I’m with Mighty Ponygirl: This article by Rachel Shukert about how Rock Band saved her marriage was a nightmare. I enjoy writers willing to hang out all their personality flaws for the world to see, but it’s also amazing to me how some of them can describe themselves so well and not realize that these are the sort of soul-destroying personality flaws that will cause them massive problems. Shukert realizes, to a degree, that she’s a nagging, clingy mess, but she doesn’t seem to realize that this is something that is a major problem that can’t be fixed with a video game.
It’s too bad, because I was pretty eager to read the story, as I am both a fan of the video game in question and have a fantasy rock band with my boyfriend called Shitbird. We also have a band with a rotating cast of friends called Cleveland Steamers.* I can testify to the fact that there’s something very socially redeeming about the game. But Great Cat, even correcting for hyperbole, Shukert has it all screwed up and it wasn’t a breezy, fun read. She was making me mad.
Animal people looking for good organizations to give your money to, I beseech of you, please ignore PETA, who seems to spend most of their budget getting young women to get naked in public as publicity stunts. If you love both animals and people, look instead to less sexy but much more humane organizations like the Humane Society, who actually have done a bang-up job of using their issue of animal welfare to highlight the problem of domestic violence. From Salon, I see that the effort from organizations like the Humane Society, PAWS, the ASPCA, and the Humane Association (and no doubt many other animal organizations that don’t see the need to parade naked women around to make a point) to improve the public’s understanding of the link between animal abuse and domestic abuse have led to an article in O about the link.
For people who understand how domestic violence really works, this link is not surprising. Abusers use any leverage they can to terrorize their victims and break their will, and will happily resort to abusing and killing pets for that end. There’s also the added incentive of using the pet as leverage to keep your victim from escaping, because she knows that fleeing without or even with the pet might result in the abuser retaliating by killing her pet. In order to make pet safety less of a barrier to women fleeing abusive homes, the Humane Society has put together a list of 170 safe haven programs, where both the victim and her pets are cared for by the shelters, using various methods.
Monogamy: Made for a woman, like fancy jewelry.
Update: I just want to make sure this post is understood not to be talking about marriages where the sex life has actually dwindled inside the marriage. Both men and women can and do suffer from a spouse who loses all interest in sex, a problem that I think compounds itself over time, because if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it. This article is more another whine from a guy who wants to screw around and wants his wife to “understand”, i.e. tolerate it without demanding her own right to screw around.
Women cheat nearly as much as men. This is not an unknown fact.
Survey takers guessed that twice as many people are having extramarital affairs as really are, estimating that 44 percent of married men and 36 percent of married women are unfaithful. The reality is it’s not as rampant as we think, with 28 percent of married men and 18 percent of married women admitting to having a sexual liaison, the survey found.
I’m always shocked at people who act like adultery is basically a male-only temptation, because who the hell are men cheating with? Prostitutes, sometimes. That might be enough to explain the gap, sadly. But I suspect—especially in our day and age where the older-men-preying-on-younger-women model has had a wrench thrown in it by feminism—that mostly men who cheat do so with peers. Which would probably be mostly equally married women.
I bring it up, because Salon blogged this maudlin “woe is men” story that claims, among other things, that evidence is growing that the need to cheat is hard-wired in men. Interesting, the only “evidence” that is growing that men are hard-wired to cheat, rape, and act like pigs is the number of times a single hack psychologist named David Buss is quoted. Sure enough, the author goes sniveling to Buss to give him “science” to prove to his wife and women of the world that he has to cheat, and Buss complies. Buss admits women cheat, but has to hedge, implying that men just roam around fucking anyone, whereas women just like to keep an extra boyfriend in reserve so they’re never going without should the current husband croak. You’d think the combination of male desire for variety and the supposed oodles of scientific evidence would cause one of the writers who tackles this subject to talk to someone besides Buss, but maybe full-blown hackery of his sort is hard to come by.
I just returned from a wonderful trip up to Delaware to see my nephew, who was born on Dec. 31. Mr. E is now babbling up a storm; he was just a tiny little one when I first met him back in February. He looks a lot like my brother when he was a baby (Tim’s 5 years younger — he turns the big 4-0 this year). The weekend was spent getting a lot of quality face time with E, since I’ll likely not see him again until July — he may be crawling by then at this rate. He is already trying to turn himself over and itching to move around. Of course my brother and sister-in-law haven’t baby-proofed the house yet, so that’s the next project to take on before E is mobile.
I can’t believe all the baby-raising gadgets and safety restraints they have today. When I was a little one (back in the 60s, friends, the dark ages), my mom had none of these handy things. Tim and I learned about stairs by falling down them. We learned about the hot stove by, well, hands got sizzled.
My favorite toddler environmental encounter milestone was when I took a stray bobby pin, pulled it open and inserted each end into an electrical wall socket. ZAAAPPPP! I liked the fry so much, according to my mom, that I actually did it again not too many days thereafter. Hmmmm…that may explain some of my idiosyncrasies.
My brother’s infamous childhood incident was crawling into the dryer and almost shutting the door. We were looking all over for him and I found him laughing inside it.
Share time: tell your own self-endangerment toddler story. 
Pam posted yesterday about the passing of Mildred Loving, linking the struggle to legalize interracial marriage with the struggle to legalize same-sex marriage. P.Z. put up a post demonstrating the religious wingnuttery that came into play in justifying the criminalization of the Lovings’ marriage, by quoting some of Mildred Loving’s account of the whole thing.
Not long after our wedding, we were awakened in the middle of the night in our own bedroom by deputy sheriffs and actually arrested for the “crime” of marrying the wrong kind of person. Our marriage certificate was hanging on the wall above the bed. The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” He sentenced us to a year in prison, but offered to suspend the sentence if we left our home in Virginia for 25 years exile.
