Tag: Sociology

Geeking Science: N is for No-Fault Divorce

Erin Penn 5 Comments

Meme from the Interwebs, basically public domain because of wide-spread distribution

With the present rapid changes, and even before, I often sent forward memes that crossed my path on Facebook for others to either enjoy or learn from. Recently, a few people have (RIGHTLY) called me out for not fact-checking things I was sharing. Two deeper dives have ended with me deleting the post; in another case, I didn’t have the energy to do the research – I think it was correct, but gut feeling is not enough – and so just deleted it.

For the Meme above, written  by Qasim Rashid, I merrily forwarded it and then went, wait, I need to fact check it.

  1. I found out who Qasim Rashid was: an attorney who has run on the Democratic ticket for state senate in Virginia
  2. When he wrote it: International Woman’s Day in 2023
  3. I found a fact checking website (truth or fiction) which confirmed the data through their research – complete with article sources on the bottom (LaCapria)
  4. I found further data on the South Dakota ACLU website. (Chapman)

As someone who took a lot of Sociology in college (one of my two majors), I was fascinated by the statistical study which could happen because states legalized no-fault divorce at different times. As a result, scientists were able to run models to see if suicides rates impacted:

“For example: California changed its law in 1969, Massachusetts in 1975. “If we expect the suicide rate to fall, we expect it to fall six years earlier in California than in Massachusetts,” said Wolfers.” (Chapman)
This step-stone approach allowed Stevenson & Wolfers to examine suicide rates outside of larger on-going cultural changes such as allowing contraceptives, change in medicines to help with depression, women getting the right to have credit cards and start their own businesses, etc.
The impact? A six percent (6%) decrease nearly immediately for women, no change for men. A twenty percent (20%) decrease in rates after a couple of decades – for women. I suspect why the full impact wasn’t immediate was community pressure – families, churches, and other support systems returning women to the untenable situations, refusing to help them escape even after it became legally possible.
Going further down the rabbit hole, I discovered domestic violence decreased (for both men and women), and murder by partner decreased (for women only).
In other words, when men cannot get out of a poisonous relationship, they kill their partner, and when women cannot escape the situation, they kill themselves.
What is needed for a Fault Divorce? Prove wrongdoing by the spouse: cruelty, adultery, or desertion were the common causes.  But the woman or man would have to prove it IN COURT, telling the judge and other members of THE COMMUNITY WHERE THEY LIVE how they were raped (if the state allows one to claim rape by a spouse, that is a fairly new thing too – South Dakota and Nebraska were the first two states to completely outlaw it in 1975 (wikipedia)), or beaten, or verbally abused. The spouse would need to show bruises, which likely have healed by the time the court date came around, if the woman or man lived that long.
Otherwise, if fault cannot be proven to the satisfaction of the court, the divorce ending the marriage had to be mutually consented to. In a world where women could not own property, would lose a job if they got pregnant, needed a male “owner” (for lack of a more accurate term) to sign off on even getting a bank account, many would refuse to get a divorce because they could not survive without a husband. (Hence why males chose option B, homicide.) On the other side of the equation, men did not have time to work in the house and on the job. Losing the partner (or forced domestic-laborer), would result in lack of food, clean clothing, and a host of other necessary services to be well-placed within the job force. Getting both people to agree to lose these economic benefits was rare, even at the steep cost of mental health and relationship well-being.
If America returns to the age of either mutual agreement or proving fault for a divorce to occur, especially with the ongoing stripping of women rights, one of two things will happen – (1)  females will return to the previous situations resulting in “trapped” reactions – suicide and murder or (2) females will just stop getting married (which will be an interesting side-effect for the “Family” crowd pushing for this legal change to deal with).
A healthy relationship needs the participants to have the power to end it when it is no longer beneficial. I love reading romances, and the healthy relationships resulting in HEA are the best.
Bibliography
Chapman, Samantha. “Attacks on No-Fault Divorce are Dangerous – Especially for those Experiencing Domestic Violence.” ACLU South Dakota. 2023 October 20. (https://www.aclusd.org/en/news/attacks-no-fault-divorce-are-dangerous-especially-those-experiencing-domestic-violence – last viewed 3/31/2025)
LaCapria, Kim. “After No Fault Divorce Was Legalized in 1970, Female Suicide Rates Dropped 20 Percent.” Truth or Fiction. 2023 March 8. (https://www.truthorfiction.com/after-no-fault-divorce-was-legalized-in-1970-female-suicide-rates-dropped-20-percent/ – last viewed 3/31/2025)
Pickler, Les. “Divorce Laws and Family Violence.” The Digest. 2004 March 01. (https://www.nber.org/digest/mar04/divorce-laws-and-family-violence – last viewed 3/31/2025)
Stevenson, Betsey & Wolfers, Justin. “Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: Divorce Laws and Family Distress. (Working Paper 10175).” National Bureau of Economic Research. December 2003. (https://www.nber.org/papers/w10175 – last viewed 3/31/2025)
Wikipedia. “Marital Rape in the United States.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape_in_the_United_States – last viewed 3/31/2025)
Wolfers, Justin. “Did Unilateral Divorce Laws Raise Divorce Rates? A Reconciliation and New Results.” The American Economic Review. December 2006. (https://users.nber.org/~jwolfers/papers/Divorce%28AER%29.pdf – last viewed 3/31/2025)

