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

Month: October 2007

Just because you call something satire, doesn’t mean it is.

Kat passed along to me yet another example of a “satirist” taking a stab at “A Modest Proposal” and failing, miserably, because said “satirist” fails to understand satire. This has been rampant at college papers lately; the latest was written by a high-school boy. The twist here is that the school paper, evidently staffed by editors equally as uninformed about satire as the author, published the piece. The principal, after having read the piece, seized 500 undistributed copies and created a newspaper advisory board. As a result of this, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution decided to run the column, meaning that Justin Jones’ poor excuse for satire has now been taken up as a freedom of speech issue.

For a millennium, the world has been plagued with stupid people corrupting society and bastardizing the value of life for all of mankind.

The intellectually handicapped have been reproducing at a substantially greater rate than those with a fully functional brain.

The problem of the unintelligent reproducing is, and has been, a serious threat to society that has gone unchecked for far too long. It is the responsibility of man to solve this problem before a reverse Darwinism takes effect.

It is depressing to think (especially at the high school age) that people with a high IQ are generally stereotyped as “geeks” or “nerds” because they choose to do more intellectually stimulating activities like homework, and reading, instead of those activities preferred by their peers like power lifting, full contact football without head protection, or crushing cans on one’s head. So while the intelligent are exiled from the masses, the ignorant are cherished and embraced.

Due to the substantial amount of low IQ reproduction and relatively low amount of high IQ reproduction, the intelligent become fewer and farther between.

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What Color Are the Holes in Your Parachute?

Back in my second introduction on this site, I mentioned that my daughter was born premature at 25 weeks gestation, 735 grams (one pound, ten ounces). As you might imagine, she was extremely medically fragile, and had many complications. She had four surgeries, and stayed in two different hospitals for the first six months of her life (her fifth surgery occurred after she was already home). I am typing on a borrowed laptop for the time being, but if I had access to a scanner I would post the picture that was handed to me as I was being wheeled out of surgery, about a minute after I regained consciousness from general anaesthesia. That Polaroid (taken by the nurses) is probably far more dramatic than I can describe in words, but I will try.

My first thought, other than “yay! she’s alive” (something I knew before they told me—I could tell the way the people around my stretcher were talking to one another, before they addressed me and could tell I was conscious enough to understand conversation), my very first thought upon seeing that photo was how raw she looked. It wasn’t even her physical size that had the most impact—it was her rawness. I had never seen a preemie before, let alone a “micropreemie”. Her skin was translucent—no pigmentation yet. She did not have a fat layer. She was all raw bone and muscle. It was like looking at someone who had been skinned alive. Her legs were darkened, due to the limited blood supply they received from her being footling breech. One leg was the color of liver, the other was even darker. And then came “the speech.”

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Tuesday Travel Blogging – Mljet

I’m in Tunisia, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be skipping Tuesday Travel Blogging. Today: Mjlet, a lovely little island off the coast of Croatia. I was there in August of 2006, and unfortunately the weather wasn’t very good (it was overcast for days), so the light in the pictures isn’t great. It was beautiful nonetheless.



Monastery, originally uploaded by JillNic83.

More below the fold.

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Classic Examples of Modern Colourism

I am an avid reader of African-American gossip blogs like concrete loop and crunk & disorderly. From Crunk & Disorderly, I was shocked and disappointed when I heard this crazy story of a party promoter who handed out flyers for a party solely for light-skinned black women. The party for lightskinned girls was called “Light Skin Libra Birthday Bash” and the promoter claimed that he had ones for medium skinned black girls and dark-skinned one.

The whole bloody concept of these parties is outrageous, that much is obvious. The promoter apologised but is that really the point? It is no secret that colourism is a phenomenon that affects all members of the African diaspora but the way in which this was done is really quite disgusting.

I have heard many examples of colourism: My mum told me once that in the old days, a bride who had light skin would fetch a higher bride price than say a woman with darker skin (Ludicrous but true). In Martinique, the French Caribbean island, has a hierarchy of words to describe people who are light, dark, medium (when I was there last year, some boys complained that women only liked chabins, light-skinned black men). My boyfriend is from the West Indies too and told me that people would call him “red” or “redman” because of his skin-tone. Do these labels still matter?

In ways, I feel like the promoter of the party and many other victims of colourism did not know any better because if people cannot get over what happened in the past such as the brown paper bag tests, what actual hope is there for our futures? People like Beyonce, Diana Ross, Tina Turner have become superstars. They are undeniably talented but did them being light-skinned push them forward? I think it would be naive to deny the part shadism did play for many black entertainers.

