Misogyny – Page 29

Need a little spark in your marriage? Try a little gender-role revanchism!

Gah. In an otherwise fairly non-objectionable article about couples who never really talked about sex or made it a real priority experiencing periods of sexlessness, CNN quotes this bit of advice from sex therapist Laura Berman:

Berman offers at least one reason to resolve unsatisfying love lives: “Often, when you’re not having sex, your empathy and ability to connect is lower, and it’s easier to have conflict,” she says. “It amplifies (marital) problems.”

At the Berman Center in Chicago, she counsels couples on repairing their sex lives. Some advice:

• Try traditional gender roles: Men may become more sexually assertive if they feel more in control, and women may feel more desire for a mate with newfound machismo. “You don’t have to get his slippers,” explains Berman. “You just have to give him some control.” She suggests a date where the man chooses everything — her clothes, the restaurant, the food — as a starting point.

Being equals is soooooo unsexy. Remember, ladies, it’s your fault the marriage is sexless, because not letting your man control you, down to choosing what you wear, makes the baby Jesus cry. Or at least makes his wee-wee soft. And if you don’t let him control what you wear, what you eat and what you do in bed, then it’s your fault that he and his wee-wee take up with some other woman who will.

Or, you know, maybe you could learn to talk about sex and learn to ask for what you want:

• Talk about it: Couples also would benefit from simply communicating with their partners about what they want in bed. “There is no secret to hot sex,” says Klein. “Sexy lingerie and dinners out are no substitute for an honest conversation about sex.”

Is it just me, or does it seem that these two pieces of advice contradict each other? I would guess that the kind of people who are heavily invested with traditional gender roles aren’t going to be comfortable talking about sex.

Thanks to Jen for passing this along.

Come on, ladies! Don’t be so humorless. Can’t you take a joke?

So says John Pomfret of the WaPo, who’s receiving a spanking over the latest dribblings from Charlotte Allen. Even Ed Morrissey, writing at Hot Air — neither of which are known for their pro-feminist stance — didn’t miss the abject woman-hating in the piece:

Bobby Riggs during his intentionally provocative promotion of his tennis match with Billy Jean King couldn’t have written this with a straight face. Allen blithely consigns the entire gender into second-class status and advises women to give up their dreams of wealth and power, and instead stick to chick flicks, chick lit, and classic chick roles as mothers and homemakers. That, she promises, will make everyone happier.

What a load of absolute nonsense. Women succeed every day in every arena. If Allen feels a little dim, that may have more to do with her own talents that those of her fellow females. It almost sounds like an excuse. I couldn’t help failing, kind sir; I’m only a woman!

Pomfret is now furiously backpedaling. It was a joke, ladies! Can’t you take a joke?

“If it insulted people, that was not the intent,” Outlook editor John Pomfret told me this morning, calling the piece “tongue-in-cheek.”

Pomfret said that Allen pitched the idea to him as a riff on women fainting at Obama rallies, and similarities with the Beatles…

“She wanted to make fun of this issue,” Pomfret said. “A lot of people have taken it very seriously.”

Hey, remember what I said earlier about this kind of acceptance of blatant misogyny in our nation’s mainstream media having nothing at all to do with the dearth of women on the op-ed pages, except as instruments with which to tear down women as a whole? That goes double for the failure of the WaPo to attract and retain female readers, I’m sure. Wholly unconnected!

In the meantime, keep checking in with Eschaton, where Atrios is dropping gems like this today:

Next Week In John Pomfret’s Washington Post Outlook Section

When she says no, she really means yes.

ETA: Some of Allen’s greatest hits here.

The mainstream media hates women

How else to explain a weekend in which the Washington Post gives space on its op-ed page to Charlotte Allen to complain about how stupid women are; the LA Times does the same for “humorist” Joel Stein (with a soupcon of anxiety about his dick falling off because women can vote, to be added to his anxiety about his dick falling off due to women’s Halloween costumes); Bill Maher sat around on HBO with Christopher Hitchens and Harry Shearer (oh, you disappoint me, Harry) complaining about what need buckets women are; and the New York Times still employs Maureen Dowd.

