Schizoid Blogging

I'm beginning to separate into two personalities. One is a horribly rude blogger, trying desperately to turn the Democratic party into a party of rabid extremism and thereby digging its grave for the next hundred years. This one, with fangs reaching from here to Arkansas, can't be listened to, can't be ignored, must be ridiculed. This is the one who gets her kicks from imagining the slaughtering of American soldiers in Iraq. Or so Rush Limbaugh tells his faithful ditto-heads.

Then there is the other personality. The middly-mudly one, the one who doesn't blog enough on fisting or anal sex or anything really interesting, who isn't really feminist enough or angry enough or capable of building real internet communities. Who isn't doing enough grassroots work, isn't getting people involved in politics. Who is too much a wimp.

One of these is an externally constructed persona, the other one is a product of my internal videos. The two are right now duking it out in the backyard, using garbage can lids as shields and rakes and spades as the weapons. Henrietta the Hound is watching it all from the porch and she's bored because she's a much more skilled fighter than either one of my fragmented personas.

There is no point to this post, just some selfish whining. I find selfish whining a very healthy thing to do once in a while, and especially at times when I see the mythology of bloggers being created. Like right now.

The Weaker Sex

Some years ago I got a beg letter from an organization promoting more research into women's health. The letter explained in great detail how fragile and sickly women were, and I was inspired enough (read: mad as hell) to actually write them a letter giving lots of health statistics about the fact that women, on average, live quite a bit longer than men, on average.

Now Marianne Legato has taken this idea to the extreme in the New York Times, and on Father's Day, of all things. She writes:

WHEN I say I study gender-specific medicine, most people assume I mean women's health. Patients ask me, "Do you take care of men too?"

I may be partly to blame for the confusion: in the years since the revolutionary 1985 report on women's health from the United States Public Health Service, I — along with many of my colleagues — have tried to atone for the fact that for so long the majority of diseases that afflicted both genders were studied exclusively in men.

Over the past two decades, we've radically revised how we conduct medical research and take care of our female patients. And we've made valuable discoveries about how gender helps determine vulnerability to illness and, ultimately, the timing and causes of death. But I now believe that we doctors and researchers may have focused too much on women.

What emerges when one studies male biology in a truly evenhanded way is the realization that from the moment of conception on, men are less likely to survive than women. It's not just that men take on greater risks and pursue more hazardous vocations than women. There are poorly understood — and underappreciated — vulnerabilities inherent in men's genetic and hormonal makeup. This Father's Day, we need to rededicate ourselves to deepening our knowledge of male physiology.

Men's troubles begin during the earliest days in the womb. Even though there are more male than female embryos, there are more miscarriages of male fetuses. Industrial countries are also witnessing a decline in male to female birth ratios, and we don't know why.

Some scientists have argued that the probability of a male child declines as parents (especially fathers) age. Still others have cited the prevalence of pesticides, which produce more birth defects in male children.

Even when a boy manages to be born, he's still behind the survival eight ball: he is three to four times more likely than girls to have developmental disorders like autism and dyslexia; girls learn language earlier, develop richer vocabularies and even hear better than boys. Girls demonstrate insight and judgment earlier in adolescence than boys, who are more impulsive and take more risks than their sisters. Teenage boys are more likely to commit suicide than girls and are more likely to die violent deaths before adulthood.

As adults, too, men die earlier than women. Twice as many men as women die of coronary artery disease, which manifests itself a decade earlier in men than women; when it comes to cancer, the news for men is almost as bad. Women also have more vigorous immune systems than men: of the 10 most common infections, men are more likely to have serious encounters with seven of them.

While depression is said to be twice as frequent in women as in men, I'm convinced that the diagnosis is just made more frequently in women, who show a greater willingness to discuss their symptoms and to ask for help when in distress. Once, at a dinner party, I asked a group of men whether they believed men were depressed as often as women, but were simply conditioned to be silent in the face of discomfort, sadness or fear. "Of course!" replied one man. "Why do you think we die sooner?"

