being a girl, pt 2

i'm totally bloated. and i have a date tonight. niice.

but this isn't about that.
if you haven't noticed, this week is not shaping up to be good to a girl.

for instance, if you've discovered that you're getting paid less than your male counterpart because you have ovaries and he has testicles (which somehow means that he needs his whole dollar and you don't - you only need .77 cents because once you have a baby that clearly means you've lost all right to a full paycheck - or something asinine like that), then the SCOTUS has something to say to you: Shut the frak up!

and, if you're a girl who lives in montana and you'd like to continue using the Pill, well, there's a certain pharmacist who has a special message for you, too: too bad, you whore!

[update: and did you read about this? an intern sent me this news item last week and it just about made my head explode. a highschool girl gets gang raped then rescued by 3 other women at a college party and, for some reason, the DA decides not to press charges against the 8-10 guys who raped her for 'lack of evidence' even though their were plenty of witnesses, including the 17-year old girl who was raped! aargh! the comment thread is really good.]

being a girl

thanks to my friend L- who sent me this article about the woman who stonewalled the inquiry at the justice department: How Monica Goodling played the gender card. - By Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine although i read newspaper reports i haven't been all up in this story. (i have a job, you know!)

but it's a smart, savvy take on gender performance and how our public eye is still more comfortable and accommodating when women weaken themselves rather than stand from a position of strength. (which gives credence to that recent study about 'uppity' women being targets of sexual harrassment more frequently than women who adhere to traditional gender roles.)
...
speaking of being a girl, it's dating season (for good or bad.)

had drinks last week with a very naughty actor guy and yesterday had dinner with a divorced father of two who lived in the burbs. (thanks, eharmony. those 29 dimensions really know how to pick 'em!)

but i think the surprise of the weekend was running into an old boss of mine in the supermarket and, while we were chatting and catching up, suddenly thinking, 'dude. he's totally hot.'

it's going to be a rough summer.

totally can't concentrate.

Roomie just reserved a villa in italy for next year!

we're going with a bunch of friends!
italy!
tuscany!
villa!
wine!
cheese!
pasta!
vistas!
i have to learn italian!

all of us are in a tizzy of planning (wardrobes, activities, day trips, food, music, wardrobes.) we haven't been able to work sensibly for the past hour.

dude. this is completely better than the cocktail date i have planned for tonight.

when it comes to women getting killed, the MSM is a little slow on the uptake

this is the front page story of today's paper: Iraqi girl's horrific death | Chicago Tribune.

this is the story when i first read about it on may 8 - on feministing. in between these two stories are 10 days of virtual silence - 10 days for a horrific stoning of a girl to make it to our mainstream, 'the pussycat dolls are feminist,' eyes.

in the trib article we have this reaction:

"Kurds, who include Yazidis, suspect Sunni Arabs of circulating the gruesome images to fuel anger against Yazidis and undermine the Kurdish community, which exercises a degree of autonomy in northern Iraq and is seeking more.

"It seems they are trying to make it big for political purposes," said Mohsen Gargari, a Kurdish member of parliament.

In an interview, he and two other Kurdish lawmakers condemned Aswad's killing. But they noted that in February a Sunni woman had been killed by relatives for having a relationship with a Yazidi man. "Nobody talked about it. Nobody filmed it or turned it into a big issue," he said."

in other words, it's 'normal' for this to happen, it happens all the time (over there), it's what happens to women and it's not about how women are still invisible and vulnerable and killed in our world because they're women, but about political power structures scoring points off other political power structures. it's about those people and their culture.

but 10 days before this article, samhita at feministing had this take and put the focus right back on the issue at hand - it's not about culture or religion, it's about patriarchy:

"Violence of this kind is a production of male ego and woman-hate and this truth is pitifully disguised when justified through religious or cultural circumstances. There is no cultural defense when it comes to mob mentality, woman-hate and violent murder. Unless, you want to talk about the global culture of patriarchy.

As I browsed articles, questions of whether or not the woman had converted to Islam, or whether or not it was just an honor killing, or if she fell in love with the wrong man, were used as possible explanations. As though any of those reasons can justify such a hideous display of violence."

i spoke with a hate crime investigator a couple of weeks ago and he said he didn't understand why crimes against women weren't called hate crimes. he said, 'i go into a neighborhood and this woman has been attacked by her husband or a boyfriend or a guy off the street - we've been called but there's nothing we can do. her being a woman doesn't give her the protection that the other categories of discrimination would give - even though we see crimes against women surging and we know they're targets because they're women.' i was surprised at his reaction. i honestly didn't think a man would get it. i wish more got it.

one of the demonstrators in the kurdistan protest carried a banner that said honor killings were terrorist acts against women. i wonder what the world would look like of women the world over began to fight against this kind of terror.

r. kelly: narsty ped

R. Kelly to magazine: 'I'm the Martin Luther King' :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Metro & Tri-State

if i had to compile a list of the most egregious women-hating men who make me gag, i think i'd put kelly right on up there with joe francis, jailed sleazebag. come on, 14 counts of child pornography??

i know there are black women who are disgusted by r. kelly but i wonder at the deafening silence coming from black male activists who don't call out kelly for being what he is: a nasty sexual predator.

Jerry Falwell: meh

Jerry Falwell, Leading Religious Conservative, Dies at 73 - New York Times.

"I do not believe the homosexual community deserves minority status. One's misbehavior does not qualify him or her for minority status. Blacks, Hispanics, women, etc., are God-ordained minorities who do indeed deserve minority status."
-- Rev Jerry Falwell, USA Today Chat, quoted from The Religious Freedom Coalition, "The Two faces of Jerry Falwell"

'god-ordained minorities.' ah, that jerry. whatta guy.

manly men for god and nation

please, sweet baby jesus, tell me this isn't true:

What can we say about a country so anxiously hypermasculine that it can give rise to Godmen, a muscular-Christianity movement that seeks to lure Real Men back to church with services that feature guys bending metal wrenches with their bare hands and leaders exulting, "Thank you, Lord, for our testosterone!"

read the article here.

all clear!

my ob gyn called today to let me know that my irregular pap is all clear! whoo hoo! the biopsies they took are clear, too! more whoo hoo!

i've been so worried about my fibroid (aka, Agatha) that i totally forgot i had a weird pap. so: no std's. no cervical weirdnesses (as of right now). just one poolball-sized fibroid to be eradicated.

life's good.

(oh, and i broke down and re-upped with eHarmony. frakking commercials!)

when law school students run amok

fascinating.
i wonder how you'd design an experiment to see how fast it takes for a group of guys to totally devolve into a pack of Lord of the Flies-ish anti-semitic, misogynist racists with rape fantasies.

i mean, does the transformation from clean cut ordinary dude to spittle-covered savage take an average of 24 hours? two weeks? a year? or, is it just something that occurs instantaneously whenever a bunch of them gather on an anonymous chat board?

Bitch Ph.D. writes about it here.

and if any of my law grad friends are out there, have you even heard of this board? what's up with that?!

the onion: smarter about the current state of choice feminism than most feminists

Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

my favorite part (other than the whole thing):

Whereas early feminists campaigned tirelessly for improved health care and safe, legal access to abortion, often against a backdrop of public indifference or hostility, today's feminist asserts control over her biological destiny by wearing a baby-doll T-shirt with the word "Hoochie" spelled in glitter.

"Don't tell this bitch what to do," said Kari Eastley, 24, a participant in the Oberlin study and, according to one of her T-shirts, a "Slut Goddess." "I wear what I want when I want, and no man is going to tell me otherwise. We're talking Pussy Power, baby."

and, in an eerie echo of linda hirshman's main thesis in her manifesto, Get to Work!, there's this part:

Klein said empowerment is now accessible to women who were long excluded.

"Not every woman can become a physicist or lobby to stop a foundry from dumping dangerous metals into the creek her children swim in," Klein said. "Although these actions are incredible, they marginalize the majority of women who are unable to, or just don't particularly care to, achieve such things. Fortunately for the less impressive among us, a new strain of feminism has emerged in which mundane activities are championed as proud, bold assertions of independence from oppressive patriarchal hegemony."

i bow to the onion. this piece is a fantastic skewering of how the women's movement has been rendered banal by the deliberate misreading of 'the personal is political.' bowing bowing bowing.



