Every now and then, CNN and other newsmedia run puff pieces on people who are exonerated of previously convicted crimes, usually through DNA evidence and the work of groups like Innocence Project.

In this one, however, I found something that disturbed me.

Sometimes an Innocence Project client is confirmed to be guilty by DNA evidence, but the group doesn’t make the number of those cases available. Theoretically, If key DNA material in a case is properly preserved, there’s no time limit on revisiting old cases, according to the Innocence Project.

This worries me slightly – I understand that their goal is a reform of the justice system. In many ways I sympathize with their cause, since psychological science has proven time and again that certain longstanding identification techniques (books of “known criminals”, badly arranged lineups) can easily be abused and give false information, and that memory fades and changes over time.

At the same time, the question this passage raises is, is Innocence Project wilfully exaggerating the extent of “wrongful” convictions for their purposes? What other purpose does hiding the record and ratio of guilty/innocent determinations by their DNA testing serve, except that it may come out that most of the people they test are in fact guilty, and that the justice system may be mostly working as it should?

And if they were getting a whole lot of exonerations, wouldn’t they be willing to say, perhaps, that “over 50%” or “over 75%” or even “over 25%” of the people they tested were innocent? Heck, 10% or even 1% (1 in 100) would be a not-inconsequential figure and better evidence for their cause. Instead, they only list “208 exonerated.”

There’s an old rhetorical fallacy from the baloney detection kit known as “Observational Selection” (aka “counting the hits but forgetting the misses”) and I submit today that Innocence Project, in presenting the statistic of “208 exonerated” on their webpage while refusing to tell us how many of their subjects are confirmed guilty, are very guilty of this.

A story on News.com has the US Congress trying to pass a law that offers victims of identity theft the “right” to sue for restitution. As anyone who has or knows someone who’s had their identity stolen, there’s a lot of expense and effort involved in putting your credit score back together once it’s been trashed.

Unfortunately, the law as currently written is (at least to my mind) horribly flawed, in three very important ways. It counts as an excercise in misdirected effort.

The first problem is that the law addresses the problem of identity theft in a backwards manner. It presumes that thieves can be deterred by passing more punishment. The problem here is that it assumes the criminal has been found, and the vast majority of identity thieves are very hard to track down. Just as one example, recent IRS statistics place between 10 and 12 million duplicated (or worse) Social Security numbers in the tax system due to fraudulent SSNs used by people ineligible to work in the United States. Each of these is a serious enough problem to start with (try applying for college loans and finding out you’re an 18 year old with a 25 year credit/work history), but becomes worse when bank accounts and credit cards start to get involved.

The second problem is that even if you do find the criminal, and convince the authorities to prosecute, you’re then having to go back to the court a second time to get restitution. The way the law is worded, it’s not something that the judge can simply order; you have to sue the criminal in civil court. By the time you can get a civil judgement, there is likely no money left to have it paid from. It will all be gone, spent on the defendant’s lawyer in the criminal case or otherwise vanished/confiscated by the authorities, or even repossessed by credit companies trying to make back the money the criminal will never pay them.

The final problem is that this law doesn’t address the real root problem of identity theft, which is the credit companies themselves. A couple decades ago, credit was harder to come by. People started with a gas card or store card, a bank account, perhaps an ATM / Debit card, and worked their way up. Now, the credit agencies are offering credit cards to everyone and their dog, the sooner the better, and with much less requirement of proof of identity and ability to handle money. It goes without saying that the less verification the credit card agencies do, the more fraud slips by them until it’s too late. Ultimately, if the law held the credit agencies (rather than the merchants who don’t get paid and the consumers who currently suffer increased interest rates and fees) responsible, you’d see fraud go down significantly as they started to pay attention to who they were giving credit cards and credit lines to.

I’d be very interested in a real law that could crack down on identity fraud, but I don’t think this law does anything at all.

