Out. Of. Control. Dateline Kamloops, British Columbia - Three Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers apparently couldn’t subdue an elderly patient. The sadistic sickness continues. BTW, you can see pics of the man’s stun gun burns at the CBC site.

Frank Lasser, 82, appeared fragile Thursday when he showed the stun gun marks on his body and talked about the ordeal he went through Saturday.

“They [police] should have known I had bypass surgery,” Lasser told CBC News.

Lasser has had heart surgery and needs to carry an apparatus to supply oxygen at all times. He was in the Royal Inland Hospital Saturday due to pneumonia but has since been released.

RCMP said nurses called police after Lasser became delirious and pulled a knife out of his pocket.

Lasser told CBC News that he sometimes become delusional when he can’t breathe properly. He said he couldn’t explain why he refused to let go of the knife even after the Mounties arrived.

“I was laying on the bed by then and the corporal came in, or the sergeant, I forget which it was, and said to the guys, ‘OK, get him because we got more important work to do on the street tonight,’” Lasser said.

The article also refers to the Taser as “the conducted energy weapon.”

Hat tip, Shane.

The Blend Taser files.

What is wrong with people?!

A 21-year-old Harris County woman filed a $200,000 lawsuit against American Airlines alleging employees on a flight to Los Angeles from Dallas/Fort Worth Airport failed to protect her while she slept from another passenger who masturbated to her and ejaculated in her hair, according to a lawsuit she filed last week in Tarrant County.

…The woman slept most of the flight, but awoke about 20 minutes before landing when the pilot announced the plane was on decent into Los Angeles. When the woman opened her eyes, she saw that an unknown man had moved into the seat next to her and was staring at her as he masturbated, the suit states.

The woman turned toward the window in embarrassment and in an act of nervousness began to run her fingers through her hair where she noticed “a substantial amount of an extremely sticky substance in her hair,” the suit states.

OK. This incident reminds me of something that happened to a cousin of mine in NYC who encountered a perv like this on the subway. He was one of those classic raincoat pervs. She was sitting down on the train, and a man came up to her and opened his coat and started going at it. She whipped out this keychain, which was actually a giant safety pin (about 6 inches long), and opened it up and said she was going to “put this right through your dick if you don’t get it out of my face.”

Needless to say, he closed the coat and got off at the next stop.

Beyond speechless — as if police sadism with Tasers isn’t enough to give you agita, look at what occurred during a traffic stop in Albany, NY:

It was early evening and already dark when the patrol car’s emergency lights flashed in the rearview mirror of Lisa Shutter’s Mitsubishi sedan on Quail Street, just off Central Avenue.

Police records show the officers called out a “Signal 38″ to alert a dispatcher they were onto something suspicious and about to pull someone over. They would later write in a report that they had pulled her over for “failure to signal,” although no ticket was issued, according to police records shared with the Times Union.

The actions of police in the minutes that followed would end in controversy rather than with an arrest. They would also leave Shutter, a 28-year-old single mother from Ravena, shaken and angry after one of the officers allegedly inserted his finger into Shutter’s vagina on a public street during an apparent search for drugs.

When it was over, “I pulled off down the road and I just cried for probably a half hour,” Shutter said. “I called my dad. … I felt like I had been basically raped.” The incident has triggered an ongoing internal affairs investigation by the Albany Police Department.

Even worse, Shutter is watching the wagons circle…read on, it gets worse after the jump.
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Courtney Martin’s first book Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters ended up being a lot more personal, and thus moving, than I would have assumed considering the general gist of it from the marketing as a piece of journalism investigating what she deems the new normalcy of hating your body. Martin puts forward a controversial, but I think convincing, argument that the girls and women born after the second wave of feminism are in this weird situation where we suddenly have all these new opportunities but don’t have the social esteem to go with it. The “perfect girls” that she describes in the book, a type of girl or woman that is prone to eating disorders and is increasingly of any class or racial identity, is someone who has internalized the belief that she can make it, but she has to be twice as good to be considered half as good. Which means at least 4 times as good, probably 5 times as good.

The greatest strength of the book is how she explicates this phenomenon that we all know so well, but most of us have trouble describing. It’s why women are outnumbering men in universities (but falling behind still in the job market). It’s that we see the ring in our grasp and want it so badly, and know that because we’re women, we can’t have a single flaw or else that will be used to deprive us of what we want so badly, what we know men of our talents and efforts would get without a sweat. And we can’t show our sweat, either, because that too is a flaw. Thus the phrase that crops up repeatedly in the book from Courtney and her interview subjects: “effortless perfection”.

Perfect grades, perfect job, perfect house, perfect life plan—women are still largely judged on our appearances, so for perfect girls, none of this counts unless you have the perfectly starved body to prove to the world how in control you are, how perfect. And increasingly, that’s defined by how thin you are, because weight and body shape are increasingly contextualized in our society as a matter of effort, not genetics or situation. As Courtney makes clear, this isn’t even about the discourse around being obese versus the medically defined healthy weight. Anyway, as most perfect girls know, the healthy weight is way too fat. Normal and healthy isn’t good enough, because it’s moderate, and you’re looking to be perfect.

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Via Our Bodies, I found this interesting Salon article that I can’t believe I missed when it first came out. It’s about that “Skinny Bitch” book you see everywhere and how the veganism preached within allows the writers and their audience to have the excuse to finally make explicit what’s implicit in our culture, which is the notion that body fat is a moral flaw. Convinced of the righteousness of veganism, the authors apparently feel entitled to berate their readers in the same voice women the country over use to berate themselves for fat-based imperfections like cellulite and weight gain, voice that holds fat not to be just unhealthy or unattractive, but to be sinful.