[the Big Idea in hirshman's book:

"The Opt-Out Revolution may be in reality only a leveling off, but in this context it is the end of the beginning. Deafened by choice, here's the moral analysis these women never heard: The family - with its repetitious, socially-invisible, physical tasks - is a necessary part of life and has obvious emotional and immediate rewards, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government. This less flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally unjust." (p.24-25)]

ah, the female gaze

it's gettin' all springtime everywhere, and i don't know about you, but my sap is running. (it's running nowhere, but that's another, more private, post.)

yesterday, the roomie (who is, incidentally, enjoying her unemployment more than a normal human being should) went to Artopolis with a girl friend of ours. she saw some awesome art and came home swooning about industrial, metal furniture that she wants for our new place (when that happens, i'll let you know) but then the swooning over furniture evaporated when she started ranting about all the female nudes all over the place:

roomie: i couldn't believe it! i mean, if i saw one more nipple i was gonna die. painting after painting, statue after statue, naked women! i mean, what the hell?! even the female artists - all their feminist painting and crap and STILL ONLY NAKED WOMEN! i started to get seriously pissed off.

ding: hm. (keeping her mouth shut because roomie gets mad when ding mentions 'patriarchy.')

roomie: for the love of god, show me some naked men! where where the naked men? oh, yeah, over by the sensual masculine gay art! arrgh! you know? and, seriously, where do they expect me to mount a wall length painting of some naked chick and her pudenda? my dining room?!



anyway, Where Sheelzebub indulges in the female gaze at Pandagon.

of course, any and all beefcake suggestions are welcome down in comments.

heh.

the 'R' word - noticeably absent

Man Sentenced To 25 Years After Impregnating 9-Year-Old Girl - Charlotte News Story - WSOC Charlotte

i believe the word that's really appropriate here is RAPE.

but check this out:
"The judge gave him five years less than the maximum because he admitted to the crime and apologized to the girl's family."

what crime? he apologized for raping a 9 year old? or impregnating her? cuz, you know. that makes it better.

he RAPED a 9 yr. old girl repeatedly for 2 years.
why can't we call it what it is?
why are we so unwilling to see rape as the violent assault that it is?

it's not 'having sex with.'
it's not 'impregnating'.
it's rape.

there's a chicago campaign, sponsored by the Chicago Foundation for Women, that asks what it will take to stop violence against women and girls. it'll take men like this not raping 9 year old girls.

it's the last week of Sexual Assault Awareness Month and what a completely appropriate article to end the month with.

[h/t feministing]

plug plug plug

if you live in the chicago area and are looking for a great women's organization with an awesome mission and a really great history of civil and women's rights work, then make them your friend!

(no, no hidden vested interest in them at all...none!)

johnny get your gun: on violence, inadequacy and the crisis of masculinity

via truthout: Bob Herbert | A Volatile Young Man, Humiliation and a Gun

one topic that i've been posting about lately has been the increasingly apparent connection between male inadequacy and violence against women, girls and 'girly' Others. (see joe francis, the soldiers in iraq who killed an iraqi girl and members of her family, and the Amish schoolhouse killer; now we can also add the V-Tech shooter.) herbert makes a fine argument:

More than four decades later we still profess to be baffled at the periodic eruption of murderous violence in places we perceive as safe havens. We look on aghast, as if the devil himself had appeared from out of nowhere. This time it was 32 innocents slaughtered on the campus of Virginia Tech. How could it have happened? We behave as if it was all so inexplicable.

But a close look at the patterns of murderous violence in the U.S. reveals some remarkable consistencies, wherever the individual atrocities may have occurred. In case after case, decade after decade, the killers have been shown to be young men riddled with shame and humiliation, often bitterly misogynistic and homophobic, who have decided that the way to assert their faltering sense of manhood and get the respect they have been denied is to go out and shoot somebody.

Dr. James Gilligan, who has spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts, and as a professor at Harvard and now at N.Y.U., believes that some debilitating combination of misogyny and homophobia is a "central component" in much, if not most, of the worst forms of violence in this country.

"What I've concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal," he said, "is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one's manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act."

it makes me think about the imus firing, the conversations about racist and misogynist language in popular culture, the movies of quentin tarantino/robert rodriquez (and the Rapist No. 1 action figure that makes me go 'gick') and how all of these things are connected.

and once i'm home, i'll write more about it.

in addition to taxes, the virginia tech shootings, sexual assault month, equal pay day and alberto gonzales on the hot seat, there was the whole supreme court thing banning an abortion procedure with no exception made for the health of the mother.

and, as i predicted years ago, the inch by inch fight to control women's bodies wages on and the prospect that we will have to battle for a long time to maintain autonomous decision making about our own bodies looms larger. (could that sentence BE more convoluted?)

in other words, they're going to wage this fight procedure by procedure, week number by week number, until there's no margin at all and accessible abortions disappear.

so, in the eventuality that this 'abortion' fight becomes even more of an overall 'reproductive rights' fight, what do we really want?

i want over the counter access to Plan B for all girls/women - and i want the experience to be interference-free.
i want all forms of contraception to be covered by my effing health insurance.
i want comprehensive sex education in our schools and universities (you'd be appalled at what college students don't know.)
i want comprehensive pre-post natal healthcare to become an issue for our public officials.
and i want 'choice' advocates to change their message: it's not about choice. it's about comprehensive reproductive health care provision for women. it's about being able to have the best situation to have kids and the best situation not to have kids.

what's so freaking hard about that, people?


New Push Likely for Restrictions Over Abortions - New York Times

[and here is a link to Cecily, a mommy blogger who has a great post about what this ruling means in real life terms, as in, to women like her.]

plug plug plug: She Speaks Volumes

it's Sexual Assault Awareness Month and She Speaks Volumes is one of the events happening in the city. the event last year was awesome and this one looks to be just as good:

She Speaks Volumes Poetry Poetry Slam & Panel Discussion

Presented in collaboration with Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media, Columbia College, Chicago

The She Speaks Volumes poetry slam and panel discussion fuse art and activism to impact social change. In recognition of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, the event gives voice to the silence surrounding this issue. The event uses music and the arts to encourage young people to speak out against sexual violence and become activists for change in their local communities.

Featured artists, Diva Diction, are three powerful female poets both on page and on stage. Bassey descends from Nigeria, Amalia Ortiz from Mexico and Ishle Park from Korea. Their unique native roots may have originated from different countries but their cultured personalities blend powerfully together. All three women have competed in the National Poetry Slam and have been featured on Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry on HBO.

Special tribute will be paid to three outstanding women who demonstrate a commitment to anti-violence and social justice: Mary Jo Barrett, Executive Director and Co-Founder, Center for Contextual Change; C.C. Carter, Artist and Founder, Pow-Wow Inc.; and Kathy Kempke, Coordinator of Prevention Education, YWCA West Suburban Center.

When: April 26, 2007

Where: HotHouse
31 E. Balbo
Chicago, IL 60605
Doors open at 5:30 p.m.

Volunteer: For volunteer opportunities, contact us at events@ywcachicago.org

Tickets: Tickets for the event are $15. Click here to purchase tickets online. For VIP pricing, contact Tanisha Pleasant at 312.762.2743.

Contact: Tanisha Pleasant at 312.762.2743 or events@ywcachicago.org.

Join the artists for an afternoon discussion, "Where do we draw the line? Creative Expression vs. the Perpetuation of a Rape Culture."

April 26, 2007
Columbia College
Conaway Center
1104 S. Wabash, 1st Floor
Chicago, IL 60605
12 p.m.
Free admission

two down: Boy Gone Wild Joe Francis Cries

oh, how sweet it is when a disgusting piece of exploiting trash gets a comeuppance.

how many more to go?

mr. tax man

so i'm in the process of making sure i render unto caesar exactly what i ought and find myself on the phone with a federal tax guy because of a scary letter i got in the mail last week.

'so...apparently, i under-reported my income for 2003? i swear, i filed electronically and i thought it took all three of my W2s!'
'ms. Ding...'

'really! i don't know what happened. maybe it timed out, maybe i just misunderstood - but i have all the W2s! i can refile! i'll do whatever - i just can't afford this back tax thing...it'll kill me.'
'ms. Ding...'

'and i don't know what happened with my other tax refunds, you know? for tax year 2003, 2004, 2005. i mean, did you guys take them, all of them? are you about to garnish my wages? am i in trouble? i SWEAR i'll send you all the supporting documents - and they took taxes out! i'm not trying to get away with anything!'

have i mentioned i'm having this conversation while i'm at work? everyone can hear my panic.

meanwhile, tax guy is either laughing at me or choking. 'ms. Ding, you're fine. yes, we took your refunds and applied them to your tax debt. but now you're square. you don't owe us anything. we owe you nothing. we're square.'

'are you serious? really? like, nothing?'
tax guy doesn't say anything for a while. 'like, nothing.'

