mandarine

Preamble

French singer Renaud wrote a song in the 1980s entitled Miss Maggie, in which he signifies his utter disgust at men’s violence, stupidity and vanity by praising women’s lack thereof, “except perhaps Mrs Thatcher”. The words have Renaud’s trade-mark slang vulgarity and poetic touch, and the song was acknowledged by many as a great feminist manifesto, while it also aroused somewhat of a diplomatic row by taking cheap shots at UK’s then female yet stiff neoliberal PM.

(listen to the song)

[…]
It was not from a woman’s brain
That arose the nuclear bomb;
And no woman’s hand has been stained
By a drop of Amerind’s blood.
Palestinians and Armenians
Witness from the depths of their graves
That “genocide” is masculine
As are “SS-man”, “bull-fighter”…
Because in this whorish mankind
The murderers are all brothers.
There’s no sister to rival them
Except, perhaps, Mrs Thatcher.

Woman, I love you above all
For your weakness and for your eyes
Whereas the man’s strength only rests
Within his tail and his gunfire.
When doomsday’s come, eventually
You’ll find Hell crowded with he-fools
Playing “who has the longest pee,”
Playing with footballs and war tools.
But I would like a dog to be
And to keep on earth for ever;
And by way of streetlamp, daily
I would choose Mrs Thatcher.

translation by Christian Souchon

I used to love the song, and I still do, but now only for the words, not the manifesto: I believe that fueling the feminist cause with underlining alleged essential qualities women have over men can in fact dangerously backfire. Here is why.

Dead End Feminism

Famous French philosopher and feminist Elisabeth Badinter wrote a short book in 2003, entitled ‘Fausse Route’ (’Dead-End Feminism’) explaining that feminism was heading into the wrong direction, especially the radical ‘neofeminist’ views of Andrea Dworkin or Catharine MacKinnon in the US. To make it short, she deplored the fact that feminists there and the mainstream media (and law decisions) were beginning to go too far in presenting all women as essentially good, caring, peaceful, innocent, therefore victims, while men were systematically pictured as evil, careless, violent, guilty, therefore torturers. Because it can be easily amplified by the media, and because there are still unfortunately too many examples to ‘prove’ it right, this simplistic notion that genders are irreconcilable and that women must always be protected from men is rapidly spreading in the US, then to Europe and even France.

And yet, original feminism (at least in France) was not about differences, it was about equality. Elisabeth Badinter knows it well, as she’s been a pionneer for the feminist cause, along with Simone de Beauvoir or Françoise Giroud. But it seems that the message was lost along the way. The simplified “woman good / man bad” motto is gaining ground, and turning the once fundamental philosophical debate over equality into a sour farce of counting points through court rulings and inane laws.

Admittedly, the dualism emanating from the arguments of some [female] supporters of equal access to political careers never assumed the provocative shape of separatism. But through repeated statements that women are less warlike, less vain, more concrete, more concerned than others, more dedicated to the fight in favor of life and liberties, they are depicting a caricature-like negative image of men.

Translation by yours truly

She is particularly critical of how this simplified feminist battle has pervaded the university campuses in the US, where all the shades of human and boy-girl social interactions between near-adults are gradually replaced by black-or-white interpretations of sexual intentions, and where the only means of prevention against abuse is emotional or even physical segregation. Instead of letting girls and boys untangle the emotional, social and sexual mess of late teenagehood; instead of teaching girls to fend for themselves and confirm first-hand the effectiveness of a righteous slap in the face, the new paradigm is surely steering the feminist movement away from any chances of future equality.

Equality means equality

By underlining the differences between women and men and by making them look as if they were intrinsic; by pretending that women are natural angels and that the women who do infanticide, murder, theft, procuring, or bad-ass politics are all either forced or corrupted into it by males; by dismissing most cases of male victims of female abuse as weakly and pathetic while never urging women to just hit back, this simplistic feminism is barring the way towards equality, while opening wide the gates for complementarism or differentialism. All the minor forms that the same sort of feminism can take, be it through Emily’s post or endorsed by men like in Renaud’s song, encourage this complementaristic view.