The relentless bullying peppered throughout the authors’ advice accounts for much of the book’s humor, including quips like “you need to exercise, you lazy shit,” “coffee is for pussies” and “don’t be a fat pig anymore.” It was a formerly anorexic friend of mine who nailed it when she read excerpts from the book. “When you have an eating disorder,” she told me, “that’s the voice you hear in your head all the time.”

Thanks to “Skinny Bitch,” women who hate their bodies no longer need rely on their own self-loathing to stoke the flames of what seems like motivation but is actually self-flagellation — penance for the sin of being too fat. Now dieters can have the convenience of a former model (Barnouin) and a former modeling agent (Freedman) putting their transgressions in the black-and-white terms of right and wrong. “If you eat crap,” they chirp, “you are crap.”

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So I finally got around to watching the last episode written pre-strike of “Ugly Betty” yesterday, and there was a great moment when Betty’s boss Daniel drops in on her at home and is shocked to see her sister with a face mask on, and she glares at him and says something like, “Do you think gorgeous just happens?” It was a really funny joke, because Daniel is portrayed as a typical rich boy dog on the show, and yes, he feels fully entitled to plenty of sex with starved women whose wealth hides the mountains of effort that goes into their good looks. He’s exactly the guy who feels entitled to believe that gorgeous just happens.

Which is exactly who I thought of when I read this article sent to me by Anne, who pointed out that there’s not actually much reason to think that the author loves imperfections, he just feels entitled to a woman who is perfect in a way that seems effortless to him. It’s a maddening article, and I guarantee that unless you are 100% asshole-proof (and who is?), then your self-esteem will be lower for reading what is supposed to be one of those “go girl!” articles. He can’t even put a minimal amount of effort into gathering non-existent evidence for his thesis, which is that men by and large prefer someone with a flawed body over someone with a perfect body obtained through obsessive plastic surgery. He’s actually doubling up the perfection requirements on women, saying not only do you have to be gorgeous, you have to refrain from showing your work and making him uncomfortable.

He starts off by describing a woman that he found acceptable to date—which is something that is pretty rare for him, he admits, going months without meeting such women.

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I know I should weigh in on the bizarre rants coming out of NY NOW about Ted Kennedy endorsing Obama instead of Clinton, but I think my opinion will be redundant to what’s already out there. Instead I’m going to blog about this interesting article in Alternet by Anne Kreamer, who wrote a book about women who go gray instead of start dyeing their hair when the gray comes in. It’s a subject I find interesting, because dyeing your hair to cover gray has become very normalized, almost mandatory for women. It’s assumed that it’s what you do, just like it’s assumed you shave your legs and wear a bra. Since I adhere to those cultural norms, I’m at a crossroads now that my hair is actually beginning to turn gray enough to be noticeable. I really, really don’t want to dye my hair. I used to dye my hair a lot when I was younger for the hell of it—I liked being a redhead and then a blonde—but it’s time-consuming and expensive and messy and I’ve been done with it for about almost 8 years. But watching my hair come in gray, I had the initial thought, “Oh shit, now I have to start dyeing it again.” It popped into my head, because it’s just so automatic for women to do this, and then my feminist self began to ask questions. And I realized that I really don’t care enough about having salt and pepper hair to address the issue. (We’ll see if this changes.) I want to be proud of my rebellious ass, but mostly I feel a twinge of shame at having gray hair when I’m only 30 years old. I realize that I’m being ridiculous—I suspect a lot of women are in my position, but I don’t know it because they dye their hair—but still, that’s my honest reaction.

There’s two big legitimate reasons women are scared to let their gray hair just be that Kreamer mentions.

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My, my — the wingnuts in the Virginia General Assembly clearly have nothing to fix or improve in the Commonwealth. BTW, this is one happens to be a Democrat. This is unbelievable.

State Del. Lionel Spruill introduced a bill Tuesday to ban displaying replicas of human genitalia on vehicles, calling it a safety issue because it could distract other drivers.

Under his measure, displaying the ornamentation on a motor vehicle would be a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum fine of $250.

…He said he won’t hesitate to bring a set of $24.95 trailer testicles with him for a legislative show-and-tell.

“I’m going to do it,” Spruill told a handful of reporters after Tuesday’s House session adjourned. “I’m going to bring them out here and show them to you till they tell me to stop.”

What can you say when Essence Magazine features the Top Ten Celeb Hair Moments of 2007 and nine out of 10 women selected have processed, straightened hair? Only recording artist Jill Scott managed to have anything remotely resembling natural kinky hair texture.

I’ve blogged about hair politics long before the whole Imus “nappy headed hos” debacle; I was interviewed for a documentary about hair a couple of years ago. A snippet from that post (here’s the video).

In the past, people sometimes emailed me to say that they didn’t understand how or why hair is political.

Most black women know what it’s like to have an arsenal of hair care products, particularly if you choose to wear your hair straightened with chemical relaxers. [Ironically, most of the Rutgers women’s basketball team members had chemically straightened hair, which goes to show you that Imus reduced them to his assumption that black women=nappy hair=unattractive.] I had a cabinet full of “hair product” when I wore processed styles.

And oh, the dreaded hot comb. I am old enough to have experienced the “pleasure” of the thermal hot comb — you rested it over the gas flame of the stove to heat it up. Then the pressing oil was carefully applied to your hair and that comb sizzled through the kinks till it was bone straight, hissing as you prayed the comb didn’t touch your scalp. This is what black women did to emulate straight hair. I say emulate because all it took was water or merely a humid day to revert the hair back to its natural state. But that was the only acceptable style for the working black woman working in the dominant culture.

The status quo is still straightened hair, even though we see more natural styles in vogue now.  Black women are unfortunately still chastised by family and significant others not to 1) cut their hair or 2) let it be kinky. It’s one of those “dirty laundry” matters that people don’t want to discuss openly, but when you have such poisonous, enabled self-loathing, it needs sunlight upon it. Look at this ad. It implies that the woman got the job because her hair was chemically straightened. The self-loathing is so culturally ingrained, so pathological — there is nothing wrong with our hair, but nearly every signal received by the dominant culture is that it needs to be “corrected.”