'jeebus, thank goodness. you have no idea how happy you've just made me.'
'i don't believe you but i'll take your word for it.'
'so...the return i just filed now. i'll get that refund, right?'
tax guy sighs. 'yes.'
'thank you, ID number 0657398. i appreciate all your help. really.'
'my pleasure, ms. Ding.'

my motto: when under severe threat by the IRS, playing dumb and panicky is a perfectly acceptable survival method.

bringing it home: twisty on patriarchy

"Do you guys get, I mean actually get, that our society is a patriarchy? Patriarchy isn’t just a gimmick for a blog. It really exists. There are actual implications. Do you get that a patriarchy is predicated on exploitation and victimization? It’s not a joke! It’s not an abstract concept dreamed up by some wannabe ideologue making up catch-phrases while idling away the afternoons with pitchers of margs. Exploitation and victimization is the actual set-up! A person is either an exploiter or a victim, or sometimes both, but never neither.

This means me! This means you!

This means that, until patriarchy is smashed, we ain’t got a chance.

Meanwhile, do you guys see that there is no other possible outcome, in a society based on exploitation and victimization, than for the Don Imuses and the Daily Koses of the world to shit, frequently, on members of the lower castes? Shitting on the lower castes is a privilege built into the system. When exercised with macho aplomb, it attracts advertisers. It creates prestige. It makes money. It entertains the masses."

so. at the risk of contradicting my own self, what's it going to be? is civility really a solution or just a more palatable hidey hole for the exploiters?


[and i really dig that top 'graph. you have to read the whole thing here.]

bringin' bougie back: or, do manners trump bigotry?

thanks to an old grad school friend's visit from out of town i spent the whole weekend doing pleasurable things: cooking, spending time with friends, laughing, drinking, eating, and cutting flowers to within an inch of their short lives. i had no time to spare on all things imus.

but today is different. all my doctor appointments aborted for reasons or another so now i have a rare loose afternoon to my self and i'm spending it thinking about manners. yes, manners. etiquette. the preferred way to treat one another. the 'please and thank you' moments of our lives.

manners are occupying my thoughts because it's just too hard to think and speak about race or gender. outside of academic or heavily politicized circles, regular people have no idea what i'm talking about when i say things like 'white privilege', 'race privilege,' 'internalized racism', 'misogyny,' 'minstrelsy' or 'hegemonic discourse.' they get upset when i say that patriarchy is a system, rather than a guy who sits across the bus from you. they don't want to look at power, context, our sexual or racial history or think about what it means to be implicated in cultural practice.

they just want to say bad words and get away with it because it makes them feel good. (sort of like how a child discovers the thrill of saying his first 'fuck.')

and the only way that people will get the message, especially (but not exclusively) white and black men, that saying these things (i.e., bitch, whore, nigger/nigga, nappy dug out and all the especially tart things men like to throw around their funky locker rooms or board rooms) builds up like plaque and makes all of us sick (especially those of us who are called bitch, whore, ho, nigger/nigga or nappy dug out) is to call them out on how very rude it is.

more than anything, white people understand manners, and for a long time, manners was also how the black community policed itself: whatever our actual economic status, we acted bougie. but bougie fell out of vogue once the huxtables disappeared from TV and now it seems we have to bring the bougie back. this is not without its problems; being bougie or suddenly becoming a culture of 'manners' is uneasily akin to 19th century behavior books. it concentrates on the manner of things rather than the matter, so to speak. for a feminist like me to say 'if only people weren't so rude!' - it sounds ineffective, school marmish and old fashioned.

but what else can our sexist, racist culture handle?
its proven it can't handle big, complex thoughts like sexism and racism; it has had at least a century to grapple with and discover its finer self. but it hasn't. so, like a spoiled, feces-throwing child in an episode of Super Nanny, it must be put on the naughty mat and made to face the corner and not move until it really means 'i'm sorry' and knows what it said and why it can't ever be said again.

calling for a national rebirth of civility and manners in our public discourse is infantilizing, i know. but, after all, isn't this what our parents told us whenever we got into trouble and whined about it: "if you're going to act like a child, expect to be treated like a child."

domestic friday

it's a quiet night.

roomie is off visiting her family and i'm prepping for a small dinner party tomorrow night. i've actually been chopping, mincing, grating, cubing, measuring and all sorts of culinary things. i've also decided that i need a mortar and pestle. we may have one in the kitchen but i'm too tired to go digging for it.

this is just one meal to be prepared. i honestly don't know how my mother made all those dinners for us without going completely bonkers.

my prep work is done - final errands tomorrow for wine, appetizers (hello, Trader Joe's!) and maybe a different flower arrangement. i tried to do a homemade one with mums, but it's just not fabulous enough.

speaking of food, over on my other blog, i linked to this and it's been real thought provoking.

(my number, incidentally, is 222.)

one down.

CBS Fires Don Imus From Radio Show | Chicago Tribune

and earlier today, msnbc dumped the show.

what the brown folks are talking about

supporters of imus have been saying that his language didn't come from himself but from the black community - basically, this is the norm within the black community.

i beg to differ. (i mean, no one black i know has used that kind of language.) but whatever. conversations about misogyny are happening in our community - and they're a lot more honest than the ones mainstream society keeps managing to avoid.

so instead of blindly appropriating the language of black sexism like irresponsible children, here's everyone's chance to actually share in our conversation:

Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes—Documentary Screening & Discussion with the Director, Byron Hurt
Friday, April 27, 2007
7:00 p.m.
Ida Noyes Hall, Max Palevsky Theater
1212 East 59th Street
Chicago, Illinois
$5.00 admission

Does Hip Hop Hate Women—Panel and Discussion
Saturday, April 28, 2007 | 1:00 pm
Saturday, April 28, 2007
1:00 p.m.
International House Assembly Hall
1414 East 59th Street
Chicago, Illinois
Free & Open to the Public

still on the soapbox: imus and sexism

a little friend was kind enough to smuggle something out from behind the NYTimes Iron Curtain.

in all the kerfuffle about the Imus Incident, one thing consistently gets lost: the blatant sexism of his comments. race is the most obvious thing to get riled up about, but what about the sexism? are women still so invisible as subjects that it never crosses our minds? selena roberts below takes a look at how women are easy targets; we become the symbol of what men don't want to be: powerless, weak, less than, debilitated, unskilled.

Sports of The Times
A First-Class Response to a Second-Class Put-Down

By SELENA ROBERTS
Published: April 11, 2007

Of grace and dignity, without a single boob joke for ratings or a raunchy sidekick for on-air laughs, the women wearing Rutgers scarlet managed to capsize society’s power differential yesterday.

The meek held the microphone — or the lifeline of the potent Don Imus — as the Rutgers players used their poised voices to hold a radio cowboy accountable for losing his 10-gallon mind during an unconscionable riff last week.

That was when Imus departed from his usual ridicule of influential equals, whether politicians or pro athletes or celebrities, to mock the vulnerable by degrading a mostly African-American basketball team of 18-, 19- and 20-year-old women.

The Rutgers team had done nothing but excel as history students and music majors, as big sisters and determined players on an improbable joyride to the national championship game.

“Nappy-headed hos,” Imus called them.

Racism, shouted prominent black male politicians and journalists. And on the crawls across the screens of cable networks, when news of the Imus rant fomented, the word “racial” bumped into “racially charged.” Right account, if only partly.

By its lonesome, “ho” has barely registered a ripple for anyone outside Gloria Steinem’s buddy list or the Rutgers team.

“It’s more than about the Rutgers women’s basketball team,” the team’s captain, Essence Carson, said during a news conference in Piscataway, N.J., adding, “As a society, we’re trying to grow and get to the point where we don’t classify women as hos and we don’t classify African-American women as nappy-headed hos.”

Ho is the new bitch. And bitch is the old sissy. But whatever the label, women are always first to be part of the gag when sexism and misogyny are publicly sanctioned and celebrated — particularly in sports.

Shaquille O’Neal, in his Lakers days, referred to the Sacramento Kings as “Queens.”

And in this sanitized version, a top Division I football coach was once overheard telling his team after a particularly big win: tonight, you guys deserve to take whatever woman you want.

In Johnny Damon’s long-haired Boston days, a punch line used to circulate: He looks like Jesus, throws like Mary.

Last fall, a television ad for DiGiorno frozen pizza was broadcast throughout the college football season with South Carolina Coach Steve Spurrier and Washington Coach Tyrone Willingham in starring roles. They were shown participating in a news conference at which pizza was served. “If this isn’t delivery, we’ll play the entire game in dresses,” Spurrier tells Willingham.

Cut to the beefy players in sundresses and heels.
•
No one wants a nanny planet, but funny has to be a fair fight — even in pillow fights.

It’s not just Imus in the cross hairs for mocking the defenseless. The Toronto Blue Jays have been under scrutiny for producing a commercial promoting this baseball season.

At 6 feet 5 inches and 275 pounds, Frank Thomas is filmed whacking a small boy so hard with a pillow that the child flies off the bed and hits the floor with a thud. Thomas then breaks into a home run trot.

