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

Month: January 2005

Draft?: Uncle Sam Wants You

Conspiracy theories be damned.

From Rolling Stone:

Richard Flahavan, spokesman for Selective Service, tells Rolling Stone that preparing for a skills-based draft is “in fact what we have been doing.” For starters, the agency has updated a plan to draft nurses and doctors. But that’s not all. “Our thinking was that if we could run a health-care draft in the future,” Flahavan says, “then with some very slight tinkering we could change that skill to plumbers or linguists or electrical engineers or whatever the military was short.” In other words, if Uncle Sam decides he needs people with your skills, Selective Service has the means to draft you — and quick.

Unless Selective Service is desperate for a website clad in pin-ups designed by a young, belligerent, anti-war feminist, I think I’m safe.

Not necessarily: “experts on military manpower say the focus on drafting personnel with special skills misses the larger point. The Army needs more soldiers, not just more doctors and linguists. ‘What you’ve got now is a real shortage of grunts — guys who can actually carry bayonets,’ says McPeak. A wholesale draft may be necessary, he adds, ‘to deal with the situation we’ve got ourselves into. We’ve got to have a bigger Army.'”

Theorists expand further on the notion of a draft:

The politics of the draft are radioactive: Polls show that less than twenty percent of Americans favor forced military service. But conscription has some unlikely champions, including veterans and critics of the administration who are opposed to Bush’s war in Iraq. Reinstating the draft, they say, would force every level of society to participate in military service, rather than placing a disproportionate burden on minorities and the working class. African-Americans, who make up roughly thirteen percent of the civilian population, account for twenty-two percent of the armed forces. And the Defense Department acknowledges that recruits are drawn “primarily from families in the middle and lower-middle socioeconomic strata.”

A societywide draft would also make it more difficult for politicians to commit troops to battle without popular approval… Charlie Moskos, a professor of military sociology at Northwestern University, says the volunteer system also limits the political fallout of unpopular wars. “Without a draft, there’s really no antiwar movement,” Moskos says. Nearly sixty percent of Americans believe the war in Iraq was a mistake, he notes, but they have no immediate self-interest in taking to the streets because “we’re willing to pay people to die for us. It doesn’t reflect very well on the character of our society.”

Experts acknowledge that in a contemporary draft all adults within the selected age range would be required to register, men and women, college students and working people, parents and singletons alike.

More at Daily Kos.

via Unscrewing the Inscrutable

Letter to the Editor Update

My letter to the editor was printed today. Of course they would take the most provocative (remember it’s Indiana) line in the letter and use it as the title: “Isn’t a queer dollar just as green?”

And Linnaeus, you will be pleased to know that they edited out that pesky apostrophe (Word, Mac).

I hate that, as one commenter said, the rhetoric of equality, rights and freedom do not resonate with many of my neighbors. Sometimes Lorde’s master’s tools/master’s house must be inverted. Whether or not the appeal to the most conservative free market Republicans among us is successful can be debated, but it is obvious that words like “liberty” and “love” mean little to this kind of people when the subject regards those that upset their delicate sensibilities. I am also sure that should someone of that vein come by and read this, that same charge will be reversed.

I, for one, am tired of seeing my gay and lesbian friends have their plans and dreams disrupted by a vocal set of neighbors and lawmakers. The disappointment grows deeper.

Knowing the community I live in, and considering the flood of other liberal letters printed today, I expect a response in the next week. Ten bucks on someone writing in objection to the use of “queer.”

Revisiting the Porn Debate

Chyng Sun attends the annual Las Vegas Adult Entertainment Expo for AlterNet:

Pornography encourages people to disregard others’ pain for one’s own pleasure. Many people I interviewed acknowledged that, based on their own experience and knowledge of the human body, certain sex acts they’ve watched in films likely would have been painful for the female performers. However, they argued that since the performers were paid, it was not the viewers’ concern, and they acknowledged that they get aroused watching it. That mentality helps create a world in which a producer can brag about having originated a popular video series that shows women gagging during forceful oral sex.

Although pornography is often rationalized as a celebration of women’s sexuality and liberation, some gonzo pornographers were direct about their anger and contempt (or their imagined customers’) for women. When asked why he used certain brutal sex acts in his films, one producer replied that when a man gets angry at his wife, he can imagine she is the one being violated.

Pornography has been primarily made by men and used by men. Men watch these videos for their own sexual stimulation. Men also told me that they tried acts they learned from pornography with – or on – their sexual partners. However, as pornography becomes increasingly mainstream, it is not surprising that women’s use of pornography is rising. Pornographers are eager to explore the female market, with some claiming to make women-centered pornography. However, looking at the repetitive content, whether male-centered or female-centered, the essential message is the same: All women want sex all the time, in whatever fashion men want them.

There isn’t much differentiating this article from previous criticisms of the porn indistry except for a couple of points. The first is that “Alberto Gonzales told senators he intended to make obscenity prosecutions a focus of his tenure as the nation’s chief prosecutor,” perhaps opening the doors for another round of the porn wars, a la former Attorney General Edwin Meese III.

The second is this, an observation that is largely missing from previous debates that I have read and participated in:

We should be afraid of government forces interested in repressing sexual expression. But we also should be afraid of the influence of misogynist pornography. These two fears are not mutually exclusive and can co-exist. Our fear of the former shouldn’t stop us from critiquing the latter.