Can you name many well-known black female celebrities who break the processed hair mold (aside from Whoopi Goldberg?). The images we see on film and TV affirm the misguided notion that there is less beauty to be found in naturally kinky hair. And Essence, btw, is a magazine that actually does frequently contain images of black women in natural hairstyles. The lye is a hard habit to break.

A must-view — a clip from the documentary “My Nappy Roots:”

Also highly recommended — Linda Mosetta Jones’s “Naturally Speaking” column at naturallycurly.com, where I learned that under her famous wig, Tina Turner actually sports short locs!

Someone from Details sent along this article making fun of fake breasts to Lauren, and she sent it to me. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me smile; it’s both funny (especially the joke about how you can hear the sea in them) and a nice reminder that fake tits can actually be a huge turn-off to straight men who value women’s independence or confidence. Fake tits symbolize two general themes that directly conflict with that—low self-esteem and dependence on men. That’s why I can’t really begrudge anyone who gets them, in my heart of hearts. I don’t doubt that women who perceive that their value in society rests with the judgments of men and get implants to improve that value are actually rational actors. One of the women mentioned in the article, Victoria Beckham, would, for instance, have completely faded from the glow of fame if she hadn’t married a famous athlete. Her value in society is almost solely dependent on her famous marriage. To a lesser extent, that sort of calculus works for a lot of women who get breast implants.

As for the self-esteem thing, well, I don’t buy that getting the universally recognized symbols of desperation implanted into your body is good for the long-term self-esteem, but what do I know? I did grow up with the benefit of the indie/punk subculture, where being kind of flat is something of a badge of pride. I haven’t walked in the shoes of someone who moves in circles where being flat is so damn shameful.

By the way, Details magazine is so confused sometimes. Sometimes they like to hearken back to their pro-queer, pro-woman past and sometimes they publish stuff that celebrates sexual assault.

I’m entirely unsure why on earth they singled out Lauren to send this to. Maybe did a search on “feminist blogs” and pulled up her email? I feel weird about this. On one hand, my usual knee-jerk fuck you attitude is kicking in. On the other hand, it would be kind of funny if positive response from the blogs made them more and more willing to slaughter a few sacred cows, like the big cultural myth that women get breast implants for themselves instead of to broadcast a certain message to men.

Echidne has a really good post up now about the overt hostility towards fat people, and how it relates to notions about responsibility and the shunning of those who we think of ill by their own hand.

Something similar is visible on many discussions about health issues. An illness is seen as “deserved” if the patient ever engaged in any activity which is now known to be correlated with that illness, and the illness itself is now viewed as punishment for evil deeds. Illness becomes a moral condition and the search for its epidemiology becomes a court case where the jury looks for that one decision where the patient went wrong, the one sin for which the current pain and suffering might be a just punishment.

In some ways we have stepped out of the framework where illnesses were caused by demons and into the scientifically medical one. But in other ways we have brought those demons with us, transformed into a different type of an ethical judgment or into a search of a different type of causal explanation, and that little hidden demon is what allows us now to judge other people without feeling any embarrassment over doing so. After all, if medical science tells us that some patients “caused” their own illnesses, then it is simply natural that we, too, point out that causal mechanism in all sorts of daily interactions.

This kind of discourse on illness is on the rise lately, because conservatives who are opposed to universal health care are rapidly trying to redefine pretty much all illness as a matter of personal responsibility to avoid taking collective responsibility for the health and well-being of citizens. Even the horrible and surely unintended car accident of the Frost family became an attempt to talk about “responsibility”, as if all misfortune could be attributed to a failure of will.

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Update: In comments, Elaine brings up a good point. It’s a social thing as much, if not more than a sexual thing. A man who is privately excited by the new post-pregnancy curves could still be embarrassed to present a wife who has them. A woman in the job market, responding to the bias against mothers, might wish to erase some motherhood evidence from her body to get a leg up at work.

A gazillion people have emailed me this article in the NY Times (link to Salon, because I couldn’t get the Times to load) about plastic surgeons who’ve zeroed in on the potential of pathologizing the stretched-out and puffier forms the body can take after having a baby or two or more. You have your babies and then off to the plastic surgeon to make sure your husband gets to fuck the same body before you had kids. The package includes a tummy tuck, breast implants (or a lift), and general liposuction, which I do believe has the highest infection rate of all plastic surgery. Turns out the popular notion of the “MILF” hasn’t taken hold with a lot of people who can afford to erase the “M” part from their bodies.

The word “vanity” is getting thrown around a lot, though last I checked, being vain is the only acceptable reason to get plastic surgery, now that a full 95% of women claim to be doing it for themselves and not to fit a beauty standard set upon women or compete with other women for male attention. I would like to quarrel with the idea that women who get the “mommy makeover” are vain. In my eyes, they are economic rationalists of the highest order. They have figured out what feminists have been noting for a long time—that the gap between men and women economically is now more a gap between mothers and everyone else. Once you have a baby, your value on the market as a worker goes through the floor, relatively speaking, and your dependence on male income into the household to maintain your living standard rises, especially now that you have dependents. Even if you have a job, your ability to climb the ladder at work is getting a pinch due to discrimination against mothers.

In other words, your need to maintain your husband’s sexual interest in you is rising at the exact same time your body is losing some of the markers of conventional attractiveness. Is it any wonder that some women buy a little painful, expensive advantage against competitors for their husband’s attention in such an environment? You need to keep him or replace him easily more now that your value as a worker has decreased.

Others have seen this and thought, “More evidence that we have impossible beauty standards,” and that’s true. But it’s also true that this is evidence that we need federally subsidized day care, more worker protections for working mothers, better maternal leave (and maybe even mandatory paternal leave), more flex time at work, and less social stigma on motherhood.