The Television Bureau of Canada refused to approve the spot. The Blue Jays can’t understand why. But possessing the power differential means bullying someone your own size.

With the ear of a national audience, Imus denigrated women who have revealed the courage to play a sport in its pure, fundamental form even though it is often branded inferior to the dunk style of men. The gals absorb enough put-downs as it is.

The racial twist of Imus’s derision prompted the public outrage and scared network executives out of their focus groups. Talk of race ultimately gave the Rutgers women a platform, but a dialogue on vanquishing sexism and misogyny ribboned their message as they spoke from a dais yesterday.

“It is all women athletes,” Rutgers Coach C. Vivian Stringer said. “It is all women. Have we lost the sense of our own moral fiber? Has society decayed to the point that we forgive and forget because, you know what, it was just a slip of the tongue?”

With everyone’s attention, would Rutgers scream for justice? Instead the players eloquently described their tales of personal pain and their disillusionment with the networks. As the sophomore forward Heather Zurich said, “Our moment was taken away, our moment to celebrate our success, our moment to realize how far we’d come on and off the court as young women; we were stripped of this moment by a degrading comment made by Mr. Imus.”

With the stage, would they demand Imus be fired? They would not play shock jock, but calmly asked for time to meet with him, time to reflect.

“Right now, I can’t really say if we have come to a conclusion on whether we will accept the apology,” the junior guard Matee Ajavon said.
•
Ajavon and her teammates could have cracked Imus over his cowboy hat with the microphone in their hands. They had the outlet to mock him if they had chosen to attack him just as personally as he had them.

Rutgers wasn’t out for revenge, though. Carson said the team did not want to be looked at “as if we’re attacking a major broadcasting figure.

“We’re attacking an issue we know isn’t right,” she said.

Somewhere, Imus was listening. He, like everyone, had to hear the women out. This wasn’t his studio or his sidekicks. The Rutgers women ran the show without abusing the privilege. Very ladylike of them.

E-mail: selenasports@nytimes.com

imus action

so, if you're not as cynical as i am and want to lodge a righteous complaint against the radio station, CBS and MSNBC you can go here - thanks to the women at the National YWCA, we have a handy dandy letter just itching to burn through some PR flak's inbox.

...

i talked to my dad briefly yesterday.
he sort of chuckled and said, 'i read your blog today and, man, you're really mad.'

and i guess i am. the heart of my anger seems to be our society's crass hypocrisy. we say we're a nation of 'values', but are we really? i don't think so. we already know there's a huge 'values' divide on the so-called Big issues like gay marriage and abortion; somehow, our 'values' have been defined by the position one takes on these two things. but i think our values are often defined by the smaller things - by our daily conversation and acts.

when are we, as a group of people, going to assert that at the very least, being a bigot - or talking like one - is ugly and distasteful. like, what if your kid called another kid a 'nappy headed ho'? wouldn't you, as a parent, be mortified and angered that your child lacked all social skills? so if we'd punish our child for being so mean and bullying, why don't we, as a social group, punish those who create the worst in our society?

we punish murderers, predators and thieves. why can't we punish a bigot? no, not by prison but by social isolation and derision. why can't we say we cannot tolerate that?

i keep thinking about that book, The No Assholes Rule. if a racist, misogynist, homphobic asshole threatens civility and civil behavior, get rid of them. fire them,if you will, for the good of the rest of us.

don't you think?

cry me a river, don.

i woke up this morning and turned on Good Morning America and the first story i heard, while i tried to ignore my clock, was the whole 'nappy headed ho's' thing. i sleepily watched while robin exuded hurt disapproval and her co-anchor, chris, practically set himself on fire in empathetic outrage over imus' remarks and his lame apology.

as a brown girl who is seriously tired of every single story like this, i give a great big Whatever to his apology and everyone's outrage. i mean, how outraged are we, really? we're shocked and apalled that don imus spewed asshat bigotry on the air? gasp!
and as for his apology, whatever. chalk up another Tour of Sorry as he tries to cleanse himself of his PR mistake.

i don't really give a crap about imus or his remarks (as bad as they are) because, honestly, i don't expect anything more from 'mainstream society.' (read that however you wish.) my expectations have been managed downward at such an alarming rate, things like basic bigotry no longer make my blood pressure jump; i expect the larger society to behave stupidly, crassly and ignorantly. i no longer expect people to behave like civilized, rational adults. unless i have evidence to the contrary, whenever i see people like don imus open their mouths, i wait expectantly for a foot to be inserted.

The Man (and those who love The Man) can no longer stun me with his inner pig because i expect the inner pig to make an appearance, sooner rather than later. how cynical and bad is that?

i am outraged at how paltry our language for condemnation has become. i don't want to hear imus apologize for saying 'bad,' 'insensitive,' 'racially charged' things about those girls on the college basketball team; i want to hear him apologize for being an asshole. i want to hear him apologize for shitting on civility and farting in the face of our cultural discourse. i want him to go on his radio show and say, 'I'm sorry. I'm a pig.' say something that actually matters and is true.

that what repentance and confession is - it's being bald with the truth of one's failure. you don't say, 'dear God, forgive me for saying those really mean things even though i'm really a good person.' you're supposed to say, 'dear God. i'm a shithead. please forgive me even though i don't deserve it.'

on those rare occasions i meet someone who's a bigoted, misogynist or homophobic asshat, or am confronted with an unexpected asshat bigoted, misogynist or homophobic comment during a social occasion, i drop that person. immediately. they no longer exist for me. they disappear from my universe.

when are we going to start setting some rules for all the rest? why aren't we outraged over that?!


[everything bloggy you need to know about the imus kerfuffle can be found here.]

why email is great

it leaves a record- one that's just as damning as a fingerprint. love it.

Army suspends recruiter for anti-gay e-mail rants | Chicago Tribune

the article above is a little bland. the good stuff is here, in the transcript of the emails exchanged between the gay guy and the recruiter. dude. homophobic and borderline racist slurs aside, the recruiter seems to be the poster child for Unprofessional. and if the military needs more people and wants to change more than its image as a haven for assholes, they need to do something about people like this recruiter.

i just got finished reading a management book called "The No Assholes Rule" and it's basically about how organizations would thrive if they identified, isolated and eliminated assholes who make their organizations poisonous and uncivilized. (i let my CEO borrow it for her vacation.)it makes a good argument that most behaviors that expose an organization to bad press, lawsuit or poor returns would most likely be eliminated if the assholes in the organization were fired.

think of it. the military suffers from rampant accusations of sexual harassment, homophobia and sexual assault. it also suffers from poor performance, low recruitment numbers and bad PR. how much of this would disappear if they just got rid of the assholes?

it's a thought.

holy week

and so here we are; we've just left the triumphant entrance into jerusalem and are moving inexorably toward maundy thursday then good friday then onto easter.

and, to my discredit, i've been so busy i've hardly had time to reflect on any of it.

100 out of 4800: what's that percentage?

Scholarship fund to help blacks go to UCLA - Los Angeles Times

african american students numbered only 100 out of last year's entering freshman class.

100 out of 4800.

Aged, Frail and Denied Care by Their Insurers - New York Times

so what's the point, you know?
if you spend all this time paying for something you'll never get, what's the frakking point?

lately, especially with news of insurance companies denying care to pregnant women because it's not profitable (which could probably expose them to accusations of gender bias, as well), stories like these have moved insurance companies (and the actuaries who create these frakked up equations) onto my list of industries that probably deserve a flaming meteorite to hit them.

last week, my Fancy Church threw a small fashion show to showcase our social service center and basically call for volunteers. it was sweet: a makeshift stage in the fellowship hall, our pastors and administrators wearing clothes that were donated to the center, thumping disco pouring from the speakers (modified slightly to reflect our churchy environs) and the smell of barbecued meatballs, cocktail wieners and banana pudding wafting from the back of the room. and half the audience smiling in their denturesand nodding underneath their gray wigs.

i leaned over to Roomie and whispered, 'this feels very british.'
she said, 'yeah. i'm having a Vicar of Dibley moment.'
...

some interesting things in the news lately.
so sad to hear about elizabeth edwards; i think it's rather brave of her to encourage her husband to keep on with his campaign. did anyone catch the katie couric interview? i heard it was a whopper; the reaction to it is rather interesting.

and then there's this article about the black church and gay people, which i thought was noteworthy. what stood out: attitudes toward homosexuality change once contact with gays becomes personal (through family or friends); and what one man interviewed said: 'God loves you but must correct you' or something like that.