Geeking Science: Two Types of Creativity

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

Drawing from various journals and studies, Ms. Livni presents information about the two stages of creativity and when people peak.

The first is Conceptional Innovators. These twenty-somethings have learned just enough to be dangerous. With basic stills of their craft in hand, they make things. They don’t ask, they just do – breaking conventions left and right. The firebrands of the world. Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein. They spend their long (or short – depending on how the public receives their work) lives defining the fields they invent – painters, poets, scientists. Their visions are firm.

No doubt a lot of conceptional innovators actually just reinvent the wheel, since they never actual got to the point in their field to find the wheel has been around for centuries, and get lost in the background noise of their fields. Their passion pushes thing forward. And a lot of conceptional  innovators make a wrong assumption – they learned enough to be dangerous, but in their case, was only dangerous to themselves.

Still, the groundbreaking work of the mid-twenty people change the world.

At the other end, in their mid-fifties, are the Experimental Innovators. People who had ideas but wanted to test them. Job and family got in the way, but it gave them time to really explore, test things, experiment with different ways, go back and try again. These older people have had time to learn more than one field, and their innovations often traverse between specialties, creating new connections. Charles Darwin and Virginia Woolf rocked the world, but only after their hairs turned gray.

You are never too old to change the world. The young aren’t the only ones to come up with Creative Thoughts.

You are never to young to change the world. The old don’t know everything.

Bibliography

Livni, Ephrat. “The two types of creativity that peak at different ages.” Quartz. 2019 April 28. (https://qz.com/1606423/the-two-types-of-creativity-peak-at-very-different-ages – last viewed 11/17/2023)

Other Cool Blogs: Scientific American 4/2/2013

Erin Penn

5173163 © Newphotoservice | Dreamstime.com
“Wow, I’ve never expected a woman to write such good science fiction.”
I grit my teeth and close the sale. “Thank you.”
“And hot too. Would you like to meet at the bar later?”
Thankfully, this has never happened to me to me. Well, at a convention. The bar thing – being asked on a date after performing a professional service like tax preparation, that happens every year. The “you are really good at math for a woman”, “you are really smart for a female”, “how come you are not home taking care of babies, you are so pretty”. Yeah, all of that.
It’s called “Benevolent Sexism”.
Women should be home with children. Men should be protecting and supporting the women. Math and science for men; language and emotions for women. Women are fragile; men don’t cry. Females are pretty first and then their occupation; men are competent wage-earners before being physically healthy and attractive. No one is valued for being themselves.
Smile, you look pretty.
How badly does this impact society? When people are being “nice”, but judging worth by gender stereotypes? 
Wage inequality. Medical inequality (see One Gender Research). Legal inequality. Abuse hiding in shadows. Glass ceilings. The list goes on.
And, no, it isn’t pleasant to have to a guy (after turning him down twice while you can’t get away because you are doing his taxes) laughingly go “see you next year, you might say yes!” 
Yes, this article is nearly a decade old. It still applies today.
Tannenbaum, Melanie. “The Problem when Sexism Just Sounds So Darn Friendly…” Scientific American. 2013 April 2. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psysociety/benevolent-sexism/?fbclid=IwAR2Qu6B-R7XjLwA0AGrR0U8VMOQsCHvjo5r23O4p5l63Ptgle6gHjl5VC9E (Last viewed 4/5/2022)
(If you read nothing else of the article, read the obituary for Yvonne Brill. The “twist” at the end is EXACTLY what is wrong about benevolent sexism. If you read a second thing in the article, read the comments of when ‘I f*king love science’ come out on twitter as a woman. )