Taking the two together, it’s doubly clear not only are same-sex marriage rights linked with interracial marriage rights because they have arguments in common for them, but also because the opponents are the same assholes they’ve always been, using the same arguments that they always have. (In sum: “God shares my bigotry!”) The fight for interracial marriage was part of the culture wars, just like reproductive rights, gay rights, and the separation of church and state.
I meant to blog about this, but got caught up in “ohmigodabortionart”, but I suspect better late than never. Matt is wondering why it might have been hard to pry a few favorite recipes out of Cindy McCain.
Looks like someone on John McCain’s staff decided to rip off some Food Network recipes and assert on the campaign website that they were Cindy McCain’s family favorites. This is a bit of an odd thing to have happen. Most people, I take it, do in fact have some favorite recipes. Surely Mrs. McCain would have been willing to divulge hers. And if she doesn’t have any favorite recipes, it’s not as if failing to include a “Cindy’s recipes” section on the website was likely to prove a devastating liability in the election.
First thought: Hey, what if Food Network recipes really are her favorite? Just kidding. I had to blog this because I’m sort of surprised that Matt didn’t bring up the obvious answer to the question of why Cindy McCain probably doesn’t have recipes to put up on the site: I doubt she does much cooking, if any at all.
I mean, think about it. McCain is the daughter of an extremely wealthy man who made his money through a beer distribution company. In fact, if you read Glenn Greenwald’s book, you’ll see there’s good reason to believe that part of the reason that John McCain aggressively courted her while still married to his first wife was that her wealth and connections would help get him into politics. And by “aggressively court”, I mean “most likely had an adulterous affair”, because he did, after all, marry Cindy within a month of divorcing his first wife. But this is a long way of saying that Cindy McCain is probably someone whose wealth means that she doesn’t really have to do much cooking for herself, and thus wouldn’t have favorite recipes. Not, I must stress, that I would hold that against her. There is no reason a woman should have to cook if she doesn’t want to.
So why have the recipe section on there? It wouldn’t really be that easy to avoid it. While the strict recipe issue wouldn’t be a devastating liability, it’s part of a larger image that McCain does have to uphold if he wants to win over the base. And that image is that he’s the same old grandpa you know and love enough to laugh at when he’s being gruff and rude. And what’s loveable old (if racist and sexist) grandpa, without grandma in the kitchen doing all the work while he watches sports and talks politics? This image is perceived, quite rightly, as critical to McCain’s ability to win. The reality—a man who married into wealth and connections to get his political career going—will be considered emasculating, especially, as Greenwald points out, to a crowd that just recently got a big kick out of calling John Kerry a “gigolo” because he married wealthy, though he was not dependent on his wife’s wealth and connections for his political career to near the extent that McCain has relied on his wife’s. So the recipes are the exact issue, but they hint at a larger image issue that he has to deal with.
Kathryn Joyce has a great piece up about the continuing agitating of anti-divorce nuts, who are trying to perform the social equivalent of putting toothpaste back into the tube. What’s really great about this dude from Marriage Savers, though, is that he openly argues that marriage should be a legal trap.
Basing its implied equation of liberal divorce laws with unjust war, McManus justifies the term “Unilateral Divorce” because “in four out of five cases, one spouse did not want the divorce, but had no choice.” In a press release announcing the new Reform Divorce website, McManus argued that one spouse’s freedom to divorce the other without permission was the reason behind America’s high divorce rate.
Unfortunately for them, these are reforms that will only pass Republican muster if you only reverse a woman’s right to sue for divorce. After all, the John McCains and Newt Gingriches of the world would have been fucked if their first wives (or second) were able to prevent them from trading them in for younger models. But I suspect that these Marriage Savers would be perfectly happy to accept a compromise that allowed men to sue for divorce and not women. Though I suppose even an equal divorce law that prevented men from divorcing as well as women would fuck women over more than men, because men that aren’t politicians would do what they always did before, and just leave without bothering with the divorce. Women are the ones who more often need the protections of divorce.
In case there’s any doubt that this is more about women’s freedom than men’s (though, to be fair, the anti-divorce nuts also get off on thinking about men being trapped in unhappy marriages as a sacrifice to the patriarchy), check out this article.
Divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing cost U.S. taxpayers more than $112 billion a year, according to a study commissioned by four groups advocating more government action to bolster marriages.
Of course, the groups are the sort that should immediately raise suspicions—a bunch of wingnut organizations that are too busy thumping the Bible to crack it open and realize that it’s about more things than the importance of all people being wedged into very narrow gender roles. They defined costs incurred by single “parents” (read: unmarried mothers) very, very broadly, making the findings pretty much guaranteed as illegitimate.
All good feminist men mark women as their property.
The Feministe Feedback question from yesterday is too juicy not to tackle. M. LeBlanc has a good answer. Here’s the question:
Your most recent entry - on what a feminist relationship looks like - is primarily pitched at female feminists. I, as a well-intentioned but nonetheless male participant in relationships, would really like to know the answer to that question. i don’t commit the obvious sort of mistakes that non-feminist guys do, or at least i hope i don’t. Nonetheless there are certainly crimes of ignorance, so to speak.
In fact, you should write a book answering this question - “how to be a feminist boyfriend.”