(what does God's correction have to do with having gays in church? or preaching tolerance? seems to me that the whole 'gays must be corrected like everyone else' misses the fact that not 'everyone' gets 'corrected' the same way. so, until some straight person is told to get the hell out of dodge for being a lying philanderer, then folks should shut up about other folks needing 'correction.')

then there's this piece about the coast guard academy report whose findings showed that cadets would rather not report someone for sexual assault. considering how prevalent sexual assault is in our military academies, this should give us pause about how we're inculcating particular values in our armed forces. i wonder why we don't admit that our military academies are turning into breeding grounds for violent sociopaths. i mean, that seems to be the kind of soldier we want for our unending war against terror, isn't it? forget words like 'character' 'dignity' 'honor' or 'valor.'

but all is not lost. eric keroack, the anti-contraception 'doctor' who was appointed to oversee federal family planning programs resigned last night. yay!

women in the military: a double whammy

The Women's War - Sara Corbett - Iraq - Soldiers - Women - Abuse - New York Times

one of the goals of feminism, especially feminist historiography, is to shed light on women's untold stories and now that our country has embarked on a path of endless war, the stories of women in our military are slowly beginning to leak out. women, in some capacity, have always been part of our military machine - either as support staff, medical staff and now combat staff. but knowledge of their actual lives within the walls of the military is largely unknown - except for the stuff that's so bad it finally breaks the news.

this times magazine piece is fascinating: one, it becomes connected to the earlier article about boozed up men in the military and violence and, two, it prompts me to ask whether women belong in the military at all.

it's clear the military, despite some good lip service to the contrary after every sexual assault scandal in their training camps, academies and ranks, has no capacity to deal with the needs of military women who've been assaulted or harrassed within the military. their reporting structure is broken, their punishment structure is failed and their treatment/prevention capabilities seem to be non-existent. and all this failure and inaction, as well as the sexual assault itself, seems to be built into the very fabric of the military.

from the article:

''So you have young women joining the military who have the profile of being victimized, who don't have boundaries sometimes,'' [V.A. Palo Alto Health Care
System psychiatrist, Dr. Tina] Lee went on to say. ''And then you have a male
population that fits a perpetrator profile. They are mostly under 25, often
developmentally adolescent, and you put them together. What do you think will
happen? The men do the damage, and the women get damaged.''

i'm actually surprised to be asking myself this question of women in the military. i've always thought 'anything a man can do, a woman should be allowed to do' and service in the military certainly shouldn't be withheld from women because of cultural stereotypes of 'weakness' or 'girliness.' but what if the military is too unsafe for women? oh, not because of combat. they're trained to deal with combat situations, just like their male counterparts.

but what if it's too unsafe for women because of the danger posed by their male counterparts?
and if this is so, should women want to join the military?

(notice the particular frame for that question and the implied agency - it's not about 'belonging' in the military at all, but whether women should even choose it, given what that culture is actually like?)

in the stirrups

so a couple weeks ago i went to the doctor for my bi-annual pelvic. (although i know better, i don't go to the doctor unless something is hanging out of me, bleeding.)

anyway, there i am, in the stirrups, being palpated by my doctor and missing the old cloth robes we used to wear during these kind of examinations.

then she goes, 'Hm.'
i think, Hm is never good.
i say, 'what's wrong?'
she says, 'did you know you have fibroids?'
'uh, no.'
'well, you do. do you know what they are?' palpate. palpate.
i say, 'big tumor-y things?'
she laughs while continuing to palpate. 'yes, big tumor-y things.' she snaps off the gloves and gets ready to do the pap.
'you got 'em. i'm going to recommend you get an ultrasound just so we see how big they are.'

i just nod and i can't help but think, wow, i no longer have to justify being childless. i have fibroids! huzzah!*

god works in mysterious ways, doesn't He?

*for folks out there who may be befuddled at my logic re: infertility: fibroids keep growing back so i'd either have to get them lasered out all the time, take constant medication all the time, or get a hysterectomy. it's an inevitability. goodbye uterus.*

boozed up & defending freedom

For U.S. Troops at War, Liquor Is Spur to Crime - New York Times

this is really interesting. the article draws a straight line between alcohol use and the more egregious (or, in the case of the rape of the iraqi girl and the murder of her and her family, the downright criminal) acts our 'boys' get into while fighting this ridiculous war we can't extricate ourselves from. i draw attention to this line because it's one that's rarely made: heavy alcohol use by men leads to violence in general (and against women, in particular.)

but do we hear that narrative in our popular culture?

no. instead we get cautionary tales directed at women about our drinking. (remember the AMA's Spring Break warning to college girls? or the online chatter about the girl who was abducted on a school trip to mexico?) having been in the position once or twice to have made bad decisions while under the influence (hello, ex-whatever), i'm not saying that all decisions made while tanked are healthy but let's place agency where it really belongs, you know?

(and to make it a personal thing, which is my prerogative because it's my personal blog and which proves nothing, but only provides a context for my thinking:
a friend of mine, on new year's eve, was assaulted in her sleep by the person she let crash on her couch because it was too late for him to drive home. his bullshit excuse the next day, when she confronted him? 'I get horny when I'm drunk.' frakking asshole.)

anyway, it's an interesting article that should prompt more discussion about how we acculturate our MEN but it probably won't.

hey, pitches!

a pitch call from my fave mag waay up north. i'm not twinkly or sparkly enough for this one but if there are any budding poets, artists and/or faery folk who are interested please see below:

PITCHCALL GEEZ NO. 6

The re-enchantment of the world

We need personal, social and political liberation from malaise and mediocrity.

A new way of seeing can provide the seeds of change. An eye for the sacred in each moment, the animation in the trees, the spirit in the wind, the eternal reflected in ancient scriptures and back-lane scrawl.

We want to describe the world behind that twinkle or sparkle, that gleam or glow that emanates from some stalwarts of social change.

We see this revolutionary enchantment in Buddhist teachers like Joanna Macy, poets like Mary Oliver and authors like David C. Korten as he describes the transformation from Empire to Earth Community. It's also the vision that drives youth pastors to shun exotic overseas mission trips and make greater trips closer to home. To see the love and life in what they formerly called inner-city squalor.

This is a call for seers, poets and cultural healers to guide us along this Way.

We are looking for investigative reports, arguments, poems, art and reflections documenting how an enchanted world-view is the fuel for social change. Show us how an enchanted worldview undermines consumer culture and inspires social change.

(Or, if you think this is bogus hocus-pocus, show us the error of our ways.)

Tone and flavor
Think deeply, write lightly. Explore the deepest questions, but go easy on the earnesty. Geez does not assume a religious audience, so cut the religio-jargon, and only send a piece if your sharpest unchurched friend gives it the go-ahead.

Due date
Send pitches (your idea and how you will develop it) by March 21, 2007. If you already have a completed manuscript, poem, photo or design feel free to submit it as well. Unfortunately we are not able to respond to every pitch. If you do not hear back from us within 6 weeks, assume we were not able to use your idea or article.

Send to
editor@geezmagazine.org
or
Geez, Issue 6
264 Home St
Winnipeg MB, R3G 1X3
Canada

ok, i really like obama.

AlterNet: MediaCulture: Obama's Identity: Where Do We Start

a really great article from patricia williams about our public discourse on race in the figure of obama. (and check out the comment thread; it seems williams' piece was too beond most of everyone's ken. they talk about everything except what the article is about. and this is supposed to be a progressive thread!)

vomit vomit vomit: the pussycat dolls are feminist??

Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll - TV - New York Times

jeebus save me from totally ignorant hollywood folks who wouldn't know feminism if it bit them in the gonads:

When one reporter said his 17-year-old daughter looked at the group and their antics as a giant step backward for women, the Pussycat Dolls’ founder, Robin Antin, became defensive, invoking female role models who follow the Dolls.

“There’s a reason why people like Scarlett Johansson, Gwen Stefani, Cameron Diaz have all been so interested in what Pussycat Dolls is all about,” she said. “They feel that it is empowering to get up there and dress up like a Doll. It’s fun, and it’s something that every girl in the world — she may think one thing, but I think inside every girl in the world wants to do it.”

yeah, because scarlett, gwen and cameron are EXACTLY what feminism is about.

and in other news, how about a totally worthless discussion of 'hooking up' over at the today show? (incidentally, the women they showed for the story are all in their early 20s. so much for 'teenagers'.)

and why is the story worthless?
they don't talk about boys (what, these women are having sex by themselves??)
they don't talk about what this 'hooking up' is in reaction to
they treat an adolescent context the same as an adult context
and they link it to feminisam, which it's the farthest thing away from.

just my two cents.

they'll adjust. really.

so my sister told this story when she was visiting over the summer:

back in my undergrad days i relented, just a few times, to do some babysitting for a couple in dad's church. my sister and her boyfriend (now husband) were hanging out at our house watching movies while i 'babysat,' which entailed feeding them, then watching the clock assiduously and praying for bedtime to come. at last, bedtime. i tucked the little tykes in bed, clicked off the light and shut the door. i'd barely settled on the couch before faint wails wobbled from the bedroom down the hall.

i opened the door. 'yes?'
'it's dark!'
'it's bedtime.'
'it's dark!'
'it's bedtime.'
'leave the light on!
'your eyes will adjust!' click.

my sister and her husband laugh their asses off whenever they tell this story, always shouting the ending: 'your eyes will adjust!'

anyway. co-sleeping. excuse me while i roll my eyes.

