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I too am a long-time Prawfs reader and a virgin guest blogger. Thanks to Dan and the Prawfs team for extending the invite to me this month ? I?ll be blogging mostly about international, comparative and corporate contexts with a focus on gender and sexuality. First topic: food coupons for women in Haiti. Now the food coupons in Haiti must be denominated for ?women? because the men who received the limited rations were not sharing them with women and children.

Sex differences persist between men and women, and the Haitian authorities? response reminds me of the creation of women-only train cars in India and Japan. Men are constructed as a sex that ignores rules, whether legal or societal. Both the prompting behavior and the resulting policies in such contexts both amaze and disturb me.

One?s observations of another culture reflect first and foremost one?s own, as comparative theory tells us (think Roland Barthes and Lama Abu-Odeh). When we see something elsewhere, we must look home first to find the meaning. So the United States cannot fall so far from these examples - we may behave similarly in such a shattering crisis. A study by Esther Duflo of MIT in two Indian regions exposed the divergence between male and female leaders? policy decisions, and how they reflected sexed opinion differentials - in her example, women preferred access to water, while men preferred roads. These examples remind us that strict adherence to identity-neutrality, such as that embodied in recent Supreme Court jurisprudence, can lead us to mistaken policy outcomes.

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