I’ve been hanging onto this all weekend, because it’s a real Monday morning bit of hilarity. It’s also a good indicator of how the concept of the boycott, wielding so powerfully when used strategically by the civil rights movement, has really devolved into a temper tantrum that’s less about effecting change and more about the boycotter preening over her moral superiority. Observe Rachel Ray’s outfit in a new ad for Dunkin Donuts:
To ordinary people, this is an example of someone wearing the confusing combination of a lightweight summer shirt and a scarf. There are two major possibilities here. One is that this is yet another example of the fashion trend fascists trying to push a stupid idea on the public to see who buys into it. Considering that said fascists have successfully convinced a handful of women to dress like this:
I suppose we should have seen this coming, but still: Oh my god. (Hat tip.) The headline is pure scare tactics.
‘Sex and the City’ Fiend: Show Turned Me Into Samantha
I’ve never understood the nation’s paranoid obsession with that show. Well, I do, but I also don’t. This headline really gets at it—there’s a real fear that women across the nation are going to watch the show and start getting ideas about how it’s not only okay not to get married and start having babies fairly young, but that being single and living independently is fun and exciting. Because no matter how some of us feminists wrung our hands because the characters on “Sex and the City” weren’t empowered enough (i.e., two of them openly yearned for marriage and one was somewhat disorganized and compulsive in her life choices), there’s no denying that the show did really portray single women with independent incomes as exciting, fun people. (With flaws, of course, but good lord, if every show portrayed all women as pillars of strength at all time, they’d be too damn boring to watch.) From the point of view of some of us who’ve tasted the life of independent living, we don’t see what the fuss is, but the show was wildly popular with women who went straight from the home to perhaps a college/young adulthood situation with roommates to marriage without ever having that part of your life where you answer to no one but yourself. And it’s those women that are feared might get ideas.
This is extremely bizarre. A Staten Island high school has banned girls from the prom if they don’t have a male date. It’s a girls-only school, which probably means that proms generally have a huge number of girls and not that many guys. Maybe the principle is pitying the boys at the prom, feeling they shouldn’t be outnumbered. There’s other speculations.
“That makes sense only because it probably controls the chaos,” Valente said. “You know you’re there with somebody, you’re less likely to go crazy.”
So, there’s a grave danger of high levels of squealing and circle dancing. I say, good practice for the weddings the principle presumably wants them to have in the future.
A reminder to Americans with short fucking memories.
The number of anti-vaccination cranks out there on the interwebs seems to be multiplying. It seems you can’t make reference to any kind of vaccination lately without people, sometimes pretending to be liberals (sometimes actually misguided liberals) wailing and moaning about how terrible vaccinations are. It’s the new fluoridation. I’m somewhat surprised that no one wailed and moaned that I mentioned on Pandagon a tetanus vaccination I got the other day, but rest assured, while my arm has been kind of sore, I haven’t yet developed autism.
I have very little patience for cranks as a general rule (which is why working for this site is so fun, because it’s about pushing back against anti-choice cranks), but I reserve a special contempt and loathing for anti-vaccination cranks. They remind me of nothing so much as women who make their living as professional anti-feminists in terms of denial and idiocy levels. Anti-feminist professional women create a special kind of loathing, because they don’t acknowledge that their very ability to be out there earning a paycheck lambasting feminism would not be possible without feminism giving them the right to be women in the public sphere. Anti-vaccination cranks have a similar parasitic relationship to the existence of vaccines. If it weren’t for vaccination, our country would have far more immediate infectious disease health concerns to worry about that the largely imaginary health drawbacks of the vaccination wouldn’t have a chance to ruffle any feathers.
On the horrid article itself (instead of just the jaw-dropping quote), which isn’t technically about the casual cruelty that men inflicted on women in the conservative-romanticized utopia of the 50s, well, Lance Mannion has the long takedown that this article deserves. It’s by Michael Wolff and he at least does the nation a favor and shows that yep, The Village is more worried about politician’s sex lives than about what the public cares about, which is policy and leadership.
Politics is now about sex. Not just scandalous sex, not just who is having what kind of sex, but what we think about the sex each politician is having, or not having. Sex (sex, not gender) in politics is as significant a subtext as race.
From Echidne, a jaw-dropping tale from the fundie vs. reason battleground in our public schools.
Substitute teacher Jim Piculas does a 30-second magic trick where a toothpick disappears then reappears.