I thought, “Hell, I could write that book,” but when I actually started to think about it, I found myself drawing a blank. There’s a lot of trite, obvious answers like, “Eat pussy and don’t make PMS cracks,” but I’m committed to treating people like they aren’t stupid and I don’t think anyone interested in this question is so stupid they haven’t thought of this. So I opened the comments and immediately found that I was disagreeing vehemently with the first comment:
Via Ezra, this paper (PDF) about how the link between cohabitation and higher divorce rates has dissolved and why is well worth reading. Social conservatives have harped constantly on the statistic that says couples who live together before marriage are more likely to divorce for a long time, with the suggestion that young couples considering moving in together should abstain and just get married instead. It’s a classic “correlation equals causation” fallacy—people who are making this argument might consider if there’s something else that raises both the cohabitation rate and the divorce rate. As the paper argues, persuasively, there was: economics. The further down the economic scale you are, the more likely you are to live together outside of marriage, and the more likely you are to get divorced. Or that used to be true, but now cohabitation has been normalized for the middle class, which means that the correlation between causes of cohabitation and causes of divorce has been broken, and sure enough, once the common cause disappeared, so did the correlation.
The cohabitation panic is just another reminder of the frustrations we were expressing on the panel Saturday. The media allows social conservatives to run rampant with bullshit concerns, and rarely do pundits point out how the people who are screaming about murdering babies are the very same people that think cohabitation is bad. Without those connections, it becomes easier for the public to become complacent about feminism, think that it’s a done deal, when it’s clearly not and we’re having to fight some of the same battles over and over. We get called feminists—which is fine, accurate labeling is critical—but social conservatives are rarely labeled accurately as “pro-patriarchy” or just plain “sexists”. And these sexists are allowed to present their various issues as if they were discrete issues with no relationship to each other. Cohabitation is bad because of the divorce rate! Abortion is bad because of “life”! Yeah, that’s the ticket.
I wish there was a way to do an intervention on Meghan McCain. If you’re guessing, yes, she’s the daughter of John and Cindy McCain and, as a grown woman, she’s out there stumping for her dad. And, well, I kind of like her. If her blog wasn’t ostensibly to get her war-mongering, corporatist, anti-choice father into office, I’d probably be a fan. As Politico explained in an article comparing Meghan McCain and Chelsea Clinton:
McCainBlogette.com is all snappy photos, quick video and fashion tips offered up from the back of McCain’s Straight Talk Express bus. Meghan writes about her favorite shades (Chloe aviators) and her song of the day (Coldplay’s “Brothers and Sisters,” for example) but never policy. One online critic called it “Chicken Soup for the Candidate’s Daughter’s Soul.”
Actually, that’s a little unfair. I get the strong impression reading the blog that McCain is smart, but has chosen to play a role that meshes better with the expectations of Republican voters—that women be smart and bubbly, but not too smart, lest they intimidate the easily intimidated white male voter who votes almost completely because he feels intimidated and needs someone to reassure him he has a big cock. But this article really downplays McCain’s hip side, registering her fandom of the putrid Coldplay, but ignoring the fact that she has pretty good taste otherwise, and she puts out regular playlists on the blog, almost as a seeming counterpoint to the intellectual vapidity she otherwise has to display as an official female member of a Republican family campaign. On her latest playlist, she has Sleater-Kinney, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, the Cure, Danger Mouse & Jemini, the Screaming Trees, and a bunch more stuff that certainly passes a minimum hipness measure. Her playlists read like a cry for help, like they’re saying, “I’m actually really smart and cool, unlike pretty much every other person around me on this campaign trail.”
Remember how the advice column “Dear Prudence” at Slate used to be written by this nifty, warm-hearted, genuinely feminist woman? And how the universal rule that all mainstream publications must eventually tend towards shit kicked in, and that “Prudie” left and was replaced by someone who seemed really stupid? I mean, she had this weird anti-female bias in her writing, but it came off less as reactionary and more like, “I’m too dumb to know better than to buy every sexist big of crap fed to me.” That’s what I assumed, at least, but I confess that she was so bad I quit reading, especially after she wrote this jaw-dropping column advising a woman to marry a man that she was considering dumping because he went to Asia and had sex with a prostitute there. The answer was very much in the, “But the unpleasantness aside, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” Seriously, her answer was, “Well, if he’s otherwise great besides the cheating on you with prostitutes overseas who are probably 12 years old, then why fuss over that minor detail?” Any sane person would realize that “sleeping with prostitutes, especially on overseas business trips” is the giant red flag of red flags that you’re marrying a grade A asshole at minimum, and perhaps you’re even running the risk of marrying Neil Bush. But Prudie shrugged it off. So, I thought she was stupid.
I should have looked harder. She’s not stupid so much as she’s a crazy reactionary misogynist.* (Though she’s often pro-gay and otherwise socially liberal in other writings, but just has this weird blind spot when it comes to women. It’s typical Slate dressing-up-reactionary-politics-as-something-daring-since-they-come-from-an-ostensible-liberal.) She has recycled the same old story about how single mothers are the end of civilization (because civilization is defined as a system of making sure that women’s reproductive functions are used to keep them dependent and subject to men) and there seems to be no indication on her part that she realizes that everything she could possibly say on the subject is both mean-spirited bullshit and has been said a billion times before. She does go the extra mile, though, with this quote:
This article in the San Francisco Chronicle about why political wives allow themselves to be put through the humiliating “stand by your man” routine, wherein you literally stand by your man while he admits (or issues a semi-admission/semi-denial) to fucking a mistress, another man, or a prostitute to the press, is pretty interesting. Of course, to hear Dr. Laura speak it, the women being put through this humiliation at the behest of their beloveds (or at least sources of prestige and income) are being let off easy. They probably should be the ones apologizing, since they the reason men cheat, and if they were more submissive, this wouldn’t happen. But I suppose standing silently with pain written all over your face while your husband tells the press about his extra-marital dalliances is the first step on the long road to proper wifely submission.
