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

Tag: Capitalism & Consumption

Two Articles

MoJo has some great pieces up right now. Two I want to highlight:

1. The Dark Side of Overseas Adoption. International adoption is loosely regulated and often “closed;” in some places, it’s turned into a child-buying market.

2. Brave New Welfare: Clinton-era welfare “reform” is lauded for decreasing welfare dependency and shortening the TANF rolls. In reality, case workers are turning down eligible women in an effort to keep enrollment down, and families are living in severe poverty.

In 2006, the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence conducted a survey to figure out why so many women were suddenly failing to get tanf benefits. They discovered that caseworkers were actively talking women out of applying, often using inaccurate information. (Lying to applicants to deny them benefits is a violation of federal law, but the 1996 welfare reform legislation largely stripped the Department of Health and Human Services of its power to punish states for doing it. Meanwhile, county officials have tried to head off lawyers who might take up the issue by pressing applicants to sign waivers saying they voluntarily turned down benefits.) Allison Smith, the economic justice coordinator at the coalition, says the group has gotten reports of caseworkers telling tanf applicants they have to be surgically sterilized before they can apply. Disabled women have been told they can’t apply because they can’t meet the work requirement. Others have been warned that the state could take their children if they get benefits. Makita Perry, a 23-year-old mother of four who did manage to get on tanf for a year, told me caseworkers “ask you all sorts of personal questions, like when the last time you had sex was and with who.” Elsewhere, women are being told to get a letter proving they’ve visited a family-planning doctor.

Read the whole thing.

Citigroup Uses Bailout Money to Lobby Against Workers Rights

According to the Huffington Post, Citigroup has been caught using some of its $50 billion in federal bailout (TARP) money to help organize large corporations against the Employee Free Choice Act — an important piece of legislation which would make it easier for workers to unionize and demand better wages and benefits, not to mention make life more difficult for union obstructionists like Walmart.

And there you go.  That’s exactly why enforceable guidelines for spending the bailout money should have been imposed from the beginning!

CREDO, however, thinks that Neil M. Barofsky, Special Inspector General for TARP, and Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel to review TARP, might actually be able to do something about this, if put under pressure.  Sign the petition now asking them to investigate Citigroup and other TARP recipients, and to revoke funding from those who insist on spending it for unintended and damaging purposes.

“Bridezilla”? Really?

The right-wing obsession with trashing women never ceases to amaze me. Kathryn Jean Lopez’s write-up of Feministing blogger Jessica Valenti’s wedding is no exception (and of course, Ace of Spades follows up). Lopez titles the piece “You’ve Never Met a Bridezilla Like a Feminist Bridezilla” — the implication being that Jessica is acting like a crazed, selfish bitch about her wedding (that’s what “Bridezilla” usually means, right?). And Ace writes:

Everyone who believes that she was seriously considering delaying marriage until “everyone could,” and believes she’s looking at her wedding as a “pro-active way to talk about same sex marriage among our friends and family,” rather than as Princess’ Special Day, please raise your hand.

The reality is… less entertaining. Jessica talks about deciding whether or not to change her name (she’s not going to), how getting hitched squares with her beliefs that marriage shouldn’t be a hetero-only institution (she’s using the wedding as a platform to raise both awareness and money for same-sex marriage rights), and what color her dress should be (not white).

There weren’t any Bridezilla or princess antics as far as I could tell — just a basic look at which traditions she and her fiancee want to keep, and which ones they want to scrap. Which is what most couples do, right? Even if it’s not from a feminist perspective?

Kind of amazing how even totally normal wedding planning, if it comes from a woman (and especially a feminist woman) is de facto evidence of selfish bitchitude.