Has anyone seen “The Human Stain” film with Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman? (Brief synopsis: Hopkins character is a black man who is passing for white/don’t read the next part if you don’t like spoilers!).There is a part in the film when the young Anthony is with his mother and talking to her. She tells him something along the lines of “your skin is as white as snow and you think like a slave”. That was in reference to him basically turning his back on his family. That line for me sums the thorny subject of colourism because ultimately it asks difficult and uncomfortable questions about identity and whether identity is based on hierarchies.

Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie have both played ‘black’ characters in films where they are white. Is this proof that colourism is stopping black actors from having a fair chance at playing roles or does colourism solely affect ethnic minority communities without any spill over?

Links

*”Passing” ~ Nella Larsen

*‘Colourism: Shattering the Illusion’

Want to live a longer life? Don’t be pregnant in America

Sarah Blustein’s got the reasons why, especially if you’re a woman of color:

Good news! if you are an ordinary mortal living in the United States, your chances of staying alive are better than ever. According to new government numbers, the rate of Americans dying in 2004 (the most recent year to be calculated) hit a record low, while life expectancy — for blacks and whites, men and women — hit a record high. Men were closing their historic life-expectancy gap with women, and African Americans were closing their life-expectancy gap with whites. Even the babies were doing well: The infant mortality rate dropped, too.

Sadly, however, if you are a pregnant mortal living in the United States today, your chances of dying appear to be greater than ever. Yes, the total number of women who die in childbirth in America is low. But according to the Centers for Disease Control’s new “National Vital Statistics Report,” the number of women dying in or around childbirth has risen — putting the United States behind some unsurprising countries, like Switzerland and Sweden, and some surprising ones, like Serbia and Macedonia, Qatar and Kuwait, in its rate of maternal mortality. In rankings calculated on 2000 numbers, the World Health Organization (WHO) ranked the United States at No. 29 on the list, even though, according to the most recent statistics, there is only one country, Tuvalu, that spends more on health care as a percentage of gross domestic product than the United States.

Be sure to read the rest.

The US healthcare system is irrevocably broken. There’s no reason at all that the maternal mortality rate should be so high in a country with world-class healthcare facilities, except for the fact that we don’t have world-class access.

I knew people in my very first job, where few people made over $30,000, and only because they’d been hired away from union papers, where pregnancy and birth care wasn’t covered because the pregnant woman’s husband had been hired after she’d become pregnant and it was considered a pre-existing condition. And that was in 1990; it’s much worse since then.

Even I don’t have health insurance ATM, and I make somewhat more than the Frosts, with no kids. But I have student loans, and a mortgage, and unless you work for the kind of law firm that I turned my back on long ago, you’re not going to make a hell of a lot. I also have no dependents to consider taking a gamble on; the only person’s health I’m taking a chance on is my own. But I’ve priced health insurance in the private market, and thanked my lucky stars that I qualify for a couple of different group plans. If I could spare the cash. And I’m only getting it for myself.

Via Bean, who’s got some more information on a ruling which struck down an injunction against getting pregnant again as a condition for a homeless couple to regain custody of their children.

Those gossipy female prison guards

Give me a moment to pick my jaw up off the floor.

Okay, ready now. The State of New York’s Department of Correctional Services has, as the result of a lawsuit, stopped distributing a handbook to its female employees that made it very, very clear that the powers that be weren’t very happy about women working their turf:

The state Department of Correctional Services is no longer distributing or using a handbook that told its female officers to not gossip at work, be too bossy at home or swear to “be one of the boys.”

That handbook, which had been given to officers who graduated from the training academy for more than 20 years, was featured recently in an article in The Post-Standard.

Women were encouraged to play tennis or eat ice cream on their days off to relieve stress and to not dress for work as if they were going to a nightclub or beach.

Department officials had been reviewing policies, as well as the handbook, in recent months. In light of publicity about the handbook, “Whatever speed it was being done at before is being sped up,” said Erik Kriss, public information director for the department.

“We decided to update or possibly discontinue it, but in the meantime decided the best thing to do is not use it for the moment,” Kriss said of the handbook.

No such handbook exists for male officers, who outnumber female officers by about 10 to 1.

The book had sections on catcalls and wolf whistles, discouraged women from being flirtatious on the job and encouraged them to seek out other women’s advice in child-rearing.

The best thing to do is not to use it “for the moment”?

How about, it was a stupid thing to distribute in the first place!

The department claims that it received only one complaint about the handbook, and that only recently (a claim disputed by the plaintiff in a sex-discrimination suit, who submitted the handbook as evidence of disparate treatment). Corrections departments are not the most forward-thinking of places, but you’d think that someone, somehow, in 20 years, might have cottoned to the idea that telling your female employees — and only your female employees — that they’re untrustworthy, gossipy airheads who can’t be trusted to put on a standard uniform and need to be told to eat ice cream and ask other women for child-rearing advice just might be a wee bit sexist.