You know what? I feel as angry about this reverse take on the relative health of the sexes, and the reason for my anger in both cases is the same one: Discussions like these may or may not be the springboard for better health research, but they certainly will be used to perpetuate the status quo of power imbalances between the sexes.

It's pretty obvious how an article explaining the weakness and fragility of women can be used that way: Women must be protected from the hurly-burly of jobs and power and political debates. Someone else must decide for them, someone else must regulate their lives so that they will stay healthy. Or so that at least their womb and ovaries will stay healthy.

But the reverse story can lead to the exactly same conclusion. Don't believe me? Here's Legato on that very topic:

Considering the relative fragility of men, it's clearly counterintuitive for us to urge them, from boyhood on, to cope bravely with adversity, to ignore discomfort, to persevere in spite of pain and to accept without question the most dangerous jobs and tasks we have to offer. Perhaps the reason many societies offer boys nutritional, educational and vocational advantages over girls is not because of chauvinism — it's because we're trying to ensure their survival.

It's like that old joke we used tell about communism when I was a tiny goddess: My doughnut is my doughnut. Your doughnut is my doughnut. - Not a very good joke, but it shows the odd way any differences between men and women are obvious explanations for male dominance. It doesn't matter what way the differences would go.

None of this should be intended to read that I don't care about men's possible fragility, compared to us stoic and almost-unkillable women. I do care. Good research in the field is much encouraged, and we might also do something about all those wars that still kill men disproportionately. Also the murders and car accidents which pick out young men more often than young women.

But Legato is exaggerating some of the findings to make her point. For example, there are still more boys than girls being born, even in the industrialized countries. We should remember that when interpreting the sad description of the difficulties that boys have in becoming born in the first place.

The question of depression rates by sex is interesting. I remember reading a study on depression among the Amish sect in the United States. It suggested that the rates were fairly equal by sex, whereas the general consensus is that women are much more likely to suffer from depressive illness. One suggested explanation for the findings among the Amish was that the Amish don't self-medicate with alcohol and that for some reason there is no cultural ban for men to say that they are depressed. Both these factors might disguise male depression in the wider American context. But this was just one study and I can't recollect whether it was well done or not.

We clearly need good research on these issues and probably also programs that support seeking help earlier among men. But I still don't like this current trend of thinking about all of us as just simply generic examples of "male" or "female". A good female friend of mine died young and another woman I knew committed suicide. I had a great-uncle who died at ninety-nine. Programs that would lump all people into treatment groups by sex alone would be as ham-fisted an approach as ignoring the question altogether.

George Bush Answers Questions in Vienna

Ah, the Sacher torte. George Bush is in Vienna and meeting, for a change, journalists which are not of the tame American breed. See how he manages to answer the questions from the wild or feral type:

The question from a British journalist: "President Bush, you've got Iran's nuclear program, you've got North Korea, yet most Europeans consider the United States the biggest threat to global stability. Do you have any regrets about that?"

Bush: "That's absurd. . . . That is the United States is -- we'll defend ourselves, but at the same times we're actively working with our partners to spread peace and democracy. So whoever says that is -- it's just -- that's an absurd statement."

And then later, a follow-up from an Austrian journalist:

Q: "Mr. President, you said this is absurd. But you might be aware that in Europe, the image of America is still falling and dramatically in some areas.

"Let me give you some numbers. In Austria, in this country, only 14 percent of the people believe that the United States -- what they are doing is good for peace; 64 percent think that it is bad.

"In the United Kingdom, your ally, there are more citizens who believe that the United States policy under your leadership is helping to destabilize the world than Iran.

"So my question to you is why do you think that you've failed so badly to convince Europeans, to win their heads and hearts and minds?"

Bush: "Well, yeah, I thought it was absurd for people to think that we're more dangerous than Iran.