All joking aside, it’s more painful when it’s a Democrat, isn’t it? Republican wives are a little easier to understand, aren’t they? Being a political wife is their career, and so standing by your man is basically just shoving through a major issue at your job, with the hopes that things will continue as normal soon. But the Democratic men are another story altogether—the high power, professional wife with a life of her own has become the standard. As the Chronicle states, Silda Wall Spitzer fits into this mold, with her history of being a handsomely paid Wall Street attorney. Same story with Hillary Clinton clutching Bill’s hand in 1992 to wave away his infidelities. These are women you can imagine just packing their things and walking straight into a brand new life without him.
Via Feministing, I have to admit this article from Reason by Ronald Bailey about the bullshit threat of a “demographic winter” and why childlessness is just fucking great cracked me up. Say what you will about Reason, but they are consistent about their libertarian values in a way that most conservatives who claim to be libertarian aren’t. As I’ve noted in the past, a lot of libertarian utopian fantasizing requires a belief that women will have communal values to hold society together while every man is out for himself, but at Reason, they go even further and allow a feminist libertarianism to thrive. Hilarity ensues, because it turns out that this ideology circumvents guilt-tripping women into setting aside their own life goals to make more patriots for the nation.
There are many reasons social and economic that people (read: women, for the purposes of the anti-choice doom-sayers) don’t want children, or at least many children. They’re expensive, they’re time constraints, and our fast-paced economy doesn’t have time for the slower lives required to raise children properly. All this is true, but even if you managed to fix those problems, you can still expect people, especially educated women, to just opt out.
Scarily appropriate reference courtesy of Whiskey Fire.
Jesus H. motherfucking Christ, I really do think that Ann Althouse believes that Bill Clinton screwed around on her. (Hat tip.) She puts up a hokey campaign video for Hillary Clinton that’s based around a venerable theme, which is how this campaign is a great moment in women’s history and women should be proud. I agree with all that, but Ann sadly can’t. Fuck having a female President—when are feminists going to pass a law requiring that assholes who cheat on Ann women will have their dicks cut off?
“This one’s for the girls, who love without holding back….” At what point in the song did you start thinking of the girls the Clintons don’t want you to think about, the ones Hillary wasn’t for? If you reached 1:39 without thinking of Monica Lewinsky, you might be a Hillary Clinton voter.
Or perhaps a person who’s not completely obsessed with The Threat From The Young Man-Stealers. Tbogg links this obsession of hers with her demands that young women with breasts be forbidden from leaving the house, much less being in the same room with her man former Presidents, so I don’t have to. But I doubt very seriously she’s very happy with flat-chested young women being permitted to roam free where men can see them. We won’t have our feminist utopia until everyone female in her fertile years is forbidden to leave the home without a male relative as an escort.
You may have already seen this appalling disaster of a post by Kim “I Don’t Even Pretend That I Don’t Hate Women” du Toit, where he takes it upon himself to explain men’s (and by men, he means himself) views of marriage so that we too can obtain and hang onto marriage with an appallingly misogynist (which he wrongly assumes is all men). Why would women want this? I suppose du Toit thinks we’re another species, or perhaps robots programmed to get a man, any man. We’re all familiar with the argument, “Give up your rights/self-esteem or assholes won’t want to be married to you,” but du Toit really puts his own, insane spin on it.
After quoting some Dr. Helen doing her schtick about how it’s okay to hate women, because she does, too (not a direct quote, but sort of the meta-theme of her writing), he dives right into how marriage is basically for men like a car purchase.
I think that men keep a running ledger going in their subconscious—all the good/great things about their relationship on the one side, and all the bad/terrible things on the other. At some point or another, if the perceived negatives outweigh the positives, the man will quit the relationship—I mean, just bail out of the whole thing—and usually with a swiftness and finality which confounds women.
He forgot the part where men check Consumer Reports to see if they can get fair trade for a non-cooking bitch in order to get the down payment on one who knows her way around a kitchen better. If they don’t have that section, they totally should, of course. Dr. Helen says it would be okay.
Sadly, I’m not exaggerating.
He. will. not. shut. the. bigoted. piehole. A man with zero experience raising children is endlessly calling for state control over the womb and family.
At a time in human history when people are radically re-thinking the meaning of the concepts of family and of the relations between men and women, Pope Benedict XVI has told women that the natural differences and complementarity of the sexes is the foundation of the dignity of women. He called upon the state to protect the natural rights of families in order to support the rights of children to be raised and educated by a mother and a father.Children can thrive in a home with two parents, opposite-sex or same-sex. Single mothers and fathers are capable of raising healthy happy children.Speaking at the Congress on Women, sponsored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Laity, the pope said that Catholic anthropology differs profoundly from post-modern secularist ideas - notably feminism and the homosexual movement - that “attempt to eliminate, or at least to obfuscate and confuse, the sexual differences written into human nature, considering them to be cultural constructions.”
On the contrary, he said, the questions surrounding the dignity of women are based in “fundamental anthropological truths of men and women”, that recognize the “rooted and profound” and complementary “difference between the masculine and the feminine.”
…The pope spoke of the natural family as the “specific vocation”, based on the inherent complementarity of man and woman, in which, “woman and man, thanks to the gift of maternity and paternity, together play an irreplaceable role in regard to life.”
For Prada Papa Ratzi - is a child really better off in a home where the father regularly beats the crap out of the mother? Or with parents that place a baby in a microwave and hit the “On” button? Or a couple who adopts children and proceeds to starve them, lock them in closets and pull out their toenails with pliers?
I’ve been meaning to blog this, but haven’t managed to pull together the enthusiasm to do it. But hopefully better late than never.
For those following the despicable “men’s rights” movement, one of the primary motivating beliefs is that women lie about, well, everything. But mainly rape and domestic violence. I’m not sure how many MRAs really believe that women regularly lie about these things, or if they just push that line because they know that as long as people believe it, they can rape and beat without much consequence. I don’t know. The human mind is a funny thing. People believe they are kidnapped by space aliens. Maybe they can hit their wives and later decide that it didn’t happen and she’s a lying bitch. I really don’t know.