And I believe gender complementarity is patriarchy under a disguise, as it contains two major pitfalls:

1. If there are fundamental, essential, intrinsic differences between men and women, they must be a consequence of sexual differences. The essential sexual difference is that women can give birth. Therefore, the normal destiny of a woman is to be a mother and thus take care of the kids, the nest, etc…
2. Once you begin to admit that men and women have essential differences, why would you want equality? And even if there were natural differences, is it not mankind’s fate to rise from its natural state?

In my opinion, the immediate and practical implications of sexual differentialism are even more dangerous. By making biological differences the distinctive characteristic of women, they justify in advance the specialization of genders we have tried to fight against for more than thirty years. Under the pretense of opposing ‘horrible neutrality’ and ‘abominable lack of differentiation’, they are giving back undue strength to old stereotypes, masculine and feminine alike.

Therefore, I strongly resent all manner of speech going along the lines of “equality in complementarity”. It sounds too close to “the world needs floor cleaners as much as it needs rocket scientists”. This is why you will see me jump at your throat if you go that way, even when you are as dear a friend as Emily is.

You see, I have stakes in this too. While all along feminists have been fighting so that women could be equal to men, I have been thinking that I would love a world in which men could be equal to women. I’d love a world where it would be socially acceptable to be a stay-at-home father, while the wife runs a computer repair business; I’d love a world where a man could say (without you smiling): I’ve never touched a screwdriver - I leave it all to Tessa, she’s so clever with DIY stuff ; I am more into crochet and knitting - I love it with my herbal tea while watching major league baseball on TV with my buddies.

The feminine and the masculine

I am not much into Yin and Yang stuff, but I am convinced there is a feminine and a masculine side to everyone. The words feminine and masculine are misleading, as they make it sound as if femininity was intrinsically attached to women, and masculinity to men. I do not think so. I believe the level of femininity and masculinity in men and women is 90% cultural (you do not have to agree there, but bear with me for the sake of the argument). Just like a small imbalance in a chemical mix can gradually segregate two compounds, likewise it does not take a lot of initial difference in testosterone levels to kick-start the cultural chain-reaction and lead to the appearance of biological determinism through millennial delusion.

I strongly believe that the world would be a better place with more femininity in it; it does not mean that women should take over. It only means that femininity should take over, and men have (almost) as much of it in them as women do. Hardcore neofeminism just does not leave them a chance to find it out.

Epilogue

Now, it does not need a lot of straightening up to make Renaud’s song and Emily’s post acceptable. Just change ‘woman’ with ‘femininity’ - and forget you ever believed feminity was womankind’s own, and you get very convincing literature. I am not too much of an extremist after all.

Cross-posted at What We Said

Along the same lines

Men are, women are
The gender meme
Statistical gender equality

When you google 'Airbus Boeing Peak Oil', the top result is this article that I wrote in the summer of 2006. Being a Cassandra proved right gives one all sorts of uneasy feelings, but I will carry on in that direction and offer a revised version of my prophecy, adorned with new details.

In a nutshell: people are talking a lot about the difficulties for airlines with $150-a-barrel oil. But we also have to understand that it is going to be much worse for aircraft manufacturers. They probably know it; but they cannot believe what they know, and they cannot say it either. This is not just another crisis for air transportation and aerospace construction: this is the last crisis until the end of the fossil fuel era.

Hard times for airlines

First an important premise: there are no serious alternatives to jet fuel for airliners. And even if there were, they could never be cheap in a world of expensive energy. The problem is not that oil is scarce: the production has never been this high — that's why we call it Peak Oil. The problem is that energy supply is not meeting global demand: until demand abates, any type of energy will end up costing the same, be it classical kerosene, gas-to-liquid synthetic jet fuel, or biodiesel. Regardless of the environmental footprint. Just know that if it was technologically feasible, filling an A380 tank with biofuel would use up 150 hectares of yearly yield,considering an optimistic figure of 2000 litres per hectare for Jatropha biodiesel. You'd need 150×2x365×150 = 16 million hectares — the arable land in France — to power the currently ordered A380 fleet.