"I -- you know, it's -- we're a transparent democracy. People know exactly what's on our mind. We debate things in the open. We've got a legislative process that's active.

"Look, people didn't agree with my decision on Iraq. And I understand that. For Europe, September the 11th was a moment; for us it was a change of thinking.

"I vowed to the American people I would do everything I could to defend our people, and will. I fully understood that the longer we got away from September the 11th, more people would forget the lessons of September the 11th. But I'm not going to forget them.

"And I understand some of the decisions I've made are controversial. But I made them in the best interest of our country and, I think, in the best interests of the world.

"I believe when you look back at this moment, people will say, It was right to encourage democracy in the Middle East.

"I understand some people think that can't work. I believe in the universality of freedom. Some don't. I'm going to act on my beliefs so long as I'm the president of the United States.

"Some people say, 'It's OK to condemn people to tyranny.' I don't believe it's OK to condemn people to tyranny, particularly those of us who live in the free societies.

"And so I understand. And I'll try to do my best to explain to the Europeans that, on the one hand, we're tough when it comes to the terror. On the other hand, we're providing more money than ever before in the world's history for HIV/AIDS on the continent of Africa.

"I'll say, on the one hand, we're going to be tough when it comes to terrorist regimes who harbor weapons.

"On the other hand, we'll help feed the hungry.

"I declared Darfur to be a genocide because I care deeply about those who have been afflicted by these renegade bands of people who are raping and murdering.

"And so I will do my best to explain our foreign policy. On the one hand, it's tough when it needs to be. On the other hand, it's compassionate.

"And we'll let the polls figure out -- you know, people say what they want to say. But leadership requires making hard choices based upon principle and standing by the decisions you make. And that's how I'm going to continue to lead my country.

"Thank you for your question."

"Leadership requires making hard choices based upon principle and standing by the decisions you make." Hmm. I learned two things from this: First, Bush has watched too many cowboy movies and not enough about the last czar of all Russia. Second, we are going to go over the cliff any day now, because we will not veer from the course he has selected. Sigh. - Did you notice how he talks about "leading my country". Imperial tones. Ta-Ram-Pam-Pah.

Virginity or Death - A Book Review

Virginity or Death! And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time is the new collection of Katha Pollitt's columns from the Nation magazine, spanning the time period from 2001 to early 2006. Go and buy it now. I did, though I asked the sales clerk at the local bookstore to "give me virginity or give me death" and his eyes bulged out a little.

I'm not an unbiased reviewer of Pollitt's work, because I love her writing. I wrap myself in it as if it were a silk blanket, I gorge on it as if it were the best chocolate in the whole world, I inhale it as if all the secret and luxurious spices were found it it. That last sentence shows that, alas, I'm no Pollitt myself. The idea I wanted to reach was that for me reading Katha's writing is such a sensual experience that it wouldn't matter very much what she writes.

But she writes good stuff, mostly, and stuff that very few other commenters in the mainstream print media cover. Not only is she one of the few out-of-closet feminists out there but she is also one of the few writers who takes women seriously as a topic. Of course, these two things are pretty much the same.

You should buy this new collection even if you have read every one of the columns before, because of two things: First, the Introduction alone is worth the price of $13.95. Here Pollitt writes about the current regime:

The fecklessness of the current regime astonishes me, I admit. Hurricane Katrina displayed to the whole world the inability of the administration to do the bedrock job of government, which is to ensure public safety and protect people from catastrophe, while simultaneously revealing what should definitely not come as a surprise but somehow did to many: the deep poverty of the Gulf region and its racial nature. Surely -- after botching the rescue in full view of the whole world, after Bush's unfortunate use of Trent Lott's beach house as the synecdoche for the towns and neighborhoods destroyed by storm and flood, and his mother's even more clueless remark that living in the Houston Astrodome was "working well" for the displaced, who were "underprivileged anyway" -- surely, I thought, the Administration would pour on steam to show what a good job it would do to get the evacuees back on their feet. I forgot for a moment that this was the same administration that had shown nothing but contempt for professional expertise, whose answers to every question of public policy was tax cuts, and whose response to every crisis has been to leave people to their own devices, down to expecting soldiers on active duty in Iraq to supply their own body armor, like medieval knights.