Will posits, in contrasting his churchgoing nature with that of his lovely wife, the idea that for some reason, Catholics have a “Catholic or nothing” approach to religion. As one of the Catholics of which he speaks, I think I can shed a bit more light on this phenomenon.

The first issue for a Catholic, as opposed to many other churches, is that the gulf in beliefs is much larger. I am fortunate in that my family is of mixed demoninations: my grandparents are a Catholic/Lutheran duo who have managed to stay together for 52 years, and their kids turned out to be 3 Catholics, 3 Lutherans, and a Methodist. This has allowed me to see the differences in what is taught.

For a Lutheran going to services at a Baptist or Methodist church, or even to Church of Christ, there is not an immense gulf in belief. There may be minor dogmatic differences, but there’s a certain “protestant unity.” For a Catholic, the structure of the service will be vastly different; there are also major hurdles to get past (differences in the belief on various sacraments, possible differences in prayer structure related to saints, etc) before someone raised Catholic might feel comfortable attending such a church. By the same token, a Catholic would likely be much more comfortable going to mass in an Orthodox church, whereas I get the feeling most “Protestants” would be much more uneasy in that regard.

This also will extend to how the sunday services are structured. Catholics, for the most part, grow up with a basic sunday mass that includes a definite sequence of events. There’s a lot of sitting/standing/kneeling involved (aka ‘Catholic Calisthenics’ by some). Ironically, the reforms of Vatican II allowed for some radical changes and regional variations, and yet most of the churches I have gone to have seemed to carry much the same music, much the same organization, and much the same character. When I visited Germany, I knew the melody to every single song at mass as well as the sequence of events, even if I was tempted to sing in English rather than in German. Had I not understood a word that was said, I still could have followed the mass just on gestures and timing alone.

The other issue – strongly prevalent in the southern regions but still present nationwide – is a decided animosity towards Catholicism and those who are raised Catholic on the part of many/most Protestant churches.

If a Lutheran wanders into a Methodist church, and speaks to people there about curiosity towards their church, there’s a certain level of acceptance about it. If a Catholic wanders into the same place, there’s much more a “oh dear we need to save you from that evil church” vibe to the response. From personal experience and the experience of other Catholic friends, Baptists are actually worse on this, with many Baptist churches actually teaching that Catholics are “not really Christian”, that their baptisms and sacraments are all 100% invalid (one particularly ugly implication being that Catholic marriages are invalid and they are “living in sin” and producing out-of-wedlock offspring), and other rather nasty things. The one Baptist roommate I had during my college years was 100% friendly, right up until he learned I was attending the Catholic mass on campus; after that point, he decided he hated me.

The more “born again” the particular Protestant branch is, the more likely they will have this sort of reaction to a Catholic. A few places I’ve been, admitting to being Catholic was somewhat akin to telling them to hang up the garlic wreaths and start sharpening the oaken stakes.

This is not to say that all Protestant churches are that way. Lutherans have a varying level of animosity depending on which Synod they belong to, and some have mellowed out in recent years (when my grandparents were married, they had to have a civil ceremony because neither church would take them; at their 50th anniversary, the pastor of my grandfather’s church had nothing but good to say about them, including regret that his church had taken so long to come around). I’ve found Methodists to be much more inviting than Lutherans or Baptists, though they are amazingly hardcore about their music; one imagines that someone tone-deaf might have a hard time there, or at least become very good at lip-syncing.

However, as for just picking up and going to a non-Catholic church? There are a lot of extra barriers to overcome, erected both by the Catholic beliefs and by the other churches.

One of the truisms of office life is that after a while, someone dealing with a catalog or office supply chain will go to that one chain for all their needs. For some things where the market is competitive, this makes sense. On the other hand, it behooves a marketer to pad their bottom line by offering more and more things, many of which are in the catalog priced at levels nowhere near where common sense would dictate.

Example:
Single torchiere lamp, with 55-watt 2000-lumen bulb. Expected life of bulb: 6-9 months. Cost of bulb: $50. Cost of lamp: $125. Supplier: Shoshona Office Supply Office Supply.