Sleeping-Co-Sleeping-Children - New York Times

generation gap, pt 1

There really is a gulf separating those of us who live in my vague Generational X-ish sphere and Boomers like my dad, and the chasm between us seems virtually impassable. But I suspect this impassability has more to do with the comfort of familiar nostalgic narratives than anything real.

On the phone with my dad Sunday morning while he waited in Nebraska for a flight to get him back to California after a series of snow delays, our conversation turned to my sister and her husband calling my father for more babysitting duties.

Shorter Dad, the Boomer: Young folks today with families are shirking their responsibilities and have too much free time.

Shorter Ding, the Gen X-er: Young families/single people today have totally different (and in crucial ways, more demanding) responsibilities than the ones you guys had back in the 70s. Life is different now so don’t expect solutions to be the same as back in the day.

And this is where the dangerous power of nostalgia comes in. I love and esteem my dad in a huge way, but there are some crucial gaps in his memory. Gone is the fact that he and mom didn’t have an extended network of family around them – there were no cousins, aunts or uncles to take up any family slack (which isn’t usually the norm), so he and mom going it alone was a matter of necessity rather than choice; gone is the fact that mom was a secretary and he was a civil servant, so their professional obligations were very different than the ones my sister, brother in law and I have; gone is the fact that the cost of living/raising a family was considerably lower then than now; gone is the memory that my sister and I, through our elementary and junior high lives, had babysitters to watch us after school until our parents came home from work, though it’s somewhat comforting to think that mom and dad provided every moment of care themselves; also gone is the uncomfortable fact that, at the height of his pastorate, my father spent 90% of his time away from the home and family.

(Also forgotten: the bulk of their parenting advice came from our hardened, cranky, arid as Texas, Depression era Baptist pastor whose relationship with his own offspring was, shall we say, less than ideal.)

Nostalgia, however, paints a golden patina over all of these potholes of memory until the surface looks smooth and glossy. Instead of highlighting how he and mom operated in a parenting context that reflected their social and economic context, their childrearing is a simple story of two parents stalwartly facing the music and going it alone because, naturally, that’s what parents do.

But perhaps my sister and I are guilty of the same kind of nostalgia, too. Perhaps, in our mind's eye, we have a comfortable idea of what grandparents are: accessible, doting on the grandchildren, service-oriented. But that's not who my father is at all. Like others of his generation, he has a very fixed outside life from family. There's a strong feeling of "I put in my time and now it's Me time." Who can argue with that? What right do we have to impose on what little time he has left? (heh.) The grandparents now aren't the grandparents of whenever: they get depressed, restless, horny, impatient and, frankly, don't want to relive the years of raising kids.

My father teaches, goes on conferences, counsels, and preaches. (Sometimes he even goes out on a date.) And he deliberately bought a car that won't fit a child's car seat, let alone two. Deep down, the single childless woman in me respects his independence, applauding and encouraging it.

So if we are more similar than we think, why can't our generations keep nostalgia from clouding our perceptions of one another?

(next: take this job and shove it!)

back from springfield...other thoughts

i'm thinking about...

my old city. well, my old metropolitan area in southern california, anyway. it seems like some folks there don't like the way their neighborhood is changing: Some in Chino Hills nervous about ethnic shift exemplified by Asian supermarket [h/t from angry asian man]

i love how, if you study how (mostly white) communities deal with increasing numbers of non-white peoples, the discourse of protest hinges on 'community standards,' a handy code for racism and bigotry.

(it's basically the NIMBY argument: 'they can live like that around their own kind, but not in my back yard!')

it reminds me of a book i finished: There Goes the Neighborhood, a study of 4 chicago neighborhoods undergoing racial/ethnic demographic changes, how they either maintained their racial composition or changed and the strategies they used in 'fighting' the change. it's fascinating. in the study on the anonymous southside white neighborhood shows how inhabitants use the language of 'neighborhood standards' to justify keeping their community all white. it's a really interesting look at how ingrained, generational racism (not simply bigotry) affect quotidian details like, oh, where a person lives.

(it also explains why, 9 years ago, i probably stopped dating a guy who lived in one of those south side chicago ethnic neighborhoods. there were issues, the biggest being the fact i was the first brown girl to be introduced to his friends and family EVER.)
...
thoughts of the anti-asian sentiment in chino hills (no one finds it funny that 'chino' in spanish means 'chinese'?) also lead me to think of how we respond to racial or ethnic changes - but from the other direction.

for instance, when a brown neighborhood sees signs that it's getting less brown and more white it's funny that our discourse isn't about 'maintaining community standards' but a reverse narrative of imperialism. (for instance, imagine the story of 'settlement' told from the vantage point of native peoples.)

isn't that what gentrification really is - urban imperialism? a markedly capitalist, consumerist population running out of resources sees how other populations/geographies aren't exploiting capitalism as much as they can, so it moves to annex and control the population in order to benefit and spread itself.

i read the arguments in favor of manifest destiny and can't help but see similarities in chicago's language in favor of 'community renewal' on the southside and its heavy investment in development in places like hyde park, lawndale, pilsen.

of course this also puts me in a weird position since participating in this kind of urban imperialism is part of my job (but without displacing original populations, somehow.)

things i'm thinking about

i'm thinking about...

gay people...
this article in the sunday style section about gay PDA really brings home (to me, at least) how much still needs to be done on behalf of gay rights. yeah, it's easy for me, sitting on my hetero-normative ass, to be saying this, but really. there's something glaringly wrong when people are AFRAID to hold hands or kiss each other on the street because they're AFRAID of getting their asses kicked, or being told to leave a restaurant.

you think civil unions are 'going too far'? sweetie, they don't go far enough. see what laws are in play in your state here.

(just check out this professional athlete who says he 'hates' gay people and doesn't think it should exist. period. or even the outcry about the snickers campaign - which i thought was actually funny because it totally demonstrated how based in hysteria the notion, and image, of straight 'masculinity' really is.)

DOMA and domestic violence...
so you know about all the Defense of Marriage Acts being enacted in states across the country. on the surface it seems a silly, yet totally anti-gay issue. (meaning, you assume it's only really important to gay folks.) but now we see some unintended consequences of state legislated homophobia: it provides protection for domestic violence abusers. ohio's supreme courst has heard a case that argues domestic violence laws don't apply to the abuser because he and the women he 'allegedly' abused were unmarried and, under ohio's DOMA, their relationship has no legal standing.

and you know what happened? the ohio supreme court agreed with him. (and once i find the source for this, i'll post the link; it came up on a conference call i was on last week at work. and if i heard the update wrong, i'll post that, too. but the point remains the same: though there are those who support these 'defense of marriage' bills as protecting, the result of them is decidedly immoral.)

sometimes it seems like the interests of gay and straight people are far afield of one another but they're really not. like it or not, what affects one of us truly affects all of us.

valentine's day. is it over yet?

things have been sort of light here and that's because things have been so heavy at work; since i can't really write in detail about work without jeopardizing that work, then it means that i don't have a lot to write about.

but that doesn't mean that a lot isn't going on.

for instance, the very excellent people at Alas have been on a really great streak (must read them more regularly), writing about race, free speech, the kerfuffle involving the Catholic League and the blogger Amanda and there's one particular post i'd like to draw attention to: the one about rape and men 'getting it.' it links to an excerpt from tim beneke's book Men On Rape and it's so worthwhile reading i heartily encourage folks to go there.

(april is sexual assault awareness month, so be prepared. i'm gonna write about it.)

after reading the excerpt, i was struck by a disconnect beneke's subjects showed. there's an academic acknowledgment that rape is bad but there's also the very real emotional/psychological urge to act on that desire to rape, though they guys may not define what they want to do as rape.

it's interesting, this gap in logic. or, perhaps, this isn't a gap at all. to them, it makes complete sense.

which just reinforces a growing suspicion in my mind that straight men and women are utterly foreign to one another and perhaps men should live on an island somewhere to dress in skins and spear fish.

[jeebus. i just read about this asinine thing - Take Back the Date - over at feministing.

when are these people just going to face it? the 50's are dead. they're gone. done.
seriously, i can't wait until all these people who 'remember' what things were like back then and keep wanting things to 'return' to them to just shuffle off this mortal coil.]

approaching cliche

Bloog.