Meanwhile the fuel efficiency improvements do not come anywhere close to compensating the price surge. Boeing claim that their new 787 will burn 20% less fuel than current jets of the same category (namely the 767 or A330). 20% is how much oil prices rose between the beginning of April and mid-May 2008: 30 years of technological improvement in aircraft and engine design will offset six weeks of price increase, and no technological Deus ex Machina will change that deal.

The obvious consequence is that cheap flights are gone for good. We are currently witnessing a fast concentration of the market, because the fierce competition prevents airlines from transferring the whole fuel bill to their passengers. As the weaker players exit the arena, ticket prices will rise until the few remaining airlines can break even financially. We will see a trend of de-democratization of air travel, and people will gradually change their travel habits, starting with the poorer and newer travelers.

There is a second key element that will drive air traffic down: as planemakers' market forecasts point out, air traffic growth is consistently correlated to world GDP growth. No need to be a psychic to imagine that GDP growth will seriously suffer from expensive energy. When people's purchasing power shrinks because of the energy bill, they will think twice before flying. Note that a major economic downturn could very well stop the rise in oil prices or even reduce them for a while. But it will not help air traffic - unemployed people do not fly all that much.

Meanwhile, environmental awareness is growing worldwide: the global warming theme is increasingly popular with the sort of middle class travelers who used to fill economy seats for exotic vacations. There will be less scuba-diving in the Maldives; less horseback-trekking in Mongolia; less leopard-spotting in Tanzania. Flying is losing political correctness points by the day. This is even beginning to reach the corporate world, although sometimes only for mere greenwashing concerns: more firms are asking their employees to fly less, to favor teleconferencing or to merge meetings. Business travel, the spine of airline profitability, is probably weaker than most hope.

I also see a final, more tricky contributor to airline misfortunes: many airlines have based their financial model upon the resell value of their aircraft. Planes are a huge investment, with a long lifetime — a bit like homes. Maybe you see what I am hinting at. Just as the housing crisis brought many people to bankruptcy, many airlines will lose their financial footing when the industry's obvious overcapacity and gloomy outlook pulls the market value of second-hand aircraft down. All this will contribute to reduce air traffic over the next decades, to the levels of the 1990s, then the 1980s, then the 1970s …

Harder still for aircraft manufacturers

The average natural decay of a fleet because of ageing is around 6% a year. When yearly traffic is constant from one year to the next, 6 planes for every 100 go into retirement, and are replaced by newer planes. This means that if airlines cut the world's capacity by a mere 6% each year, old retiring planes will not need to be replaced, and no new aircraft will be sold at all. A 6% capacity reduction is equivalent to just changing the Tuesday flight of the daily San Francisco to Tokyo service from a 747-400 to a 777-300ER. A reduction the economic press or the general public would hardly notice can make Airbus and Boeing assembly lines grind to a halt. US carriers will reduce capacity by 10% to 15% this third quarter of 2008 alone.

All told, the industry will cut capacity by 9% in 2008, according to James Higgins, analyst for Soleil-Solebury Research. (quote from CNNmoney.com)

In short: airlines make money in proportion to air traffic; aircraft manufacturers make money in proportion to air traffic growth. In a world with negative air traffic growth, the former float, the latter drown. Therefore, although we will probably not see the end of air traffic any time soon, this extremely nasty leverage effect will make aircraft manufacturers suffer considerably.

One might argue that in a world of expensive oil, airlines should scrap all old, gas-guzzling planes and buy new, soberer ones instead. That would be easy if they were making a lot of profit or could promise a bright future. But when the industry is consistently in the red zone, and getting redder, bankers do not follow. Few airlines have sufficient cash to sign billion-dollar contracts without external investment. Therefore airlines will be like people in poor countries: they will be running old vehicles which use up tons of gas because they cannot afford the newer models which make twice the miles per gallon.