Two torchiere lamps, each with a single 20-watt, 1300-lumen bulb. Expected life of bulbs: 4+ years. Cost of bulbs: $5 each (total $10). Cost of lamps: $30 each ($60 total). Supplier: Nördske Furniture.

What’s the difference? Shoshona Office Supply doesn’t expect to sell this stuff. Indeed, I’d be surprised if they ship it that often. Nördske, on the other hand, sells and ships this stuff on a daily basis and competes with other stores in the area that do the same.

There is one other difference. I’ve had Nördske deliver furniture to me, as well as shipping it from their stores. They pack everything heavily, and I’ve only had one thing I ever had to return. Meanwhile, the first thing I ever ordered from Shoshona Office Supply – 5-shelf heavy duty unit – came packed with nothing to protect it but the cardboard in the box itself, 3 of the 5 shelves busted in transit.

[Addendum]: The “replacement” from Shoshona arrived today. It’s missing two of the endpieces, so only three of the 5 shelves can actually be set up.

A new movie (remaking an old movie and broadway production) is in theaters this week, called “Hairspray.” The plot synopsis given by IMDB is: “Pleasantly plump teenager Tracy Turnblad teaches 1962 Baltimore a thing or two about integration after landing a spot on a local TV dance show.”Regrettably, though I’m sure the movie’s fun and the musical numbers are entertaining (and it could be one of the first times John Travolta’s actually been watchable in years), I’m not so sure the movie has the right message.

Society’s got a love-hate relationship with body image. On the one hand, the weight/shape standards for women have become increasingly unrealistic; two cases in point would be Marilyn Monroe and Angela Lansbury, who were highly attractive actresses in their time but probably would be considered “fat” by producers today (Monroe was 5′ 5.5″ and around 120 pounds, which is pretty darn healthy but sure ain’t a size 0; the “in-crowd” these days are 5’8 or higher and under 90 pounds).

On the one hand, the film gives the message that a fat girl can still achieve her dreams, get the cute guy, etc. On the other hand, it does nothing to show the girl taking control for herself – regulating what she eats, exercising, showing some self-restraint. And I’m sorry to say that the words “pleasantly plump”, regrettable as it may be, are a euphemism for “a girl who needs some medical help before she develops obese-onset diabetes” in the case of this actress.

For point of reference, my household was not filled with skinny people. My family background is germanic and celtic for the most part; short, relatively plump people. However, even if none of my family will ever fit into small-size clothing, they were all active. My father was very reliable about a morning volleyball group and running; my mother taught aerobics and water aerobics; my grandfather is an organist and trombonist in addition to his own walks; my grandmother (before a tragic accident that cost her the use of her legs) walked with my grandfather and participated in aerobics and water aerobics as well. Fast food meals were the exception rather than the rule in our house.

Does everyone need to be a supermodel? Of course not. On the other hand, should the message be to children/teenagers who are seriously overweight that it doesn’t matter, or should it be that they need to control what they eat, exercise responsibly, and speak with their doctor if the weight doesn’t come off?

I would hope that the second message is what we should be teaching. Alas, instead of the healthy middle ground, we’re stuck oscillating between girls who drive themselves into sickness (anorexia/bulemia/other eating disorders) in pursuit of an unattainable Size 0 goal, or giving up so far that they destroy their own bodies, causing all sorts of other health risks with binge eating and lack of exercise.

And then I remember a fundamental shift – reading one of my dad’s old comic books (I think from 1971) I saw an ad for a product I considered unthinkable: a product advertised to young women who were too skinny to be considered attractive.

How far we’ve come!

(Addendum: yes, I am aware that young boys are taught unhealthy things too – everyone wants to be the overly muscled football star, etc. However for some reason, the “unhealthy weight” aspect is drilled into girls a lot more than into boys, probably because men don’t spend nearly as much time watching nearly-naked men prancing down a runway in fashion shows or seeing nearly-naked men on the cover of fashion magazines, as opposed to the myriad products marketed towards women this way.)

