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

Tag: Are you serious?

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy

Former FDA head Lester Crawford to plead guilty for failing to disclose his interests in several companies regulated by his agency.

Court papers say Crawford chaired the Food and Drug Administration’s Obesity Working Group while he and his wife owned shares worth at least $62,000 in soft drink and snack food manufacturer Pepsico Inc., based in Purchase, N.Y. In addition, the documents say, he held stock worth at least $78,000 in food product manufacturer Sysco Corp., based in Houston.

While he and his wife owned the stock, the panel Crawford chaired met with representatives from the packaged food industry and gave congressional testimony encouraging manufacturers to relabel serving sizes to give calorie counts greater prominence.

Crawford, a veterinarian, abruptly resigned last fall after an embattled three-year term at the head of the FDA.

His three-year tenure at FDA was marked by increasing criticism and a particularly rocky final 12 months. The painkiller Vioxx was pulled off the market for safety problems, FDA was embarrassed last fall when its British counterparts shut down a supplier of U.S. flu vaccine for tainted shots, and over the summer recalls of malfunctioning heart devices mounted.

Finally last month [August 2005], morale at the agency plummeted when Crawford indefinitely postponed nonprescription sales of emergency contraception over the objections of staff scientists who had declared the pill safe. FDA’s women’s health chief resigned in protest.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Crawford’s sudden need to spend time with his family had a leetle something to do with the massive conflicts of interest.

via

Hot sexy law school deans are waiting for you…

Creepy indeed. A law gossip blog (who knew?) is soliciting nominations for the sexiest female law school dean. Because, you know, when you’ve clerked for the Supreme Court, graduated at the top of your class, been published dozens of times over, and worked your ass off to succeed in what remains a remarkably male-dominated (and remarkably white) field, it’s really important to make sure that you know your place as a pretty thing to be admired. Or torn apart, as is inevitable in these kinds of contests.

Some of the nominations seem tongue-in-cheek and genuinely laudatory of the nominee’s accomplishments, using “sexy” in a Real Hot 100 kind of way. Others, though, aren’t quite so charming:

“I apologize in advance for ruining your contest. After you put up this nominee, the vote won’t even be close. She will lead the pack right out of the gate, and she will continue to lead until the cows come home.”

“So I’m sorry. But I couldn’t sit on the sidelines and watch someone other than Asha Rangappa win the title of Hottest Law School Dean in the United States. It would be a miscarriage of justice.”

“Asha is nothing short of stunning — an overused word, kind of like ‘brilliant’ in the pages of ATL and UTR — but so, so true. She could be a model. When I attended Yale Law School with her (she was class of 2000), she was the best-looking woman in the entire school. Not just her year, but the whole damn place. Asha Rangappa, without question!”

“I write to nominate Asha Rangappa in your beautiful law school dean contest. First, she’s a genius: Princeton, Yale Law, a Fulbright, a First Circuit clerk. Second, she’s totally badass: from 2002 to 2005, she worked in the FBI as a Special Agent, focusing on counterintelligence investigations in New York City. How cool is that?”

“Third, and most importantly, Asha is simply gorgeous. There hasn’t been this beautiful a woman in federal law enforcement since Jennifer Lopez pretended to be a U.S. US Marshal in ‘Out of Sight.’ This South Asian beauty — with her milk-chocolate skin, lively eyes, Julia Roberts smile, and reddish black tresses — will demolish the rest of your field.”

And the comments are… special. A nice mix of racism, sexism and male entitlement (“She’s smart (for a woman),” “None of these chicks are hot enough for my standards, which are the universal rules of who is and is not attractive,” and “Indian people smell like curry” just about sum it up). Everything we all love about beauty contests, and none of that “scholarship pageant” silliness. Rock on, David Lat — you’re a true rebel.

via.

Concerned Women for College Sports

Tbogg, father of the lovely and talented soccer-playing Casey, has a post up about a new group with the innocuous-sounding name of the College Sports Council.

Not surprisingly, if you scratch the surface, you find anti-Title IX groups looking to restore the non-revenue men’s sports that typically get cut when sports budgets get restricted. And, as Tbogg points out, they never seem to find fault with bloated football rosters or million-dollar coaching contracts. Nope, it’s always the fault of women.

Bonus: they’ve hired as their spokesbot “Title IX expert” Jessica Gavora to put a female face on the group to soften its image. You know, because it wouldn’t do to have a bunch of angry wrestlers carping about female athletes.

And just who is Jessica Gavora? A member of the Independent Women’s Forum.

She’s also Mrs. Jonah Goldberg.

Read the whole thing.

Thinly-veiled bigotry

Speaking of the headscarf, a Muslim teacher in England has been suspended for wearing the veil — and social conservatives like Minister for Local Government and Community Cohesion Phil Woolas are arguing that she should be fired.

And their reasoning just keeps getting more ridiculous:

Woolas said Azmi’s stance amounted to sex discrimination:

“By insisting that she will wear the veil if men are there, she’s saying; ‘I’ll work with women, not men’. That’s sexual discrimination. No headteacher could agree to that.”

Riiiight… except that she will work with men. She’ll just dress in a particular way if there are men around. She isn’t asking anyone else to change their behavior. She isn’t asking for special accomodations. She’s simply making herself comfortable given her situation.

The problem isn’t the woman, or the veil. It’s the people who see a veiled woman and make certain assumptions: Unworthy of public participation. Uneducated. Silenced. Lacking authority. Extremist. And those assumptions become highly problematic when they leak into public policy, and result in veiled women having decreased access to the public sphere.

via Feministing.

