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

Hello Kitty punishes Thai police officers

The Thai police force has developed a new way to keep its officers in line: Make them wear pink Hello Kitty armbands if they screw up. Why? Because Hello Kitty is for girls, and so making grown men wear it is horrendously emasculating and humiliating.

It is the pink armband of shame for wayward police officers, as cute as can be with a Hello Kitty face and a pair of linked hearts.

No matter how many ribbons for valor a Thai officer may wear, if he parks in the wrong place, or shows up late for work, or is seen dropping a bit of litter on the sidewalk, he can be ordered to wear the insignia.

“Simple warnings no longer work,” said Pongpat Chayaphan, acting chief of the Crime Suppression Division in Bangkok, who instituted the new humiliation this week.

“This new twist is expected to make them feel guilt and shame and prevent them from repeating the offense, no matter how minor,” he said. “Kitty is a cute icon for young girls. It’s not something macho police officers want covering their biceps.”

Lovely.

What a charmer!

So:

http://f-words.blogspot.com/2007/08/biggest-mystery-of-all-how-does-he-not.html

What is this negging bullshit? I’m curious: have any of you ever been subjected to negging? Was the man who negged you wearing a giant merkin on his head? Dish!

Greatest Hits Project

As I mentioned earlier, this week is going to be extremely busy, and I’m not going to have much time to blog. I will put up the YearlyKos reflections that I promised, and I should be able to get up one new post every day. Our lovely guest bloggers will also be posting all week. But to keep content coming, I’m going to continue the Greatest Hits project, where I’ll re-post some of my favorite pieces from the past 2 1/2 years. I might even go further back to my first blog if I’m feeling adventurous. I’ll post one or two every day. Enjoy!

“This way of thinking reflects ancient notions about women’s place… under the Constitution — ideas that have long since been discredited.”

A guest post by Scott Lemiuex. Cross-posted at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

Kathryn Jean Lopez essays the “my unprincipled positions on abortion are defensible because women are passive victims who cannot be held morally responsible for their actions” routine. I’ve recently explained why no “pro-life” position that punishes doctors but not women can be defensible, and see Jill Filipovic as well. But let’s look at some of her other contributions. First, we get the “overturning Roe is no big deal” evasion:

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Welcome, Whoopi! Now STFU.

As any of you who care (and many of you who don’t) know, Whoopi Goldberg has been named as Rosie O’Donnell’s successor on The View. As Rosie proved with her big, political mouth: this is not just “Entertainment News.” For more Americans than we’d care to imagine, The View is the closest approximation to a frank political conversation that they’re going to encounter on a daily basis.

Which is why Whoopi’s performance on her first day on the job pains me considerably. Check out this clip.

I’m sorry, was that just Whoopi Goldberg? The one who refused to apologize for ripping Dubya a new one, even though it cost her a multimilliondollar contract? Promising Babs Walters and her two other white co-hosts (and “The Powers That Be”!) that she’ll behave herself lest she offend anyone?Think I’m reading too much into that clip? Check out these choice quotes she later gave Ryan Seacrest in a radio interview:

“I disagree with a lot of stuff a lot of people say, but there is a dialogue to have with people that I was taught by my mom – how to be respectful and listen.”

“I have a different approach. I stir the pot just by my presence.”

“It’s not so much that I am nice. but I have a great life and I have no reason to be angry at anybody.”

Sooooo… Rosie (and the rest of us) are angry because our personal, individual lives suck, and not because we’re living in a murderous proto-fascist state propped up by multiple, interlocking systems of oppression?

At least one of three things is happening here:

  1. It’s getting harder and harder to find work in the entertainment biz for an aging, “overweight,” somewhat butch, loudmouth Black woman, and Whoopi’s gotten desperate enough to make a deal with the devil, in this case otherwise known as ABC.
  2. Whoopi was never as political as I gave her credit for, she just goes where she thinks the audience wants her to be.
  3. That’s not Whoopi Goldberg. That’s an alien disguised as Whoopi Goldberg. The real Whoopi Goldberg has been taken to the alien’s home planet for study.