Over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Walter Dellinger pre-emptively discuss the possibility that racial “preferences” used by Louisville and Seattle to enforce a “minimum” and “maximum” African-American presence in each school (while conveniently neglecting to watch other races) might be struck down as unconstitutional. Both opposed the idea.

The eventual decision (by 5-4 ruling, as most of this term’s have been) was that opponents were right. I think Justice Kennedy’s line was the best: “Crude measures of this sort [as illustrated in this case] threaten to reduce children to racial chits valued and traded according to one school’s supply and another’s demand.”

Where I grew up, there was a forced busing system actually worse than Louisville’s. Instead of being limited to within ISD districts, it actually was an “exchange” system; students from certain districts with high minority populations were bussed out to less-populated suburban districts. The results were staggering, and I’m confident in saying not helpful.

But I don’t think the results actually had anything to do with race.

The actual results of the program, which may or may not still exist (and hopefully will die with this decision if it does still exist) were the following:

– Increase in violence and gang activity in the suburban schools.
– Decreased involvement by parents and bussed kids alike in school programs.

By the time I was of high school age, these were bad enough for the local high school that my parents sent me to a private school (another 7 miles away). The high school had had at least one violent incident involving a weapon every week.

However, I believe that neither of these complaints has a direct relation to race. For the first, if a majority of kids were from any low-income area (“white trash”, latino, asian, black) there would likely be a larger number of latchkey kids, bad parents, violent behavior, and yes, crime and gangs and drugs.

For the second, I believe the primary problem was partially the income of parents, but also partially the onerous nature of the busing program. When kids are near a school, or “nearer” compared to a 3-hour bus ride, it’s not as far for parents to pick them up after school events. It’s not as far for parents to drop them off early. And it’s an extra amount of time for parents to drive to make it to games and cheer their kids on, and then bring them home again.

Even if the 3-hour bus trip equates to a normal 30-minute ride (and my parents usually dropped me off rather than have me have to sit and wait for a bus that took 2 hours to make what would have been a 30-minute bicycle ride, 15 in the car), that’s an hour lost from someone’s day trying to participate in these extra things. It’s harder for them to make it to parent-teacher conference night, harder for them to be there for band practice or sports programs, harder for them to be there even for a school dance. It’s also an hour of lost sleep, or lost potential study time, for the child.

And that’s setting aside the fact that school buses, even more than the school building themselves, are havens for a Lord of the Flies mentality – bored kids sitting in a confined space, with nothing to do but cause trouble and the only “supervision” an adult whose primary point of attention is not the kids, but the road. A lot of damage can be done to kids on a bus, and the longer the bus trip, the worse it gets.

The end result is a net loss for the kids on both sides of the equation. The school attendance numbers may not change, but the school community numbers do.

Will offers up his experience with beggars and bums below; I maintain a normally steadfast refusal to give money. My refusal is based partly on the behavior of those in Colosse.

When I was still a student at Southern Tech, we had experience with the bums. Generally they didn’t come onto campus (or campus cops did a good job herding them off), but they sat (and sit to this day) at the entrances to campus by the freeway, hounding people for money. Absurdly, they take shifts, and you can see them switching if you know what times they do it; one time we even followed one as he got “off shift” and went to a rather nice and well-maintained sports car to drive off.

The other thing that’s always a lark is their shifting stories. A couple summers back, there were some rather rough hurricanes; the local bums (whose signs had previously indicated out of work status) quickly shifted, all claiming to be refugees or that their places of work were destroyed by the hurricanes. When the second hurricane came by, that name went up on their begging signs, replacing the previous hurricane’s name; as if we wouldn’t notice that they were the same bum who’d claimed to be an evacuee of the previous weather the week before.

There is, however, one person I’ve given to in the past few months. I consider him the exception that proves my case. Driving home late on a wednesday night, I had the misfortune to hit one of the miscellaneous pieces of debris that inevitably come up in Colosse’s roads. It punctured a tire, and a mile down the road I was stopped.