And I’m sure the fact that these opinions are aired in mainstream outlets has nothing at all to do with the dearth of women on op-ed pages. Well, except for those engaged in the ignoble pursuit of tearing down other women.

So will re-claiming my status as a college freshman get me out of these law school loans?

I know the “second virginity” craze is nothing new, but the whole thing strikes me as ridiculous and sad enough to merit comment.

Virginity fetishism is at heart about the idea that women are objects, and that those objects become less valuable when they’ve been “used” by someone else. A shiny new hymen on your wedding day is, apparently, the Bentley of the Religious Right — a fairly rare acquisition and therefore a major status symbol. The fact that it’s attached to an actual person is less of an issue. Just look at how religious groups discuss reclaiming “lost” virginity:

“Have you already unwrapped the priceless gift of virginity and given it away?” asks the Web site for the Pregnancy Resource Center of Northeast Ohio, where Watts began working part-time after she reclaimed her virginity. “Do you now feel like ‘second-hand goods’ and no longer worthy to be cherished? Do you ever wish you could re-wrap it and give it only to your future husband or wife? Guess what…? You can decide today to commit to abstinence, wrapping a brand-new gift of virginity to present to your husband or wife on your wedding night.”

Because a husband or wife who thinks you should be a virgin until marriage is the last person who’s going to think you’re second-hand goods, right?

Some Numbers.

An Afghan woman at a protest in Kabul against the death sentence passed on the student Pervez Kambaksh for downloading allegedly blasphemous material.

–87: The percentage of Afghan women who report suffering physical abuse, half of which is sexual.
–60: The percentage of marriages in Afghanistan that are forced.
–57: The percentage of Afghan brides who are under the age of 16.
–88: The illiteracy rate amongst Afghan women.
–5: The percentage of Afghan girls attending secondary school.
–1 in 9: The number of women in Afghanistan who die in childbirth — that’s the highest in the world, alongside Sierra Leone.
–1 Million: The number of Afghan widows who have no rights, including no right to work — leaving them to beg on the street.
–£800 to £2,000: The price of a child bride if Afghanistan.

And Afghanistan is the only country where the suicide rate is higher for women than for men.

Just a few things to think about today, and every time you hear politicians talk about how we “liberated” Afghanistan and Afghan women.

Gardasil for Boys

Apparently the idea of vaccinating boys against HPV is a tad controversial — even though the vaccine is already approved for girls.

At issue is the fact that HPV is a major risk factor for cervical cancer, which women can get but boys can’t. So parents are wondering why they have to vaccinate their boys for a “girl’s disease.” What the article doesn’t get to until halfway down the second page is that the strains of HPV prevented by Gardasil are the ones that cause genital warts, penile cancer and anal cancer — and I’m relatively confident that boys can get all of those. But that doesn’t stop the reporter from writing an entirely sexist, condescending and obnoxious hit piece about vaccinating boys against HPV:

HOW cool are those Gardasil Girls? Riding horses, flinging softballs, bashing away on drum sets: on the television commercials, they are pugnacious and utterly winning. They want to be “One Less,” they chant — one less victim of cervical cancer. Get vaccinated with Gardasil, they urge their sisters. Protect yourselves against the human papillomavirus, or H.P.V., which causes cervical cancer.

But someone’s missing from this grrlpower tableau.

Ah, that would be Gardasil Boy.

Has Jan Hoffman never seen a pharmaceutical commercial in his/her life? They all show shiny happy people going kayak or mountain-climbing or doing whatever else they couldn’t do before they had medicine to treat genital herpes / arthritis / heart disease / whatever. That’s the schtick. Although I suppose it’s more fun to mock the “Gardasil Girl” than it is to deal with the actual issues; and it’s more interesting to paint a picture of a controversial vaccine than to recognize that most people are a-ok with preventing cancer.

