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Tag: Misogyny

What if you threw a party on Stained Blue Dress Day and nobody came?

Stay classy, Brian Ross and the ABC News Investigative Team.

The wankers at ABC adding their wankstains to the Blue Dress

Screencap image swiped with permission from Liss.

I really don’t know what to say at this point. Unbeknownst to me, yesterday was not actually the fifth anniversary of our invasion of Iraq, but Wank Day, as our mainstream media pored through the 11,000 pages of records from Hillary Clinton’s eight years as First Lady and grabbed the Lubriderm.

Oh, yes, boys and girls, it must have felt so good to be able to trot out the Blue Dress and add new, fresh wankstains to it. Thing’s more stain than dress at this point, what with being used as a receptacle for the splooge of a media desperate for ways to revive the Lewinsky scandal and remind everyone that Hillary Clinton’s husband cheated on her! Right under her nose!

(The WSJ, OTOH, would like to remind you that she’s a murderer, even if she wasn’t in the area when Vince Foster was killed.)

Message to the media: if you really want to relive the Clinton era, you might want to reach a little further back and this little mantra in mind: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Joe Francis, Child Abuser

The bad news is that serial woman-abuser and exploitation profiteer Joe Francis is out of jail. The good news is that he is now a convicted child abuser, having pleaded no contest to a charge of felony child abuse, and a misdemeanor prostitution charge.

I think it is incumbent on all of us to say a hearty “Ha Ha! Joe Francis is a child abuser!”

What I have not seen is any discussion of whether this will require him to register as a sex offender, though I expect he will not because the top count was an abuse charge rather than a sexual assault charge. I do not know Florida law on this; I will update if anyone has specific information.

The sister-punishers are out in force

More on the Spitzer mess. This time, we’re hearing from the sister-punishing Serena Joys who’ll happily tear down their own gender if it means they get to spend more time in the warm, warm glow of the television lights:

“Are you saying the women should feel guilty, like they somehow drove the man to cheat?” a visibly aghast Meredith Vieira of “Today” asked Dr. Laura Schlessinger,* a radio host.

Dr. Schlessinger replied, “Yes, I hold women accountable for tossing out perfectly good men by not treating them with the love and kindness and respect and attention they need.”

That’s right, Silda! It’s your fault your husband strayed! Why, if you’d just let him control you, you’d have satisfied his need to direct and dominate another human being, and he wouldn’t have had to move all that money around, attracting the attention of the banks and the IRS and the US Attorney’s Office! Dammit, woman, what is wrong with you?

Look, here’s another shameful political wife who couldn’t keep her husband in her bed! Bring her out for the ritual humiliation and penance.

Dina Matos McGreevey, the estranged wife of James E. McGreevey, who resigned as the governor of New Jersey in 2004 after admitting to an extramarital homosexual affair, has been much in demand these last two days.

On a different “Today” panel on Tuesday, called “Secret Lives: Does Power Equal Promiscuity?,” Ms. Matos McGreevey argued that blaming wives for their husbands’ infidelities was “like blaming a rape victim for being victimized.”

Heyyyyyy… she’s not following the script. What’s with this not being properly shamed? Get her out of there! Get a new panel to remind wives of their duty!

Daytime television does have a way of encouraging women to blame themselves or change themselves to hold on to their men. On yet another “Today” panel, this one labeled “Refresh Your Romance,” an expert advised viewers eager to rekindle their marriages to take erotic dance classes to “unleash the inner vixen.”

That’s better. Remember, ladies, it’s your fault, and yours alone, if your husband strays and gets caught and has to resign from office.

___________
* Yes, *that* Laura Schelessinger. Of the affairs and the divorce and the nude photos and the criminal son and the mother who was found in her apartment, having been dead for two months.

Forced marriages in Britain may be higher than originally thought

A government agency in Britain charged with investigating forced marriages has released a report estimating that the number of forced marriages may be as high as 4,000 per year, up from earlier estimates of about 300. These cases involve young women and girls being taken abroad and married against their will. And there are some differences of opinion on how to proceed with investigating these:

Sayeeda Warsi, a Muslim member of the House of Lords, said forced marriages should be treated as a criminal offence like domestic violence, to protect young women from ethnic minorities.