We’re in the middle of moving, and I pulled that fucker. BAD. I thought I was going to have to go to the ER this morning, it hurt so bad.

Good thing all I have left to move is two large boxes full of books and all our furniture.

Update: And yes, that drawing is a remarkable likeness of my torso, thanks for asking.

I’m stealing Zuzu’s picture from an Indian ad campaign for McDonalds. Because it gets right to the point.

Zuzu has a post up about a study that made me all the sadder for how much it didn’t shock me.

Preschoolers preferred the taste of burgers and fries when they came in McDonald’s wrappers over the same food in plain wrapping, U.S. researchers said, suggesting fast-food marketing reaches the very young.

“Overwhelmingly, kids chose the one that they perceived was from McDonald’s,” said obesity prevention expert Dr. Thomas Robinson of the Stanford University School of Medicine, whose work appears in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

They gave the kids the same exact food in different wrappers, mind you, and the kids liked it better if the food came with the McDonald’s brand on it. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s had a preschooler, been around preschoolers, or remembers being a preschooler. I remember when my sister and I went through the phase of wanting to eat at McDonald’s all the time. My father, who likes good food to say the least, pretty much preferred driving needles into his arms rather than eating lunch at McDonald’s, so he went on a parenting rampage to break us of picky eating and junk food yearnings. I’ve told the story before of how he blindfolded us and made us eat different kinds of pizza to show that we liked mushrooms better than we though, which was part of a larger program of breaking us of picky eating. I recall that some people were quick to liken that to child abuse, which I find a little overdramatic, though not at the Dan “Women Who Won’t Worship My Cock Must Have Dark Secrets They Don’t Want Their Master To Discover” level. I found his methods to be an enjoyable challenge—he’s told me that his main issue was that he hates it when people who make their kids clean their plate before they’re excused from the table, which encourages overeating. Anyway, I digress. I just remember being a little kid and like bouncing around begging to be taken to McDonald’s and having my dad rock my worldview by describing the coveted junk food as disgusting. At the time, I took his opinions very seriously, which is good in this case, since McDonald’s is disgusting.

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I was just surfing around before going to bed last night and found Yahoo Avatars and decided to see if I could create something that looked even remotely like me.

Skin tone: You’re limited to 5 choices, I selected the middle one, kinda mocha.

Face: the proportion of lips/eyes/nose — not a lot of selections here to choose from. I picked “Face 9 w/Dark Brown Eyes.

Hairstyle: Something close to my locs, both in style and color, was actually available (”brown braids”).

Apparel: Just as it is in the real world, you have a lot more options in clothing if you’re thin. I guess I’m supposed to be grateful that Yahoo Avatars even has a “plus-size” option, though as you can see, she’s not too large. Then again, the “normal” avatars are ridiculously thin by comparison. So, my avatar is wearing “Teal Print Tunic & Black Leggings.”

Accessories: You can pick bags, jewelry, scarves and eyewear. I passed on all of these and just went for the glasses (”Black Narrow Glasses”). There’s also a wide variety of fantasy accessories, pets, sports and hobbies that you can overlay on your avatar.

Background: I picked Coffeehouse Chat Background, natch.

The narrow options to represent oneself are a bit disturbing, but the palatte of humanity is hard to replicate online. The selections I made, given the intent was to accurately depict my physical self say quite a bit, though I’m not sure what, about self-image and representation. It also says quite a bit about the constraints the virtual palatte itself. Colors, shapes, sizes — and fashion sense — are limited by the imagination and world view of the creators of this particular online world.

You’ve probably seen the study trumpeted from every corner about how having fat friends will increase your likelihood of being fat. Stereotypes about weak-willed women no doubt jumped to mind, even if you wished they wouldn’t.

What was not emphasized in most reports: The correlation between fat friends and gaining weight only held for men.

My theory: Men and women both strive for physical standards set for them by men. Discuss.

Perhaps this news will put to bed the right-wing bleating about John Edwards’ $400 haircut and we can get on to real issues.  Mitt’s spending his dough on makeup consultants. It’s hard work staying beautiful, folks. (Raw Story):

The perception that Mitt Romney is some sort of pretty-boy was burnished earlier this week when reports emerged that he spent $300 in campaign funds for makeup “consulting” this year.

It turns out Romney has maintained an expensive beauty regimen for years.
A RAW STORY analysis of Romney’s campaign finance records during his time as Massachusetts governor shows he spent nearly $2,000 on makeup artists over four years. The personal-beautification spending was divided over six sessions to three separate companies. Individual makeup jobs ranged in price from $180 to $690.

…The Politico on Monday reported that Romney twice paid $150 to a California company that describes itself as “a mobile beauty team for hair, makeup and men’s grooming and spa services.”

Raw’s Nick Juliano also noted that the Edwards haircut was mentioned twice as often as Romney’s makeup services.
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There’s almost surely something more important I could be blogging about, but fuck it, this story is both disgusting and intriguing and I am caving to the urge. Warren from The Indigestible sent it to me, and I saw something about it briefly on Science Blogs. Tara blogs about this young woman in Australia has become the subject of an article in Clinical Infectious Diseases (warning for the squeamish) about a girl who got a very dangerous infection from getting a Brazilian wax. Now, it was kind of an odd thing, so I’m not trying to imply that this is common (though buyer beware) or that this is due punishment—far from it. It seems the young woman had a specific set of circumstances that made her likely to get streptococcal cellulitis and toxic shock syndrome—she had herpes and type I diabetes to begin with, leaving her immune system compromised. For all we know, she also had tender skin that opened up and bled more than usual for a Brazilian wax, though I was somewhat surprised to find out how common such bleeding is.

The damage to her body was pretty scary. This wasn’t one of those infections that lays under the skin and makes you sleepy. Whatever you do, don’t look at the frigging pictures.