What I do know is that the organized support for rapists, wife beaters, and sometimes child molesters is something that makes me sick to blog about, in part because it exists and in part because doing so tends to draw the MRA supporters out of the woodwork to scream and carry on in your comments. But I still think it’s important, because like many reactionary movements, the MRA movement works primarily by putting forward one face to the world and showing the other only to themselves.
Dean Tong is a prominent and professional “men’s rights activist”. He is the most repulsive of the repulsive, in that he works primarily in helping men beat the accusation that they’ve been molesting their children. That child molestation is a lie concocted by deceitful females intent on getting one over on men is the natural conclusion of the line of thought that posits that those bruises on your wife’s face got there all by themselves and that traumatized rape victim is just making shit up because she changed her mind after the fact. He helps men beat child molestation charges through a bunch of tricks and unscientific methods that seem scientific, and of course relying heavily on the supposition that a man’s word is worth more than a woman’s and certainly more than a child’s in court.
Well, he seems to attract people that are willing to “lie” about him, because he’s been arrested for beating his wife.
Tong got into the business of being an “expert” (sadly, one who has been allowed to testify in trials and has been presented as an expert on various TV shows) after he was accused of molesting his 3-year-old daughter by his ex-wife. After 10 years of litigation and $120,000 spent on lawsuits, he was able to receive visitation with his daughter.
Sigh. We were on a roll there with positive news about civil equality…
First there was the ruling by New York’s The Appellate Division of state Supreme Court that Canadian same-sex marriages must be recognized here. Kate and I married in Vancouver in 2004, so this was a big present.
Then, in Oregon, couples who wish to take advantage of the recently approved domestic partnership law may now do so as a federal judge tossed out a lawsuit attempting to prevent its implementation.
But it’s time to roll up the sleeves for folks in the Sunshine State as the fundies have collected enough signatures to put a “marriage protection” measure on the ballot there. (Florida Sun-Sentinel):
“In less than 2 weeks we were able to collect 92,000 signatures, which we thought was remarkable,” said John Stemberger, an Orlando lawyer and Florida4Marriage chairman.Yes, this is going to be an election issue yet again, in a state that has been critical in deciding who ends up in the White House, placed in the center of the marriage equality storm. It cannot be avoided. It will force the intellectually dishonest leave-it-to-the states folks to answer for the ability of Florida to deny civil rights to a group of taxpaying residents.Florida4Marriage’s amendment would define marriage as “the legal union of only one man and one woman as husband and wife,” and that “no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized.”
…Gov. Charlie Crist distanced himself from the issue when he took office, proclaiming himself a “live and let live” governor.
Now with voters being asked to decide on gay marriage when they head to the polls to pick the next president, the amendment could drive more voters on both sides of the issue to the polls.
(more…)
(UPDATE: The Freepi are in a tizzy, the freak-out is after the jump).
Woo hoo, what great news to cap off the week! My marriage is legal somewhere in the U.S. (Newsday):
The Appellate Division of state Supreme Court on Friday reversed a judge’s ruling in 2006 that Monroe Community College did not have to extend health benefits to an employee’s lesbian partner.The ACLU has issued a press release on the case; the reversal was unanimous:Patricia Martinez, a word processing supervisor, sued the school in 2005, arguing that it granted benefits to heterosexual married couples but denied them to Martinez and her partner, Lisa Ann Golden.
The couple formalized their relationship in a civil union ceremony in Vermont in 2001 and were married in Canada in 2004.
In a unanimous decision, a New York appellate court today ruled that marriages of same-sex couples entered into outside of New York must be recognized. The case, filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union, is the first appellate court decision in the state and the first known decision in the country to hold that a valid same-sex marriage must be recognized here.The only possibility of reversing this, and it’s an unlikely one, is if the NY legislature chooses to amend marriage law to specifically not recognize the marriages:“This is a victory for families, it’s a victory for fairness and it’s a victory for human rights,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU. “Congratulations to all same-sex couples validly married outside of New York State: You are now considered married in New York as well. Now we need to work toward a New York where you don’t have to cross state or country lines to get married.”
…“If a marriage is valid in the state or country in which the marriage took place, New York law generally requires the recognition of that marriage,” said Arthur Eisenberg, the NYCLU’s legal director. “This case involved a straightforward application of that principle.”
…“Today’s decision is a great step forward for same-sex couples in New York,” said James Esseks, Litigation Director of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Project of the ACLU. “But there is still lots of work to be done here. It’s now up to the state legislature to finish the job it started last year and pass the marriage bill so that lesbian and gay New Yorkers won’t have to leave the state to celebrate their commitments.”
The state Legislature “may decide to prohibit the recognition of same-sex marriages solemnized abroad,” the ruling said. “Until it does so, however, such marriages are entitled to recognition in New York.”A reader noted that this decision was at the intermediate court level, and the New York Court of Appeal could still grant review, but until then, we’re legal.
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Remember, homos cannot adopt or foster kids in many states because only the heterosexual parenting model provides the optimal situation for raising a child. (AP):
nvestigators believe China Arnold killed her infant daughter by putting her in a microwave oven. Arnold’s attorneys argue she had nothing to do with the baby’s death in 2005.As one readers said at my pad, “We know that there are SOME bad heterosexuals, but ALL homosexuals are bad. ”Jury selection for Arnold was scheduled to begin Monday in Montgomery County Common Pleas Court. Arnold, 27, has pleaded not guilty to aggravated murder. If convicted, she could face the death penalty.