“As a society we draw a line in the sand,” she told GMTV. “This is not a culturally sensitive issue, this is an abhorrent act which we must stand together on.”

Khanum added: “Forced marriage has nothing to do with religion. It is a part of a patriarchal system where parents believe they know what is best for their children.”

But the government argues that criminalising forced marriage would only drive it underground.

Home Office Minister Alan West told the House of Lords Monday: “The difficulty is that these things happen in families. We have taken a lot of advice and talked to many people.

“There is a feeling that the crime would go even further underground because people generally do not want to put their families through this.”

There was also a separate study released which may tie into the forced marriages:

A separate study to be released Tuesday highlights how many children have suddenly stopped attending school, amid fears that some have been forced into marriages against their will.

The BBC said it had been told by one teenage Pakistani girl that she was withdrawn from school aged 13, taken to Pakistan and forced to marry a man who raped her.

She blamed the authorities for failing to launch a search for her. “I think they let me down,” she said. “I did still secretly think when I was in Pakistan, the school might search for me.

“Nobody looked for me. It was horrific.”

It was disclosed this month that 33 girls were missing from schools in Bradford despite efforts to locate them. It is feared they have been forced into marriages.

Thoughts?

Women Across the Globe Speak Out on International Women’s Day

Iraqi women
Iraqi women hold banners asking for justice in Baghdad

Women around the world raised their voices and agitated for gender equality on Saturday.

Scores of women rallied outside a Baghdad hotel demanding an end to violence and equal social status with men.

“Stop neglecting women. Stop killing women. Stop creating widows,” read a large banner that the women, from various ethnic and religious backgrounds, held at the Babylon Hotel in Baghdad’s central Karada neighbourhood.

In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai spoke out against forced marriages and said threats from a Taliban-led insurgency were keeping girls out of school.

“I call on religious leaders, tribal elders and particularly men: stop forcing your under-aged girls to marry, stop marrying them to old men,” he said.

Up to 80 percent of Afghan women face forced marriage, and nearly two-thirds are married before the legal age of 16, according to the United Nations.

Events were also planned in neighbouring Pakistan, where “honour killings” of women and punishment gang-rapes have been widely reported.

Gatherings took place in India, Indonesia and China as activists pressed for an end to discrimination ranging from abortion of female foetuses to workplace bias.

Australian women’s minister Tanya Plibersek said the occasion was a chance to acknowledge issues such as women’s lack of financial independence.

“From the moment a woman enters the workforce she is likely to earn less than her male colleagues, regardless of her career, industry or level,” she said.

In Japan, a rally was scheduled in Osaka to express solidarity with women in Iraq.

Communist North Korea marked International Women’s Day in its own way by urging its women to reject Western fashions and to “set good examples” in their clothes and hairstyles.

“Women must set good examples in all fields of culture and custom, including clothes, hairdos and language,” Rodong Sinmun, the official daily of the North’s ruling Korean Workers’ Party, said in an editorial.

In Europe, job inequality, domestic abuse and abortion rights were highlighted.

In Italy, labour unions and women’s groups planned a protest in favour of the right to abortion — legalised in that country 30 years ago, but unexpectedly a hot topic ahead of April elections.

Nearly 2,000 people gathered in Warsaw to demand reproductive rights. Poland, like Italy a heavily Roman Catholic nation, has one of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws.

A demonstration in France drew attention to French-Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt, seized by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in February 2002 as she campaigned the Colombian presidency.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for an end to pay inequality between men and women, and pledged to institute financial sanctions to address the problem.

The plight of women was outlined Friday by the UN high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour, who said: “Laws that discriminate against women are still to be found on the statute books of virtually every country.”

Women everywhere experience great suffering and discrimination, but women are also strong and proud — and they’re voicing their concerns and demanding equality. That’s a beautiful thing, and something that women (particularly in developing countries) too often don’t get credit for.

Don’t Forget the Angry White Men

klan
It’s so much easier when the Angry White Men just wear their nightclothes all the time.

Otherwise known as self-important, racist, sexist assholes.