Admittedly, a handful of airlines will be in a position to buy the new planes. When all the world's money ends up in oil exporters' hands, they have to buy things from us to avoid drowning under the heap of green bills. Aircraft are a great choice, as they are both hard-currency-intensive and fossil-fuel intensive, which oil producers have a lot of, as per design. Consequently, aircraft sales may in fact undergo an increase because of high oil prices. This I call the "Aboulafia effect". I conjecture that such an increase is inherently short-lived. Middle-East carriers will probably become prominent players, and gradually snatch the bulk of the market from the traditional airlines. But air traffic will shrink nonetheless, and all they will need to do is buy back the recent planes from their victims, scrap the old ones, and make the most of a declining market — something they are becoming good at.

As if matters could be any worse, there will finally be a mean backlash effect: thanks to cheap liquidity seeking asylum, the years 2003-2007 were absolutely euphoric in terms of aircraft orders. Manufacturers had to invest massively in infrastructures and people in order to ramp up production and honor those orders. But these planes will not materialize into deliveries before a couple of years. There is plenty of time for many airlines to go bankrupt or otherwise hit financial turbulence. This will mean massive delivery deferrals, then cancellations, so that assembly lines cannot even hold onto their current backlog. Who knows, we may witness the very curious artefact of a negative net yearly order-book. In the real world, that's called jumping off a cliff with a lot of momentum.

The combined value of the orders for Airbus and Boeing planes exceeds $500 billion at list prices, so large-scale cancellations and deferrals could easily amount to tens of billions of dollars and affect suppliers of engines and other parts in addition to the jet makers. (from the Wall Street Journal)

What next?

When that happens, it will be catastrophic for all the people, organisations, or communities, which now contribute to the aircraft manufacturing adventure. This could send Seattle or Toulouse the way British textile, or French foundries went not so long ago. And do not get influenced by prejudice. Aerospace does not have an intrinsically higher value than those industries we have come to regard as lowly. Today's ghost slums were full of very busy and extremely proud people at the peak of their flourishing trade.

I do not know what the smartest move for aircraft manufacturers is, and I am glad I am not in Tom Enders' or Scott Carson's shoes. Publicly acknowledging that the air travel industry is on the brink of inevitable decline would discourage investors and hasten the fall. And yet, the earlier they can start downshifting, the smoother the forced landing. They should be cancelling the B787 (a little too late for that one) or A350 developments, and simply offer to fit new generation engines on good old 767s and A330s. That would already be at least half the fuel economy, for a much smaller cost, while not forcing new capacity on the market place. Or silently work on a totally new kind of bird, absolutely optimized for fuel efficiency, even if it changes the rules of the game: a Mach 0.62, 20,000ft, turboprop, middle-range, high-capacity, DC-4-comfort machine that would be the soberest flying camel to get people where trains can't go for the next half century.

Or maybe steer away from this dwindling trade altogether and find a new frontier. How about giant wind turbines? If those do not sell, nothing will anyway, so that may be worth a try.

Notes

Many thanks to Richard Heinberg and Julian Darley of the Post Carbon Institute for accepting publication at Global Public Media.

Requests for reproduction or translation should be sent to the Post Carbon Institute.

Economist and Nobel Prize recipient Joseph Stiglitz recently published a book entitled The Three Trillion Dollar War. He claims that the global cost of the war (not just counting troops wartime bonuses or weapons, but a host of indirect costs) is above three trillion dollars for the US and the same for the rest of the world.

There are roughly 30 million people living in Iraq.

Instead of using the money to destroy a country and make cripples, terrorists, or fundamentalists, maybe it would have been smarter (and just as machiavellian) to share the six trillion dollars among Iraqis and give a million to each family, in exchange of all the oil, a democratic tame government, and exclusive commercial rights for US firms, so that the money finds its way back to where it came from.

Nobody wants to blow themselves up when they get to choose between being a martyr and a millionaire.

By command of Her Royal Highness, I hereby answer a series of personal questions which make the blogging world a futile and friendly place.

Where I was ten years ago.