But after performing it in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land ‘O Lakes, Piculas said his job did a disappearing act of its own.
“I get a call the middle of the day from the supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, ‘Jim, we have a huge issue. You can’t take any more assignments. You need to come in right away,’” he said.
When Piculas went in, he learned his little magic trick cast a spell that went much farther than he’d hoped.
“I said, ‘Well Pat, can you explain this to me?’ ‘You’ve been accused of wizardry,’ [he said]. Wizardry?” he asked.
Read that next to this post by tristero, to really get that he’s not kidding when he says this.
Holy mother of Disco Ball, is this just wrong. It’s a semen detection kit that is marketed for catching cheating spouses and teenagers who have unruly amounts of autonomy. Naturally, they are trying to suggest that it’s for catching both men and women, but of course, we know that’s just some ass-covering and defies all common sense that tells us that since men shoot the semen away from their bodies, clean-up to the point of avoiding detection would be simple enough. Also, as blogger Slut Machine notes, this would be really good at catching male masturbators (i.e., all men), if not cheaters. I’m sure some woman out there will try it, and much sorrow will be had as she discovers that her husband is a man and thus has trace amounts of semen in his underwear all the time, but on the whole, I see this being marketed towards men who are looking for novel ways to control wives and daughters now that the law is less cooperative than it used to be.
My main concern here is that the abstinence-only nuts are going to find out about this. (Probably shouldn’t blog about it, since many of them read this blog to get their daily titillation thinking about women who have sex without apologizing for it.) You think the metal detectors at school doors are ridiculous? Or think about all the annual dust-ups with over-zealous, perverted school officials start doing underwear checks on high school students. This could make the situation a thousand times worse, with school officials getting the brilliant idea of having panty drills, like fire drills except everyone has to submit to panty-testing to make sure that they’re not having Teh Sex. Sure, various civil liberties organizations would sue them into the ground, but don’t think the idea isn’t attractive. Though I suppose it would encourage young women to use condoms.
Anyway, it’s a rip-off. If you want to find out that there’s biological material in people’s underwear, you can just assume that there is. And if you’re skeptical, I recommend the black light as a cost effective alternative to satisfy your doubts.
Rebecca Traister has a great article about the 10th anniversary of “The Vagina Monologues” in New Orleans, and ends up having the same reaction that a lot of what you might call advanced patriarchy-blamers have when seeing this play: a reluctant appreciation for how fun it is to see it, after a period of intense irritation at the hoopla around it. I’m definitely in the rationalist category of feminism, as it were, and have little to no patience with the Earth Mother feminism that tries to make a big deal out of the feminine essence. It’s true that we are awash in a culture where anxious men have a submissive relationship to The Phallus, but seriously, the way to correct that is not to make a great emblem out of vulvic energy or whatever you want to call it. There are some men who have a healthy relationship with the penis—they like it, but see it as a tool that belongs to them. I think that route out of shame over having ladyparts is to take that pathway. But, as Traister notes, Ensler surrounds the play itself with this Earth Mother goddess stuff that makes me squirmy.
In Ensler’s megalomaniacal V-universe, everything from voter registration to the Iraq war is seen through the speculum, er, spectrum, of the vagina, and moist metaphor and love for Eve (and beav) rule the day. It often seems, in fact, that Ensler has taken her laudable grass-roots success and turned it into a celebrity-centric, glitzy franchise — one that has, in its unrelenting and patronizing focus on women-as-cootches, often felt as reductive and objectifying as the language Ensler originally set out to fight.
All that is true, but at the end of the day, the “Monologues” continue to draw huge audiences because the play itself is so good. You don’t have to love Ensler’s approach to love the play, because what makes the play awesome is that the monologues are all built from the direct words of a bunch of ordinary women. The factors that were in play 10 years ago when the play made its debut—shame about sexuality, the belief that women are inferior and that control of the ladyparts belongs to men, because women can’t be trusted with it—are only more pronounced now than they were then, and have been enshrined into the law. I think women flock to the play, because it’s refreshing to hear other women talk about their vaginas…..much in the way that men with healthy masculine identities see their penises. It’s mine, but it does not own me. Ensler may skirt the edge of “women as cootches”, but the play itself sends home the all-too-uncommon message that women own their cootches. And because of its emphasis on personal narrative, it does this without being preachy or driven by ideology, and it’s really funny and entertaining.