I understand the hesitancy to give your kids a new vaccine. I haven’t gotten the HPV vaccine largely because I can’t afford it and it’s not covered by my insurance, but I’ve certainly weighed the potential risks of getting injected with a relatively new product, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me nervous. That said, I tend to be personally averse to medical treatment in general, so it’s more a weird individual thing about me being a paranoid scaredy-cat than it is about Gardasil. And at the end of the day, watching more than one friend go through HPV-related health problems has convinced me that the vaccine is the way to go.

Point being, I understand parents’ hesitancy. But vaccines aren’t just about your own personal health — they’re about public health. And that understanding is missing in this piece.

Thankfully, a few parents seem to get it:

That’s good enough for some mothers. “If there was a vaccine I could take that would get rid of prostate cancer, why wouldn’t I?” said Lisa Lippman, a Manhattan real estate broker with three sons. “If there was a vaccine that sons could get that would get rid of breast cancer, most parents wouldn’t hesitate. But cervical cancer is the ‘sex cancer.’ ”

Unfortunately, the reporter doesn’t — and s/he plays right into sexist stereotypes by only talking to mothers, as if moms are the only family members who care about their children’s health.

The article is kind of infuriating, but this quote was my absolute favorite:

A few prescient pediatricians are already laying a foundation. The other day, during Cathy Anderson’s 11-year-old son’s annual check-up, the pediatrician mentioned that Gardasil might become available for boys.

“He talked about taking responsibility for controlling a communicable disease,” said Mrs. Anderson, a stay-at-home mother in West Lafayette, Ind. “My first reaction was: ‘Well, that makes sense.’ Then I told my son he wouldn’t have to worry about the disease, because he wouldn’t be having sex until he’d been married for a long time.”

So now you don’t just have to wait until you’re married, you have to wait until you’ve been married for a long time. Beautiful.

Lots of diseases disproportionately affect one community or another. But when those diseases are deadly, and when we find a way to prevent them, we do. This isn’t about “vaccinating boys for girls’ sake;” this is about a public health issue that we need to nip in the bud. And the fact that “lots of women die of this disease and almost all of them get it from men” isn’t enough reason to vaccinate boys too is a pretty good indicator of just how misogynist and backwards our society can be.

Finally, why the fuck is this article in the Styles section?

What she said

I had plans for writing a long post on why withholding your vote in November is a perfectly rational, defensible and principled stance if you’re offended by racist dogwhistles coming out of the Clinton camp or sexist dogwhistles coming from Obama. Why? Because it’s not the voter’s job to just suck it up and vote for someone who hasn’t worked for your vote; it’s the candidate’s job to make sure that he or she doesn’t turn off voters. And all the bullying about handing the election to McCain and losing Roe v. Wade isn’t going to change that one simple fact.

But then I saw that Portly Dyke has pretty much said everything I wanted to say, and said it better. So go read her post.

How Sexism Works

So true.

via.

Thanks to all the readers who sent this on.

Dogwhistles

The whole point of dogwhistles in politics is to send a message to a target audience that goes over the heads of most people, because those people might be offended or turned off if you came out and said it. One way the going-over-the-heads-of-most-people bit is accomplished is to speak in code, such as when George Bush suddenly blurted out something about the Dred Scott decision during a debate with John Kerry, in response to a question about abortion. A whole lot of people were scratching their heads about that one, but he had a target audience, and they understood exactly what he meant:

If elected to another term, I promise that I will nominate Supreme Court Justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade.

Bush couldn’t say that in plain language, because it would freak out every moderate swing voter in the country, but he can say it in code, to make sure that his base will turn out for him. Anti-choice advocates have been comparing Roe v. Wade with Dred Scott v. Sandford for some time now. There is a constant drumbeat on the religious right to compare the contemporary culture war over abortion with the 19th century fight over slavery, with the anti-choicers cast in the role of the abolitionists.

Another way to send your message to your target audience while maintaining deniability is to go the wink-wink-nudge-nudge route, where you know that many people not in your target audience will pick up your meaning, but because you’ve crafted your statement to be facially innocuous, anyone who objects will be accused of being hysterical, hypersensitive, or overreacting.