I think ten years ago was when I got my first doubts about my job. I had been working for two years then, in what is probably the finest job in the world for an engineer who likes hardcore technique: future spacecraft projects with the leading European space systems manufacturer. There’s nothing like achieving a childhood dream too early to kill glamour for good. The job was extremely interesting, but essentially abstract. One of the inventions I made back then did make it into a live spacecraft design, which is due to fly in 2010. That’s a five percent chance of seeing a concrete outcome for my work after twelve years. The job was (and still is) great fun, but essentially aimless. I have lost all illusions about space conquest (and will probably write soon why). There is no democratic debate on how the space subsidies should be spent either. I spend taxpayer’s money for things taxpayers have no clue about. Sometimes I feel like a Monsanto scientist doing fun stuff just because it can be done and it’s fun to do; and that which can be sold makes it to the market.

For the past two or three years I have been wanting to find some other job, one that would be more useful to mankind, but now I have decided to keep my fun (and mildly harmless) job, and save the world on my free time, like most superpeople do.

Five fatty snacks

1. Home-made nutella (which some would call Gianduja; it’s hazelnut butter with sugar and chocolate), by the spoonful
2. Roquefort cheese. My boy’s nanny is raising ewes, whose milk is used to make Roquefort. Each year, she gets discount cheese from the ‘caves’. We have six pounds of the treasure cheese hoarded in our freezer, bought for the price of burger-grade cheddar.
3. Saucisson. You’d probably call it dry sausage.
4. Foie gras. (We do it ourselves with our neighbour’s ducks, but not before November)
5. Tomates confites. Half-tomatoes that are slowly baked in the oven with olive oil, garlic and pesto.

Five other fatty snacks (no dietary duality in my world)

1. Tapenade. A paste made with olives.
2. Caviar d’aubergines. A paste made with eggplant and olive oil.
3. Ail confit. Garlic slowly cooked in duck fat.
4. Fresh cheese with herbs. Chives especially.
5. Onion jam.

Have you noticed? All go with bread. I must be French.

Five things I would do if I was a billionaire

1. Wonder where all that wealth came from
2. Subsidize conversions to organic farming in my region
3. Subsidize research in natural and organic farming all over the world
4. Donate heaps to open-source projects
5. Go back to work

Five jobs I have had

1. Math & physics tutor for rich but mediocre pupils
2. Summer camp leader (volunteer)
3. Metalworking lathe operator in French Guyana (2 month internship)
4. Flight control systems engineer for commercial aircraft future projects
5. Attitude control systems engineer for spacecraft future projects

Three of my habits

1. Going to sleep with the same chapter of the same audiobook on my mp3 player.
2. Commenting blogs in bed instead of reading serious books.
3. Reading blogs at work whenever I need a break. The more pressure there is, the more I read.
4. Driving slower than the elderly.
5. Taking a 30′ nap every other day.

Five places I have lived

1. Paris, France (0->1/2)
2. Trois-Rivières, Québec (1/2->2)
3. Paris, France (2-22)
4. Toulouse, France (22-32)
5. Home, Home (32-Inf)

Remember that I recently recommended reading George Monbiot? Well, he’s just agreed to my translating his recent article Small is Bountiful, in defense of smallholdings, on my garden blog. Not that you need a French translation anyway, but I thought I’d let you know.

Barter vs. gift

We often think that when currency did not exist, most societies relied on barter for economic exchange. This is the main argument in favor of the use of money, which essentially allows to delay both halves of barter by materializing debt. In a barter economy, you can only trade what you have, whereas with currency, you can trade what you will (probably) have later.

When the seller (or the lender) realizes later that you cannot in fact honor the debt, then you get a financial crisis, in which everybody starts to question the value of everybody else’s debt (i.e. money loses its value), therefore nobody wants to sell or lend (i.e. accept someone’s debt as payment), therefore many people stop working (nothing to sell), therefore economy grinds to a halt.

But this is not true. Barter may have been the rule for merchant trade (i.e. rare and foreign stuff like beads, salt, silk, spice, etc.), but for daily economic exchange, barter was the exception and gift was the rule.

Somehow, we have been brainwashed into believing that any exchange should be reciprocal. But we must not look very far to find perfect examples of a gift behaviour which is as old as life itself: one expects no quid pro quo when one raises a child or takes care of a family. Obviously we do not ask a newborn baby to give something or do something special in return for nursing or shelter. We do not ask a newborn baby to sign a debt certificate. It is true that some parents have great expectations (you’ll be a famous lawyer, my son), but most parents only want the best for their kids, regardless of what the kids will do to them in the future.