So I just listened to a recent edition of Radio Lab about bioengineering and chimeras and the possibilities of blending genes, and in the show was this really amazingly cool story. Basically, this woman they interview needed a kidney transplant. (That’s not the cool part.) They go to family members first, of course, and they tested their DNA for a match. And they found that her sons…..were not her sons. They were her husband’s sons, but they weren’t a genetic match to her. So they retested her, same result. So they desperately tested a lot of different tissues around her body, after she demonstrated that she did in fact give birth to these boys, and they found out that the reason for all this was some of her body had one set of DNA and another had another. Her blood had one, but her reproductive system had another.
I felt bad for the lady. Obviously, this whole situation unnerved her and rattled her to the bone, and it’s too bad. I can’t help but think that if I found out that I’ve got the genetic material to make two people, I’d be stoked.* What great cocktail party banter! You could probably convince people you had superpowers and shit. I don’t truck with the more superstitious need to have individuality strongly defined in religious or biological terms—a person is a social construct that I think is best defined around the concept of the lived experience of having your consciousness and your body and your memories. But most people probably don’t think very much about the constructed nature of identity, and thus a revelation like this was pretty rattling. Most people think what you are is what you are, that your race and ethnicity and gender are set in stone and that your unique personhood is something special. But really, it’s not. Human beings are what we socially define them to be, and the boundaries can be blurred as the social understandings of these things are blurred.
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.
If it weren’t such a gimme, this would be sublime headline writing:
‘George Bush is like crusty potato’
I would have said cold corn chowder, but I don’t happen to be synesthetic.
So I’m reading yet another article (via) telling women to “focus” on getting married and having babies instead of a career, because the career can wait and the babies can’t, and it occurred to me that these routine articles are similar to the pressure-heavy, heavily photoshopped magazine covers and impossibly thin mannequins out there. Which is to say, women are being held to a standard that doesn’t actually exist in the real world, and only exists to make women insecure, wandering around wondering if they should be doing something different, but have no idea what it could be. With the impossible beauty standards, it goes like this: after dieting and exercise and buying a bunch of products, and hair styling, and fashion-buying, you still can’t look like that, because what you really need is to be a two-dimensional image that’s been worked over for hours in Photoshop. With the no-career-have-babies-now mentality, you’re being scolded for either behaving in a way that will save you from dependency, i.e. being scolded for being a full, responsible citizen of the sort Americans are supposed to be, or being scolded for not doing what you’re already doing, but just not enough.
This article is a perfect example.
Cyborgs for Obama!
I bring you this awesome bit of presumably meth-induced Corner ranting from Lisa Schiffren. With translations.
Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics. (During the Clinton Administration we were all introduced to then U. of Pennsylvania Professor Lani Guinier — also a half black/half Jewish, red diaper baby.)
Translation: Children of interracial couples are the result not of love or possibly even of sex, but of Communist breeding schemes that would put the Protocols of the Elders of Fertile Veil Ladies to shame. The racist dread you feel in your heart when you see an interracial couple (we’re assuming that the intended audience at NRO is a bunch of people who still rail against Brown v. the Board of Education in private) is completely rational, racists. What you’re seeing is not normal human relationships, but instead freaky 21st century mind control experiment shit.
I’ve been meaning to write about this piece (summarized in the video above) about the ways the right has woven together an agenda of racism, specifically anti-Muslim hysteria, anti-immigration hysteria, and anti-feminism to create this myth that there’s an imminent destruction of the white, Christian race due to insufficient sperm worship. In America, we hear cute little stories about how European governments are bribing women to have babies, and we may just keep moving, but as Joyce notes, this is part of a larger racist agenda with genocidal overtones, a particularly troubling thing, considering the widespread belief that Europeans learned a valuable lesson about the possible consequences of demonizing a religious minority in their midst. Maybe it didn’t stick as hard as it should have.
