May 2011 – Page 4

Just totally normal pro-life things.

Babies. Aren’t they great? They’re great. Which is why in my spare time, I go around putting up billboards of myself, holding a black shadow where a baby should be, with the text “This Would Have Been A Picture Of My 2-month Old Baby If The Father Had Decided To Not REFUSE TO LET OUR CHILD BE CONCEIVED!”

Just the nice, normal aftermath of what was for the most part a nice, normal relationship until I wanted a baby and my bitch of a boyfriend wouldn’t impregnate me, so I started an organization called D.A.R.E.L.L. (Daughters of the American Revolution Embrace Loving Life), dedicated to him. I do not deny that he was a man named Darell. I didn’t create this organization out of spite or attack. I only created it to let the world know that Darell is a killer, who sometimes would choose to ejaculate into a towel, or sometimes a sock, or sometimes even his own hand, for fun instead of to make a baby with me. My only option was to put up a billboard explaining everything; Darell left me with no other choice. But let me be clear that there are no names of people on this billboard; just the name of an organization.

Since I put up this billboard, boys have stopped asking me out. I don’t know why. It’s weird, and confusing. Thankfully, I’ve found a kindred spirit in New Mexico pro-lifer Greg A. Fultz:

The billboard depicts an Alamogordo businessman, GEFNET owner Greg A. Fultz, holding what appears to be an outlined baby in his arms as he is looking down at it. Next to the picture, in large print, is the statement, “This Would Have Been A Picture Of My 2-month Old Baby If The Mother Had Decided To Not KILL Our Child! [sic].”

Fultz, 35, said he created the organization, National Association of Needed Information (N.A.N.I.), to dispense his pro-life message.
…
Fultz said he was inspired to create N.A.N.I. by an event that happened to him.

“All organizations have a meaning behind them,” he said. “I do not deny that she (a woman named Nani) was the catalyst behind creating this organization. The letters of her name are there for the meaning of value for the reason it was created. It was not created out of spite or out of attack. It’s a meaning for a story for the reason why the group was created.”

Fultz said he was in a relationship with a woman about 1 1/2 years ago.

“There was a pregnancy, then there wasn’t,” he said, “with a woman named Nani. I started my pro-life work because I don’t know if it was a miscarriage or an abortion. If it was an abortion, my work is set out to prevent this from happening to somebody else. My goal is to try to change one person’s mind when it comes to abortion and let the baby live. The billboard stands alone. There are no names of people; just an organization.”

Fultz said he would only state that Nani is under the age of 21.

“She was of legal age and consenting.” he said. “I have contacted my congressman and representative about a new bill … and lobby to get started on fathers’ rights. It’s my belief that fathers should have a say regarding pregnancy. Women have all the power when it comes to pregnancy. The men get no say when a woman wants to go and have an abortion without the say of the father. I believe that is wrong because men are 50 percent of the result of the pregnancy. They should have an equal right to their unborn child and decisions regarding it.”

Absolutely nothing questionable about this man. No reason to think that he’s a walking representation of the pro-life movement’s obsession with controlling women. No reason to bat an eye at the fact that a 35-year-old man was dating someone “under 21,” and when she got pregnant and no baby resulted — he’s not sure if there was an abortion or a miscarriage or how these things work, whatever, pregnancy is weird — he thought it was a totally logical and reasonable response to put up a billboard about her. Who among us wouldn’t have reacted the same way?

I think we could have a really beautiful life together, me and Greg, since I assume because the pregnancy is 50% his, he’s happy to do 50% of the work of pregnancy. That means he’ll take as much time off from work as I do, right? And he’ll gain between 30 and 80 pounds in a few months? And if I start to have, say, preeclampsia, we’ll be sure to also raise his blood pressure to dangerously high levels until he almost dies. That if I give birth via c-section, he’ll allow doctors to cut open his gut and scoop out what’s in there. And that if I give birth vaginally, we’ll figure out some way for him to push a bowling ball out of his ass. Equal rights, and equal burdens!

Greg, I’m single! Call me!

Accused rapists find a friend in Bernard-Henri Levy

We have a longer post coming on the rape charges brought against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but in the interim, allow me to direct your attention towards a fine piece of victim-blaming and my-friends-can-do-no-wrong-ing: Bernard-Henri Levy, also a defender of Roman Polanksi, explaining why Strauss-Kahn should not have the suffer the indignities of the American justice system.