Savings and credit

Savings (and then credit) is what you have when you have worked more than what it takes to fulfill your short-term needs (or wants). You can either stash this surplus as hard goods, like a squirrel hides nuts, but most people hoard it as money (or investment). Money (or invested capital) is someone else’s debt. When an insane economy forces goods onto impoverished people in exchange for debt, and then realises that the debt cannot be honored, then people’s savings are hit. Your surplus has melted just like hazelnuts can rot. It seems fair enough, but the crisis goes far beyond simply telling the rich that their surplus has vanished (bummer). And the poor are also hit, first when they get squeezed (e.g. evicted) so that creditors can get crumbs back, then when the economy slows down and they lose their jobs.

What if I had just given my surplus away?

Now imagine we have our brains intact and can live in an economy when we never expect anything in return. If I have surplus, I will give it away, for whatever I feel deserves it best. I will probably think twice before giving my surplus to the rich and old, and instead, it will feel natural to give it to the young (and generally poor), especially if someone had done the same for me when I was young and poor myself.

I do not expect anything in return, I do not think of the surplus as mine and to be returned one day; therefore, there cannot be a financial crisis. But society does get the full benefit of this ‘investment’ in any case, and I will get my interest directly through social recognition (there were rich people before money existed), and obviously indirectly via the healthy society I contributed to.

Note that the people who get gifts from me, even repeatedly, should not consider that they owe me anything nor feel uncomfortable in any way as a consequence of my largesse. In today’s world, only children can do that well.

If you think hard enough, there is no more nor less ‘justice’ in this system than the current one. But it is more robust, and certainly more humane. Probably, a gift economy does not work when you do not know the people. Instead of seeing it as an obstacle against my utopia, I see it as a good reason to get to know my neighbours and make tons of friends on the web. Who knows, maybe I will have to give something to you one day.

Epilogue

We have a saying in France, which goes like this: “Les bons comptes font les bons amis”, which means “Good accounts make good friends”. My personal belief is that “Les bons comptes font les bons comptables, c’est tout”: “Good accounts make good accountants, period”.

An announcement

#2 will celebrate its zeroeth birthday sometime around end October.

This is an opportunity to recycle an old post that probably not everybody has read. If you have, you are welcome to read it again.

Introduction

A couple of years ago, I heard a heated argument between my brother-in-law and his cousin. The young mother of three had hinted something about my in-law still being single at age 35+ and having no active plans to found a ‘real family’. The accused righteously retorted that the cultural model of the normal family with kids is slowly drowning our planet in overpopulation, and that his choice was the reasonable one. He was this close to saying something like ‘as far as sustainable development is concerned, having kids amounts to owning a SUV’.

[more]

Mowing is more fun when it allows for some creativity.

I was tagged for this parenting meme. I am afraid I will have to translate some of the questions so that it applies more adequately to my situation. A few context items: I have one son, and he is three and a half.
[more]

Remember how I said people should read much more than they write? Well, I am doing just that at the moment. That and write post upon post for my gardening blog. This leaves me no huge motivation to post here, all the more so that I am under the impression I would be boring people with the same themes all over again.

For those dear readers who would protest they would not be bored, I offer two solutions:

1. I will be recycling old posts - I know I like to read them again. Maybe you will.
2. I strongly recommend you to read George Monbiot’s articles. He writes the things I would like to write. Only he does it much better. And he knows what he is writing about.

[…] why are we still prospecting for fossil fuels when we already have more than we can safely [global warming] burn? The reason is that governments are pursuing two completely different policies. One is to encourage the production of fossil fuels; the other is to discourage their consumption. Until this conflict has resolved our carbon cutting programs will fail. No company extracts fossil fuels as a hobby. Once removed from the ground, they will be burnt whatever demand side policies say. May I propose a new kind of carbon capture and storage, which is geologically stable and guaranteed to work? Leave the damn stuff in the ground.

George Monbiot, as podium speaker in the Nature podcast