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What do you see when you see a picture of this girl?

I thought, “Gorgeous and hee, I hope she leans over Ryan Seacrest and intimidates him for the hell of it.” Those who watch “American Idol” know that she’s 17-year-old Jordin Sparks. Knowing that she’s running in the finals on the show, it’s somewhat impossible not to get a warm glow, because she looks like a sweet teenage girl.

But according to a commenter named Meme Roth, invited on Fox News, she sees “obesity”, she sees heart disease, and she sees diabetes.

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Via.Some researchers have looked into female self-degradation and found that women tend to treat the practice of making derogatory comments about your own body as mandatory. (Hat tip, Lisa in KS.) Hating your body is considered a baseline behavior to demonstrate that you are not exhibiting threateningly high levels of self-esteem.

Fat talk also allows females to appear modest, a prized quality in a culture that shuns egotism.

“We tend to dislike arrogance and especially dislike it in women (‘bitches’)�?, Martz explained. “Women are perceived as OK if they fat talk and acknowledge that their bodies are not perfect but they are working on it.�?

What the researchers called “fat talk” functions as a form of female bonding, basically over our shared understanding that we can never measure up.

As obesity rates in the Unites States climb, more and more females are finding their bodies further from the beauty ideal put forth in the media, and thus more women could be coping through fat talk, researchers hypothesize.

“Females like to support one another and fat talk elicits support,�? Martz said. “An example would be one saying, ‘It’s like, I’m so fat today,’ and another would respond, ‘No, you are not fat, you look great in those pants.’�?

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Wanted for the crime of being “average-looking:” Next time try to porn it up more, Lindsay.

Writing in Slate, Seth Stevenson laments the “cheap feminism” of the Dove Cream Oil ad first shown during the Academy Awards broadcast on February 25. You can tell Seth’s an expert on real, premium feminism right away:

I liked the consumer-generated ad for Doritos that ran during this year’s Super Bowl—the one with people acting out adjectives like “crunchy” and “cheesy.” That ad was clever, and competently produced. By contrast, this Dove ad is just atrocious. It uses a cheap video camera and murky lighting, and stars an average-looking woman being filmed as she takes a shower. The result bears a queasy resemblance to amateur pornography—though I’m told that even bargain-basement porn features flashier production values and more compelling actresses.

The background, in case you watch as little television as I do: Dove put out a casting call for the “next Dove Real Woman,” and applicants submitted their own ads for the Dove Cream Oil product. The winner, creator of the ad Seth is panning, can be viewed at Dove’s website if you aren’t already familiar with it.

In addition to not watching much television, I don’t watch much pornography, so I could just be a little mixed up here; but, personally, I’m not seeing what’s so pornographic about this ad, let alone what might give it “a queasy resemblance to amateur pornography.” Lindsay, the Dove contest winner, is indeed shown taking a shower–you know, the way people with good hygiene do sometimes? And then she kind of dances around, like she’s singing into an imaginary microphone (a hair brush stands in for the mike). No, the more I read the above paragraph, the less certain I am that Seth really finds the ad pornographic, either, and the more convinced I become that his real problem is that it isn’t pornographic enough. Where’s the beautiful (as opposed to average-looking) woman? Where are the compelling actresses, and why aren’t they fellating that hairbrush? Or you know what would be really good? If they made out with each other! Now that’s feminism.

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From Ampersand, another site advertising photoshopping talents while inadvertantly providing political commentary on how the system makes people, women especially, feel permanently inadequate.

I liked this one, even though it was mostly faces that had imperfections and individualities erased. A lot of photoshopping shows you how very thin, bony women still need to have their bones photoshopped out and their cellulite, which is to say that even dieting and being hyperthin is not good enough. But often we forget how the sort of impossible skin perfection is shoved on women….and used to imply that we all need to sport hundreds of dollars of makeup to be good enough. I’ll be the first to admit, I’m a sucker for the makeup press, so that’s no judgement. Just a comment.

Outlier alerted me in comments to the fact that John Tierney may be the science writer for the NY Times now, but he’s still up to his same old sexist nonsense. As usual, Tierney’s schtick is to play the condescending, chuckly uncle who laughs at the fairer sex and how cutely stupid and inferior we are, and we don’t even know it! But Uncle John is here to tell us. In fact, this article is about how if women are starving themselves to fit a standard of beauty for the presumably male gaze, we can’t go around blaming anyone but women. Because the patriarchy could never be wrong, of course.

My post on changing body fashions in Brazil prompted readers to raise and debate an excellent question: Why do women suffer to look like skeletons even when men don’t want them to?

“I find it incredibly curious,�? wrote Stephen de las Heras, “that women’s aesthetic judgments are so influenced by other women. Men prefer the wider hips, and most likely could care less about high heels and handbags. Yet for many women all these things are essential to marking their beauty status with other women.�? (He was quickly corrected by another reader about the high heels – although men don’t care if Jimmy Choo made the heels, they definitely like what the heels do to the legs and derriere.)

Which is of course, lengthen them out and make them look thinner, like models on a runway. Tierney wants to argue that the starvation aesthetic that has gotten so bad that models are dropping dead from anorexia has nothing whatsoever to do with male dominance or male desire, because men are “hard-wired” to prefer a different kind of figure. You know, the hokey evolutionary psychology stuff that denies that there’s a culture of any significance in order to assert the unchangeablility of our culture, which happens to be to the armchair evo psych fan’s liking. But even in this, Tierney shows how he doesn’t buy into his own bullshit, but only sees it as a tool to justify male oppression. He’s willing to drop the argument that men are hard-wired to like a natural female body the second that argument conflicts with his own desire to see women very unnaturally propped up on high heeled shoes.

But this is pretty typical male dominance stuff—hold women up to an unachievable standard, make them feel terrible if they can’t reach it, and then accuse women of doing this to themselves. He continues to blame women for their own oppression.