Colosse’s freeways, alas, are severely lacking in proper-width breakdown lanes/shoulders, so when my can of Fix-A-Flat didn’t work, I got out my jack, set up to swap the tire… and realized it would be a VERY dangerous operation by myself.

A couple minutes later, a car pulled over and a gentleman got out and walked up; he asked if I needed any help, and aided me, keeping an eye out so that I didn’t get hit by anyone while the tire was switched. My spare was a bit low, but I was confident I could reach a gas station on it; I gave him what I had in cash ($20) and thanked him for his help.

I got to a nearby gas station, but my spare didn’t quite manage; the old thing had popped on the way up. Called my roommate for assistance, and as I was waiting for him, my earlier benefactor came by; he’d come back to check and make sure I got to safety.

As we were waiting, I got to know him a bit better; he was a military veteran who was a bit down on his luck, had his apartment and a car, but an expired drivers’ license and a job interview with UPS to become a driver later that week. He showed me his documents – they matched. I didn’t have any more money to give him, but my roommate had a few bucks, and we both thanked him – for his military service, for the help, for coming back – and then wished him good luck with his interview and getting the license renewed in the morning.

I refuse to give to a bum – but I also believe that my benefactor that night wasn’t a bum, and he was absolutely welcome to all the help I was able to give him.

Keeping up with the posts on SoTech, I thought I’d offer a quick primer on the dorms they have as such.

First up, we have The Polyhedron. The Polyhedron was built first on SoTech’s campus, back in the 50s. Despite this, it’s probably (overall) the most well-kept of the lot. Solid metal-and-concrete construction, large block exteriors, thick walls, good A/C and ventilation. It’s in The Polyhedron that Greenwood Hall (the Honors dorm that Will and I were in for most of our stays), Lecter Hall, Dredd Hall, Bruno Hall, and Grayson Hall are located. In the normal course of things, Greenwood Hall and Dredd Hall are for Honors students, Bruno Hall is where most of the Assletes (and regrettably, the 1st floor accomodations for handicapped accessibility) are located, and Grayson Hall and Lecter Hall are reserved for the rest who don’t get into a specific one. The rest of the “student athlete” population tends to be in Lecter Hall because Grayson is a 24-hour noise-free zone, something they wouldn’t likely understand or want to be in. During the summers, most of The Polyhedron is turned into paid locations for summer camps, High School Jailbait Cheerleading Camp, and other such events.

Every couple years, they try to “clean” the walls of The Polyhedron, to turn them back to their “natural” coloration. The true natural coloration, however, is Stone Gray. It gets back that way pretty quickly in Colosse’s weather.

The second, and largest-capacity, student housing setup is Sauron Center. Sauron Center is approximately 17 or 18 floors high, and was built in the 70s. It’s more run down than The Polyhedron, the elevators rarely work, and on at least two occasions has been flooded from the top floors downward when some idiot tried to hang their clothing from the emergency fire sprinklers. Sauron Center has another rare feature: students are gender-separated not by suite, but by floor, due to the community bathroom/shower setup.

The third location, built in the early ’80s, is SoTech Plaza. SoTech Plaza is a set of two-story “apartment” setups, with single-person rooms sharing a bathroom. The good news is, you get your own bathroom. The bad news is: everything else. A/C is provided by loud, badly maintained window units, the walls are paper-thin, the metal skeletons are starting to buckle. SoTech Plaza was originally supposed to be a “temporary” setup until newer places were built, at which point it was supposed to be torn down and replaced with a real building, but SoTech are cheap that way and seem to intend to try to patch it until one of the buildings collapses on someone’s head.

The Pines is the fourth location. This was put up in the early 90s, and is what was supposed to replace SoTech Plaza, except that money became tight and they handed the reins over to a private management company to run it as apartments for a while. They got it back about half a decade ago, and seem to be running it about the same as SoTech Plaza now.