And here she writes about the media treatment of feminism:

And speaking of babies, what about feminism? If you follow the media, the women's movement is well into the third decade of the longest funeral in history ("Is Women's Lib a Passing Fad?" New York Times, 1972). A torrent of books, articles, and popular entertainment tells women they don't really want equality, and if they get it they will only be miserable, because what makes women happy is nurturing men and children, or even, as a recent New York Times front-page story suggested, quitting their jobs -- their empty, materialistic, meaningless jobs -- to move back into their childhood bedrooms and tend their aging parents ("Forget the Career. My Parents Need Me at Home," November 24, 2005). When was the last time you saw a mass-market film with a "career woman" character who wasn't a bitch on wheels? In which the diamond-in-the-rough working-class beauty was a genius who needed a scholarship, not a stripper who needed a husband? As for sex, any number of writers, from right-wing Harvard political scientist Harvey Mansfield and novelist Tom Wolfe on down, are eager to warn young women of the horrors of the hookup. (Why young women should care what these septuagenerians think about their sex lives is a question not easily answered.)

This discussion gets even more interesting, but I'm not going to give it all away.

Second, it's fascinating to see the columns in time order, starting from the earliest pre-911 ones and reading through to almost the current time. We can observe the impact of the softly-creeping veiled fundamentalism on our lives much more clearly in a context like this. It's a little similar to those films which speed up the opening of a flower.

I almost feel like an infomercial here. Must add something critical. Well, for one thing, I had to pay for the book to review it, though I didn't ask for a free copy, either. And sometimes I disagree with Pollitt because I'm more middle-of-the-road in some political areas and less capable of appreciating irony in others. I also suspect that she'd kick my butt quite admirably if I ever really angered her. Which isn't really a criticism.

Horror

Did you stay up during the night, staring into the darkness, wondering, perhaps hoping or even praying that these kidnapped soldiers, these children, were already dead, past the point where they would feel anything at all? I did that. That we have come to a place where the best thing we can see is to pray for a quick death. And a place where it seemed totally wrong to write about any of this and every bit as wrong not to write about it. Where anything I could say would seem wrong, supporting the wrong political ideas, ignoring all the other horrors (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo), just wrong. Yet somehow not to write about this horror seemed wrong, too. Everything has become politics, including the horrors from both sides. And even saying that appears to imply some sort of equality in horror. There is no such thing about horrors.

May those who have experienced horror and are still alive and those who love them and loved those who died in horrors, may all these have peace.

Justice Wingnut Style

Louisiana has joined with South Dakota as one of those places which worries about rapists' fatherhood rights:

Louisiana Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco signed into law a ban on most abortions that would be triggered if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns its 1973 ruling legalizing the procedure, a spokesman said on Saturday.

The ban would apply to all abortions, even in cases of rape or incest, except when the mother's life is threatened. It is similar to a South Dakota law that has become a battleground in the abortion debate.

The law will not come to force until Roe vs. Wade is overturned.

Which is probably just a question of time, as the new injections of wingnuts into the Supreme Court are already bringing rewards to the conservatives:

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the government can block development on hundreds of millions of acres of wetlands, even on land miles away from waterways, as long as regulators prove a connection to the waterways.

Chief Justice John Roberts, in his first major environmental case, came up one vote short of dramatically limiting the scope of the landmark Clean Water Act.

At the same time, property rights advocates won a small victory with a new test, authored by moderate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, for determining what land can be regulated.

Virtually any land in America would be covered under the government's interpretation of the law, Roberts and the court's other three conservatives complained in an opinion.