“I feel like women never want to be happy,�? one woman wrote despairingly. “They just want to torture themselves and therein is a near happiness.�? A male reader suggested that the pressure to appeal to the opposite sex isn’t as strong as peer pressure: “Women are more embarrassed being naked in front of other women than in front of men. That’s because other women are critical while men are simply grateful.�?

I think that guy found that theory last time he was investigating his own hemmoroids. Your mileage may vary, but my experience has been that after the harsh pecking order years of junior high and early high school when early developers were punished for non-conformity (even though we couldn’t help it), I haven’t been told I was too fat by a single, solitary woman. I can’t say the same about men. Now, disclaimer all over the place—this isn’t all men or even most men, but all pressure on me to lose weight has been from men, from my stepdad in high school telling me my thighs were fat to various boyfriends making remarks about how I need to lose weight. I’ve never been overweight, mind you. I suspect people that are overweight get it from all sides. But Tierney’s trying to claim that this monolith of men loves a very specific body type—”normal” weight, curvy—one I’ve always had and one I’ve been routinely pressured by men to shrink.

He has to admit, then, that there is such thing as social pressure and looks up an anthropologist who compares the starvation aesthetic to foot-binding, which has an intriguing implication for the soundness of Tierney’s last statement.

And once a trait becomes prized, it gets taken to extremes, Nancy Etcoff explains in her book, “Survival of the Prettiest.�? Etcoff, a Harvard psychologist, says there are two notions of beauty. “One is the idea of prettiness, which is about population averages,�? she told me. “The other is about rarity.�? There are evolutionary explanations for our preference for prettiness: those average, symmetrical features are a marker of good genes and health. But at the same time, humans are drawn to the unusual, and want to stand out themselves. So once thin is in, they compete to be thinner and thinner.

The rarity of hyper-thinness is indeed a contributing factor to how much it’s prized, so he’s not off there. But it’s interesting to bring up foot-binding, because foot-binding may have started off being rare, but it became standard practice in China for a long time. As is suffering your body in America or FGM in many parts of the world. The common thread to all this is that women must suffer in order to demonstrate, to steal Twisty-like language, our submission to the patriarchy. But Tierney’ll never admit that. In fact, I was sort of surprised he didn’t resort to the argument I’ve heard from people who want to dismiss the implications of foot-binding, which is that women were generally the people in charge of performing it, so let’s just blame women and ignore the mountains of writing from men praising the erotic nature of bound feet. Eroticizing these little tortures is the favorite trick of male-dominated societies because it manipulates women on two levels by invoking both their economic fear of not finding a man to be dependent on on societies that require it and the more human fear of not being sexually attractive for its own sake.

But rare isn’t a trait that people necessarily want for themselves just in the abstract. Thinness is valued because it’s on a sliding scale—there’s super-thin, just thin, average, etc. Sort of like cars come in a scale from Rolls Royce to clunker. If I sound harsh, like I’m describing women’s bodies as purchasable items, then that’s on purpose. Because in our capitalist patriarchy, they are indeed purchasable items and the entire reason that the very thinnest women in the world are snatched up to model the more ridiculously expensive clothes is an extension of these factors. Hyper-thinness indicates that the “owner” of the woman, in this case the fashion industry in general, is so rich they can just pay for women like that, who are so thin that many of them are obviously barely alive the way they are dropping like flies from anorexia. The model who died in Madrid did so right after walking the catwalk, which makes me wonder if the energy it took to stalk up and down it was a factor in her heart attack. Displaying useless women has always been a symbol of wealth and you don’t get much more useless than someone who can’t walk fast for fear of dropping dead.

So to claim there’s a monolithic “men” that has no use for hyper-thin women is disingenous. Everyone enjoys conspicious consumption. The fact that women’s bodies are items that can be consumed in a conspicious way has everything to do with male dominance.

So, there’s this new semi-controversy shaping up and I have to confess that it makes me really uneasy. To summarize: This young girl has a severe mental disability that has rendered her a lifelong, for lack of a better word, baby. In the strongest sense of the word.

Her condition has left her in an infant state, unable to sit up, roll over, hold a toy or walk or talk. Her parents say she will never get better. She is alert, startles easily, and smiles, but does not maintain eye contact, according to her parents, who call the brown-haired little girl their “pillow angel.”

To make it very clear, she will never improve. She’s never going to develop the capacity to make decisions or think or move much on her own. This doesn’t mean her life isn’t worth living, and her parents are adamantly fighting to give her a life that has the pleasures she can take maximized. In order to do this, they and the doctors are stunting her growth (so she can be carried around like a child, which is basically her main pleasure in life and the only realistic way to prevent bedsores). They are also removing her reproductive organs and her breasts before they grow in. The growth-stunting is weird, but I have to admit that the parents know better than anyone if that’s going to be a quality-of-life issue and from everything I’ve read, they have made a good case. But people aren’t just wigging out over that and casting judgment on the parents, they’re also angry about the hysterectomy, which William Saletan says is being treated like it’s eugenics or something. The Guardian has more on the concerns that this is “eugenics”.

BFP isn’t concerned that this girl is being targeted for eugenics, but that this could open doors. She also states that she thinks the parents are working out of a selfish desire not to deal with the messiness of their daughter’s sexual development. True as that may be, I think there’s something else going on. If I were this girl’s caregiver, my worst fear would be that there would be a chance one day that I may not be around to care for her. And that she might end up in hospice care, where she could be sexually abused and end up pregnant. And that because she’s white, there would be a lot of antagonism towards aborting said pregnancy to spare her the misery and that a bunch of “pro-lifers” would stake on the hospital, Terri Schiavo-style, enamored of the idea of a pregnant white woman without a real will of her own. In other words, the perfect baby incubator. There’d be moaning and wailing and sentimental rhapsodizing about getting a “miracle” baby out of this poor girl. Doctors, under all this pressure, would cave because it’s not like she can really do anything about it. And then the baby would be born and everyone would be all in raptures and Reader’s Digest would have an article about it and Ashley would be reduced from a human being to a baby incubator. So you better believe I’d want to just circumvent that. This situation has nothing to do with eugenics unless you’re paranoid enough to think that the genetically normal offspring of college-educated white people are a target.

