In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: Media & Media Literacy

Chris Matthews and the Chorus of Eunuchs*

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But where are her castration sheers?

It’s no secret that Chris Matthews is a semi-professional misogynist, but Hillary Clinton’s run for president has brought his castration anxiety out in full force.

Using overtly sexist language, he has referred to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) as a “she devil” and compared her to a “strip-teaser.” He has called her “witchy” and likened her voice to “fingernails on a blackboard.” He has referred to men who support her as “castratos in the eunuch chorus.” He has suggested Clinton is not “a convincing mom” and said “modern women” like Clinton are unacceptable to “Midwest guys.” He has called her “Madame Defarge” and “Nurse Ratched.”

Rebecca Traister says everything I would want to.

So why does Matthews hate Clinton so much? Well, because she’s an uppity bitch who thinks she’s better than him:

“I think a lot of people pick a president they figure would sort of like them if they knew them. And if you are overweight or have a problem with your diet — and I certainly did for years — you may figure Hillary doesn’t like people like me. She’s looking down on me. What do you think? Howie, she’s looking down on me, that woman. She thinks she’s better than me.”

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*My title suggestion for the next JK Rowling novel.

Clinton takes New Hampshire; MoDo gets out the knife

Clinton won the New Hampshire primary yesterday, proving that rumors of her demise were greatly exaggerated. Which is encouraging, if only from the perspective of someone who lives in a state with a late primary: the whole damn thing doesn’t have to be over after one small state votes, or even two. Some of the rest of us might like a shot at actually having a say in who runs. ‘Cause FSM knows it’s not like my New York vote in the general election is going to sway anything.

Jeff Fecke looked at the support Clinton got from women in New Hampshire, which was substantially more than she got in Iowa, and concluded that the overt misogyny that appeared this week (yes, I’m looking at you, John Edwards), what with the “crying” clusterfuck and some of the nastiness in the debate, may have motivated female voters to say, “Oh, HELL no,” and turn out for her. I’m inclined to agree.

In any event, turnout was huge, aided no doubt by unseasonably warm weather and the importance of the 2008 election in determining the direction of the country. And in New Hampshire, you can register at the polls, so there’s no obstacle to casting your vote if you suddenly got interested (or finally felt you had a stake) in the outcome.

And then we have MoDo, who’s still flogging the “manipulative tears” angle:

As Spencer Tracy said to Katharine Hepburn in “Adam’s Rib,” “Here we go again, the old juice. Guaranteed heart melter. A few female tears, stronger than any acid.”

Shut up, MoDo.

Damn Funny Women! (part 2)

I’m splitting my last post up into two sections, because it was too long, and the second half isn’t about the BBC’s horrible “science reporting” anyway. It’s about the related subject of whether women are allowed to be funny.

So what is up with humor being characterized as inherently “aggressive?” Everyone seems to take this for granted, and it’s part of why the “women just aren’t funny” trope gets rehashed over and over again. (Because you know, women just aren’t aggressive either, right?) From the recent slamming of Katharine Heigl for pointing out that Knocked Up unfairly cast its women as humorless non-jokers all the way back to Christopher Hitchens’ infamous essay in in Vanity Fair about why women aren’t funny unless they’re “hefty or dykey or Jewish,” it hasn’t been a good year for women in comedy. Or at least, the idea of women in comedy. Although they’re in a minority, there are plenty of extremely funny female comedians out there doing just fine and proving all this shit wrong.

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The BBC says: humour “comes from testosterone.”
Holly says: bad reporting “comes from the BBC.”

If you’ve kept track of the scant number of posts I’ve contributed to Feministe over the past half-year, you may have realized that I get very irritated when I come across blatantly misleading “science” reporting. (I guess it must come from being raised by scientists, then working in the media.) So my eyeballs bulged and turned a hilarious shade of pink when I came across this lead for a “Health” story on the BBC News site courtesty of Feministing:

Humour ‘comes from testosterone’
Men are naturally more comedic than women because of the male hormone testosterone, an expert claims.

Men make more gags than women and their jokes tend to be more aggressive, Professor Sam Shuster, of Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, says.

The unicycling doctor observed how the genders reacted to his “amusing” hobby.

Women tended to make encouraging, praising comments, while men jeered. The most aggressive were young men, he told the British Medical Journal.

Previous findings have suggested women and men differ in how they use and appreciate humour.

Women tend to tell fewer jokes than men and male comedians outnumber female ones.

What we really need to do is find out the gender of whoever research and wrote this story for the BBC, because few things are funnier than someone who’s supposed to be a journalist, working for the largest broadcasting company in the world, making a complete ass out of themselves. Not to mention spreading the story to all sorts of other news services that seem to be taking the story seriously.

So, the first thing I always do with these science stories is find the original study: Sex, aggression, and humour: responses to unicycling. It turns out that Sam Shuster is a retired professor of dermatology. (Note to BBC researchers: this means he studied skin, not hormones or psychology.) Shuster wrote about reactions to his unicycle for the traditional end-of-year issue of the British Medical Journal. This season, the BMJ also features densely written scientific papers on which brand chocolate bar doctors ought to use to demonstrate bone fractures and whether magical powers are heritable, based on an analysis of Harry Potter novels. In short, it’s clearly a joke. I would blame the notoriously dry wits of the British for the confusion, but it seems all too likely that the BBC reporter is… also British, albeit maybe not a doctor with enough time on hand to write witty, self-referential papers about the statistical mistreatment of orthopedic surgeons in medical journals.