He starts out, naturally, by saying that he “doesn’t know” what happened, but is happy to imply that the woman who accused Strauss-Kahn of assault is probably lying. Why? Because she’s a maid, and went in to a clean a room alone:

I do not know—but, on the other hand, it would be nice to know, and without delay—how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a “cleaning brigade” of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet.

And I do not want to enter into considerations of dime-store psychology that claims to penetrate the mind of the subject, observing, for example, that the number of the room (2806) corresponds to the date of the opening of the Socialist Party primaries in France (06.28), in which he is the uncontested favorite, thereby concluding that this is all a Freudian slip, a subconsciously deliberate mistake, and blah blah blah.

What I do know is that nothing in the world can justify a man being thus thrown to the dogs.

What I know is that nothing, no suspicion whatever (for let’s remind ourselves that, as I write these lines, we are dealing only with suspicions!), permits the entire world to revel in the spectacle, this morning, of this handcuffed figure, his features blurred by 30 hours of detention and questioning, but still proud.

What I know as well is that nothing, no earthly law, should also allow another woman, his wife, admirable in her love and courage, to be exposed to the slime of a public opinion drunk on salacious gossip and driven by who knows what obscure vengeance.

All of which is good and fine, tried-and-true victim blaming. The accuser is low-class! What was she doing in there alone! He has a wife so he couldn’t have done this! Etc. But it pales in comparison to this stand-out line:

This morning, I hold it against the American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other.

Let me copy and paste that again for you: “This morning, I hold it against the American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other.”

How dare he be treated like just anyone!

As an aside, I think “perp walks,” where they parade the accused in front of throngs of photographers, are bad and irresponsible. But they’re not particularly bad here because Strauss-Kahn is a special snowflake who deserves to be treated with kid gloves. Levi continues:

I am troubled by a system of justice modestly termed “accusatory,” meaning that anyone can come along and accuse another fellow of any crime—and it will be up to the accused to prove that the accusation is false and without basis in fact.

That actually isn’t at all how our criminal justice system works. You can’t just accuse someone of a crime, with no basis in fact, and expect to have it prosecuted. DA’s offices and police forces investigate crimes for the purposes of (1) figuring out whether a crime was committed; (2) figuring out who committed it; and (3) gathering enough evidence to actually convict the person who committed it. So no, it’s not like I can walk into a police station, point a finger and send someone to jail.

But that’s not really the issue here. Levi’s complaint is that anyone would be able to level any sort of complaint against Strauss-Kahn. Other women coming forward and saying that Kahn acted (to put it extremely mildly) inappropriately towards them, and another woman who says Kahn tried to rape her, too? They are trying to “settle old scores or further their own little affairs;” the woman who came forward and said she kept the attempted rape a secret “pretends to have been the victim.” Kahn, on the other hand, is a champion, and the kind of man who should be accorded deference no matter what he does.

Kahn, of course, deserves his day in court. But if even putting him in the court room is an indignity he should not have to face, I’m not sure how justice can be done. And I’m not sure how tarring the women who have accused him of assault furthers a just outcome.

If you read French and want to die a little inside, here’s a round-up of the worst of the worst from the French press.

The Best Thing You Will Read Today

Roseanne Barr in New York Magazine. Some highlights:

It didn’t take long for me to get a taste of the staggering sexism and class bigotry that would make the first season of Roseanne god-awful. It was at the premiere party when I learned that my stories and ideas—and the ideas of my sister and my first husband, Bill—had been stolen. The pilot was screened, and I saw the opening credits for the first time, which included this: CREATED BY MATT WILLIAMS. I was devastated and felt so betrayed that I stood up and left the party. Not one person noticed.

