The paper was presented at American Sociological Association's annual meeting - it hasn't been published anywhere yet. That doesn't mean it's not good, but I'm leery of press coverage of conference presentations - in part because they tend to not make the papers publicly available. The press release from the university is here: http://newsinfo.iu.edu/tips/page/normal/11558.html#7, but no paper.

It sounds like there may have been a lot of researcher coding of responses. For instance, from the press release:

/Somewhat contradictory, almost half the people surveyed said it would be "OK" for a man to change his name to that of his wife. But for respondents, male name change was so implausible that they off-handedly or hesitantly agreed it would be OK. For example, Powell said, one man laughed as he responded: "Sure, why not. Hey in America, anything goes!" Others said that it was OK because: "Sure, a man should be able to do it because he's a man."/

I've been thinking there's a lot of underlying gender stuff in the foodie movement, and I'm glad Pollan articulated it. These people romanticize the cooking that previous generations of women did and tell us we ought to be doing more labor-intensive food prep -- without any mention that the reduction in domestic labor has been purely a reduction in time /women/ spend on domestic labor, and it's been accompanied by an increase in paid labor and wages. They talk about the cost, but there's no sense that there's been a benefit - there's no sense that some of us, in our very real lives, have made informed, rational, and adult decisions to not cook from scratch and sit around the dinner table every night (just, obviously, as people who have made the decision to do the opposite are doing the same kind of decision-making, and coming to the right decision for their lives.)

Any movement for more labor-intensive domestic work, whether it's cooking or childcare, is in practice a movement for women to be doing more domestic labor. Anyone who criticizes convenience - who belittles microwaves or takeout, or who says things like "of course you can find the time to cook from scratch" - is in practice saying that women haven't made responsible, good, adult decisions for how the want to allocate their time - that it was 'thoughtless trampling.'

I'm not crazy about that phrase. If we're talking about the majority or median of Americans, we're not talking about people who went to selective, private colleges, blah, etc., but we're also not talking about people who've been imprisoned or had kids out of wedlock. It's not more "regular" in a statistical sense to be the second rather than the first, depending on where we draw those lines.

If the Times started giving space to couples who are middle-class (but in debt and perhaps currently underemployed), don't have prestige jobs, have some college but not four-year degrees, live in the suburbs (and not particularly tony ones), voted for Bush twice and then Obama, shop at big box stores, and aren't very good at math -- that would be a lot more "regular people," if there's a scale for what it means to be "regular."

I think this isn't the worst example of how Judge Sotomayor has been discussed in the media in an insulting and gendered way (Glenn Greenwald has done some pieces on this), but the Times article absolutely pathologized what's normal behavior for someone in her position. (She works long, hard hours; she's intense and sometimes lonely. Shocking!) That's pretty clear from the tone of it. The last line is even "“You accept the life of a federal judge,” she said. “That is your life.”

Also, the focus was on her hard work as opposed to intellect: when very successful, ambitious men get talked about, we hear about their intelligence and perhaps charisma. Not so, here.

Do you think there aren't women who choose to abort instead of carry a baby to term because of economic reasons? That some of those women would be happier giving their baby up for adoption, but fear they will lose their jobs or be unable to continue school through pregnancy? What about that is not believable?

There are better ways to express that than others, and the idea of $1000 payments to women to give babies for adoption has a lot of problems. But since some people - including politicians - seem to be in a moment of We Need to Reduce Abortions, it's not ridiculous to talk about how pregnancy and childbirth can be economically quite difficult for women, and how that is an element of why some women have abortions - and how that might be fixable to some degree.

[And, yes, the other part of this is: if you incentivize most things enough financially, you will produce more of that behavior. The reason the "women have babies to collect welfare" thing was silly was because the payments were so low, not because the idea of people being affected by financial incentives in their baby-having was inherently ridiculous. Of course peoples' reproductive behavior is affected by economic concerns.]

and every one of them I'd be more interested in listening to on the topic of masculinity, femininity, gender roles, and strength than Klavan.