What was a conservative drumbeat about Europe’s death has become mainstream media shorthand, complementing ominous news items about Muslim riots in France; Muslim boycotts in London; Muslim “veil” debates in Denmark; and empty European churches transformed into mosques, with calls to prayer replacing church bells. Evangelical luminary Chuck Colson, head of the vast Prison Fellowship ministry and a close ally of George W. Bush, espoused a conspiracy theory in which he construed an Islamic Council of Europe handbook for Muslims trying to keep the faith abroad as a “soft terrorism” plot for takeover. The late Oriana Fallaci lambasted Europe’s transformation into a Muslim colony, “Eurabia.” And in a recent political match in Switzerland, a campaign poster depicted a flock of white sheep kicking a black sheep out of their pasture, “For Greater Security.” The refrain is that the good-faith multicultural tolerance approach of the Netherlands has been tried and has failed, which is arguably a few polite steps from Mosher’s summary of the problem: that Muslim immigrants are simply “too many and too culturally different from their new countries’ populations to assimilate quickly…. They are contributing to the cultural suicide of these nations as they commit demographic suicide.” Or, as he declared while rallying a gathering of profamily activists last spring in Poland, “I want to see more Poles!”
Oh jeez, next thing you know, the NY Times is going to report in astonishment that shit really does stink. Actually, to be completely fair, this report that shows that teenage boys desire relationships, enjoy the company of their girlfriends, and can fall in love needs to be well-publicized. Despite all evidence to the contrary, this myth that teenage boys universally see girls as subhuman sex dispensers persists. And of course, for some, that belief is extended throughout life, with men like Kim du Toit arguing that men don’t ever really get to the point where they feel love for women so much as just see women as multi-functional appliances.
I’m sure most of us have known, dated, or been a lovesick straight teenage boy, so why does this myth persist that boys can’t love girls? Referencing the du Toit piece above, I think it’s basically sexist objectification (the belief that women are subhuman appliances) mixed in with condescending control over adolescents, i.e. we feel free to insult the loveability of teenage girls under the guise of protecting them. And of course, it’s very, very damaging to boys to tell them that in order to fit this mold of masculinity, they should shut off their abilities to feel affection.
(Via.)
Disco Ball bless Jane Fonda for saying “cunt” on TV.
Ah, I love moments like this. Grown adults scrambling around, getting completely offended over something that’s got no logical reason to offend you. If you’ve seen the play, you know the piece she’s talking about, and the whole point of it is to make the audience face up to the irrational fear caused by the sound of the word and realize how silly they’re being.
Something so simple and yet so hard for so many people to understand: A word’s meaning derives from its context. So many people want so badly for the sound of words to have this magical power, like there’s something inherent about the sound [kuhnt] that should give offense. Do we blanch to hear someone say “country”, even though that sound is in there? No. It’s hard for me to respect taboos about words.
Calling someone a cunt is pretty offensive, but again, that’s based on context. This was about the least offensive use of the word imaginable. I can’t help but think that the fact that irrationality so easily wins this round is just a symptom of a greater sickness of our society (maybe all societies, to be fair)—this epidemic of having rules that are inexplicable but must be followed, leading people to base their morality more on T-crossing and I-dotting rather than actually developing a philosophy that makes sense. Which then leads people to think rules are less about right and wrong than about getting caught or not. If you think about it, a lot of social problems can be traced back to this conundrum.
I recently read the observation (unfortunately, I forget where) that the paranoid sense that your world around you is decaying is usually a projection of a massive ego. Your body is decaying slowly with age, and so you assume that the world must be as well. It seems, therefore, that the cure for being a paranoid wingnut who sees decay all around him, usually in the form of eager fornication, would be to cultivate a little humility and believe that the world will go on even after you die. These thoughts came to mind after reading Rod Dreher launch into one of his more paranoid rants about how the great evil of America, our tolerance of desire, is the driving cause behind the housing bubble burst. No, I’m not kidding. (Via Crunch Con-watcher Roy Edroso.) From what I can tell, his logic pathway works like this—modernists, with their enthusiasm for the individual self and its rotting desires have created a culture of permissiveness, a culture that compelled everyone from the borrowers to the banks to Wall Street to engage in the creative economic shenanigans that created the housing bubble. All this is due to a moral rot at the center of our society. He seems to sincerely believe that there was no greed before the doors blew off and people were permitted to indulge lust. That the era of the worst excesses of capitalism, the Victorian era, was also an era of buttoned-up repression of the sort he thinks is the only salvation of humanity doesn’t enter into his equation.
Lost in his own despair about his inevitable decline and death our internally rotting culture, Dreher begins to envy poverty-stricken nations that are managed through a heavy dose of Muslim fundamentalism. Our fundamentalists are weaklings!