Police investigators believe Arnold killed 1-month-old Paris Talley by putting her in a microwave at her home. Coroner’s officials have said the baby suffered high-heat internal injuries and had no external burns. They have ruled out scalding water, open flame or other possible causes of death that could have damaged the skin.
…During a pretrial hearing in July, police Detective Michael Galbraith said Arnold told him she arrived home in the early morning hours after drinking, fell asleep and was awakened at 2:30 a.m. by the baby’s crying.
She said she warmed a bottle in the microwave oven, tried to give it to the baby, changed the child’s diaper and then fell asleep on the couch with the baby on her chest. Arnold said she and her children were the only ones in the apartment until her boyfriend arrived several hours later and noticed something was wrong with the baby. Galbraith said Arnold told him: “If I hadn’t gotten so drunk, I guess my baby wouldn’t have died.”
Also:
* Fundie parents blame Satan for burning baby in microwave
Thanks to Broadsheet, or I would have never read the ridiculous but telling comments for this article from a woman who doesn’t want to get married and is perfectly happy “living in sin”. The sheer anger that comes out at her reaffirms my desire not to get married and my suspicion that there’s a “misery loves company” element to all the pressure put on people to join the institution. Even, weirdly, from people who are happy being married but still somehow need everyone else to do it in order to feel more justified in their decision. But less telling! More showing!
If all the customs of marriage are purely for ‘inner emotional’ reasons as Ms. Eslinger assumes, who needs the ring, dress, ceremony, family etc. But, the ring is a reminder of public vows, not a reminder of how someone feels. Feelings vacillate. That’s why you make vows. She wants to shack up, on a semi-permanent basis. What’s new here? It sounds very open-minded, inclusive etc. But what would she say if she found Jeff cheating or ditching her. If she really were the soul mate she claims, she’d feel hurt, betrayed, and want to hold him to a standard of love that is publicly held, “you cheated on me, and lovers don’t do that.”
Pretzel logic argument #1: It’s better, if you find that your lover is a lying, cheating SOB to be entangled in a relationship with him that’s hard to exit. Because it’s not hard enough finding out that your true love is betraying you. You also deserve to suffer the divorce as well. Because…..? Misery loves company strikes me as the only reason.
Every few months or so, there’s an uproar over a woman who dares to breastfeed her child in public. In the latest incident to catch the eye of the denizens over at WingNutDaily, a lawsuit was slapped on a Ruby Tuesday restaurant in St. Lucie, Florida for ordering a woman to stop feeding her child at the booth she was seated in.
Dee Dee Olsen claims a manager at the eatery instructed her to nurse her infant daughter inside the ladies’ room, or else leave the premises.Now I don’t know about the claims of emotional distress or “continued mental and physical anxiety” cited in the claim by Olsen, but that Ruby Tuesday franchise is legally in the wrong.Olsen opted to pay her bill and leave the restaurant, but claims the incident caused her severe emotional distress.
According to Florida law, mothers are permitted unconditionally to breastfeed anywhere, public or private, covered or uncovered.
The relevant statute says, “The breastfeeding of a baby is an important and basic act of nurture which must be encouraged in the interests of maternal and child health and family values. A mother may breastfeed her baby in any location, public or private, where the mother is otherwise authorized to be, irrespective of whether or not the nipple of the mother’s breast is covered during or incidental to the breastfeeding.”
The Port St. Lucie News reports Olsen’s lawsuit claims the restaurant violated that rule and illegally discriminates against mothers and infants by forcing them to feed in a restroom or outside of the restaurant.
What I don’t understand is the logic of so many people up in arms over the boobie that they’d prefer to subject a woman and baby to the filthy environs of a restroom rather than simply averting their eyes if the sight of nursing gives them the vapors (see the poll). We’re not talking changing diapers on the restaurant table, for god’s sake. What is wrong with these people? Oh we know what’s wrong. Check out this Freeper thread about a case in Kentucky, where a similar incident occurred at an Applebee’s. There was one voice of sanity in the swamps…
A woman breast feeds a baby in public, what’s the big deal? The hypocrites in this country are beyond belief as if the sight of a piece of the woman’s breast area the size of an “M&M peanut candy” when exposed is going to destory our morality in America is ridiculous. I remember ten years ago our hypocrites in the media would show Black women’s nipples in African documentaries. Today those offending “nipples” are digitally edited out. I have more of a problem with having to observe men wearing shaggy pants with their butts hanging out or other members of society who reside in large cities scratching their crotch in public.Imagine what President Pastor Huckabee thinks about the boobie.
If anything, MSN’s articles on love and dating have gotten even more sexist than from my heyday of reviewing them a number of times a week at Mouse Words. Recently there was the article suggesting that the key to making men’s lives better was keeping women in marriages under duress (even MRA guru Glenn Sacks doesn’t go so far as to suggest that the solution to men’s problems is to make staying in the marriage mandatory for a lot of women), and now there’s this article sent to me by Rachel. It’s 5 New Year’s resolutions for wives, who have been tasked with the one-sided job of keeping the marriage together. Sadly, one of them is not “agitate against your right to divorce your husband”, because this is a puff piece. Still, right off the bat you know what kind of article this is going to be.
Cook More Often
Put that in your pipe and smoke it! Yeah, they said it. Get your bitch ass back to the kitchen and make your man some vittles! He didn’t marry you for your sparkling wit, you know. How was he supposed to know that your huge cookbook collection was amassed because you just like the pretty pictures? Do you know what the marketing community calls that? False advertising.
100% of the women in the country have already rejected you.