I personally don’t want to revive the porn debate unless it is to ask why this is more socially acceptable than this. Most Americans would be disturbed, if not made indignant, by the most obvious of answers.

Friday Random Ten – Now Completely Devoid of Irony!

Roxanne abandoned ship after the big boys picked up this meme1 and notably, coveniently forgot to credit where they got it from. Very naughty.

And so, the FRT ship has been pirated!2

If it’s midnight somewhere, let the games begin: Fire up your IPOD, MP3 or other digital media player, set to random play, list the first ten songs.

• Melt Banana – Wedge 3
• David Bowie – Space Oddity 4
• Cecile – Hot Like We 5
• Wanda Jackson – Funnel of Love 6
• Elliott Smith – Ballad of Big Nothing 7
• Jurassic 5 – Sum of Us 8
• Richard Cheese – Enter Sandman 9
• The Isley Brothers – It’s Your Thing 10
• Wesley Willis – Rock n’ Roll McDonald’s 11
• 7 Seconds – 99 Red Balloons 12

_________
1 Thus, the Friday Random Ten is no longer cool.
2 To prove how uncool we are, I just made a pirate reference. Pirates are so 2004.

A Quick Guide to Coolness, recommended for Egosystem Top 100 readers:
3 Prove how discriminating your taste is by being completely indiscriminatory!
4 Include some roots rock to show how much of a music lover you are!
5 Get international so your readers can see how inclusive you are. Excellent.
6 List something campy and obscure!
7 You’re sensitive. Let them know.
8 Let them know you like hip hop because you’re so urban and hip.
9 Be sure to display your sense of humor,
10 and how good you are with the ladies.
11 All the cool kids listen to Wesley Willis, so you do too!
12 And finally, a cover song, because you can never go wrong with punk bands covering new wave.

Pablo Gets In My Drawers

Since I rearranged the den, Pablo has also taken to the window seat.


He even moved the plant and candles out of the way so he could fit on the table.

Layout

I quickly resurrected an old masthead and footer for this layout while going through files for a web project I was supposed to have finished for Krista forever ago.

Don’t know if I like it yet, but it will do.

The Dingo Ate My Baby

Nope, not thinking up a title.

The Ten Worst Corporations of 2004: Unfortunately the “no-repeat rule forbids otherwise-deserving companies – like Bayer, Boeing, Clear Channel and Halliburton” keep them off this year’s list, where they belong.

Arianna Huffington offers the Political Oscars of 2005. I have only seen one single, solitary movie nominated for the Oscars, so I’m not much in a caring mood. However,

Creative Writing:
Best: Charlie Kaufman for his mind-bending screenplay, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Worst: Alberto Gonzales for his morality-bending memo calling the Geneva Conventions “quaint” (a.k.a., “Eternal Torment of the Enemy Mind”).

was good enough for me.

There is one more explanation for why I might be feeling ill. After last night I’m fairly sure I have bronchitis, and Ethan woke up with morning with a vomiting flu. Yet it doesn’t explain the fall I took last night that left a massive bruise on my left knee. I’m tired of everyone telling me I look and sound like shit, should get more sleep, or take it easy. There are things that have to be done around here that either no one else can do or should do, or things that simply have to be done on my own, like school work, going to classes, and the new job.

Someone actually suggested to me that I get a hobby. Holy shit, Batman! I have hobbies! What do you call knitting, blogging, and running? These keep me sane!

If anyone wants to spring for a live-in maid (with whom I can live in peace without that pesky power-based relationship), perhaps a cook that also grocery shops, eyeglasses, or a long vacation (that preferably isn’t in a mental health institution), then we can talk about all the rest I should be getting.

More on all this later if anything comes from the doctor’s visit I’m supposed to be making this afternoon.

Letter to the Editor, And Other Things

I fired off a letter to the editor this evening after stewing over this information.

I read with disappointment that the amendment to the Indiana Constitution against gay marriage was again coming to the forefront of state politics. I was even more disappointed to find that the state legislature was considering two related bills, one that bans gays and lesbians from adopting or fostering children and one that revokes partner benefits from the state’s universities.

Of all the time, money, and energy that could be spent at the state level, why is homosexuality, of all things, the trendy political target?

Indiana is taking great strides to move backwards, and in the meantime wonders why the Brain Drain of our young, successful college graduates is so high and our national reputation is so dismal. Hoosiers will do well to remember that gays and lesbians are among our finest assets and that a queer dollar is still green.

A legitimate government is one that represents all it’s people, not a select few.

It was hastily written but it pithy enough to make a point, I think. And yes, I used some of your words. Y’all are good.

I haven’t been feeling well lately. My poor sleeping abilities are catching up with me, especially with this new evil schedule, and my eyes feel constantly strained. It’s time for glasses but I can’t afford the initial cost all at once. If I spend too much time in front of a computer screen, read a book, or knit with finer gauged yarn, the dizziness, nausea, and headaches set in. To top it off, I have yet to fully shed the cold that killed me last week. Thus, keeping up the blog has become a chore — quick cut and paste jobs done in short spurts to avoid feeling sick. I’m trying to finish knitting a sock, but had to put it down tonight and lay around in the dark. And further, reading for my classes is getting close to unbearable.

My sub-para job was easy but draining. I was reminded today that I am mother to the best five-year-old I have ever known. Not like that’s biased or anything.

Damn

That’s it. I’m not taking any more quizzes.