The court's four liberal members said the conservatives would have opened up sensitive wetlands to polluters.

...

Antonin Scalia led the conservative bloc, including Roberts, Justice
Clarence Thomas and new Justice Samuel Alito.

The conservative views tend to favor the owners, the business, the conservative church, whites and men, and those will be the groups that will gain in the near future. Note how both baby Justices, Roberts and Alito, are now nicely nesting under the extreme wing?

How Feminist Are You?

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Everybody Hates Linda?

Last December Linda Hirshman wrote an interesting (and incendiary) piece in the American Prospect on educated women supposedly giving up on this thing called career and returning to a life of housewifery. Now she has come out with a book on the topic: Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World and an article in the Washington Post yesterday. In this article she says:

When I set out to write a book about how the first generation of women to grow up with feminism managed their marriages, I never dreamed I'd wind up the subject of a Web article called "Everybody Hates Linda."

Everybody started hating Linda, apparently, when I published an article in the progressive magazine the American Prospect last December, saying that women who quit their jobs to stay home with their children were making a mistake. Worse, I said that the tasks of housekeeping and child rearing were not worthy of the full time and talents of intelligent and educated human beings. They do not require a great intellect, they are not honored and they do not involve risks and the rewards that risk brings. Oh, and by the way, where were the dads when all this household labor was being distributed? Maybe the thickest glass ceiling, I wrote, is at home.

Okay, I'm judgmental. That's what CBS's Lesley Stahl called me on "60 Minutes." But I'm a philosopher, and it's a philosopher's job to tell people how they should lead their lives. We've been doing so since Socrates. And yet, even though I knew the Greeks made Socrates drink poison, the reaction to my judgment took me by surprise. It turns out that was what people really hated: the judgment. That working women have the better life.

Kapow! I had wandered, it seems, into ground zero of the Mommy Wars. Although I was aware of the stories about women quitting, I did not know what a minefield the subject was. Specifically, I did not know that you can say almost anything about how great it is for a woman to give up her job; standing up for staying at work is the big taboo.

I suspect that Linda likes to strike up some controversy, actually, because that's what happens when you tell people that their life choices are less worthy. And there is a very strong mythology on the side of her critics, the stuff about self-sacrificing women and domestic goddesses. Not to mention the fact that spending time with your own children is a lot more self-actualizing than scrubbing factory floors for a minimum wage, so her arguments, if they apply, apply only to the juicy jobs out there. The ones with power and influence and full of interesting things to do.

And most women don't "opt-out" for good, just as most women probably don't "opt-in" for good. If there are mummy wars then a woman might suddenly find her on the opposite side of the fight. But I hate mommy wars. Because they are part of the wingnuts' policy of divide et impera. As long as women fight over who is the better mommy the Bush administration can cut all the support structures (meager as they are) for women and we have no energy to fight it.

Still, Hirshman has a point in the last sentence of the quote above: " standing up for staying at work is the big taboo." I tend to agree. This decision must be based on something like a woman's children starving if she quits. Otherwise her choice to continue working is subject to any amount of moral ponderings.

Note that none of these moral ponderings apply if it's the father who goes on working when a new baby is born, or even if he turns extra ambitious for promotions at that point. It's just natural, we think, and never wonder if the child will suffer from hardly noticing that there is a father around, except in the form of expensive presents and fancy schools. Selfish? You judge. - I just did a reversal of the message educated women get every month in the United States.

There were things that the old, hairy feminists used to say which are still worth saying about the division of labor between partners, and we don't hear them very often anymore. For example, the partner who stays at home will have less retirement income and fewer good opportunities for a job later on. This means that she or he has a more difficult time leaving a bad marriage than someone who has continued working for money. This, in turn, means that the upper hand in such a marriage could go to the money-earning spouse. It doesn't have to, of course, but there's a reason why it might, and the reason is power and money.