Finally, there’s The Forest and The Wood, the two newest ones. Almost brand spanking new, but put up and advertised more as places for the Frat/Sorority types to go than anything for the main student body, because Frat Row is slowly being torn down. They follow much the same philosophy as The Pines, being set up more as apartment complexes (which allow people to remain over summer even if they’re not registered for summer classes) than dorms.

For obvious reasons, Sauron Center is the most inexpensive to live in, and The Forest and The Trees are the most expensive. For those on scholarship, Greenwood is still the place to be.

As Will’s noted before, we both attended Southern Tech. I, upon my graduation, found employment at my alma mater, something I continue to this day. It’s something of a feeling of giving back, something of a rewarding experience (with one or two exceptions, the co-workers are fantastic), and government jobs are always good for job security.

One of the more interesting thing about my position is that it allows me to keep an eye on the student body. My department features a number of degree plans, one of which seems to have none of the graduate-degree potential of the others; I like to call this one “Future Gym Teachers of America.” Whereas most of the other degree plans are dominated by bright kids, this one has the singular distinction of being the home of roughly 50% of the high-profile NCAA athletes for the school. I say “athletes”, but we have a slang term as well, especially come the end of semester and class registration time: “Assletes.”

When I was in the dorms, Will and I had a common friend in Karl. Karl’s troubles with this crowd started early. Southern Tech’s system of assigning roommates is affectionately known as “Roommate Russian Roulette”: they have NO overhead for people to shuffle around, they routinely overbook by 10-20% so that people spend the first couple weeks (or worse) living on cots in the common areas, and in some cases they’ve actually quartered students at another university in another part of town, and bussed them back and forth from there to campus. Getting a roommate transfer (even in conditions where items have been stolen or personal property destroyed) is a matter not of convincing them it’s warranted, but of convincing someone else to trade off in another room.

Karl’s original housing was in the worst section of the dorms, and they gave him an “Asslete” for a roommate; this person ran a nighttime barber business out of their dorm room, and Karl was rightly afraid that the “clients” would walk off with his possessions. This had a highly negative effect on Karl’s studies, but fortunately didn’t last long enough to give him too major of a problem.

When Karl managed (a couple months later) to transfer into the better dorms by moving into the room next door as my suitemate, his studies noticeably improved, because he was able to be in his room with his books and study. This lasted for approximately 1 and a half years.

Then, the housing authority “mysteriously lost” his housing re-signing documents, after cashing his deposit check. They stuck another less-savory individual in Karl’s slot, and moved him to the worst dorm in the place – a dorm known informally as the “Athletics Dorm” but more often referred to in a derogatory reference to a famous movie serial killer the dorm might have been named after. He was shoehorned into a three-person suite, the two others in the place being some of the worst, and yet somehow most representative, examples the Athletics program ever had to offer.

The idea of “College” for Assletes in the Athletics dorm was late-night parties, beer, and skanky girls; basically, it was impossible for Karl to even be in the room, let alone study. He took to spending most of his time in Hugh and Will’s suite, but not managing to study (because his books were in his own room and he usually didn’t want to go back to risk confrontation long enough to get them); at least half the time he crashed on a friend’s floor in our building, because one of their drunken friends was sleeping off their latest binge on his bed, or they were having other “things” going on in the room. At one point, they stole his backpack and one of them toted around a non-house-trained puppy for two days in it, then handed him back his (now thoroughly urine-soaked and beyond salvation) bag without even an apology for the damage.

Regrettably, this was common behavior of student athletes, at least of the high-profile ones. Oddly enough, there was (and remains) an inverse relationship between athletic scholarships and athletic achievement; the brighter the kid, the better grades they made, the more likely they hadn’t gotten an athletic scholarship at all.

Every semester, my department deals with at least 4-5 (this past fall it hit double digits) disciplinary actions concerning cheating on tests. Every semester, all but 1 involves one of the “Assletes.” We’ve had security-camera proof of some of these, and it boggles the mind that they think they’d get away with it.