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The other side of the Missing White Woman

Perhaps many Feministe readers have been following this story, but if you haven’t, Seattle has been abuzz with the story of Amanda Knox, a University of Washington student studying abroad in Perugia, Italy. Knox is being held on suspicion of involvement in the murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher. In addition, two men, one of whom was Knox’s boyfriend at the time, are being held in connection with the murder.

I won’t delve too deeply into the details of the case, but Knox has certainly not helped herself with the conflicting statements she’s given to the Italian police, particularly concerning her whereabouts on the night of the murder. Despite this, Knox still maintains her innocence, so we will have to wait and see how justice plays out.

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Why strip? Because it’s good for your blog!

OK, I will probably go see Juno and I’ll probably like it. The title character is apparently one of the smartest, funniest, pluckiest female protagonists in a while: a 16-year-old who’s dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, initially goes to have an abortion, then ends up deciding to carry the pregnancy to term, with a nice couple she finds as adoptive parents. (More about that aspect of it later.) It’s been described as a whip-smart, witty indie comedy, like Little Miss Sunshine but less disturbing, like Knocked Up could have been if it weren’t so intensely dude-focused without much insight into the female characters.

The fact that Juno has a strong, nuanced female lead shouldn’t be entirely surprising, because the film was written by a womna: Diablo Cody, an up-and-coming screenwriter who’s been getting a fair amount of attention in the reviews. I feel like I ought to be excited by this. There aren’t enough women writing screenplays that get made into films, and writers don’t get enough attention as it is. Is it awful that I find Diablo Cody deeply, deeply irritating? At least in this interview?

It’s not every day that you sit down with a fiery femme filmmaker who’s got a tattoo of a pinup girl on her right shoulder, but that’s just what young Juno bad girl screenwriter brought to the interview table today.

With a crown of choppy black goth hair as the ultimate anti-‘do, and a surgical glove on her right hand that she wore for no particular reason except to snap it on her wrist every now and then for emphasis of some wacky idea or another, Diablo talked about, among other eye openers, Catholic guilt, not giving a lap dance to Steven Spielberg, her former strangely liberating gig as the worst stripper and phone sex worker, and how cyberspace made her do it, don’t ask.

Why did you get into stripping?

DIABLO CODY: Blogging led me to stripping. I was at a point where I didn’t have much to say on my blog. So I stripped for one night, and it was supposed to be a fun thing to do. But I wrote about it, and people responded right away. It got me to thinking, this could be good for the blog.

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Boy do I know that feeling

You’re telling me.

Courtney hits it on the head — there is, as she says, a feeling of being “monstrously ineffective” in the face of depressing news bit after depressing news bit. I’ve been holed up in the library this week, and while it’s only Tuesday, my email box is already full of stories to blog about — stories about gang rapes, de-funded women’s shelters, “at least 40 women murdered mutilated and dumped,” “honor killings of women in Iraq,” “Sri Lankan domestic workers [facing] abuse,” “women as weapons of war,” and on and on. They all deserve their own posts (and after Thursday, I will post on them). But there are days (and today is one of them) where I just feel overwhelmed and useless, and I kind of envy the people who just don’t care at all.

The easy answer, of course, is to say “Quit thinking about yourself; it’s a privilege to feel bad as opposed to actually having it bad.” And that’s true and that’s fair, but I still relate to what Courtney is saying, and I do understand the frustration of feeling very tiny and very powerless and at the same time recognizing one’s status as a person of incredible privilege and relative power. And not knowing what to do with that.

I do get particularly depressed as a feminist blogger.

I also get particularly inspired. Because as much as the feminist blogosphere gives us ugliness, it also gives us beauty and knowledge and humor and inspiration and hope.

And so I feel particularly lucky.

Even if it is That Week, and so I’m well-familiar with this feeling too. (Really, who in their right mind thinks that taking a class called International Mergers and Acquisitions is anything approaching a good idea?)

And it’s Helen for the win

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I love this woman. Love.

Do watch the video. I’m not sure what my favorite part is, but I do enjoy it when Dana Perino berates Helen Thomas for having the audacity to use her front-row seat in the briefing room to actually ask tough questions — especially since Perino follows it up with the statement that “to suggest that we, at the United States, are killing innocent people is just absurd and very offensive.”

I understand how suggesting that you’ve killed tens of thousands of people may be offensive and, in most cases, absurd. However, one thing I find more offensive than the suggestion that you’ve killed tens of thousands of people is actually killing tens of thousands of people. So perhaps Perino should can the indignation.

Whether you’re pro- or anti-war, it’s pretty difficult to argue with a straight face that we “at the United States” are not killing innocent people in Iraq. Perino even says so herself (sort of) when she laments, “To the extent that any innocent Iraqis have been killed, we have expressed regret for it.”

For now I’ll put aside the fact that that sentence makes little to no sense (“to the extend that any innocent Iraqis have been killed?” The fuck?) and simply emphasize that Dana Perino is both a bloody moron and an outstanding representation of the brain power in the White House. And Helen Thomas is my hero:

Helen Thomas: Do you know how many [Iraqi civilians] we have [killed] since the start of this war?

Dana Perino: How many… We are going after the enemy, Helen. To the extent that any innocent Iraqis have been killed, we have expressed regret for it.

Helen Thomas: Oh, regret. It doesn’t bring back a life.