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

Tag: Humor

What would happen if right-wingers played by their own rules?

Katha Pollitt — who, yes, I am in love with today (and hell, every day) — has a few suggestions to allow righties to practice what they preach. My favorites:

1. Stem-cell research. According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 22 percent of the population thinks extracting stem cells from pre-embryos frozen in fertility clinics is unethical. These tender souls have prevailed upon the Bush Administration to restrict federal funds for stem-cell research. This has resulted in a bidding war among states eager to lure researchers, which nobody sees as the best way to do the science. Why not split the difference? Bring back federal funding, but those who oppose it can take the appropriate tax cut. The catch is, they agree to forgo any cures stem-cell research might yield: They’ll have to live with their Parkinson’s, diabetes, Alzheimer’s or cancer, which, since they believe stem-cell research is wrong, is surely what they would want to do anyway.

4. Teen sex. Every school will offer both abstinence-only and comprehensive sex ed–parents can sign their kids up for the course they prefer. In states with notification/consent laws, parents will remain free to discourage or prevent their daughters from having abortions. The catch is, if they choose this route, they are legally responsible for the total financial support through college of the babies their underage daughters produce. After all, if a girl is too young to learn about birth control, too young to have sex and too young to decide on her own to have an abortion, she’s obviously too young to be a mother. Having made the choice for her, the parents should bear the consequences. If they don’t like this system, they can try to extract child support from the baby’s father (or his parents), and good luck to them.

6. English only. Do you blow a gasket when your ATM asks you if you’d like to bank en español? Check the English-only box, and get priority on tract housing in Utah or Idaho. But first, just to make sure your own linguistic skills do justice to the language of Shakespeare, Woolf and Baldwin, you’ll be enrolled in a free, intensive, yearlong literature class taught by brilliant, dedicated, culturally conservative professors who firmly believe they failed to get tenure at Ivy League universities because of their resistance to grade inflation and what passes for education these days. Less than a B sends you back to the land from which your ancestors most recently escaped.

Of course, liberals like me would never support the kind of legislation that Pollitt suggests (and she’s obviously being a little tongue-in-cheek with this piece). Why? Because, unlike those running the current administration, I kinda like the idea of people other than just me having a wide range of rights, and the ability to decide for themselves how they live their lives. How novel.

Instructions and advice for the young bride

From an 1894 newsletter:

To the sensitive young woman who has had the benefits of proper upbringing, the wedding day is, ironically, both the happiest and most terrifying day of her life. On the positive side, there is the wedding itself, in which the bride is the central attraction in a beautiful and inspiring ceremony, symbolizing her triumph in securing a male to provide for all her needs for the rest of her life. On the negative side, there is the wedding night, during which the bride must pay the piper, so to speak, by facing for the first time the terrible experience of sex.

Read More…Read More…

Nuclear Option, What?

Tom Burka gets me rolling:

Senate Republicans to Reject Nuclear Option in Favor of Biowarfare
Senate Republicans who feared that they would not get the 50 votes they needed to destroy the filibuster spoke of abandoning the so-called “nuclear option” in favor of biological or chemical warfare.

“We should just gas all of them,” said Sen. Rick Santorum of the Democrats, almost immediately after he had called them Nazis. Sen. Santorum later told critics that he had meant “sedating all of the Democrats with a non-toxic inhalant.”

“[Then] the only issue would be whether we had a quorum,” said Frist. “And when Dick Cheney is the Presiding Officer, well, a quorum is what we say it is.”

The conservative organization Focus on the Family, which has been instrumental in forcing Republicans to wage the filibuster battle, supports the exploration of all “extreme” options, said Dr. James Dobson. “The ends definitely justify the means,” said Dobson. “If it takes unethical and immoral acts to make this a more ethical America, then — what are we waiting for?”

Startling Coulter

Remember this?:

“You say that you believe in the sanctity of marriage,” said Ajai Raj, an English sophomore. “How do you feel about marriages where the man does nothing but fuck his wife up the ass?”

Raj has given an explanation for the comment and details his arrest. Personally, his account is not only vitriolic and juvenile, but guiltily hilarious.

HR Blog Has Arrived

I’m sure you know that the Huffington Report blog is in action, and is already an enjoyable read.

But today, the Huffington Report has arrived. How do I know? Richard Bradley writes:

Where Are the Women?

No, this isn’t a plea for a date.

I was merely scrolling down the page reading people’s posts when I noticed a certain gender imbalance. (I just wrote a book about Larry Summers, so the issue’s on my mind.)

25 posts as of this writing. 22 men, 3 women.

What’s up with that? Anyone?

Oh, honey. I’m not dipping a toe into this one.

How to Score With Chicks (And Real Women Too)

I got some flack for some of the things I listed as my dating requirements in The Ideal Man According To Lauren. Some of them, I admit, sound elitist and snobbish, and further, they are. But these are requirements for being a long-term partner that I am committed to and will spend significant amounts of time with, not the friendly guys I talk to every day. I have far looser requirements for friends (integrity, people) but hell if I’m loosening my standards for an intimate partner.

Via Brutal Women comes another guide for dating (within my peer group) that I largely agree with, though I could have done without much of the crassness and the father-fellating comment. Numbers 1 and 5 are dead on.

In short: Try. You don’t have to succeed at everything, just be doing something interesting with yourself. Enthusiastically.