Then there is another old point: That we lose all the skills of those women in the public sector who quit their jobs. We lose the specific education they have and their specific work experiences. We lose women in decision-making positions which they could use to make the world a fairer place for mothers.


The other side of the argument also has very good points: Children need their parents' time and most parents want to spend time with their children. Work is not necessarily more rewarding than spending time with your children. In fact, work is often pretty tedious and tiring.

But then that is sometimes true of children, too. I'm not sure how we got the idea that specializing in one thing only would make people happy, on average. Though there are exceptions to this rule, I believe that most of us need both families and meaningful work to thrive, at least over our lifetimes. It is only women that are asked to choose between these two, and only women who are expected to feel guilt and shame over their choices. And no, you can't escape the guilt and shame by remaining childless, because then the wingnuts tell you that you are causing the population to die out.

Let me return to Linda's arguments to finish this long piece. She says:

And yet, even though I knew the Greeks made Socrates drink poison, the reaction to my judgment took me by surprise. It turns out that was what people really hated: the judgment. That working women have the better life.

I wouldn't make this judgment, because I'm not sure what measures we'd use to compare lives of totally different individuals. But there is a different judgment that has been made for centuries: That it's the work in the marketplace that counts, men's work. Whoever made the money owned everything: the house, the horses, even the children. Never mind the mythology about the valuable work mothers did. Accolades and pretty paintings of angelic mothers with apple-cheeked children never paid old age pensions. Motherhood didn't even get women voting rights in the pre-women's-suffrage era. It was lauded in words and ignored in deeds.

And there is still some of that going. Indeed, a lot of that going. Think of the resources we dedicate to children as opposed to warfare, for example. Think of the prestige of childcare workers (nonexistent) and the way we react to those who suggest that mothering should be paid work (preposterous).

Most old-time feminists still worth reading pointed this all out. It is not that feminists had contempt for stay-at-home mothers, it is that the society had such a contempt where it really counted: when something needed to be done to make those women's lives easier. Indeed, it was the feminists who got Individual Retirement Accounts first extended to cover housewives.

The second wave of feminism, the one from the 1960's and 1970's, wanted to change all the problems they saw in the work-family balance, but they succeeded only partially. It is now somewhat easier for women in the labor force and in the public sector in general, but the division of labor at home and the monetary rewards for parenting are still about as bad as they were forty years ago.

Is it the case that whatever is viewed as men's work gains in prestige and whatever is viewed as women's work falls in prestige? If this is true, then the only long-term solution to getting a better work-family (or work-life) balance for all people is when more men choose to "opt-out", too, when "mothering" becomes parenting.

If this solution strikes you as too far-fetched another might be to institutionalize some rewards of mothering into the system. Take this often heard idea: There are so few women in American politics, because there are so few women in the pipelines which lead to the important jobs, and this, in turn, is caused by women having to care for their children which doesn't give them enough time to do the necessary apprenticeships. Suppose all is true (which it probably isn't). Then what a really family-oriented society would do is this: Put in another pipeline for women who have done all the mothering. Make sure that they get in. Don't just stand there and wring your hands over the facts of life. Likewise for promotions and higher education and so on. In short, stop punishing those who care for the next generation. This might make more fathers interested in the "opt-out" strategy, too.

I could add all sorts of stuff about more daycare and longer parental leaves and so on. But I'd be talking to myself, probably.

Wow. Just Wow.

Click on this link for some laughs. Then you can wonder about the braveness and courage of our president.

The Ten Commandments

You should really watch this video if you already haven't.

Bush's Best Week Ever!

Listen to this:

It's been the kind of week that President Bush and the beleaguered White House have only dreamed about.

A spate of polls now shows a slight rise in public confidence in the war in Iraq after Bush conducted a high-powered summit at Camp David on the Iraq war, made a surprise trip to Baghdad to meet with troops and newly elected Iraqi government leaders, and then returned home to a triumphant Rose Garden news conference.