Via.

Oy.

I have to agree with Thers; this has to be the dumbest thing I’ve read in a while.

AS THE “first pet” of the Clinton era, Socks, the White House cat, allowed “chilly” Hillary Clinton to show a caring, maternal side as well as bringing joy to her daughter Chelsea. So where is Socks today?

Once the presidency was over, there was no room for Socks any more. After years of loyal service at the White House, the black and white cat was dumped on Betty Currie, Bill Clinton’s personal secretary, who also had an embarrassing clean-up role in the saga of his relationship with the intern Monica Lewinsky.

Some believe the abandoned pet could now come between Hillary Clinton and her ambition to return to the White House as America’s first woman president. …

Clinton’s treatment of Socks cuts to the heart of the questions about her candidacy. Is she too cold and calculating to win the presidency? Or does it signify political invincibility by showing she is willing to deploy every weapon to get what she wants?

Such a perfect example of a hit piece, really. First, there’s the implication that Hillary Clinton is an ice queen, and that it was the cat, not Chelsea, who brought out her “caring, maternal” side. Then, there’s the equation of giving the cat to Betty Currie with dumping or abandonment. Does Betty Currie live in a box by the side of a busy highway? I think not. Was Socks left in a box by the side of a busy highway? No. But the cat had been Chelsea’s, Chelsea was at college, and Bill was allergic. Currie undoubtedly spent a lot of time with Socks in the White House, seeing as how she worked there and all, and maybe she had bonded.

Then, there’s the whole “some say” bit, making sure to get in a swipe at Hillary’s “ambition,” her coldness and calculatingness. As if no one else running for President is ambitious, cold or calculating.

“Some say.” But who says?

“In the annals of human evil, off-loading a pet is nowhere near the top of the list,” writes Caitlin Flanagan in the current issue of The Atlantic magazine. “But neither is it dead last, and it is especially galling when said pet has been deployed for years as an all-purpose character reference.”

Flanagan’s article, headed No Girlfriend of Mine, points out that Clinton wrote a crowd-pleas-ing book Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids’ Letters to the First Pets, in which she claimed that only with the arrival of Socks and his “toy mouse” did the White House “become a home”.

I thought I smelled sulfur.

To be honest, I don’t remember much about Hillary interacting with Socks during the 8 years the Clintons spent in the White House, other than than this one book. I hardly think that qualifies as deploying him for years as a character reference.

Now, I don’t subscribe to the Atlantic, so I can’t read Flanagan’s article, but something tells me that the hits just keep coming. And I really have to wonder if Flanagan has anything to say about where this falls in the annals of human evil:

The reporter intended the anecdote that opened part four of the Boston Globe’s profile of Mitt Romney to illustrate, as the story said, “emotion-free crisis management”: Father deals with minor — but gross — incident during a 1983 family vacation, and saves the day. But the details of the event are more than unseemly — they may, in fact, be illegal.

The incident: dog excrement found on the roof and windows of the Romney station wagon. How it got there: Romney strapped a dog carrier — with the family dog Seamus, an Irish Setter, in it — to the roof of the family station wagon for a twelve hour drive from Boston to Ontario, which the family apparently completed, despite Seamus’s rather visceral protest.

Potluck

Kat emailed me with a request to poll the readership: What’s your favorite dish to bring to an office potluck?

Singing with the Enemy?

Singing with the Enemy is the title of a genius programme on British TV at the moment. It is a reality show where two constrasting music bands are put together to make a song that comprises of both their music styles. Yesterday, it was a Gun N Roses inspired all male rock group called Lethal Fixx with a thrash metal all female group called Severed Heaven.

The twist was Severed Heaven believed strongly in feminist values while Lethal Fixx did not have great things to say about women in rock and just genuinely were all about shagging women. One band member even said that women don’t make good rock music. My question is, are women ever going to be given a fair chance in the music arena? Why is always seen as traditionally male dominated? Granted, there are many styles of music out there but as a hip-hop lover, I am never surprised to hear of women struggling to make it as rappers because hip hop is over-flowing with men. Yesterday’s show was interesting because I did not know that such differences were that big in rock. Of course, they are just one example but it was still unnerving how Lethal Fixx were so oblivious to how they used women as objects (their logo was a line drawing of a the nether region of a woman’s parts *ahem*).

Will women always have the ”groupie” tag stuck on them while trying to break into mainstream music? The rumours of people saying Notorious B.I.G writing Lil Kim’s raps when they were together really pissed me off because it was like people were insinuating that because she was a woman that she could not write rhymes. Maybe women will always be the outsiders looking in unless they are in the video as the models?