The next battle came when Matt sent down a line for me that I found incredibly insulting—not just to myself but to John, who I was in love with, secretly. The line was a ridiculously sexist interpretation of what a feminist thinks—something to the effect of “You’re my equal in bed, but that’s it.” I could not say it convincingly enough for Matt, and his hand-picked director walked over and gave me a note in front of the entire crew: “Say it like you mean it … That is a direct note from Matt.” What followed went something like this: My lovely acting coach, Roxanne Rogers (a sister of Sam Shepard), piped up and said, “Never give an actor a note in front of the crew. Take her aside and give her the note privately—that is what good directors do.” She made sure to say this in front of the entire crew. Then she suggested that I request a line change. So I did. Matt, who was watching from his office, yelled over the loudspeaker, “Say the line as written!” I said, “No, I don’t like the line. I find it repulsive, and my character would not say it.” Matt said, “Yes, she would say it. She’s hot to trot and to get her husband in bed with her, and give it to her like she wants it.” I replied that this was not what she would say or do: “It’s a castrating line that only an idiot would think to write for a real live woman who loves her husband, you cocksucker.”

When the show went to No. 1 in December 1988, ABC sent a chocolate “1” to congratulate me. Guess they figured that would keep the fat lady happy—or maybe they thought I hadn’t heard (along with the world) that male stars with No. 1 shows were given Bentleys and Porsches. So me and George Clooney [who played Roseanne Conner’s boss for the first season] took my chocolate prize outside, where I snapped a picture of him hitting it with a baseball bat. I sent that to ABC.

But at least everyone began to credit me. I was assumed to be a genius and eccentric instead of a crazy bitch, and for a while it felt pretty nice. I hired comics that I had worked with in clubs, rather than script writers. I promoted several of the female assistants—who had done all the work of assembling the scripts anyway—to full writers. (I did that for one or two members of my crew as well.) I gave Joss Whedon and Judd Apatow their first writing jobs, as well as many other untried writers who went on to great success.

Call me immodest—moi?—but I honestly think Roseanne is even more ahead of its time today, when Americans are, to use a technical term from classical economics, screwed. We had our fun; it was a sitcom. But it also wasn’t The Brady Bunch; the kids were wiseasses, and so were the parents. I and the mostly great writers in charge of crafting the show every week never forgot that we needed to make people laugh, but the struggle to survive, and to break taboos, was equally important. And that was my goal from the beginning.

I finally found the right lawyer to tell me what scares TV producers worse than anything—too late for me. What scares these guys—who think that the perks of success include humiliating and destroying the star they work for (read Lorre’s personal attacks on Charlie Sheen in his vanity cards at the end of Two and a Half Men)—isn’t getting caught stealing or being made to pay for that; it’s being charged with fostering a “hostile work environment.” If I could do it all over, I’d sue ABC and Carsey-Werner under those provisions. Hollywood hates labor, and hates shows about labor worse than any other thing. And that’s why you won’t be seeing another Roseanne anytime soon. Instead, all over the tube, you will find enterprising, overmedicated, painted-up, capitalist whores claiming to be housewives. But I’m not bitter.

Nothing real or truthful makes its way to TV unless you are smart and know how to sneak it in, and I would tell you how I did it, but then I would have to kill you. Based on Two and a Half Men’s success, it seems viewers now prefer their comedy dumb and sexist. Charlie Sheen was the world’s most famous john, and a sitcom was written around him. That just says it all. Doing tons of drugs, smacking prostitutes around, holding a knife up to the head of your wife—sure, that sounds like a dream come true for so many guys out there, but that doesn’t make it right! People do what they can get away with (or figure they can), and Sheen is, in fact, a product of what we call politely the “culture.” Where I can relate to the Charlie stuff is his undisguised contempt for certain people in his work environment and his unwillingness to play a role that’s expected of him on his own time.

I have nothing to add. Read it all, for real.

Countdown to May 21, 2011

Bad news you guys: We’re all gonna die.

I heard about this a while ago, but it didn’t really sink in until I was on the train Friday and two End Times guys were handing out pamphlets and educating the heathens about the impending rapture. Apparently all the good Christians get to be gathered up and then get to meet Christ in the air? And the rest of us get left on Earth, but, worse news: Earth turns into Hell. So one minute you’re just going about your business on a Saturday afternoon, and the next minute your intestines are hanging from some trees. I’m going to be at a wedding that day, so if this thing goes off according to plan, that’s going to be a real bummer. At least I know I’ll be wearing a nice dress and clean underwear.

Anyone else doing anything to prepare for the end of the world?

Assholery, like attractiveness, is usually subjective

Photo of Pan Grier — Objectively unattractive, right?

