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

Month: February 2010

Do you live in the United States? Here are some stats that will make you want to move

via Daily Kos, here are some interesting stats from a survey of Republicans in the U.S.:*

1. 39% think Obama should be impeached (for what, exactly, is unclear).

2. Only 42% believe Obama was born in the United States. 36% believe he was not born in the U.S., and 22 percent are unsure.

3. 63% believe Obama is a Socialist. 22% are unsure.

4. About a quarter believe that Obama wants the terrorists to win. 33% are unsure of whether or not he wants a terrorist victory.

5. 55% believe that Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president than Barack Obama. 33% are unsure. Only 14% believe that Palin is not more qualified than Obama. The survey did not ask participants if they understand the definition of “qualified.”

6. 2/3rds of Republicans either believe that Obama is a racist who hates white people, or aren’t sure if Obama is a racist who hates white people.

7. A third of Southern Republicans would like their state to secede from the Union. Which, hey, is better than conservative Southerners 150 years ago, so here’s to progress.

8. Only 7 percent of Republicans believe that Congress should make it easier for for workers to form or join labor unions. Nearly 70% do not believe that Congress should make it easier.

9. If illegal immigrants agreed to pay a fine and learn English, 25% of Republicans think it would be ok to let them stay in the United States.

10. More than half of Republicans do not believe that openly gay men and women should be allowed to serve in the military.

11. Only 7 percent of Republicans believe that same-sex couples should have the right to marry. Only 11 percent believe that same-sex couples should receive state or federal benefits — belying the idea that this is just about the “institution of marriage.”

12. Shockingly, even to me, only 8 percent of Republicans believe that gay men and women should be allowed to teach in public schools. 19% are not sure; 73% believe that gay men and women should not be allowed to teach.

13. In better news, 42% of Republicans think that sex ed should be taught in schools.

14. In less-good news, apparently most Republicans didn’t get decent sex ed, because 34% of them think the birth control pill is abortion, and 18% of them aren’t sure.

15. Apparently science is also lacking, because a large majority — 77% — of Republicans believe that public school students should be taught that the book of Genesis in the Bible explains how God created the world.

16. Back to good news: Feminism has infected even Republicans! 76% of them believe that marriage is an equal partnership between men and women, and 86% of them believe that a woman should work outside the home.

17. Back to bad news: A solid 31% of Republicans think that contraceptives should be outlawed. As noted above, 34% think the birth control pill is abortion; 76% think abortion is murder. I think it’s probably safe to say that most of that 34% also believe that abortion is murder. Does follow, then, that somewhere around 1/3 of Republicans think you have committed murder for being on the pill? How much time, do you think, should the more than 80% of American women who use hormonal contraception spend in jail for murder? And is flushing a tampon destroying evidence?

18. The one thing that the largest majority of Republicans agree on? Killing people! 91% support the death penalty, and only 4% oppose it. That’s a more significant margin of approval than the 67% who believe that Jesus Christ is the only way for an individual to go to Heaven.

Conclusion: America needs to invest significantly more in its educational system. And if only there was a way to teach children empathy.

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*I have no idea what the methodology of this survey was, or how accurate it might be. I suspect it’s not all that representative, but maybe that’s because I live in New York and most of the Republicans I meet here are just not this totally ridiculous. But who knows, maybe I need to get out more.

UPDATE: Methodology is apparently quite solid. Wowza. Wasn’t trying to doubt Kos, just… don’t want to believe this is actually true.

Tim Tebow and the anti-choice Superbowl ad

To read the mainstream media spin in the Tim Tebow / anti-abortion ad controversy, you’d think that we Hysterical Feminists ™ were at it again, getting whipped into a censor-happy frenzy just because some lady decided to have a baby.

The issue, though, isn’t that we disagree with Pam Tebow’s choice (although it’s worth pointing out that she had a choice she now wishes to take away from other women, and that the choice she made — to continue a pregnancy after she became ill while on a mission trip in the Phillipines — isn’t actually available to most women in the Phillipines, where abortion is illegal and most procedures happen clandestinely); it isn’t that we don’t think anti-choice ads should be allowed on the air; it isn’t that we think anti-choice views should be censored. It’s that CBS has, for the past few years, regularly rejected ads from left-of-center organizations — MoveOn.org, PeTA, and the United Church of Christ. CBS was clear that it did not accept ads on contentious or controversial subjects such as, apparently, democracy, animal rights and gay rights. But an ad about abortion, from Focus on the Family — one of the most radical, right-leaning organizations out there? Apparently totally fine.