Income Inequality

Erin Penn

7865703 © Tomislav Forgo | Dreamstime.com
Those that do not study the past are doomed to repeat it. – a variation on a quote by Spanish philosopher George Santayana.
When I ran across the article featuring Stanford professor Walter Scheidel explaining “income inequality can be mitigated by policy but is only leveled by upheaval” in an article entitled “Historically, Income Inequality is Known as a Destroyer of Civilizations”, I was hooked. Seems the good professor studied history (one of my favorite topics), and, historically speaking, new civilizations start with a fairly even playing field income-wise but over time more and more income inequality slips in the cracks, widening the divisions between the have and the have-nots until something breaks and a new civilization is formed.
“Unfortunately for humans, the only remedy <for solving income inequality> appears to be societal upheaval, produced by war, disease, state collapse, or revolution.” (JakeThomas, 2021)
Eventually the divide of income inequality becomes so wide, the society shatters. The final straw could be War – neighbors seeing the weakness of the elite being isolated from the worker class, or wanting the isolated wealth-hordes for themselves, ripe for plucking in one easy package instead of distributed throughout the population. Disease – say, a pandemic, because a failing education system of the masses (prevents acceptance of a vaccine) – or food scarcity reducing the health of the masses, allowing a pandemic to spread among those who are not able to have healthcare and food for health. State collapse – maybe because the political system becomes so divided every action is considered from the elite “game” standpoint and not what is good for society and it can no longer respond in a timely fashion to disasters. Revolution – this one is simple – eat the rich. Once the poor are so poor they no longer care if they live or die, they are willing to die to save their children from the same fate.
Any or all of these, war, disease, or revolution, can take a society from the brink of collapse to a full dissolution. For those survivors of the process, a level playing field of whatever comes after the dissolution promises another turn at the civilization wheel.
Income inequality can be mitigated to delay the societal restructuring. Education of the young as EQUALS, both the elite and masses, is one possible key. So long as education isn’t linked to property or income, allowing the lines between the have and have-nots to be crossed, the pressure cooker can release some steam. But twenty years for the young to grow into haves and help their parents is a long time wait. (White, 2017)
And the education system in America would need restructuring. Right now, generational lines from redlining have separated the have-nots into the rural or urban settings – with lesser investment into education. Suburban settings provide Charters and STEM and enrichment opportunities. Artificial food scarcity and real safety issues impact the have-nots ability to focus for learning.
Second key would be restoring trust. People no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life. (Purtill, 2020) And they believe this because of empirical evidence that working hard is not getting them ahead, but the elite (the bosses and stockholders) are getting richer on the workers backs. The “gig” economy exists because workers can no longer afford to have one job and survive. They have no downtime.
And food insecurity is brutally high.
When a society can make enough food for everyone within the society but cannot deliver the food to its citizens to the point more than 10% wonder if they will have enough food to last a week, the divide between the elite and the workers are cracks quickly shattering the society’s foundation to dust.
And I live near one of the biggest problem areas in America:
Charlotte struggles with more than issues of food insecurity. Despite being one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation, it ranked dead last in a study that analyzed economic mobility in the 50 largest cities in the U.S, meaning it’s nearly impossible for residents living in poverty to gain financial security. (West, 2020 – bolded for emphasis)
The part of that sentence that I bolded above tore at me after reading about income inequality being a destroyer of civilizations. Because that sentence says the have-nots have NO chance to become haves – which mean overcoming the income inequality divide isn’t passible. My interpretation was America is much closer to that “society restructuring” that I would like; a society restructuring is not something I want to live through, if I am able to survive it at all.
Trust cannot be restored until the have-nots believe they have a chance to become haves.
Which leads to the third key. The burden of generational debt must be lifted somehow. The Marcetic interview with Hudson (2021) provides another historic perspective. Relief from debt. So long as workers get further in debt while working, their labor became less an equal exchange and more a slave who cannot leave. Interest collection on debt (a recent invention) exasperates the issue, as the interest will always be a little higher than inflation (it has to be for the banking numbers to work) which means the worker CANNOT get in front of it without a whole lot of luck. The have-nots are chasing loans building faster than they can be paid off.
I found it interesting that the word “debt” and for “sin” came from the same base. I remember learning the Lord’s Prayer with “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” and remember it changing to “forgive us our sins, as we forgive those that sin against us.” Until I read the Marcetic article, I didn’t realize what the “forgive us our debt” really meant. The article is eye-opening from a Christian perspective.
The forgiveness of debt brings the elite and the working class closer together. The elite lose some of the excess, and the workers lose some of the negatives that have prevented them from running the race.
A forgiveness of debt or other method of pulling the haves and have-nots together pushes back the eventual time of “societal restructuring.” Admittedly whatever mitigation is implemented will in-part be a societal restructuring, but it wouldn’t be a violent upheaval, just little steps. A more stable society.
The scales need leveling. I am hoping America can get our act together enough that we just move a couple of the bundles of the “haves” horde over the the “have-nots” needs, and not throw the scale into the trash with all the bundles and start over from scratch. Let’s break the cycle of history before it breaks us.
Bibliography
JakeThomas. “Historically, Income Inequality is Known as a Destroyer of Civilizations.” The Intellectualist. 2019 Feb 10. https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/historically-income-inequality-is-known-as-a-destroyer-of-civilizations (last viewed 4/7/2022)
Marcetic, Branko. “When Debts Become Unpayable, They Should Be Forgiving – An Interview with Michael Hudson.” Jacobin Magazine. 2021 December 23. https://jacobinmag.com/2021/12/michael-hudson-interview-debt-forgiveness-cancellation-ancient-rome-christianity (last viewed 4/7/2022)
Purtill, James. “People no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life, survey shows.” abc.net.au. 2020 January 20. https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/2020-edelman-trust-barometer-shows-growing-sense-of-inequality/11883788 (last viewed 4/7/2022)
West, Kelly. “Nonprofits band together to ‘make the pie bigger’.” Resolve Magazine. 2020 July 13. (last viewed 4/7/2022)
White, Gillian B. “Escaping Poverty Requires Almost 20 Years with Nearly Nothing Going Wrong.” The Atlantic. 2017 April 27. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/economic-inequality/524610/ (last viewed 4/7/2022)