But sometimes, someone is objectively a total asshole. Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist and the coauthor of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, fits the bill. See, for example, his latest article in Psychology Today: “Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?”

There are marked race differences in physical attractiveness among women, but not among men. Why?

Add Health measures the physical attractiveness of its respondents both objectively and subjectively. At the end of each interview, the interviewer rates the physical attractiveness of the respondent objectively on the following five-point scale: 1 = very unattractive, 2 = unattractive, 3 = about average, 4 = attractive, 5 = very attractive. The physical attractiveness of each Add Health respondent is measured three times by three different interviewers over seven years.

From these three scores, I can compute the latent “physical attractiveness factor” by a statistical procedure called factor analysis. Factor analysis has the added advantage of eliminating all random measurement errors that are inherent in any scientific measurement. The latent physical attractiveness factor has a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1.

Recall that women on average are more physically attractive than men. So women of all races are on average more physically attractive than the “average” Add Health respondent, except for black women. As the following graph shows, black women are statistically no different from the “average” Add Health respondent, and far less attractive than white, Asian, and Native American women.

Example 4865730 of why “evolutionary psychology” is mostly crap. Over and over again, it’s a way for scientists to look at a particular set of cultural preferences and make up a reason for why those preferences exist (spoiler: the reason is always “evolution,” and “evolution” is apparently tied quite closely to “things straight white American men like”).

Kanazawa uses the term “objectively attractive” a bunch of times in the article, but never explains what that actually means, or how certain traits can even be “objectively” attractive. As far as I can tell, study participants were asked to rate photos of individuals on a scale of 1 to 5 (with 5 being the most attractive). From there, Kanazawa concludes that (1) women are objectively more attractive than men, and (2) black women are objectively the least attractive women.

Which is fine if you don’t care about the meaning of the word “objective.”

Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday

Post a short description of something you’ve written this month, with a link. Make it specific; don’t just link your whole blog.

Eat, Pray, Love, Read, Mock

Elizabeth Gilbert seems like she is probably a really nice lady. That’s great. But Eat, Pray, Love made me want to stab myself in the eye. So this review of Lucca Spaghetti’s memoir — a meta-memoir, actually — made me quite happy. And this review of the review makes it so much better. (And yes, I thought about starting out this blog post with, “I’ll never forget when I read Adam Sternbergh’s response to Sam Anderson’s review of Lucca Spaghetti’s memoir,” but I refrained. Mostly).

Against Pasta Primavera

I love vegetables. I love pasta. But I’m with Bittman that “pasta tossed with every vegetable under the sun, spring or not — broccoli, tomatoes, peas, zucchini, asparagus, mushrooms, green beans, you name it — and enough cream to smother any hint of freshness” is not my favorite thing. Luckily, he offers us a bunch of simple, vegetable-centric pasta dishes that aren’t overwhelming primavera-style. The gemelli with dandelions and smoked sausage, and the tagliatelle with peas, pecorino, mint and chiles, are going on my to-make rotation this week.

Morning Show SCANDAL.

This Morning is at the centre of controversy after the show played host to a woman claiming the world’s largest breasts at a massive 164XXX.
[…]
One woman writing on the show’s Facebook page said: ‘It looks horrible, my kid was like ewwww.’

IT WAS HORRIBLE. HER KID WAS LIKE EWWWW.

So, men in shorts.

Photo via the Sartorialist.

Per usual, Choire is right about everything. No shorts at work. None of those horrible cargo shorts. But nice-looking well-fitting shorts? I TOTALLY SUPPORT men in those shorts. All men? No. Not all men look good in shorts. (And listen, I love jumpsuits, but I cannot wear them! I also cannot wear miniskirts! I also look REALLY BAD in shorts, because I have weird-looking legs. So men who look terrible in shorts, I feel your pain. Not everything looks good on everyone! The world is a great big beautiful place with all kinds of different-looking people and that’s a beautiful thing. So wear what you like and let’s all move on).

But men who have great legs? Ohmygod I have such a tremendous boner for great man-legs. Supposedly in some olden-times men’s legs were intensely eroticized? I can see why. Men: GREAT LEGS (often, not always). So, you know, if you’ve got ’em? WEAR SHORTS. Because goddamn. Men in shorts? MEN IN SHORTS. Yeah.