The solidity we enjoy now is a facade; we have been living on the capital of centuries of cultural development in the West, but we have badly overextended ourselves. The Islamic nations — yes, they’ve lived lives of relative poverty, misery and unfreedom. I wouldn’t trade places with anyone living there, and neither would you. But. But, but, but. They will endure. Robert D. Kaplan saw this for himself, traveling from chaotic western Africa to Cairo. Both places are filled with very poor people, but Cairo, it had a lot more order than anarchic west Africa. The people there managed to live more humanly because of Islam. They had order, they had unity, they had purpose. Islam gave that to them. It also extracted a tremendous cost from them in terms of personal liberty. But they survive tough times. Islam tells them right from wrong, and as Charles Curtis has eloquently written on this blog in recent days, provides them with a sense of communality that is immensely powerful, and which we in the West can scarcely imagine.
It’s intriguing, because there’s a tacit understanding in this passage that religion is the Big Lie. In theory, Dreher (who was Catholic and then switched to Orthodox) believes in Islam as much as I do which is to say not at all. But he’s drawn to it, because he believes that Islam has greater power to function as he thinks a religion should, which is to oppress the people. This is why I get so frustrated with pro-religion arguments that point to the good that religion can do. (Which aren’t limited to those who think oppression is a social good—liberals also argue for religion because of things like community and charity.) All of the benefits of religion do not make the existence of god any more true, or the tenets of the faith any more real. While there’s going to be a level of construction for any method of ordering society, I prefer ones that are more transparent about how they are constructs. Religion lies, argues that it has access to a fundamental truth that it doesn’t. At least democracy admits that it’s a construct created to maximize fairness. Dreher admires the certainty that he thinks that fundamentalist Muslims have, but I think it’s weird to admire certainty in a belief you think is false.
The post is so very, very telling, though. The language of internal rot and decay is contrasted with the concept of “surviving”—the dominant metaphor is that of aging and death. The attraction to fundamentalist religions really seems rooted in this egotistical desire to convince yourself you can escape the conclusion that’s been foregone since you were born. Fred at the Slacktivist has noticed this common thread through the Left Behind series—the Rapture is predominantly a huge fantasy about never dying. The fantasy about going to heaven after you die isn’t comforting enough. American fundamentalists had to also add this strange belief that you’re going to be transported up into heaven sci-fi style, without having to suffer the indignity of physical decay and rot that comes with death. Desire, especially sexual desire, is a reminder that we’re flesh-bound creatures, not transcendent souls, and so desire must be quashed to uphold the no-death fantasy. The obsession with procreation that Dreher has in spades is just more extension of the ego, a little fantasy of achieving eternal life through having children as if they were copies of yourself. Anti-choice politics get called “pro-life” because birth control is an admission of creaturely mortality and refusal to feed the denial beast.
Bill Hicks gets it really well in this rant he did about “pro-lifers”—listen to the whole thing. His notion of “pro-lifers” protesting funerals is just awesome.
I love religious kitsch, but this piece is truly transcendent. Via PZ—the comments in the caption contest are priceless. My favorite? “For he is the Gloryhole, and the Light.” Come up with your own!
There are two flavors of the patriarchal view of female sexuality, which I’d deem the “masculine” and the “feminine”, or at least the “controlling” and the “tragic” views. The former is the one that rises to the top in most anti-choice materials, particularly of the abstinence-only education sort, though they do try to soft-pedal it, mostly by changing the word “punishment” to “consequences” in materials meant for the non-fundie eye. If I were to describe it, I’d say the masculine philosophy of female sexuality is, “God gave women a virginity as a treat for their husbands, properly selected as their fathers, so that these husbands can get the thrill out of symbolically dominating you through blood and pain on your wedding night. If you deprive your husband and master of this right by having sex before marriage, god will punish you with STDs or unwanted pregnancy.” I call it the masculine view, because it’s the view that puts men at the center of it, and its about their rights and their domination, and it’s unforgiving to women. But a lot of women have this take on it—look at pretty much any conservative female writer or official face of an anti-choice organization (women hate women, too, so it’s not sexist! is the message there).