Geeking Science: History of Puddings

Erin Penn

222416058 © National Library New Zealand | Dreamstime.com
“Now bring us some figgy pudding”
“Hurrah for the fun, is the pudding done!”
“Georgy Porgy, pudding pie”
So many songs about pudding, you would think it is a central dish to holiday season. Which it was throughout history until mixed foods, associated with mixed immigrants, became verboten in the white-bread vanilla-paste backlash from the USA melting pot.
Pudding now-a-days is a single flavor not-liquid not-solid dessert – chocolate, rice, vanilla, etc. Banana pudding – with banana chunks, Nilla wafers, and whipped topping on top is closest to the concept of old puddings. A mix of everything. Christmas fruitcakes are close to the sweet puddings of Christmas – moist and full of all kinds of things.
The savory puddings have been removed by history. (But would be really cool to bring back in a science fiction or history fiction piece.) Meat puddings, vegetable puddings, bag puddings, etc.
Find out more about the history of this gastrological missing link by exploring the below posts and articles … maybe even experiment with a few dishes for Geeking Science. 
Suggested reading in order of complication:
Veit, Helen Zoe. “A backlash against ‘mixed’ foods led to the demise of a classic American dish.” The Conversation. 2017 November 19. URL: https://theconversation.com/a-backlash-against-mixed-foods-led-to-the-demise-of-a-classic-american-dish-86293?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1542405362 (last viewed 3/29/2022)
Pudforallseasons.com.au. “Christmas Pudding: History and Traditions You Would Love to Know.” 2019 October 27. URL: https://www.pudforallseasons.com.au/blog/christmas-pudding-history-and-traditions/#:~:text=The%20very%20first%20version%20of,the%20time%20of%20Christmas%20preparation. (last viewed 3/29/2022)

Olver, Lynee. “Food Timeline FAQs: puddings, custards, & creams.” 2015 February 5. URL: https://www.foodtimeline.org/foodpuddings.html (last viewed 3/29/2022)