Barrel Strength

What do women CEO and women porn stars have in common?  They are both paid more than their male counterparts.  A report in Bloomberg notes the following.

Sixteen women heading companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index averaged earnings of $14.2 million in their latest fiscal years, 43 percent more than the male average, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News from proxy filings. The women who were also CEOs in 2008 got a 19 percent raise in 2009 — while the men took a 5 percent cut.

“When you see numbers like this, one can truly say that the glass ceiling in corporate America has been shattered,” said Frank Glassner, CEO of San Francisco-based Veritas Executive Compensation Consultants LLC. “I don’t remember seeing women ever getting paid more than men.”

As for female porn stars, the facts are as follows.

Most male performers in straight porn are paid less than their female costars. Ron Jeremy has commented on the pay scale of women and men of the sex film industry: “The average guy gets $300 to $400 a scene, or $100 to $200 if he’s new. A woman makes $100,000 to $250,000 at the end of the year.  “Girls can easily make 100K-250K per year, plus stuff on the side like strip shows and appearances. The average guy makes $40,000 a year.”

Marci McDonald’s dimwitted expose of the vast conservative and Christian plot to change Canada is a classic example of a very narrow mind encountering people who do not agree with her, and recoiling in shock . Glendronach nailed it a few days ago. Marci McDonald manifests the curious and increasing phenomenon of the left bigot; the side that used to believe in the inexorable triumph of their brand of rationalism is frightened that the tide has turned.

“Who are these revolting people, anyway?”, she seems to ask. The same people who voted for Reagan, honey.

 In an interview in the Toronto Star, she says:

“That showed the canniness of Harper’s strategy,’’ explains McDonald. “Most people saw it as, ‘Oh yes the neocons don’t like government-funded social policies.’ What they didn’t realize was that he was also pandering to social conservatives who don’t believe that the government should have any role in child-rearing, who believe that mothers should be at home bringing up their children or who send their children to religious daycares and schools. It was one of those policies that cut across both of his constituencies, economic and social. That would characterize most of his policies.”

“This was not a polemic I wrote; I do not reveal that Stephen Harper has a secret altar in his basement. But I did try to connect the dots because everybody was telling me this isn’t happening here, not in nice, tolerant, moderate Canada,” says McDonald.

For a conservative (or sensible moderate, for that matter), it would appear normal that governments have a highly restricted role in child-rearing, that mothers as much as possible be enabled to stay home to raise children, having regard to women’s free choice and economic opportunities, and that the family, not the state, have the preponderant if not exclusive voice in religious education. This has been the way societies of all religions have modelled themselves, since time out of mind.  The late 19th and 20th century  fixation on the state as the levelling, progressive, and liberating vehicle for social progress is the exception in millennia of human history.

The challenge to all those folks down in Toronto’s Beaches area is that they have inherited a civilization whose tolerance in based in the evolution of Christian thought, and who believe that Christianity is per se the enemy of that nice, decent moderate Canada in which they live.  As far as I can see, their anti-Christianity  is to the polity as carpenter ants are to a house. They seem to believe that belief in our creaturehood by a higher power, who is also the author of this universe, is something that should not be allowed to inform politics, but their “nice”, secular, “moderate” beliefs are to be the exclusive legitimate basis of both  political participation and set of goals which politics seek to achieve.

As Charles Lewis observed in the National Post, if McDonald wished to find intolerance in Canada, she need only look at her face in the mirror.