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

Five Things You Should Know

About living in New York. This is all true, and is genius. Especially “when you don’t see someone for a few weeks it usually means they just didn’t feel like going outside. We get everything delivered. We are a social bunch, but we also retreat and isolate when need be. You’ll get used to the rhythm eventually.”

Yeah, basically. Also the complaining, yes. My allergies are killing me right now, ugh, but I am so glad it is spring because winter is seriously the worst.

Chally’s been doing an awesome “Where are you from?” series, which everyone should be reading. Riffing off of that, sort of, what are the five things anyone should know about living in ______?

Where are you from? Part 7

That is it, there is no more. Thank you for participating in this project. Writing it certainly helped me to clarify and work through a lot of my thinking and pain around this question, and I feel a lot easier within myself. I hope it was helpful for some of you, too.

With all that in mind –

with opening thoughts on what belonging can mean,
figuring the components of fromness,
who gets asked the question,
always being from elsewhere,
feeling like you’re home,
and casting our gazes into the future

– with all that in mind, how has your fromness changed or been made more clear over the course of the last few weeks? How has your thinking around this question developed?

Bowling for Abortion Access (Again)!

People, it’s time to get your bowl-on! OR, for those of you not in the NYC Metro area, it’s time to get your fundraising-on!

Yep, for the second year in a row, Feministe & friends are participating as The Barrier Method in the National Network of Abortion Funds’ bowl-a-thon. NNAF is raising money for grassroots groups that work to provide abortions for low-income women.

This year, we’re bowling on Sunday, April 17th at The Gutter in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Check out our team page where you can sign up to play with us or donate so we can reach our $2,000 goal. There are also events in Queens and Manhattan you can sign up for (and several other cities throughout the month, check out the full list of events here), but we’ll be in Brooklyn.

Last year was tons of fun. Jill and I were there along with Sady [fuckin’] Doyle, Sarah Jaffe, and many others. There were laughs galore and drinks aplenty. Oh, and really rad signs from anti-choice protestors (all two of them) — because “abortion stops a beating heart,” in case you didn’t know!

Female infidelity: “It’s different”

Says… this guy. Why is it different? Because men cheat for sex. Women cheat for True Love. Obvs.

But let’s start at the beginning:

In a committed relationship nothing hurts more, or is harder to recover from, than infidelity, and this is even truer when it’s the female partner who’s been doing the cheating.

Even truer! This is a true fact — ladies who mess around damage their relationships more than men who mess around. How do I know that this is a true fact? Because Sexuality Expert Ian Kerner tells me, with absolutely no evidence to back it up. Definitely true, though.

In recent years I’ve noticed a precipitous rise in the number of men who have been betrayed by adultery, and while there’s an overall consensus among professionals that female infidelity is on the rise, the trend doesn’t garner nearly as much attention as male infidelity That’s surprising, because female infidelity is often much more damaging to a marriage. Don’t get me wrong: Male cheating is definitely harmful. But when a woman fools around, it’s often the death knell to a couple’s relationship.

He’s noticed, you see, and what he’s noticed is incredibly precipitous. Which is totally fair and a really great way to prove a point. I mean, I’ve noticed that over the past few years, my friends and I have dated a lot of very pretty men, and that the relationships at some point become unsustainable. Therefore, I think it is fair to conclude that very pretty men make relationships unsustainable; so while female attractiveness can definitely be harmful, male attractiveness is often the death knell to a couple’s relationship. PROVE ME WRONG.

It’s often said that men cheat for sex, while women cheat for love, the theory being that men can more easily compartmentalize sex and emotion, while women typically need to experience an emotional connection to a person before feeling sexual desire. Without those pesky emotions to stand in the way of a potential mistake, a guy is much more likely to get himself into trouble (especially if alcohol is involved and inhibitions are down) or to get involved with someone for whom he has no feelings.

I mean, duh. Penises have, as they say, “minds of their own.” Whereas women’s minds are just so weird, right guys? LOL, who even knows what women are thinking like ever? Because PMS. You know what I’m talking about. And as an actual woman myself, I can tell you that there’s, like, a really cute and romantic cobblestone pathway between the heart and the vagina, and it’s basically physically impossible for a woman to let you try to make a baby with her unless her heart engorges her clitoris with love. LOVE. Otherwise that shit just locks up like a vise and not even in the fun way. So yeah, Ian Kerner, totally speaking to my own personal experiences here.