The continuing series of rants from Dr. Helen about how women need to settle into marriage with anyone who asks, because men are men and like entitled and stuff, has been getting some attention around the blogosphere. (I briefly blogged it here.) For those who don’t want to click the link, the staunch economic conservatives over there have a really odd attitude about women—not that women are subhuman commodities that are exchanged on an open market (people all over the political map believe that), but that unlike every other good on the market in the libertarian eyes, communist principles should apply in the pussy market. The same people who’ll mock you if you don’t have enough money for food or shelter suddenly get teary-eyed and sentimental at the idea of some poor middle class white guy who can’t buy himself a model to marry like Donald Trump can. Anyway, I’ll get back to that in a bit, because Lindsay makes the good point about how there is a link between the declining fortunes of the rest of us (compared to the rising fortunes of the rich in what looks to be like a direct wealth transfer from labor to the elite) does in fact influence the marriage rate negatively.
I wish liberals would talk more about how increasing relative economic inequality might be affecting people’s day-to-day lives. Abject material deprivation is only part of the problem. For example, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that a lot of young people are priced out of marriage–not because they can’t find a willing partner, but because they don’t have enough financial stability to “justify” getting married.
If you don’t have substantial assets in common, or a job that would give benefits to a spouse, marriage just isn’t as practically alluring as it might have been.
That seems like it makes sense. For instance, if a couple is doing well enough to be saving money and perhaps getting assets like real estate, then marriage makes good sense, because it gives you a quick and dirty way to legally share your assets going forward. But if you’re both in debt (or if only one of you is), you sure as hell don’t want to get married and share the responsibility for debts you personally didn’t incur. As more and more Americans are going into debt and fewer and fewer are saving money all the time, we can probably expect that formula to kick in and marriage rates to decline.
In a study that seems almost designed to send a lot of people off in a defensive spin, the Institute for Social and Economic Research has released findings that stay-at-home mothers* tend to be less happy on average than women who have income-bearing work. Much less happy.
Of course, for those who think a woman’s place is in the home, this news is only relevant in the P.R. department. The idea that women should be “happy” performing their womanly functions only arose because of the demands made by feminists. So for your social conservatives, the idea is that women are made to mop, we’re all happier being ourselves, ergo, women are happiest pushing mops. Bona fide scientific evidence against this is mostly an attack on their P.R., not on any fundamental belief about women’s roles.
More problematic is what this means for people who accept that women have plenty of other roles to play in the world other than stay-at-home-mother, but nonetheless posit that it’s just another choice like any other, and they’re all perfectly fine and equal and don’t ask too many hard questions about why, if stay-at-home-parenting is a delight like any other, do men reject the opportunity? Yes, yes, there are men who stay at home—93,000 fathers compared to 5.4 million mothers in 2003. It’s kind of embarrassing, in the face of those statistics, to even get close to suggesting that the gendered nature of housewifery has changed one iota.
It’s not surprising that staying at home is correlated with lower levels of happiness, and it has nothing to do with devaluing the work or anything like that. The work is isolating, for one thing, and human beings are social animals. But I think it’s more than that—dependence can be debilitating to the ego, and so can doing work that is generally undervalued. While I have no doubt that a fraction of stay-at-home mothers are genuinely appreciated by their husbands and feel independent and valued, I suspect most families that resort to this model of family stick with the old-fashioned sexist frame that undervalues women and robs them of financial autonomy. After all, if you don’t bring in the money, you have to ask for it, and again, while there’s no doubt a fraction of husbands out there who are not going to abuse the power that comes with being the sole breadwinner, human nature dictates that power is corrupting and most men with that power will be less than perfectly benevolent dictators. Again, if these generalizations don’t fit you, calm down. Averages almost by definition require individual variation.
The survey found that part time workers with children did the best, probably because part time workers both had some financial autonomy and better-valued work outside the home, but also had more time freed up to attend to the plethora of at-home responsibilities that don’t dry up just because you get a job.
*I prefer the term “housewife”, which reminds people that men are in fact involved in the decision to pull a woman from the public workforce and keep her doing valuable, underpaid, and dependent work at home. It also gets us out of the media-preferred catfight “mommy wars” realm, which makes the staying at home vs. working thing sound like a battle between women that doesn’t involve men at all. But I understand and respect that some women would prefer to have themselves called stay-at-home mothers than housewives.
I was of two minds about this NY Times article about “push presents” that’s being lambasted on the feminist blogs. One one hand, I 100% agree that the whole “wives are so bitchy and domineering!”* tone is grade A sexism that would make your average misogynist 60s comedy writers flinch. And then there’s the assumption that what all women really want is more baubles to display in the “whose husband loves (read: spends the most money on) you the most?” game. But I also had a reservation, because the concept of “push presents”—gifts presented a woman after giving birth that are about her as a human being instead of her as a mother—struck me as a great idea. If they weren’t generic gifts of jewelry, but there was a tradition of family and friends of the new mother thinking hard about her taste and buying gifts that were appropriate for a birthday or Christmas, that would both remind the new mother that she doesn’t have to subsume her identity into her new role, and would be a reminder to said family and friends that having a baby isn’t the end all, be all of a woman’s existence.
But Lindsay’s post on the article squelched my reservations. She latched onto the fact that “push presents” are contextualized so utterly and completely as expensive jewelry—and that the articles use sexist tropes that the diamond industry is married to—and concluded that this entire attempt to start a tradition is being funded by a jewelry industry looking for a growth market.
Fellow Durhamite Barry Yeoman has a piece up in AARP Magazine, R.I.P. Off, about the fleecing of thousands of people by the poorly regulated funeral industry.
The latest scam involves the fairly popular practice of pre-paid funeral plans, where you buy your arrangements (embalming/cremation services, burial plots, caskets, etc.) ahead of time at today’s prices. It’s a great idea in principle, since people don’t want to have to think about such matters at such a stressful time.