That’s why pro-choice and lefty folks were angry and calling for this ad to be pulled. I personally think those calls were not the best strategy, and that we should have focused on trying to buy our own ad, but that opportunity has passed. Even though I don’t support CBS pulling the ad, I am floored at the hypocrisy of their shifting standards. It also adds insult to injury that this ad is being aired during the Superbowl — not a “man’s event” by any real measure, but an event that is widely perceived to be All About Men. It just feels a little shameless and extra offensive to run an ad that forwards an anti-woman political position at an event where the advertising has traditionally focused on Stuff Dudes Like (beer, trucks and titties, for the most part).

I don’t begrudge Tebow using his fame to forward his political views. I don’t agree with him, but go for it. I think CBS should play the ad (I also think they should have played the ads from MoveOn and UCC). I also think that “Look, a Heisman trophy winner’s mother could have had an abortion!” is a really silly and shallow anti-abortion argument, since any set of circumstances can lead one person or another to exist or not exist. The fact that my existence wouldn’t have happened without WWII and without Australia’s old policies of not allowing certain physically disabled immigrants does not make WWII or that policy good things; the fact that Hitler’s mom didn’t have an abortion doesn’t mean that abortion should be mandatory. The fact that I have friends who would not have existed if their mothers hadn’t had earlier abortions doesn’t make abortion a universally perfect choice. The abortion debate is not, and should not be, centered around the existence of potential future Heisman trophy winners. A turn in that direction is pretty easily smacked down, so I’m not convinced that feminists are just too scared to address the ad itself.

It’s the hypocrisy that is frustrating. It’s the fact that an admittedly tame anti-choice ad is considered mainstream enough to air, but an equally tame ad promoting the basic humanity of gay people (and God’s love of gay people) is controversial. It’s the fact that abortion — a woman’s most basic right to control the number and spacing of her children, and her most basic right to not have the government interfere and legally compel her to carry a pregnancy to term — is still one of the most hot-button issues in the United States. This isn’t just politics; it’s a human rights and a bodily integrity issue. And yes, some of us are a little salty about the fact that our claim to our own bodies is often spun as immoral and controversial, while it’s just peachy for others to purport that we exist as vessels to produce future Great Men like Tim Tebow.

CBS claims it has changed its policy and now allows more controversial ad compaigns, so it would have been interesting to see if they actually stood by that had a pro-choice group wanted to buy ad space. Of course, they did just reject an ad from a gay dating website and an ad for Dante’s Inferno (because it used the phrase “Go to Hell”), so maybe we have our answer.

In all of this controversy, though, there isn’t much mention of the fact that Focus on the Family spent $3 million on this ad — how much money do you think that organization spends on actually helping women? In honor of Tim Tebow and his mother — who, lucky for her, actually had a choice — I’ll be making a donation to the National Network of Abortion Funds, a network of more than 100 local organizations that helps low-income women cover the cost of abortion. I hope you will donate too. I have a feeling that if NNAF had an extra $3 million laying around, it wouldn’t be using it to compete for ad time with Doritos.

Girls vs. Boys

via The Awl, this is one of the worst articles I’ve read in a long while. The New York Times decides to take a look at the girls vs. boys TV networks Lifetime and Spike — and concludes that men are sex-addicted idiots and women are fat, fearful and desperate world-savers. No, really:

We can, from these observations, construct the perfect day as imagined by a gal and by a guy.

In the gal’s perfect day she is kidnapped on the way back from putting the kids on the school bus but vanquishes the kidnappers in time to go for a fattening lunch with her single-mom pals, at which they lament their lack of dates before donning designer gowns to go to a school board meeting where they successfully address all major educational problems.

In the guy’s perfect day he awakes and, still sleepy, sticks his hand down a running garbage disposal trying to retrieve the bottle opener he has dropped in it; an ambulance crew made up entirely of strippers rushes him to the Hospital for Advanced Trauma Care and Stripping, where naked but highly trained female surgeons sew his hand back on, then take him home and wash his entire house as well as his car with their breasts while answering questions like: Does being spanked make a woman want to have sex?