The second option is the one that Barack Obama went with when he said the following while campaigning in Wisconsin:

This is, I understand Senator Clinton periodically when she is feeling down launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal.

And that’s exactly what’s happened — all over the place, when anyone has objected to this statement as a sexist dogwhistle, they’ve been accused of overreacting. Of trivializing *real* sexism. Of seeing things that aren’t really there. Of stretching. Of ignoring context. Of simply being in the tank for Clinton (pay no attention to that double standard behind the curtain! The fact that some of the most vehement denials of sexism are coming from Obama supporters is mere coincidence!).

In other words, of being the exact same sort of overemotional and inconsequential person that Obama’s dogwhistle made Clinton out to be. Of being someone whose opinions and perceptions don’t matter, because everyone knows how women are.

Melissa McEwan has made the point many times that Obama has been praised for his rhetorical skills, for his ability to craft a message using just the right words. On the surface, this statement appears to be saying merely that Clinton goes negative when she’s behind. But then you look at the words he chose to make that statement:

Periodically.

Feeling down.

And you have to ask yourself: Why did he choose those words to make this point? And the answer, unfortunately, is to send the message that Clinton is a big girly girl ruled by her hormones.

This isn’t the first time he or one of his surrogates has used this kind of coded language to remind voters that Clinton is a woman. Among other things, he’s dismissed Clinton’s experience in the White House as having tea; he’s said that Clinton’s “claws come out” ; said during a debate, “You’re likeable enough, Hillary”; and his campaign co-chair implied that she was crying over her looks (among other things, but the important point is that she cries like a girl).

Clinton was called out for racial dogwhistles, and rightly so. But a lot of the same people who were on her for that are pooh-poohing the sexist dogwhistles that Obama’s been employing, or ignoring from his own people. He’s also benefited from the kind of misogyny that’s been aimed at Clinton by the mainstream media, in the same way that all men benefit from misogyny: he doesn’t have to spend his time defending against attacks like that, so he can concentrate on his own message rather than responding to that of his detractors.

And it would be so easy for him to decide that he wasn’t going to win that way, too. 50% (or more, in the case of Democrats) of the electorate is made up of women. Why not refrain from the sexist dog whistles, or denounce the media’s misogynist treatment of Clinton? If you’re going to position yourself as being above it all, why not actually *be* above it all? If you’re going to campaign on a message of change and of progressivism, why not be an agent of change and say, no, I don’t need to win this way, that change starts right here? You’d think that such a message would only help him with the kind of voters who are leaning to Clinton just because they’re sick of the misogyny.

Unless your real audience is the kind of frat-boy voter who knows all about what those women are like. Periodically.

The Good Old Days

While state senators are pining for the good ol’ days of easy rape and conservative Texas communities are doing their darndest to shame and punish young women who “choose life,” a Colorado representative is letting teen moms know exactly how he feels about them:

“In my parents’ day and age, they were sent away. They were shunned. They were called what they are … There’s no sense of shame today. Society condones it … They’re sluts. And I don’t mean just the women. I mean the men, too.”

Ah yes, the good old days when women were socially shunned and sent away upon becoming pregnant (and, sorry, but the young slutty men were never shunned or sent away). I’m sure that never contributed to increased abortion rates among young women. I’m sure that young women who become pregnant today will “choose life” when “pro-life” politicians tell them they’re whores who should be ostracized and shipped off.

But this is the “pro-life” movement for you — they rail against abortion, but then take every step possible to (1) make preventing unwanted pregnancy more difficult, and (2) punish and harm women who have kids. They aren’t just hostile to abortion rights; they’re hostile to women, and to women being able to make their own decisions.

Oh, but he “apologized:”

“I certainly could have had a better choice of words,” said Liston. “That’s the word that inadvertently came to my mind.”

Funny, because reading this, “self-righteous ass” is the term that inadvertently came to my mind. All my most genuine apologies for that.