It's like I'm a manitee. I'm so incredibly bloated right now I actually look pregnant. (And the empire-waisted blouse I'm wearing ain't helping.)

It feels good, though, to let the belly out. Just stand there and let it all go. ahhh...
Who cares that Valentine's Day is tomorrow and I'm sitting here with my belly pooching out? Feels good. Watch the snow fall and let your belly hang out.

Hm.
I'm so signing up for Weight Watchers Online...

um, why can't i see my blog?

grr.
good thing i'm gonna be in springfield tomorrow or this'd upset me.

yuck.
Posing as a Family, Sex Offenders Stun a Town - New York Times

proving that more sexual assault education and training needs to happen in law enforcement, here's a stunner quote from an investigator:

“With boys it is a really tough deal,” said Lt. Van Gillock of the Police Department in El Reno, Okla., where Mr. Rodreick is believed to have posed as a 12-year-old to ingratiate himself with boys at church. “If they did it voluntarily, they have the stigma of homosexuality, and if it is forced, well, boys are supposed to be tough and the things the boys have on them gives them an embarrassment factor.”

riight. because getting raped is so much easier for girls.

a really good discussion: what are the risks of being anti-racist?

i really have to point out, again, the discussion over here, at Alas, a blog.

in the comment thread there is a fascinating sub-topic of what one risks when they decide to be anti-racist. i'd like to pose that here, in the face of the somewhat deafening silence from a larger white society when things like the Clemson ghetto party happens. (while also acknowledging the equally deafening silence from black folks when jesse jackson says totally problematic things like Hymietown.)

as a white person, what risk do you run when you decide to take an anti-racist stance - whether in the office when a coworker wants to know how many blacks it takes to screw in a lightbulb or in your family when someone complains about all the black people moving into the neighborhood?
as a person of color, what risk do you run when you decide to call someone out on their racism or bigotry? what risk do you run when it's another person of color you're calling out?

as nice progressives, what actual risks have we taken to be the nice progressives we think we are?

cuz if we aren't taking any risks, we aren't doing shit.

aw, damn: Molly Ivins, 1944-2007

Molly Ivins, 1944-2007

who cares if you're a racist? you're stupid.

here is a post from Alas, A Blog commenting about a really ill-thought racially themed party at Clemson on Martin Luther King Day.

not only does the general ignorance of college kids stun me, their whole misunderstanding of satire (which just re-emphasizes they weren't paying that much attention in their english classes in the first place) frustrates me.

we've seen this excuse before. michael richards had his defenders who said his n-word laden rant was perhaps a misfired attempt to satirize ... something (it's unclear what exactly he would be satirizing); chuck knipp's drag character, Shirly Q. Liquor, is supposed to be (in his words) a satirical look at racism; the hipsters in brooklyn with their Kill Whitey club nights think they're satirizing 'ghetto culture'; and now, every frat boy/sorority girl, college or law school student who wants to wear a sombrero, put on blackface, speak in ebonics or 'run for the border' thinks they're engaging in satire.

but what they forget, or perhaps never knew or understood, is that satire is a punch in the eye of Power. satire's anger, it's needle, is directed upward - never downward. if it does, then it ceases to be satire and it's just another way for those in power to bully the powerless or to scream to the public that you're just another tool of the status quo.

so, for all you dumbass college kids and misinformed adults out there, this is satire:

it is a precise literary term (which means you have to have some measure of intellectual weight to pull it off)
it has a very specific target (i.e., a person or group of people, an idea or attitude, an institution or a social practice)
in satire, your target is held up to merciless ridicule that is often very angry, ideally in the hope of shaming your target into reform (again, critical faculties are necessary as well as a recognition of power and how it operates in society)
it has a strong vein of irony or sarcasm (parody, burlesque, exaggeration and double entendre are all devices frequently used in satirical speech and writing - again, pointing to intellectual rigor in the person who calls herself a satirist)
finally, it is strictly a misuse of the word to describe as "satire" works without an ironic (or sarcastic) undercurrent of mock-approval, criticism and an element at least of anger.

how does a privileged white boy in blackface poke fun or criticize or throw into instability the codes of racism or our racist history? how does a white girl in a do' rag holding a forty problematize the ways that race, sexuality and racial images are reproduced and disseminted in this country?

it doesn't. because all you have is a white girl in a do' rag holding a forty.

here endeth the lesson.

[and photo credit goes to The Smoking Gun]

the wonder years: remember sassy?

instead of the standard piece about the best way to give oral (for that, you have to check out Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man) nerve has an excellent love letter to the magazine that made me the hopelessly feminist, bitchy woman that i am today: Nerve.com - Cute Band Alert by Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer.

it was sad when Sassy went away. perhaps i was outside its demographic (when it ended, i was just beginning grad school) but i'd like to think my extended virginity lent me an adolescent glow for a realllly long time.

(um, i'm killing time waiting for my gay dinner date. clearly, i have nothing important to say.)

they shoot horses, don't they? well, duh!

i was at the planned parenthood gala/fundraiser tonight. i worked a little late so i missed half the cocktail hour and i've resolved that, next year, i am not going alone. it was totally boring without someone to dish with and get secretly smashed.

however, todd stroger, our new county board president, was there. he's really short. (i will ignore the fact that he looks like a guy i dated in my dad's church.) and his handwritten nametag gave him a forlorn, paddington bear kind of air. poor thing. (everyone called him Urkel behind his back.) but, hey, why should i feel sorry for him? there he is, in a feminist organization's annual gala, rubbing elbows with other politicos (like gov. rod blagojevich, jan schakowsky and carol ronen). he's made in the shade. but he's also the guy who's proposing to get rid of the women's justice services dept in the sherrif's dept (meanwhile, men's services stay intact.) i wonder if he felt the irony. i know i did. i wonder if anyone approached him to ask him about it. probably not.

then i hung out in the bar to drink a glass of jameson's and overheard some staffers complain that the big donors got tables while the frontline staff didn't; she railed on about the hyprocrisy and i hid a smile. i've heard this complaint before, from folks in my own organization, and i have to admit to a certain lack of patience with the complaint. it's petty and painfully childish.

in a perfect world, organizations that provide crucial social and human services would be fueled by all the good feelings it produces in the world. butterflies would bring me coffee and birds would read my email; then, a blue fairy would hit me with her wand and i'd suddenly become a real boy.

but, alas, we live in the world of cold, hard cash. the money that staffer is so quick to scoff at actually means something to the organization. it's a fucking line item in the budget - a line item that needs to exist if the organization is going to keep functioning.

fundraisers aren't about recognizing the hard work of front line staff; unfortunate, but true. they're about the story we tell donors so we can get our hands on their money. they're marginally about the work we do. what they're really about is telling a great story of our organization to the donor so the donor can feel good about parting with hefty sums of cash. it's an intricate dance of seduction - and, if you've done the job well, you will celebrate and feel a little icky that you've just spent one night whoring yourself out for nearly $1 million. (hence all the folks who shook hands with todd stroger with gritted teeth.)

yes. $1 million dollars. what would you do for $1 million, knowing that it pays for programs, overhead, education, advocacy capacity, and direct service? can those of us in the nonprofit arena afford to be so frakking naive about how our organizations operate and what our money is used for? with the increasing strictures of govt funding and private sources of funding becoming even more important, i think not.

(this is also what i think about my church's huge annual fundraiser; it's glitzy, obscenely rich and raises scads of cash for our social service center. a center that doesn't bring in PROFIT but needs to spend money in order to operate. while some folks get skeeved out about a church raising this amount of cash in this manner, i think, what else is it going to do? wait for the Budget Fairy to stop by?)

so i say this to all the true believer non-profiters out there who think the taint of cash pollutes their mission and work:
leave graduate school behind and frakking grow up a little.

uneasy ambition

while the bears trounced the saints on sunday, i received a voicemail from my church's nominating com'tee. i'd been unanimously recommended to join the board of directors for our community outreach services entity.

i'm a little stunned. i had no idea they were considering me.

but underneath the stunned-ness is also a little bit of glee. yay! (that's a humble yay because there's a lot of work attached to this position, but it's still a yay!)

so, after thinking about how my deacon commitments would have to change or shelved outright for my third year, i accepted.

oh, ick: when the money shot is a little too...money

In Raw World of Sex Movies, High Definition Could Be a View Too Real - New York Times

gick.
there are so many things wrong with this article, i can't even begin to list them. but the biggest is that it assumes we should care that the porn industry (enough with the antiseptic 'adult industry' moniker) is wringing its hands because we can see all the razor burn and augmentation during the money shots. um, no.

what's fascinating and appalling about this piece is the way it accepts at face value the female sexbot ideology of the industry and turns it into a matter of business practice. while sony shies away from the porn industry and distribution the pornographers tsk and say "it is shortsighted of Sony to snub them, given how pornography helps technologies spread." well, pornography helps other things spread, as well.

remember the guy who created Girls Gone Wild? the men who, over the summer, killed those girls in two school shooting sprees (remember the amish school shooting)? i don't think it's too extreme of me to say that the female sexbot ideology that porn transmits created these men and influenced their acts. i don't think it's too far afield of me to say that porn, more than just exploiting women's bodies (and that's too simplistic an argument to make against porn because of the participation of women in the industry, i think), makes it possible for our culture to see women merely as receptacles, objects, holes and mouths and wet pink things. it dehumanizes us. it desensitizes us.