The Angry White Man is not a metrosexual, a homosexual or a victim. Nobody like him drowned in Hurricane Katrina — he got his people together and got the hell out, then went back in to rescue those too helpless and stupid to help themselves, often as a police officer, a National Guard soldier or a volunteer firefighter.

His last name and religion don’t matter. His background might be Italian, English, Polish, German, Slavic, Irish, or Russian, and he might have Cherokee, Mexican, or Puerto Rican mixed in, but he considers himself a white American.

It’s guys like this who give white men everywhere a bad name. But he’s not sexist or racist, he swears! He just hates when black people act all uppity and when Mexicans don’t speak English, and he knows that his wife is kinda dumb and needs to be under his control:

He might be a Republican and he might be a Democrat; he might be a Libertarian or a Green. He knows that his wife is more emotional than rational, and he guides the family in a rational manner.

He’s not a racist, but he is annoyed and disappointed when people of certain backgrounds exhibit behavior that typifies the worst stereotypes of their race. He’s willing to give everybody a fair chance if they work hard, play by the rules and learn English.

Just like him, I’m sure, who has gotten everything in life solely through hard work and playing by the rules. Super convenient that all the rules tilt the game in his favor.

But this isn’t about all those other folks. It’s about how much he hates Hillary Clinton:

He also votes, and the Angry White Man loathes Hillary Clinton. Her voice reminds him of a shovel scraping a rock. He recoils at the mere sight of her on television. Her very image disgusts him, and he cannot fathom why anyone would want her as their leader. It’s not that she is a woman. It’s that she is who she is. It’s the liberal victim groups she panders to, the “poor me” attitude that she represents, her inability to give a straight answer to an honest question, his tax dollars that she wants to give to people who refuse to do anything for themselves.
…
He hopes that she will be the Democratic nominee for president in 2008, and he will make sure that she gets beaten like a drum.

But no, it has nothing to do with the fact that she’s a woman. It’s just that her physical appearance and her voice disgust him.

Excuse me if I lack patience for “progressive” arguments that these are the guys we should be pandering to.

I think a dictionary may have helped her out here

So I know Slate prides itself of being different and politically incorrect, but that doesn’t have to translate into mind-numbing stupidity, does it? From XX, Slate’s lady-blog:

Today, the front page of the Washington Post has another installment in the “feminists are pissed” series dominating the press (and soon to dominate more if Hillary loses today). They call her a witch, a hag, an old bimbo, say the leaders of NOW. They are threatened by her power. Once again, I can’t relate, particularly since the NOW leaders never even consider the possibility that people simply may not like her. But one thought did strike me in reading this. One of the NOW leaders tells the story that she was wearing a Hillary sticker in a hotel and a man came up to her and said, “Ah, come on. A woman’s place is in the kitchen.” I’m not sure I believe the story, but let’s say it’s true. Maybe what it means is this: There are people who still believe this. When I travel around conservative Christian circles, it’s commonly held that a woman’s place is not in leadership. This is true even for modern, highly educated conservative evangelicals. In my book, I focus on a couple of highly successful young career-minded women who are facing this dilemma—work or cede your life to your new husband and family. Basically, they all choose the latter. This makes this “ism” different from “racism.” No conservative Christian would argue anymore that the black man needs to be kept down. But they do have a coherent, theological, philosophical explanation for why a woman’s place is fundamentally still in the kitchen. One may disagree, but is this the same as sexism?

Yes, Virginia, it is the same as sexism, even if lots of people believe it and even if religious fundamentalists have a theological justification for it — kinda like how it was still racism when the Mormon church had a theological basis for denying membership priesthood to black people. “Sexism” isn’t rare, and it doesn’t have to be uncommon to be identified — and the idea that women should be in the kitchen instead of in leadership positions is sexism a first-grader could understand.

Glad to see Slate has hired women with a basic understanding of women’s issues to write for their women’s issues blog.

Pantysniffing former Kansas AG loses another one; still determined to get his nose in the drawers of Kansas women

A grand jury in Johnson County, Kansas, has refused to indict a Planned Parenthood clinic in Overland Park on charges that it violated restrictions on the procedure.