The feminine take is mostly a reaction to the punishing attitude of the masculine take. It’s a way to understand the injustice that is the punishing attitude towards female sexuality by displacing responsibility from the men who get a rise out of dominating women onto god and nature, and make it seem like female suffering is just a woman’s lot in life. This soft-pedaling comes mainly from women trying to make nice with the patriarchy. It kind of goes like, “Women’s lot in life is to suffer. Blame Eve, or accept that god made it so out of necessity and wishes that it could be another way. But in order to remind us daily of our submission and gratitude towards our male masters, our sexuality is about suffering. Virginity loss, pregnancy, menstruation—all pain and misery, how can you deny it? Sex itself is the tragedy of a woman’s life. You have to do it in order to fill your role and please your master, and maybe you can eventually come around to getting the joy that is the joy of a job well done.” Sex is constructed as worship, but of male power more than god, and the pain and sacrifice is part of the display of lowliness that allows you to approach the holy.
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.
It’s quickly becoming an iconic moment of adolescent female sexuality. First you’re penetrated, then it hurts terribly. You may cry. You may even faint. For a day or two afterward, you might feel kind of weird.
Losing your virginity? No, getting the HPV vaccine.
75% of me wants to write off this story about how incredibly painful the shot is (with hints of maybe you shouldn’t let your daughter get the raging slut shot) as mostly laziness. The reporter clearly went to a CDC-based conference in Georgia and saw this presentation and thought, “Both easy to write about and has a great hook, because it’s about teenage girls and Teh Sex.” But the hyperbolic language of the piece, especially the stuff about the vaccine being the most painful shot ever (more painful than having your cervix removed?) is irresponsible in an atmosphere where sexphobic, religion-addled parents are resisting getting this life-saving prevention for their daughters in the first place, and are probably looking for any excuse possible to avoid it.
Because the shot doesn’t sound significantly different than other vaccines.
A couple of links from readers to demonstrate the grasping depravity of anti-feminist thinking.
You know, I often wonder why convincing women to marry young has been such a big deal for anti-feminists, even dating back to the 80s, with the false report claiming that you’re more likely to be killed by terrorists than married in your 40s. Then I think about my own history, and consider how I had increasing amounts of personal power in each relationship as I got older, wiser, and less subject to the social standards that function mainly to oppress women. I suspect that this spine-growing tendency is not unique to me—for instance, the hoary old myth that men “peak” sexually at 18 and women at 30 or 35 has this grain of truth in it, which is that you probably do reach a peak (though I dislike the implication that it’s all downhill from there, which is definitely not true for men after 18, and I doubt it is for women after 35) of sexual self-awareness that correlates nicely with how much society allows you to feel ownership over yourself. In other words, women probably do need an extra decade just to get over the social messages telling us that we don’t have a right to own ourselves sexually, social messages men don’t get. I’m sure there’s a similar issue with spine-growing. So the pressure to marry young translates as, “Get locked into a commitment while you’re still in the phase of dating men who have a lot more power in the relationship than you do.”
The desperation to twist anything so it looks like evidence that women should give up personal power in exchange for the ring is all over this article by Bettina Arndt scolding women to marry young. (Thanks, Tim!) Turns out the supposed man shortage you hit in your 30s doesn’t have the numbers to back it up.
The latest 2006 census figures show 35 per cent of women aged 30-34 are still single, neither married nor living with a partner, and an astonishing 41 per cent of the men.
By age 35-39, it is still 31 per cent for women and 35 per cent for men.
This is the Australian census, by the way, not the American census. I suggest a rather mundane explanation for these trends, which is that a lot of couples that are married are a year or two apart in age (with the man older), and thus there’s a lot of couples where the wife is 29 and her husband 31 (or some variation of that), which accounts for a lot of the percentage difference. But regardless of the cause, the numbers tell you one very inconvenient thing: The perception that a woman in her 30s has a severely reduced dating pool is backwards. It appears that the supposed danger years are the years when women are facing a lot less competition than men in their 30s.
But Arndt isn’t going to let a mere pile of evidence that completely upends her assumptions get in the way of her scolding. No, the fact that there are more single men than women in your 30s is all the more reason to marry young to prevent the horror of childless spinsterdom.
If we look at the numbers available to women in their 30s, at first the ratios look fine, with near 500,000 more available men than women.
But significant numbers of these men are unemployed and low-income — men who are the big losers in the partnering stakes and the most likely to end up never married.
Cody’s audition shot for Playboy. I know I’m in love.