In terms of disability rights activism, the compelling case for it is the idea that having a disability doesn’t mean that your life isn’t worth living and therefore you should be accomodated and given as many opportunities as anyone else for the joys of life that other people who are considered more able-bodied have. With that in mind, I think it’s quite possible the parents of this girl are living up to that standard, if in a way that’s startlingly out of
the norm. They’ve identified their daughter’s needs and pleasures—basically, those of an infant—and are looking for ways to fight social structures and even biology that would erode their daughter’s ability to have those things. It’s weird, but it makes sense. From that perspective, they are taking activism into a new dimension, seeking not a cure, but a radical rethinking of how far we’re willing to go to accomodate the disabled as they are. I might be wrong, but it’s worth considering it from that angle.

A little birdie dropped this unbelievable laff-fest in my mailbox today. The pray-away-the-gay-crowd at Exodus International also has another mission — to keep the the ex-gay evangenitals’ hands off of their holy pee-pees and hoo-hahs — look at this Freedom Conference it held last year.

Jeebus and Russell Willingham will show the hairy palm set how to stop stroking the pole.

What’s Wrong With Masturbation?
We’ve all wondered about Masturbation. Is it healthy self-expression or a bondage? What does the Bible say and not say about it? In this workshop we will explore these questions and look at ways to deal with this challenging issue.

And for the ladies, former lesbian Lorraine Durso, the girlfriend of “ex-gay for pay” Randy Thomas, Exodus International’s Director of Membership,  gives you assistance on how to stop thinking about Muffin buffin’.

Finding Freedom From Masturbation
Often in our recovery we trade one vice for another in an effort to medicate from our pain. Many have given up sex with others in exchange for self-sex, considering it the lesser of two evils. A former chronic masturbator shares her struggle to overcome her habit and the shame, guilt, and contempt that accompanied. This class will explore whether masturbation is sin, are there special circumstances when it is not, tips and techniques to increase self-control, the importance of accountability, and the role of thought life.

Randy, btw, had his own special session, one with unique cinematic flair…

Escaping the Gaytrix
In the blockbuster trilogy, The Matrix, moviegoers are challenged to explore a fundamental theme we can all relate too: what is the truth underlying reality? This workshop will challenge and explore how gay defined reality is a complete system of beliefs, moral code and philosophy presented as imposed reality on all those who have same sex attraction. Christ presents a complete paradigm shift that initially feels like Morpheus’ statement “Welcome to the desert of the real,” but in reality, while Truth may be initially foreign and difficult, Jesus leads us to the abundant Life found in contentment in Christ. This workshop will help us all view life with same sex attraction in the Light of Truth instead of imposed gay ideology.

Ezra links to a story from Paul Campos in The New Republic where he’s speaking some common sense about how the aesthetic issues and morallizing about fat tend to screw up any hope for intelligent dialogue about the health issues that are linked with being overweight but not necessarily caused by being overweight.

Americans think being fat is disgusting. That psychological truth creates an enormous incentive to give our disgust a respectable motivation. In other words, being fat must be terrible for one’s health, because if it isn’t that means our increasing hatred of fat represents a social, psychological, and moral problem rather than a medical one. ….

So what should we do about fat in the United States? The short answer is: nothing. The longer answer is that we should refocus our attention from people’s waistlines to their levels of activity. Americans have become far too sedentary. It sometimes seems that much of American life is organized around the principle that people should be able to go through an average day without ever actually using their legs. We do eat too much junk that isn’t good for us because it’s quick and cheap and easier than taking the time and money to prepare food that is both nutritious and satisfies our cravings.

I think this is where it gets confusing. The odds are that if people focused on eating better and getting more exercise, then the country would be slimmer on average as a result. It’s wrong to confuse that with saying there would be no fat people even in a nation where everyone was conscientious about these things. As Campos says, people come in different shapes and sizes and what may a healthy weight for one won’t be for another.

The fact that a lot of the “war on fat” is about a national sense of disgust about fat and not about genuine concern about health is well demonstrated by the fact that women have a lot more pressure to be thin as a stand-in for health, to a degree that get ridiculous. For instance, as many feminist bloggers are well aware, you can’t do a blog post on, say, the problem of the fashion industry demanding that their models be so thin that the exertion of wallking down the catwalk actually made one model’s heart give up and she died backstage without some dude jumping into comments and saying that the real problem is obesity as if the only thing standing between all the women in America dying of diabetes and women being healthy is the images of starving teenage girls hobbling down catwalks. Beyond just the sense that anorexia is an admirable show of “health”, it’s interesting that the levels of “concern” about women being too fat for their own good are so much greater than the levels of concern over men’s health, since if it was indeed merely concern for health motivating people, we’d be more worried about men than women, since men carry their fat in places that are more dangerous than women do. Needless to say, men are not going to be told that pressure to be anorexic is the only thing standing between them and heart attack-inducing obesity.

More evidence that the appearance of being thin is not necessarily the best predictor of health is this discovery that a lot of thin people have alarming amounts of visceral fat, which is the really problematic fat in terms of damage to your health, because it puts stress on your organs. The researchers are concerned that the focus on the BMI (Body Mass Index) is a disservice to people because it doesn’t measure things like visceral fat and does ding people who are athletic and have a lot of dense muscle mass—in other words, it doesn’t go far enough to encourage people to get out of the chair and move around (or mop something).