He goes on to say that men cheat because they’re in “the wrong place at the wrong time” — aka WITH FLOOZIES — and that men who cheat often say that they have satisfying sex lives and want to stay in their relationships. So if you’re a lady who doesn’t want your dude to stray, it’s a good idea to just keep him away from floozies. Which is pretty easy, since floozies are easily-identifiable by their short red dresses and suggestive MySpace pages. Also they are the only women who actually like sex. (The only other explanation for this contention that “men don’t want to leave their relationships and are totally satisfied with their sex lives” is that men who cheat on their wives may be huge fucking liars who might not tell their therapist the absolute truth, and also may be narcissists who don’t want their wives to leave them. But that seems a little far-fetched, right? Probably just totally normal, happily-married men who tripped on a stripper heel and fell into some floozy’s vagina).

But if you’re a dude and you don’t want your lady to cheat, the best option is to keep her inside and limit her financial independence:

While there aren’t any hard statistics on female infidelity, most experts agree that it’s on the rise, especially among women who have their own careers and a degree of financial independence. A University of Washington study found that people who earned $75,000 or more per year were 1.5 times more likely to have had extramarital sex than those earning less than $30,000. And with so many women in the workplace, it’s no surprise that among the spouses who cheated, 46 percent of women and 62 percent of men did so with someone they met through work.

With so many women in the workplace. How many? So many!

But wait, you said that way more men than women cheat with people they met at work? Like, more than half of men who cheat do it with someone they work with and therefore know and therefore probably are not just randomly fucking at a bar because they’re bored and in the wrong place at the wrong time and you know how men are and a penis is as penis does or whatever? Oh.

Man, look at the problems we have with so many men in the workplace these days. Someone should write about that.

(Thanks, Kate, for the link).

Wino Forever.

Thirty-eight percent of Americans are regular wine drinkers, but they account for more than 85 percent of all wine drunk in the U.S. And 26 percent drink wine without consuming any food.

I’m mostly in the Eric Asimov camp when it comes to wine sans food:

I’ve become used to the notion that not everybody assumes wine is meant to go with food. But I find the idea of divorcing the two unsettling to say the least. Personally speaking, I love a glass of wine when I’m cooking, as an aperitif. The idea of not finishing a glass after pushing back from the table? Perish the thought! But I can conceive of very few social situations not involving food where I would want to drink wine. It’s not that I’m antisocial; I’m just pro food-and-wine.

It’s not that I think drinking wine without food is a bad idea; I do it, actually really often! But wine is often better with food. Also, I’m an eater, so any time I can add food to a situation, I’m in favor. Also, the wine-without-food thing has sadly led to the kind of wine I like being taken off of menus:

Some wines that are perfectly enjoyable with food might seem austere, tannic and uninviting on their own, while wines that might seem too soft, plush or unstructured with food might offer more pleasure without it.

Certainly, that was a lesson for Joe Campanale, the beverage director and an owner of L’Artusi and dell’anima, restaurants in the West Village. Last year, when he opened Anfora, a wine bar near the restaurants, he expected most people to drink wine while noshing on salumi or crostini. Instead, he has found that many people don’t order food at all.

“It’s affected the styles of wine I put on the list there,” he said. “I tend to like very structured wines with very high acidity and sometimes prominent tannins, but those don’t always go well if you’re knocking wine back without food. I still look for crisp acidity, but tend not to look for tannic wines.” For instance, he’s found that Spanish wines like well-aged Riojas from López de Heredia or Bierzos from Alvaro Palacios are more approachable without food than full-bodied but tannic reds like a traditional aglianico from Campania.

Joey’s restaurants are some of my favorites in New York, and his wine selections are particularly great — I’ve discovered more than a few favorites from his lists. I also like very structured wines with prominent tannins, so it’s a little sad that those are being replaced.

But! I do like this American foray into wine-drinking. Having a glass of wine to relax while you watch TV, or drinking a good glass or two before going out, is a nice cultural shift (and hopefully it means an influx of better wines into my local wine stores).