“…This is a real paradox for me: My entire life I’ve been told I wasn’t pretty enough. My entire life I was told by people that I was ugly, that I was too tall, that I was flat-chested, that I was this, that I was that. When I was a stripper I was never quite pretty enough. I was never one of the beautiful girls. I was never one of the top earners. Suddenly I achieve something in my life that is purely intellectual and purely creative, and I’m being told that it’s because I’m pretty. To me that is the weirdest, most ironic thing ever. Like all of a sudden I’m attractive when it suits people’s purposes. But in the past when I needed to be attractive I was ugly. So let’s pick. Which is it?” — Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody [Minneapolis City Pages]
Surely she’s aware of the different-kinds-of-pretty phenomenon. The kind of pretty that earns you the big bucks in the strip club would be considered garish and unappealing on someone trying to work geek hot or the hipster pretty thing. If Cody really had the stereotypical stripper/porn star look to her—fake tits, fake tan, bleached blond hair, fake fingernails—she wouldn’t be taken seriously enough to get screenwriting work, and I’m sure she’s well aware of that. Which is shallow and unfair, of course, but not exactly a secret.
That said, I’m deeply alarmed at the way that Cody is being treated like a talking dog by the entertainment press. It’s 2007; is it really that amazing that a woman can write a clever screenplay? (I’m assuming it’s clever. While I want to see “Juno”, I haven’t yet.) I have little doubt that people are in fact casting around for excuses, reasons that she has had this success other than merit. The real irony here is that we’re clearly far away from the day when a woman can rise to the top through brainless hackery, i.e. a female Michael Bay.
Update: I want to draw attention to Dan’s alternative theory that makes even more sense. If he’s right, just more evidence how homophobia fucks people up. Anyone who fakes a crime against himself is a figure to be pitied more than loathed, honestly. They’re probably suffering from some terrible problems.
I haven’t blogged this whole thing about Francisco Nava, the Princeton undergrad who faked a “hate crime” against himself for being conservative, in large part because people who fake crimes against themselves usually turn out to have reasons to do so that weren’t immediately apparent and can’t be written off as mere sympathy or attention-seeking.* But Atrios pointed out a specific angle to the story that I can’t avoid addressing.
Francisco Nava ‘09 said his falsification of threatening emails to prominent campus conservatives and subsequent assault on himself stemmed from a belief that his actions would draw attention to the pro-chastity cause, attendees at a Monday-evening meeting said early Tuesday morning. The gathering included Nava, Butler College administrators and fellow Anscombe Society members.
Oh boy, a virgin bride fetishist. A meeting for people to sit around griping about how girls these days have too much social power, sexual freedom, and sexual agency. Yeah, yeah, guys should be “chaste”, too, but if girls would just keep their knees together and remind themselves of their future husbands’ entitlements to virgins, then that would be less of an issue. And the gays! So on and so forth.
Between this post and the fact that the wingnuts are rapidly spreading a rumor that Hillary Clinton is having a lesbian affair with her aide Huma Abedin, who is incredibly beautiful, creating unconcealed jealousy from the Freepers. Which is just extremely weird, to be jealous of an event that is only happening in your mind. Do you ever wake up from a dream that your partner is cheating and find yourself glaring at him/her in anger, only to realize in less than 15 seconds that it was just a dream and that you need to step off and that everything’s just fine? Well, it’s like that, except without the rational second half. But logic isn’t going to enter into this, because they’re off like fire, because Wingnut Rule #72 has come into play: If three or more wingnut obsession buttons are pushed, reality doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of penetrating the paranoia. And this rumor is more than three buttons: powerful woman, beautiful and unattainable woman, the belief that Democrats and liberals have these jealousy-inspiring non-stop orgiastic lifestyles,* the hint of foreignness and especially Muslim foreignness, Teh Ghey. Reality doesn’t stand a chance.
Feministe is down right now, but Jill had a great comment in one of the threads, noting something like that this isn’t necessarily a nationwide expression of closet casedom in the gay sense, but more a widespread resentment of the strawliberals they’ve built up in their mind, who apparently do everything short of fucking in the streets with wild abandon. For those of us who don’t get the non-stop obsession with the 60s, I think there’s a clue in this. It’s unbelievably frustrating, for two major reasons: 1) Seriously, no one has as much crazy sex or other wild, abandoned fun as the liberals of the paranoid right wing imagination do and 2) Nothing is stopping the bitter resenters from hanging up their resentment and embracing a little freedom.
*Those who do don’t go into politics, and really, why should they?
From PZ, Michael Hanscom has received a truly awesome ad for some snake oil.