And then there’s the “Bridezilla” concept in the first place. We place an incredible amount of pressure on women (especially women of certain social classes) not only to get married, but to make their wedding The Best Day Of Their Lives. Entire industries thrive because of weddings — because of the pressure to put on the biggest and best party, because of the pressure to match or best the other weddings in your social group, and because of the pressure to be the most “beautiful” bride (“beautiful” often couched in terms of conspicuous consumption). Women are still largely charged with organizing the wedding, because it’s supposed to be their day. Wedding planning, for a lot of couples, is a huge endeavor — for a lot of women, it’s the equivalent of a part-time job on top of whatever they already do for work. But if all that pressure ends up making them crack just a little, they’re crazed selfish biatches.

Not that I’m defending the bad behavior of some women in planning their weddings. Assholes are assholes, and there are a fair number of assholes who eventually get married and, unsurprisingly, act like assholes in the process. The ability to even freak out about your wedding is a function of socioeconomic and cultural privilege.

But when we get to the point where all we need as evidence that a woman is a selfish jerk who thinks of her wedding as Princess’s Special Day is the fact that she’s a woman, I think we’ve gone a little too far down Misogyny Lane.

All of that said, Jessica is asking readers for feminist wedding planning tips. Another friend of Feministe (and real-life friend of mine) is also getting married this summer, and has had a lot of trouble navigating the (thoroughly un-feminist) wedding industrial complex. Any suggestions or tips?

Red State Special

(Totally stealing Jezebel’s title for this post).

So whaddaya know: Red state citizens consume the most online porn in the United States. Utah is the biggest porn customer in the U.S., and eight of the top-ten highest porn-consuming states went for John McCain in the last election. But don’t get too worried yet: Porn consumption decreases on Sundays, when more people are ostensibly in church. And states that have banned same-sex marriage in order to maintain traditional values consume 11% more pornography than states without marriage bans.

States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage,” bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behaviour.”

Here’s the paper (PDF).

Mommy, What’s a Blow Job?

So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids by Diane E. Levin and Jean Kilbourne
(Ballantine Books)

I really wish that when I was in preschool, my parents had told me that it’s okay to masturbate.

Yeah, that’s right – I’ve been masturbating since preschool. (Not continuously, smart ass.) At age 4, I polished the knob. At age 9, I tickled the pink. At age 12, I buffed the muff. And you can be sure that I developed a deep sense of shame and disgust about it almost as soon as I learned to understand language. I had no idea what it was or that it was related in any way to reproduction; my first and only lesson about it was that a) it was wrong, and b) I was the only human being on the planet sick enough to do it.

Which isn’t to say that sex education was absent during my childhood. I knew from a very early age what the word “sexy” meant. She-Ra was sexy. Strawberry Shortcake was not sexy. When the grown women in my life put on makeup and heels, they became sexy, and they stopped being sexy when they changed into jeans and T-shirts. In fifth grade, the girls in my class started shaving their legs, and I became painfully aware of my own coarse carpet of hair. My mom and I fought about it for weeks. She was (rightly) appalled that an eleven-year-old was gunning to take a razor to her legs, but unfortunately, her flat refusal only made me more determined to do it. See, I needed to do it. In a Southern California April, wearing long pants wasn’t an option, so it was either shave or endure teasing about my hideous gorilla-legs. The fact that my mom didn’t seem to understand only served to turn her into an opponent instead of an ally – someone I learned to hide things from throughout my entire adolescence.

By now, at least some of this story probably sounds familiar to you.

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I just threw up in my mouth a little.

For those who have not heard of Henrietta Hughes, she is a homeless woman who stood up at a town hall meeting and told Barack Obama that she is unemployed and has been forced her to live in her car.  She further pleaded with the president to do something to ensure that people like her had housing: 

“I have an urgent need, unemployment and homelessness, a very small vehicle for my family and I to live in,” she said. “The housing authority has two years’ waiting lists, and we need something more than the vehicle and the parks to go to. We need our own kitchen and our own bathroom. Please help.”

Now, Michelle Malkin has decided to publicly mock her with taunts like “If she had more time, she probably would have remembered to ask Obama to fill up her gas tank, too.”  She then went on to say:

Hughes didn’t explain the cause of her financial turmoil. Obama didn’t ask. And if we conservatives dare to question the circumstances — and the underlying assumption that it is government’s (that is, taxpayers’) role to bail her out — we’ll be lambasted as cruel haters of the downtrodden.