Abortion opponents, through a petition, had forced the court to convene the panel and investigate the clinic in Overland Park, Kan., to determine whether it violated laws on parental notice and informed consent.

They also wanted to see whether the clinic was illegally trafficking in fetal tissue.

”We are once again vindicated, as we have been any time there is an objective review of these allegations,” said Peter Brownlie, president and chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri. ”The jury investigated all of the allegations that were in the petition that resulted in the grand jury being formed, and they found no evidence of any wrongdoing.”

Said Planned Parenthood attorney Pedro Irigonegaray: ”It gives me great faith in the justice system and the people of Kansas.”

That’s the good news. The bad news is, this isn’t over, not by a longshot. The District Attorney in Johnson County is none other than Phill Kline, infamous for his pantysniffing fishing expedition into the sex lives of Kansas’ women. While he served as Attorney General for the state, he reinterpreted state law to require a wide variety of medical and school personnel to report all instances of “intimate contact” between consenting teens (even though he had a hard time defining just what comprised such contact, and got soundly smacked down by the federal court for his trouble); filed a lawsuit against the governor trying to ban the use of Medicaid funds to pay for abortions; attempted (unsuccessfully) to get the private medical records of thousands of women who had had late-term abortions in Dr. George Tiller’s clinic in Wichita, one of the few that is authorized to conduct the procedure — with the justification that he was looking for instances where the clinic failed to report statutory rape. Happily, Kansas voters had enough of Kline and bounced him in the last election — though he wound up as Johnson County’s district attorney, from which position he promptly launched an investigation of Planned Parenthood in Overland Park.

And defeat? Defeat means nothing to Kline and his ilk. When they lose, they simply persist; if persistence doesn’t pay off, they change tactics. And of course, if the law won’t help them out, they’re perfectly happy to engage in terrorism.

Do these sound like people who have accepted defeat?

”Planned Parenthood cannot claim they are free of any indictment, because the full evidence never reached the grand jury,” said Tim Golba, spokesman for the LIFE Coalition, the anti-abortion collaborative that petitioned for the grand jury.

The jurors issued a subpoena in January seeking the records of 16 clinic patients, but Planned Parenthood feared information in the records would identify the patients.

Johnson County District Attorney Phill Kline, who has started his own investigation into Planned Parenthood, asked District Judge Kevin Moriarty to make the agency and its clinic abide by the subpoena…

Cheryl Sullenger, spokeswoman for Operation Rescue, one of the groups in the LIFE Coalition, said she wasn’t surprised by the grand jury’s decision. Jurors didn’t appear to seriously investigate all of the allegations, she said.

”We’ve been considering a second grand jury effort,” Sullenger said. ”That’s something that’s on the table right now.”

Not that the people at Planned Parenthood are surprised:

Brownlie said he expected abortion opponents to claim the grand jury’s work was tainted.

”Any time a decision is different from the one they want, they will claim it’s because of some nefarious doings,” he said. ”The only people who continue to insist that there’s criminal wrongdoing are people who have a political agenda.”

UPDATE: As Thomas reminded me, Kline was caught out last fall — seems that he doesn’t actually live in Johnson County, which might be a wee bit of a problem for him, seeing as how he’s supposed to live in the county in which he is DA. Whoops.

PETA misogyny strikes again

This time with a naked pregnant woman in a cage.

I’m sympathetic to the argument that sexualized stunts get attention. Fine. But really, PETA, why do you always have to use women’s bodies to make your point? A major feminist critique of advertising in general is the fact that images of women serve as stand-ins for sex itself, leading to a greater cultural understanding of sex as something that women both “have” (and that men are trying to get) and physically embody. That’s incredibly problematic — and (perhaps ironically), it works itself into the way that meat-eating is masculinized and vegetarianism is feminized and de-valued (just read Carol Adams, since she explains this better than I can).

Animal liberation theory does intersect with feminist theory, and our cultural understanding of animals and food (and animals as food, and women-as-meat) is heavily gendered. But PETA is promoting animal rights at the expense of women’s rights — and that’s not only simplistic, but it’s bad for everyone involved.

If you want to draw attention to the plight of animals by humanizing them, go for it. But you don’t have to de-humanize women in the process.

Image below the fold.

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