Prairie picked up the mail and started flipping through the envelopes. Handing one to me with a puzzled look on her face, she asked, “What mailing list are you on?” The envelope she handed me had a somewhat softcore porn-ish shot of a man and woman in bed, with the text “THE FIRST TRUE REVOLUTION IN MALE SEXUAL POWER IS HERE…NOW!” emblazoned across it.
“I’m really not sure,” I said and popped it open. Pulling the folded newsletter style paper out of the envelope, my eyebrows shot up, and I started to laugh at the headline that greeted me:
It gets better. The product promises to blast estrogen from a man’s body, you know, so he can return to blasting his man fluid inside a female body on a more reliable basis, restoring the natural order of things. I think about what having sex with a guy who finds this ad compelling must be like, and once again I’m impressed by the formidable patience that many American women must possess as a basic marriage survival skill.
The eternal optimist in me looks at this and hopes that it might have the effect of raising awareness of the problem of estrogen mimickers in our environment, which you can’t blame for inconstant erections as you age, but certainly aren’t good things and probably linked to rising rates of cancers in both men and women. But the realist in me knows that these ads will probably just reinforce the notion that the process of being a “real” man requires scrubbing hints of the dreaded feminine within.
My Elunium PU36 explosive space modulator beats rock!
Overheard from the other room:
Augustlet: Mama, do you want to play rock-paper-scissors?
Augustienne: Okay.
Augustlet: 1, 2, 3, draw! I win. 1, 2, 3, draw! You win. Wait, what was that?
Augustienne: That was a rock.
Augustlet: Yeah, okay, you win, I had scissors. 1, 2, 3, draw! You win. 1, 2, 3, draw! Ah, you win again. 1, 2, 3, draw! I win!
Augustienne: Wait, what is that?
Augustlet: I had lasers.
———
Also of note: It appears that Augustlet is now using the word “ginormous” entirely without irony. Thanks a bunch, Merriam-Webster!
If you haven’t been properly sickened yet this sleepy Sunday about the banality of evil, I recommend reading this extremely strange NY Times story about a woman who has a matchmaking service, except all the money she earns goes to charity, because being a “feminine” woman, she is not permitted by her husband to earn her own income. Like many people who suffer in depressing circumstances, it seems easier to her to spread the misery around rather than try to get out of her own situation, and as such, she’s taken up the mantle of streamlining attractive young women into marriages with men who can pony up the proper bride price. If everyone is married to a domineering, older rich man, then it seems more normal, less fucked up. But it’s okay, since the wife-purchasing all goes to charity.
Ms. Livermore raises money in multiple ways. About 60 male clients are designated as patrons, meaning that they usually donate up to $10,000 a year (though it can be much more or less) directly to a charity.
“She kind of sizes you up for what you can afford and extracts it from you,” said Mr. Katz, a lawyer and onetime patron.
Ms. Livermore then arranges dates for them and invites them to parties. “If they don’t like what I do for them, I will often refund their money, which a matchmaker will not do,” she said. “That’s maybe only happened two or three times.”
The story tries to make it sound equal by pointing out that while the women are not expected to pay for the service (since they’re the thing being bought not sold, of course), they are expected to do some work to get this opportunity to be peddled out to wealthy men.
If fundie dudes really imagine vaginas like this, then no wonder they’re so scared of them. That seems about ten times as painful as stubbing your toe.
These “pro-life” assholes have a page dedicated to talking people out of getting their daughters vaccinated against cancer. Better dead than de-diamonded, apparently.
For some, just another method. For others, an escape route.
Scott linked Becks at Unfogged dissenting with the pro-choice community that if middle school girls (mostly 14 and 15, by the way, not 10 or 11 like the more hysterical reactions are suggesting, though certainly I don’t think that pregnancy gets a better idea that younger the girl, and we must keep at the forefront of our minds at all times that people advocating against the birth control pill for sexually active minors are, whether they like to admit it or not, advocating a policy that means more pregnant girls, period) want the birth control pill, they should be allowed to have it.
This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion but I’m opposed to the plan for Maine schools to give young girls access to birth control pills. I’ve known too many people (myself included) who have had strong physical or psychological side-effects from being on the pill to think that’s a good idea. The latest anecdote to add to the pile is a friend who recently confessed that she changed formulations of pills when she switched insurances and the new ones made her suicidal.