If you love seeing babies in the park, punish rape survivors

The South Dakota abortion ban has no exception for rape, incest or life of the pregnant woman. There are apparently quite a few people who think that anti-abortion laws should focus on punishing women for choosing to have sex, and therefore should offer an exception for those women who get pregnant through no fault of their own — that is, rape and incest survivors. These generous souls also believe that if pregnancy is going to give a woman kidney failure, or force her to have a hysterectomy, then she should also have access to a legal medical procedure. The folks who think along those lines have pushed forward a vote on abortion exceptions in South Dakota. So that is, normal slutty women still won’t have access to this procedure; those who had their personal autonomy taken away will be allowed to have abortions. Bill Napoli, of “pity only the sodomized Christian virgins” fame, has thoughts:

Wide open abortions

Elections should be about the truth. The debate about HB1215 may not be full of lies, but there’s a lot of mistruths and deception.

HB1215 is a law that can be changed during any legislative session. If the debate were really about rape and incest, why aren’t we talking about changing it in the next Legislature? Change it to something that works for all?

Defeat of HB1215 is not about exceptions, it’s about unlimited abortions. If you vote to repeal HB1215, you’re actually voting for abortion on demand, abortion as a means of birth control, and abortion for convenience.

If you vote to repeal HB1215, you’ll be voting for the death of 800 babies that didn’t have anything to do with rape or incest.

The truth! Repealing HB1215 is for wide-open abortions, not just rape and incest exceptions.

If you love babies, and see those cute little babies in the park, grocery store, mall, or cafe, think very carefully about your vote to repeal HB1215.

When you vote, are you going to vote to end the life of a baby, or are you going to vote to give that baby a chance to live? Vote Yes on 6.

State Sen. BILL NAPOLI
Rapid City

Sarcasm aside, I obviously think that a rape/incest/health exception is far better than no exception. I hope that this passes. I just take major issue with the idea that particular medical procedures should be available contingent on social approval of one’s behavioral choices. I think that the person who didn’t wear their seatbelt should have as high a level of medical care in the case of an accident as the person who drives with a seatbelt and a helmet on. I think that the person who eats french fries and potato chips occassionally should have the same access to heart surgery as the health nut who would never touch fried food. I think the woman who gets pregnant because she chooses to have sex should have the same access to abortion as the woman who has that choice taken away from her.

Bodily autonomy is a human right. Access to medical care should not be dependent on sexist moral judgments.

Protect Yourselves, Ladies

By finding a good man (read the comments, not the post itself). Or,

Could it be that feminism has contributed to violence against women?

Could it be that some unbalanced men, having been disrespected by women are going to get some respect at the point of a gun?

Could it be that men, who as little boys who were taught in elementary schools to sit and pee like little girls have had enough, and aren’t going to take it any more?

Could it be that boys who grow up in fatherless homes, soaked with testosterone and without the training on how to channel that active aggression into good and noble activities turn it on innocent victims?

Good men have a desire deep in their hearts to protect women. To use their native aggression and greater strength to the protection of those weaker. When that is nurtured in a family environment, the most common product is good, strong and acourageous men who use their attributes for the protection of the weak and the betterment of society.

When you discard fathers as unnecessary, you teach a whole generation of boys that they don’t need to take their family responsibilities seriously. When women render their reproductive organs sterile so that men can use their bodies, without consequences, for their personal pleasure, it teaches them that women are to be used for their sexual gratification.

Men want one woman who will respect and support him and to be all of the man that she believes he can become.

A good man will die for a woman like that.

That’s right, ladies: When you step out of line and demand your “rights,” you bring violence upon yourself. When you challenge a traditionally male role, you disrespect men, and you should expect to get smacked down.

Read More…Read More…

Passing the Buck

Through Amanda, I learned that the Biting Beaver, who last month wrote about the gantlet she had to run in order to obtain Plan B when a condom broke during sex, is now pregnant as a result of being given the runaround from so many doctors and hospitals that she missed her window of opportunity for preventing pregnancy. So, now, she has to pony up $450 for an abortion, and worse, she has to deal with the emails and comments at her blog wishing her death and worse for daring to have sex; she has to visit the clinic four times and face angry, hostile protesters each time; and she has to go through a medical procedure to terminate a pregnancy that could have been avoided. And the guy who was wearing the condom when it broke? His biggest worry is getting time off in order to go to the appointment with her. Nobody’s bothering him about having sex.

I highly recommend both Biting Beaver’s righteously angry post and Amanda’s. I want to take a slightly different spin on something Amanda wrote about, and relate it to one of my new obsessions, Battlestar Galactica. This concerns something that happened in the season premier, so if you haven’t seen it, I’m putting spoilers on the next page.

Read More…Read More…

A Cornucopia of Homophobia

foley

I’m just gonna quote directly from Gawker:

Post “cartoonist” Sean Delonas raises his game today with the masterpiece you see here. We’re not sure which hand-drawn gay stereotype is our favorite: there are so many to choose from! Village People reference? Check! Umbrella drink? Check! Limp wrists? Check! AIDS ribbon? Check! Light loafers? You’d better believe it! He even gets a hamster in there (note the cage behind McGreevey)! Still, even with this cornucopia of homophobia, we’re going to have to give the nod to what’s going on in the bedroom, where a teddy bear holds what appears to be a big black dildo. You’ve got to hand it to Sean; he knows it’s an accumulation of small details that really brings the bigotry to life.

In other news, this “Assholes” category is really coming in handy lately…