Every semester as well, a good number of professors get phone calls from the Athletics department concerning team members who are about to fail a class, demanding they be given a minimum grade (usually “C”) or else an “Incomplete” so as not to screw their GPA and fall below eligibility guidelines. These aren’t kids who missed class due to road trips representing the school, but simply kids who couldn’t be bothered to show up for their classes, or do their homework, or their projects, and in some cases who didn’t bother to show up for their finals.

Every semester, the Assletes converge upon the Academic Advisors. The name of the position is not a coincidence: the purpose of Advisors is to give ADVICE, to recommend what courses they take, doublecheck their GPA and recommend they retake something if they didn’t understand it, and make sure they are nominally on-track to graduate when appropriate. The Assletes are given a preferential sign-up time to register for classes that actually (these days) begins before the Honors students. They are given the tools to make sure they have the exact schedule they want, to schedule around their daily practices and whatever else they need. Yet every year, they show up and insist that the Advisors, rather than fulfilling an Advisor role, do it all for them.

It always amazes me how it turns out this way. The largest list of these comes from three teams: Football, Men’s Basketball, and Women’s Basketball. We do not (as a general rule, with only the occasional exception) get these from Soccer, or Volleyball, or Golf, or Swimming, or any of the other sports, but at least a sizable minority of the “scholarship” students from those three seem to think they are entitled to a college degree without ever lifting a finger or exercising a brain cell working for it.

Capella has a few things to say about the word “slut” and its meaning.

Specifically, she attacks the usage as a method to attack women with which the speaker has some other disagreement. It doesn’t really matter whether the speaker is male or female, it’s a mode of attack.

However, she asks the question:

A slut is someone, generally female, who has sex with a large number of people. It is supposed to mean she has sex freely or indiscriminately, although accusations of sluttishness are often made simply on the basis of the number of partners. A woman can also be called a slut on the basis of clothing or behavior that might correspond to sexually free behavior.

But what does a slut do that is bad? She engages in sex – an enjoyable activity – with consenting adult males. (Yes, I know it is possible for women to commit rape, especially statutory rape, but there is nothing in the word “slut” that implies the woman in question does that.) In other words, she does something that makes other people happy. Why is that bad?

Depending on your perspective, this alone can be perceived as bad (and yes, the behavior of the men ought to be condemned as bad as well). The implied behavior – that of seeking sex without consequences – is a short-circuiting of the societal idea that sex is something for committed relationships and that should be, well, special and with someone you care about. A “slut” is a woman who acts or by behavior is deemed uninterested in finding a permanent or semipermanent partner, which in the past would be a “bad thing.” Personally, I’d still consider that a bad thing today, but the “hook-up” culture seems to disagree.

What are the effects of this behavior? Possibly, a child (or multiple children) outside of wedlock or even put up for adoption. Is having kids bad? Depends on your point of view – I’m increasingly of the mind that there ought to be a required training class and certification before people are allowed to breed. Hey, we require that before we give people licenses to drive a car or to have a gun, and you can do a lot more damage to society with a poorly brought-up child (or worse, a gaggle thereof) than you can with either of those two mechanical devices. “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” is a lousy way to go about procreative behavior.

Possibly, the woman is being put on the spot for encouraging men to seek out like-minded women, rather than themselves seeking out relationships. The theory there goes that (somewhat like prostitution), the availability of “guilt-free” sex to men lessens the chance that the men will need to settle down into more permanent relationships. Whatever stock you put in the theory, there it is.

Possibly, there’s the worry about sexually transmitted diseases, which a somewhat randomly promiscuous person can transmit a lot faster than someone who’s got a steady partner. The old phrase “you’re not having sex just with them, but with everyone else they had sex with before you, and everyone else their former partners had sex with before them” applies. Stuff spreads fast.

Capella’s overriding point seems to have been outrage that there isn’t an equal term to use against promiscuous men, and she’s got a legitimate reason to be feministically outraged there. Still, I don’t agree with her sub-point that the “slut” is not doing anything bad, for the reasons stated above.