So, clearly, members of one sex are living in a sad, unrealistic fantasy world, trying in vain to compensate for the drabness of their day-to-day lives. Members of the other are living a rich life of the imagination, at peace with their self-image and excited by what the future might hold. Which is which goes without saying.

The whole article seems to be a case of the author confirming what he already believes to be true. For example, he asserts that Lifetime is full of true-crime scary-tales, whereas Spike is full of men getting kicked in the balls. Which is kind of true, on both counts. Except that I watch Spike three or four times a week because they play CSI over and over again, right around the time that I go to the gym, and I always want to see who the killer is so I stay on the StairMaster longer. Maybe that’s only because my ass is fat from watching too much Lifetime, but, point being, mainstream and men’s television is chock full of scary-time crime-dramas. I guess Lifetime is just noteable because it’s the only network where women usually save themselves instead of being rescued by whatever dude is playing their cop partner. Which isn’t to say that Lifetime is great and totally feminist — it’s really not. And it does play into the “your gonna get raped!!” culture of fear that women live in by constantly presenting story lines where women are raped, abused, etc etc. But that’s pretty much the entire premise of Law & Order SVU, so I’m still not sure why Lifetime is really breaking the mold.

But anyway, the crime soaps are the least egregious part of the article, and I am in full accord with the author in his characterization of Spike as hyper-masculine douchery (also, yes, I know CSI is a shitty show; it is, however, an unintentionally hilarious show, hence my gym-wating). Crappiness of both Lifetime and Spike aside, though, the article gets even worse:

IN GAL LAND THINGS WEIGH MORE THAN THEY DO IN GUY LAND.

By “things” here we mean, basically, “women.”

Haha did you see that? He called us fat! Good one, bro.

Plump women are almost never seen on Spike, and hotties are almost never seen on Lifetime. It’s a tough call as to which is the more cynical ploy: brazenly playing to a female audience that probably could stand to lose a few pounds or shamelessly playing to a male audience that likes to fantasize about women more gorgeous than actually exist in real life.

Hmmm, yes, which is more shameless… including actresses that look like actual real women on a network that targets actual real women, or only featuring actresses who are Playboy-perfect because, look, boobs? Clearly those things are the same on the cynical scale.

The Washington Post or The Onion?

“Bin Laden blasts U.S. for climate change”

My favorite part:

The change in rhetoric aims to give al-Qaida’s message an appeal beyond hardcore Islamic militants, said Evan Kohlmann, of globalterroralert.com, a private, U.S.-based terrorism analysis group.

“It’s a bridge issue,” Kohlmann said. “They are looking to appeal to people who don’t necessarily love al-Qaida but who are angry at the U.S. and the West, to galvanize them against the West” and make them more receptive to “alternative solutions like adopting violence for the cause.”

“If you’re looking to draw people who are disenchanted or disillusioned, what better issue to use than global warming,” he said.

I had to read the whole article a couple of times and double-and-triple-check that I was on the real Washington Post website. Amazing.

Mourning the End of an Era in Lazy Comedy

In times to come, my children will ask me about this day.

“So, when did you get over it?” This is what my children, whose names will be Skippy, Tall Boy, and Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor Doyle, will ask me.

“Well, Skippy, and also the rest of you,” I will reply, “which ‘it’ are you asking me about? For truly, I have gotten over many things.”

“Oh, you know,” they will say to me, “the Lady Gaga thing. The thing where you, like 99% of all people who listen to Lady Gaga, convinced yourself that you were doing so because it was ‘funny’ and ‘absurd’ and recognizing the absurdity of it in some ironic fashion could allow you to listen to it without being A Person Who Listens To Lady Gaga. I mean, now that Lady Gaga is our President-for-Life, and rules us all from a besequined flying saucer orbiting the Earth, from whence she issues fearful edicts, we all listen to her, for it is Law. But you were among the holdouts! At what point, dear our mother, did you come to recognize that appreciating this business ‘ironically’ was not only worthless – any critique of the discourse is absorbed into the discourse, and also talking about how Lady Gaga is a ‘top-secret performance artist’ is pretty useless when ‘top-secret performance artist’ is the key plank of her very marketing platform, yea, and also something she says of herself in many an interview – but also way more annoying than just saying that the nonsense-syllable hook on ‘Bad Romance’ is kind of unavoidable and you might as well give in?”

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