agency for shitty dead-end labor which won’t pay the rent. Government-controlled welfare should ultimately be abolished in favor of a voluntary system of mutual aid in the community. However, in the meantime, we can give people on welfare some breathing room.

  The system should not penalize people for choosing to spend time going to college or University (currently, this is not counted as work and so it counts against you).

  Also, it needs to stop monomaniacally focusing on shipping unemployed women off into available low-income jobs, After they are dumped into a minimum wage job and taken off the rolls, the state gets a fat credit from the federal government, but the woman still can’t pay the rent. Instead, it should provide help with finding jobs and also provide help and resources for starting your own small individual or co-operative businesses and wisely choosing how to invest your money, avoid debt, and generally provide resources for women to make themselves self-sufficient, rather than job-dependent.

For further reading:

• GT 2001-05-15: A First-Hand Look into Living in Poverty
• GT 2001-09-03: Barriers to Independent Farmers
• GT 2001-05-30: Baltimore Housing Projects Provide Computers and Training to Residents
• GT 2002-02-16: Alabama Lags Nation in Pay Equity, and the Gender Wage Gap Map
• GT 2001-04-13: Ford Workers Charge Sexual Harassment
• GT 2001-04-10: Equal Rights Amendment Re-Introduced in Congress
• GT 2001-08-22: The Labor Movement and Women’s Organizing
• GT 2001-07-10: Why Libertarians Need Feminism

Discussions about economic class and sexual orientation have often operated on the assumption – supposedly with a statistical basis – that gay people are at least as affluent, or more affluent, than straight people. However, an article on "The truth about GLBT income" by Grant Lukenbill [Gay.com] sets the record straight: the studies are based on flawed sampling and manipulation of data.

Here’s what actually happens: statistically, on average, gay male couples have more income than heterosexual couples. This much of the newspaper reports are true.

But just a cotton-pickin’ minute. Of course gay male couples make more money. Men make more money than women. So of course a household with two men makes more money than a household with a woman and a man. And, in turn, lesbian couples make even less than heterosexual couples. The issue here has nothing much to do with sexuality in the first place, and everything to do with the sexual politics of the job market. Many other similar errors disclose themselves; for example, gay male couples make more than heterosexual couples, but heterosexual people are more likely to live in couples than are gay men.

On full consideration of the data, Lukenbill argues,

The wealthiest proportion of gay Americans is a minority of older, dual income-earning, white-male households in the country’s largest urban areas. These men are an important minority within a minority, no doubt, but one that represents only a fraction of the overall gay and lesbian population.

Anyone who thinks–or reports–otherwise doesn’t know what the numbers really say.

For further reading:

• GT 2/16/2002 Alabama Lags Nation in Pay Equity, and the wage gap map of the U.S.

Sssh, they might hear the pandering… – Our Fearless Leader George W. Bush

While the mainstream newsmedia was occupied with the United States’ war on Afghanistan, President Bush took the opportunity to pass under the media radar while launching another insult to abortion rights and overt pandering to the far Right.

Last year, as his first act in office and on the 28th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, President George W. Bush decided to destroy international family planning and freedom of speech by re-imposing the Mexico City policy or global gag rule. This year, G.W. decided another celebration was in order. For the 29th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Bush declared January 20, 2002, National Sanctity of Human Life Day.

What an ass.

Here’s the best part of all. George W. Bush takes the opportunity to compare abortion supporters to the terrorists responsible for the September 11 massacre:

… we should peacefully commit ourselves to seeking a society that values life — from its very beginnings to its natural end. Unborn children should be welcomed in life and protected in law.

On September 11, we saw clearly that evil exists in this world, and that it does not value life. …

Excuse me while I repeat myself. What an ass.

Yesterday, Irish voters narrowly rejected a referendum that would have tightened Ireland’s constitutional restrictions against abortion, which are already among the harshest restrictions in Europe.

Ahem, I seem to have lost this one. – Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern

Abortion is already illegal under the Irish constitution, but the rejected amendment sought to tighten restrictions by overturning an Irish Supreme Court ruling which authorized therapeutic abortions when the mother threatened to commit suicide, and by imposing harsh criminal penalties for women who received abortions, and the doctors who performed the procedure. Currently, nearly 7,000 Irish women receive abortions each year, but nearly all must have them performed in legal clinics across the Irish Sea in the United Kingdom. Thankfully, EU immigration protections prevent the Irish government from stopping women from leaving the country.

629,041 Irish voters rejected the amendment, while 618,485 voted in favor of it. In urban centers, the vote was much more lopsided, with some 61% of Dublin voters rejecting the new restrictions. Anti-abortion proponents of the referendum urged that it be adopted because a rejection might lead down a slippery slope towards abortion-on-demand in Ireland.

I’m not holding my breath, but let’s hope they’re right.

For further reading:

• GT 2001-03-24: Victory: Abortion Legalized in Switzerland
• GT 2001-03-26: King George End-runs Congressional Review on Global Gag Rule