[. . .]

Well, pardon my unbending belief in fairness and personal responsibility, but why should my tax dollars go to feed the housing entitlement beast?

Indeed, why should housing be considered a right?  After all, what does my housing say about my personal class status and how much better I am than other people, if there aren’t those other people out there who don’t have a place to live at all?

The worst part is that Malkin isn’t alone.  From Limbaugh falsely saying that Hughes “ask[ed] for a car” to others claiming that Hughes is “milking the system,” there’s no shortage of people who want to bring down the woman who had the potential to a far more sympathetic Joe the Plumber — an everyday American who is actually negatively affected by the economic policies of our government.

And they can get away with it!  I just, honestly, do not understand.  Are people like Malkin really so privileged and entitled themselves that they just do not comprehend the very concept of housing not owned by the person living in it — and that therefore “I need a place to live” does not equal “buy me a new house, please” — or do they just really think that no, if you’re not as fortunate as the rest of us, you really do deserve to live on the street, and as a neighbor I have absolutely no responsibility for what happens to you?

On second thought, I don’t know that I want the answer to that.

Via Womanist Musings

Disrupting Bloomberg

Dissent has been bubbling up more and more frequently here in the cold, snow-blown streets of New York. The other day, when it was announced that Wall Street was using its bailout funds to hand out record bonuses to its employees, I started hearing murmurs of discontent and talk of tarring and feathering stock brokers even amongst normally placid centrist liberals. There are a lot of people here in this city, and most of us are not benefiting from the economic bailouts that are lining the pockets of a few companies and their favored employees.

This afternoon, our fairly clueless mayor was having a lunch to discuss the future of New York City. The price per seat: $249. The intended guests: the elite business people of the city. You know, CEOs. Heads of major law firms. All the people that decide “the future of New York City.” The ones who decided that the present involves fat Christmas bonuses for them and theirs.

Fortunately, some of the other 99% of the city’s people with an interest in our future decided to crash the party.

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Sexist Superbowl Ads

UPDATE: Non-U.S. readers can now view the videos. Apologies for the originals; I had no way of knowing that Hulu.com was so stupid.

Oh yeah, you knew it was coming. I knew it was coming before I sat down to watch the big game. (Though I usually don’t care, the Steelers were playing, and my dad is the world’s biggest fan. We went over for moral support; and thankfully the Steelers not only won, but it was also a pretty good game.)

For the record, I think that my 21-year-old brother and his friends laughed at every one of these commercials. My dad, knowing my political leanings well from many fights, looked nervously my way but also laughed a few times. Which was, you know, awesome. I sat there and grumbled to my thankfully non-laughing husband that each of them was going up on the blog. Which now, they are.

Firestone: “Taters”

Shorter Firestone: Haha, women nag and talk to much! Wouldn’t it be great if they never spoke again?  And isn’t it even better that enough men apparently still think this way for us to be able to profit off of it?  Oh my, we’re so incredibly original.

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Because if you put flowers on it and have a matching tote, women will buy it.

So that image to the left, at first glance just looks like some cute (though not my style) little clutch, tote and scarf set, right?  Well, close, but not quite.

Actually, it’s a laptop. A laptop made to look like a clutch purse.  A “digital clutch.”  And yes, it does actually come with the scarf and bag.  Well, if you’re willing to pay $200 extra.

I’m not even offended.  I’m just fucking bemused.

I just bought a laptop, too.  Funny, that while I did want something lightweight, I also wanted something that was easy to read, was relatively inexpensive and worked well.  I didn’t even consider the overall aesthetic value of the laptop and whether I could get away with passing it off as a clutch handbag to my ever jealous female friends.  The ovaries must have been busted that day.

Title yanked from email tip by reader Kristen. Thanks Kristen!