My money’s on #1, and it’s making me sick to my stomach. Didn’t The View’s ratings go way up when Rosie was on? I’m no Rosie apologist, but I don’t think they went up because folks wanted to see if she would make any more racist “jokes.” They went up because she was actually voicing a progressive dissenting opinion on issues that matter. When silencing those opinions becomes more important than the Almighty Ratings, we should all be very afraid.

(h/t RaceWire)

Straw Poll

In the comments thread to my last post, a bunch of people started sharing their transition stories, good and bad. I thought I’d promote the topic to a post of its own.

What was your transition process, if you don’t mind sharing? Were there any especially positive or negative aspects of it? Was there any individual circumstance that smoothed the way or created near-insurmountable difficulties?

What would your ideal process look like? Are there any general policies you feel would work better than the status quo?

(As always, non-trans people are perfectly welcome to read and comment, but please be mindful of the sensitivity of the subject matter.)

Greatest Hits: Why I’m Pro-Choice

We’re getting a bit more traffic in the post-YearlyKos blog-frenzy, so now is probably a good time to put up some decent posts. Unfortunately, I’m totally crazed right now — finishing my last week of work, moving, and then leaving for Hamburg/Italy/Hamburg again in less than a week. Plus I’m spending about nine hours a day on the phone with our server company trying to keep Feministe up and running. Which means that my ability to write decent posts is close to nil. I’m also 3 glasses into a bottle of Pinot Noir (it’s my one night to relax, ok?) and we all know that Posting Under the Influence is a poor choice. Luckily, another project I’m working on has me browsing our archives, and I’m thinking that this week might be a good time to re-play our Greatest Hits. We’ll begin with a post that I feel very good about from January, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade: Why I’m Pro-Choice.

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Technical Difficulties.

Sorry for the outages. Our server sucks. I think I fixed the problem, but we’ll see — if we go down again in 24 hours, it means that I failed. Part of fixing the problem involved deleting the Recent Comments application, which sucks because I know it’s useful. But we’re moving to a new server soon, and as soon as we do, I’ll re-activate it. In the meantime, thanks for your patience.

Project Guest Blogger, Week Eleven

Muchas gracias to Evil Fizz, Salty Femme and A.H.M.K. for their awesome blogging this week — and especially for keeping the blog going while I was away and not posting very often. You all did a terrific job.

This week we welcome Jaclyn and Little Light:

Jaclyn Friedman is a lying, man-hating whore, and you can buy the tshirts to prove it. She’s also a writer, poet and performer who earns her keep as the Program Director of the Center for New Words, where she is one of the lead organizers of the WAM! (Women, Action & the Media) Conference. She’ll blog about whatever she damn well pleases, which usually includes gender politics, pop culture, sex, media, reproductive justice, and overthrowing the goddamned patriarchy. Her favorite lipstick color is Wicked.

Little Light is practically drowning in adjectives, but suffice it to say that she is a queer brown trans woman with a kind of a mad-on for the study of religion, who comes from a reasonably long line of sailors, guerrilla leaders, and semiprofessional occultists. Between blogging, canoodling, and kvetching, she moonlights fighting crime and volunteers as a street medic, which is often not as exciting as it sounds. Her home blog, Taking Steps, is largely focused on postcolonialist feminism, queer issues, race issues, intersectional anti-oppression activism, the Religious Left, and current events, with a heavy frosting of the personal stuff to distinguish it from all the other blogs written by middle-class transgendered Filipina-Jewish postcolonial-feminist witch-doctors who own their own utility belts and like to get preachy. She has a tragic addiction to those little spicy rice-cracker things, and may or may not be a comic book someday.

If they can write bios like that, I think it should be a very good week.