The moralistic approach to waistlines does have one compelling feature—it means that we don’t have any pressure to change society because the blame for being fat lays on the individuals, who are chastened to diet more or something. But if you look at escalating diet-and-exercise related health problems as a social issue instead of an individual responsibility to shrink the waistline, then the solutions to our problems are obvious. People need for free time and encouragement to use it actively. We need to get away from a society that discourages physical activity and towards one where the able-bodied are encouraged to actually walk around during the day. The government needs to quit subsidizing corn and especially corn syrup and encourage farmers to be more diverse in the crops they provide. All the various common sense agriculture policy changes that people have been recommending forever to shut down Big Agra and all the pollution issues that come with it would have the secondary effect of readjusting food prices to make eating healthy a more appealing option for the pocketbook. We know what to do; it’s just a matter of facing up to it.

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That’s why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today’s rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products.
– James Rutz is chairman of Megashift Ministries, in his column, “A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals“

Today’s batsh*ttery article of the day is from our friends at WingNutDaily.

I personally don’t like tofu, but those of you out there who are enthusiasts of it (and any soy products)  have been doing our bidding  — you’re part of the pro-Homosexual Cabal that is creating queer folks.

Heed the call to stop the madness from James Rutz:

I have nothing against an occasional soy snack. Soy is nutritious and contains lots of good things. Unfortunately, when you eat or drink a lot of soy stuff, you’re also getting substantial quantities of estrogens.

Estrogens are female hormones. If you’re a woman, you’re flooding your system with a substance it can’t handle in surplus. If you’re a man, you’re suppressing your masculinity and stimulating your “female side,” physically and mentally.

It appears that, in addition to our desire to “produce” as many homos as possible, we’re using the devil food to give our fellow citizens cancer, leukemia, make them fat and, most importantly, cause infertility!

Research in 2000 showed that a soy-based diet at any age can lead to a weak thyroid, which commonly produces heart problems and excess fat. Could this explain the dramatic increase in obesity today?

…oy use may double in the next few years because (last I heard) the out-of-touch medicrats in the FDA hierarchy are considering allowing manufacturers of cereal, energy bars, fake milk, fake yogurt, etc., to claim that “soy prevents cancer.” It doesn’t.

He gives reassurance to those of you that like soy sauce and alerts worried hets about what soy products are safe.

Soy sauce is fine. Unlike soy milk, it’s perfectly safe because it’s fermented, which changes its molecular structure. Miso, natto and tempeh are also OK, but avoid tofu.

How do these wingers get a hold or our Master Plan?

BTW, Jim is known as an “author, copywriter, columnist, teacher, pioneer thinking, chronicler of the miraculous and spokesman for the worldwide house church community,” according to the bio on his web site.

Hat tip, Mike.

The TSA has decided to unleash this invasive horror at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix.

This is a new X-ray screening device designed to protect The Homeland, folks. Are you ready for this level of Big Brother public scrutiny?

Susan Hallowell, the director of the Transportation Security Administration’s security laboratory, allows her body to be X-rayed by the ‘backscatter’ machine at the Transportation Security Administration in Egg Harbor Township, N.J., Wednesday, June 25, 2003. Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix Arizona will test the new federal screening system that takes X-rays of passenger’s bodies to detect concealed explosives and other weapons. The technology, called backscatter, has been around for several years but has not been widely used in the U.S. as an anti-terrorism tool because of privacy concerns. (AP Photo/Brian Branch-Price)

Various feminist bloggers have been blogging about the ads for this new HP camera with an instant “slimming” effect.

At the same time, there’s apparently been a lot of hand-wringing over the increasing skinniness of fashion models after some countries have taken it upon themselves to pass entirely sensible worker safety regulations demanding that models have BMIs that are considered not overly underweight. People are worried to death that this is some kind of slap at free speech or what have you, but since the impetus for the laws was a supermodel who starved herself to death, the truth of the matter is this is basically a necessary protection for the workers so that their employers can’t demand they sacrifice their health in order to keep their jobs.

But oh the free speech concerns! Well it seems to me that this new HP camera came in the nick of time. The models don’t have to die to meet maximum weight requirements imposed by the industry and the industry gets to make the statement it wants about what a beautiful woman should look like. In fact, this slimming effect means that the industry won’t be constrained by biology when setting the bar lower and lower for how much horizontal space a woman be permitted to occupy before she’s considered a fat pig.

In fact, I’ve put together a suggestion together for the fashion industry on how to use this slimming effect to achieve levels of female beauty that could only exist before in the imagination:

Gorgeous, don’t you think?

…a two-class system is emerging for working mothers. For those with autonomy in their jobs — generally, well-paid professionals — breast-feeding, and the pumping it requires, is a matter of choice…But for lower-income mothers — including many who work in restaurants, factories, call centers and the military — pumping at work is close to impossible, causing many women to decline to breast-feed at all, and others to quit after a short time.

The gap between the rich and the poor regarding the ability to breastfeed your child is out in the open in a stunning, but unsurprising piece that I came across in the NYT.

Lower income women receive the same message all mothers receive that breastfeeding your child is important; unfortunately, companies that these women work for see this need to pump as a “problem” even as they know this is discrimination.

It is a particularly literal case of how well-being tends to beget further well-being, and disadvantage tends to create disadvantage — passed down in a mother’s milk, or lack thereof.

…Public health authorities, alarmed at the gap between the breast-feeding haves and have-nots, are now trying to convince businesses that supporting the practice is a sound investment. “The Business Case for Breastfeeding,�? an upcoming campaign by the Department of Health and Human Services, will emphasize recent findings that breast-feeding reduces absenteeism and pediatrician bills.

And it’s definitely a case of class-based discrimination where lactation support is available as well. Stats from the CDC confirm that the corporate culture’s lack of acceptance of lactation support has exacerbated the class gap…

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