And that’s what these scam artist death merchants count on. Take the case of Forest Hill South, a mortuary and cemetery located in Memphis. Audrey and Carl Brewer purchased a pre-pay plan for the family, forking over almost $1300 over time for funeral services. And you know what happened?
The Brewers had no reason to question the honesty of Forest Hill. Its three locations had been in business since 1888, serving the rich and the poor alike, including such luminaries as Elvis Presley and his mother, Gladys. Like the Brewers, thousands of customers from Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas had also trusted the company’s reputation enough to buy pre-need policies. Then in July 2006, one of Forest Hill’s new owners, Oklahoma oilman Clayton Smart, called a press conference to announce he was invalidating 13,500 pre-paid funeral contracts, including the Brewers’. While police stood by to prevent a customer riot, Smart explained that any contract holder who wanted to use his or her pre-need policy would have to pay an additional $4,000, more or less, at the time of death, even if the plan was already paid in full. “Obviously, things were a lot cheaper in 1965,” Smart explained. “I wouldn’t have bought the business if I thought I’d have to honor those contracts.”As Barry’s report continues, it’s pretty clear that this was not an isolated incident. People (and their relatives) who purchase these policies are getting ripped off as outrageous excuses and bait-and-switch tactics by these death merchants rip them off at the worst possible time in the life of a family.Officials with the Tennessee attorney general’s office offer a different explanation for why Smart wasn’t honoring the contracts. They allege Smart and his partner, attorney Stephen Smith, drained the company’s pre-need trust funds of $20 million shortly after they purchased Forest Hill in 2004. Those funds, which were part of the purchase and were earmarked to pay for the pre-paid funerals and cemetery care, “were supposed to be in very conservative investment vehicles,” says Martha Davis, a senior counsel in the state’s bankruptcy division. Instead, she says, Smart and Smith diverted the money to risky hedge funds and unsecured loans owned by Quest Minerals and Exploration, an oil-and-gas company controlled by Smart’s family. The attorney general’s office says the Quest loans ended up being worthless.
More, including a question of the day, is below the fold.
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To men: Try to find a woman who won’t go crying to the police and lawyers every time you lay a hand on her.
To women: For god’s sake, surely you can be a better wife.
Her advice to women on being better wives isn’t bad, per se. It’s just sexist that she assumes straightaway that the only wives need to be reminded that their husbands are human beings. Why not the other way around, too?
Bean has a response up to Stephanie Coontz’s suggestion that the state get out of the business of marriage completely and instead issue a standard civil union contract to all couples who want it, gay or straight. I’ve said before that I think that’s a good idea, and that I also think the contract should be fairly easy to dissolve, and that a lot of benefits of marriage should be reduced. (For instance, I think alimony should be really hard to get, and only available to spouses who were openly dependent for a reasonable period of time.) Bean likes Coontz’s suggestions, but is wary of some of her rhetorical tactics of relying heavily on tradition to argue that marriage isn’t really a state issue so much as a religious issue anyway.
I also have to say that as much as I support Coontz’s marriage proposal (pun intended), there is something about her historical framing of it that makes me a little uncomfortable. Yes, one strong thing going for the so-called privatization of marriage is the practice’s historical roots. That said, I think we need to be careful not to idealize the marriage of the past, in which women were property and a marriage was a business arrangement. Coontz is completely right to suggest that the state is not the appropriate purveyor of “marriage”; the state should recognize civil not religious unions. But I think we can advocate for this shift without recalling the marriage misogyny of days gone by. It continues strongly enough today as it is.
Arguing from tradition is a crappy argument, of course, and not very logical. But I get why Coontz does it. Opponents of same sex marriage rights tend to fall heavily on tradition in their arguments, and she’s basically pointing out that if tradition is your thing, then you should have no problem with a more clean separation of church and state on this issue, since it’s even more traditional. It’s something of a gotcha argument, since we’re all aware that the “defenders of traditional marriage” are more defenders of specific gender roles that privilege straight men over everyone else.
The concern here is the framing issue, a la George Lakoff. When you argue inside someone else’s frames, you reinforce them. Even though Coontz has scored gotcha points that will help win the immediate argument, she’s managed to reinforce the idea that falling back on tradition is a good argument, and as Bean points out, that’s not really good for the overall argument when you’re talking women’s rights and gay rights. The part of me that knows this is at odds with the part of me that’s saying, “Ha! Your ‘traditions’ won’t save you now, wingnuts!”
Thoughts?
Jeff has already had some fun with this article, but it’s been awhile since I’ve ripped into some dating advice column, I thought I’d give it a go. “11 “Don’t-Tell-the-Wife” Secrets All Men Keep”, and by “secret” they mean “stereotypical trope about male behavior so common that all lazy sitcom writers rely on it”. They should be excluded from the strike, those lazy ass sitcom writers, since they’re the ones that get paid so much to do so little and create all the sniggering jokes in the media. What’s interesting is not the male non-secrets, but the implied female “secrets”, which are those desires women have that are hidden because the male authors of this article don’t give a flying fuck about female feelings, figuring that women have two: 1) To live for men and 2) To get to be the Mrs., with no real stipulations attached other than “the sooner the better”.
Secret #1: Yes, we fall in lust 10 times a day — but it doesn’t mean we want to leave you
If the oldest question in history is “What’s for dinner?” the second oldest is “Were you looking at her?” The answer: Yes — yes, we were. If you’re sure your man doesn’t look, it only means he possesses acute peripheral vision.
“When a woman walks by, even if I’m with my girlfriend, my vision picks it up,” says Doug LaFlamme, 28, of Laguna Hills, California. “I fight the urge to look, but I just have to. I’m really in trouble if the woman walking by has a low-cut top on.”
Granted, we men are well aware that our sizing up the produce doesn’t sit well with you, given that we’ve already gone through the checkout line together. But our passing glances pose no threat.