(if you've seen any porn for any length of time, you know what i mean. and, yes, i've seen porn.)

and so here's this article, taking dehumanization one step further and making it part of an industry's strategic business plan, deflecting our gaze from what porn actually IS to see it as just another circus of smoke and mirrors (like Hollywood, the article implies.)

so, thanks, new york times.
you've just given the cleanest patriarchy blow job ever.

why twisty is my hero: movie crit, 101

awesome.
though i loves me some mgm musicals, i cannot help but agree with everything twisty says here about TCM. her post here is a fine example of feminist cultural criticism.

(though the awful patriarchy-loving films of TCM are a constant source of hilarity in my household. at least once a week, Roomie and i record movies about lovelorn 1950s secretaries and their alcoholic bosses.)

why people are single: two views

so there's this analysis of why the numbers of unmarried people seem to be edging upward: Why Are There So Many Single Americans? - New York Times and then there's this one, coauthored by glenn sacks.

(who's glenn sacks? well, he's no disinterested party in the cultural gender wars. you can read his work right here.)

why bring up the two?
i think the emphasis in these pieces are rather interesting: one looks at the single/married disparity as an issue of class and economics and the other sort of begins from a false conclusion (men don't measure up, and are no longer needed nor often even wanted) and then takes off from there. it's an interesting contrast, also since the Times piece also looks at the marriage rates of men (so it's not just a woman issue - this declining marriage rate also affects our gonadinal counterparts.)

from a personal point of view, it's gratifying to see that i'm not the only one in my mid-late 30s still single. (more on this later. you'll have noticed that the Boy who came back on the scene during the holidays is no longer around. it's a good story and one that could be used as a personal way to enter these two stories.)

the secret to every successful woman: silky panties

Speaking Chic to Power - New York Times

in addition to my brown silky bikini panties, i'm also wearing a matching lacy brown bra underneath a sheer silk blouse, which is underneath a black nipped in blazer on top of a crisp pair of black boot cut trousers. on my feet, a pair of black/white plaid, kitten heel flats with a scarlet rhinestone buckle. (it seems gaudy, but you have to see these shoes - they're cute as hell.)

and what did i have to do today (nay, this week)?
plan/organize a board meeting for this morning, take minutes, manage the board members and CEO, set up/break down; juggle various presentations, senior managers, consultants, vendors, logistics, agendas, materials for a staff retreat; remain cheerful, supportive and efficient; take my knocks and step up when things didn't go as planned, much to my CEO's displeasure, and basically make sure that everything, by hell or high water, got frakking done for 150 people tomorrow (for whom i will be up at the crack of dawn again, onsite, helping the facilitation team, getting our bill paid and smoothing over whatever gaps/cracks appear over the course of one very long, arduous day.)

now.
what do my panties have to do with that?

the moral budget

Let the budget games begin | Chicago Tribune

our new county board president has proposed several slashing cuts to the county budget. i happen to believe budgets are moral documents, prioritizing what a municipalities obligations to its citizens. while on the surface stroger's sweeping cuts make him look like a budget bulldog (and there is something to be said about the Trib's mention of ending the corrupt patronage cycle) there is also something to be said about the affect cutting public defenders, sheriffs, health services and women's services (or services to the poor) will have on this county.

is he shortsighted, too eager to put aside that whole nepotism thing that got him the office in the first place? or are these hard to make cuts that need to be made anyway?

why does this make me laugh so hard?

Colleen Saidman and Rodney Yee - New York Times

do you read the wedding announcements in the times?
i do. (why i torture myself, i don't know. maybe i'm waiting for the one wedding announcement that won't make me barf.) anyway, this announcement struck me as particularly ridiculous - and it doesn't help that the bride looks like she's in drag.

and i know i vaguely promised a post on men's pain...i'm working on it! this has been a tough week: i dumped the boy, once and for all (that lasted all of a month) and work has been wretched, to say the least. plus, i have two writing deadlines coming up (one is next week for a reading i'm doing) and as a result i'm sort of frazzled.

complain complain complain. my life is good. i should relax, be thankful, and enjoy it.

but as a kind of preview of the thing i'm thinking about posting later, here's a piece from norah vincent's 'self-made man' (about her year plus spent dressed as a man, in order to access exclusively male circles and observe male behavior) which i just finished reading sunday:

"Being a guy was like that much of the time, a series of unrealistic,
limiting, infuriating and depressing expectations constantly coming over the
wire, and you just dummy trying to act on the instructions. White manhood
in America isn't the standard anymore by which women and all other minorities
are being measured and found wanting, or at least it doesn't feel that way from
the inside. It's just another set of marching orders, another stereotype
to inhabit."

there are trenchant observations throughout this book (especially the chapter on her time dating as a man). so, look for a post on this and some other thoughts i have about the MRM and the model of manhood i grew up with sometime over the weekend.

i love a man who's strategic

MPR: Ellison to be sworn in using Quran once owned by Thomas Jefferson

so remember that whole flap last month about the first muslim congressman using a koran for his swearing in photo op? (he was also the guy glen beck, aka assface, asked to prove he wasn't working against america?) you have to hand it to ellison; using thomas jefferson's copy was genius.

i'll be posting more later about a fascinating book i just finished and my thoughts on men's pain. (and i'll try to do it without any snark. i promise.)

my uterus ate my funny!

Adam Ash: Christopher Hitchens explains why women aren't funny

have you read the hitchens piece about why women aren't funny (faithfully reproduced on adam ash's space)? it's a doozy.
shorter hitchens: women aren't funny because mommies are never funny.

that's right; for hitchens, every woman is a nagging, churchy, fecund, humorless, authority-loving, disciplinarian mommy just dying to kill the funny. in other words, vagina dentata. that toothy vijayjay inhibits everything that makes men funny - irreverence, irreligion, rebellion, and defiance. unlike men, we're too soft, too emotional, too serious, too dreamy, and too damn biological to be funny.

(however, if we're fat, dykey or jewish, we've apparently got funny to spare.)

never in my life have i laughed as hard, snorted or accidentally farted than when i'm with my girlfriends telling them the latest B- disaster or listening to what happened at so-and-so's birthday party/wedding, or reading the sharply worded, hilarious emails sent from various scattered family domiciles while we're trapped in hometowns for the holidays. (i remember one string of christmas emails from roomie, A- and J- that had me snorting and blowing wine all over my dad's laptop. 'the baby jesus blows!')

women don't like dirty or crude? hitchens, we could make you guzzle a whole bottle of Hendricks with tales of monstrous blood clots, menstrual disasters, catastrophic sexual encounters, embarassing visits to the doctor, the unfortunate thing that happened at grandma's funeral and the reason why sometimes my friends call me Puddles. there's nothing dirtier or cruder than a bunch of women hopped up on tequila, my friend. nothing. (just ask what a bridal party did to the cowboy troubadour they hired then drunkenly held captive until they finally released him, shaking and traumatized, the following day.)

women can't be funny in the face of death? too bad hitchens wasn't at my roomie's mother's funeral this past summer. the tears were expected; the guffaws halfway through my roomie's speech were a welcome surprise. it takes guts, strength and a finely tuned sensibility to get a whole church full of mourning midwesterners to give up the funny.

his tone wavers between 'admiration' of our inherent biological/moral authority over men and a smarmy castigation of it but what's most clear is that hitchens (and other men who always seem to ask these dumbass questions) has never really known cool women. or maybe it's because he only knows neurotic white women. (expose yourself to a little diversity and suddenly you have a lot of funny.) or maybe the women he knows are just too forbearing of his crotchety booziness to be very funny in the first place.

some women aren't funny. in my experience, neurotic women aren't funny - they never know how to tell a story. however, confident, self-aware women are funny. women willing to look ridiculous are funny. women willing to point out the ridiculous and the neurotic in others are funny. women who tell the truth are funny. women in touch with their anger are funny. (bitter, but funny.) oh, we're funny, alright. just depends on who's listening to us.