In addition, Bush's top adviser, Karl Rove, learned he would not face charges related to the 2003 leak of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame.

This may have been the president's best week ever.

I hope that this was meant as a joke, because if it wasn't the alternative reality has truly taken over the so-called liberal media.

Speaking about Iraq, this item of news might be of some interest, given that it applies to the same "best ever week":

The Washington Post has obtained a cable, marked "sensitive," that it says show that just before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, "the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees."

This cable outlines, the Post reported Sunday, "the daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded international zone: harassment, threats and the employees' constant fears that their neighbors will discover they work for the U.S. government."

It's actually far worse than that, as the details publish below indicate, which include references to abductions, threats to women's rights, and "ethnic cleansing."

...

Among the other troubling reports:

--"Personal safety depends on good relations with the 'neighborhood' governments, who barricade streets and ward off outsiders. The central goverhment, our staff says, is not relevant...People no longer trust most neighbors."

--One embassy employee had a brother-in-law kidnapped. Another received a death threat, and then fled the country with her family.

--Iraqi staff at the embassy, beginning in March and picking up in May, report "pervasive" harassment from Islamist and/or militia groups. Cuts in power and rising fuel prices "have diminished the quality of life." Conditions vary but even upscale neighborhoods "have visibly deteriorated" and one of them is now described as a "ghost town."

--Two of the three female Iraqis in the public affairs office reported stepped-up harassment since mid-May...."some groups are pushing women to cover even their face, a step not taken in Iran even at its most conservative." One of the women is now wearing a full abaya after receiving direct threats.

--It has also become "dangerous" for men to wear shorts in public and "they no longer allow their children to play outside in shorts." People who wear jeans in public have also come under attack.

--Fuel lines have grown so long that one staffer spent 12 horus in line on his day off.

Other than that, it's been a very good week. For Bush.

Loose Lips Sink Ships

We are going to lose the Iraq war if we mention any of the reasons that makes us lose it. Got it? Maybe one more repetition would help:

"We do need to do a better job, but it takes time," said Graham, who appeared with Biden on CBS' "Face the Nation." "Zarqawi's death was a sea change. We're now making some progress. If we do shows every Sunday talking about every mistake, we're going to lose this war."

A new psychological approach to fixing problems: just pretend that they don't exist and they will go away. I also doubt that the small number of politics junkies who watch Sunday morning political shows have much to do with the Iraq uprising.

A Sunday Sermonette To Women

It has to be "a sermonette to women" as a woman can't preach to men, according to conservative religious guys. And women can't become bishops in the Episcopalian/Anglican church and still remain Best Friends Forever with the Catholics. This I have learned. Now you can learn it, too, from "the address Cardinal William Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, gave to the Church of England bishops' meeting June 5, on the question of ordaining women as bishops":

On the other hand, it can be academically demonstrated that the rejection of the ordination of women within the tradition was not predicated on contemporary concepts alone but in essence on theological arguments. Therefore it should not be assumed that the Catholic Church will one day revise its current position. The Catholic Church is convinced that she has no authority to do so.
Where and on What Side Does the Anglican Communion Stand?"

Put that in your pipe, all you hairy feminazis, and smoke it. How does it feel to know that you'll never be equal with us penised people? - But of course that is not at all what our dear Kasper meant. Women and men are wholly and holily equal. Just don't try to test that assertion.

You know, this stuff hurts. It hurts that in this great human family of ours it is so necessary to shit on women. To have the family thrive. This definition excludes women but what the heck. Women are used to being told to sacrifice for the greater good, and we have interesting ways of defining "greater good".

This was supposed to be a nice and superior type of a sermonette, with uplifting ideas about self-flagellation for women. But I sinned and fell into the duckpit of despair there for a moment. I will try to do better now, I swear.

One thing I could be is more modest. Modesty is becoming in women. It's an odd virtue as men don't seem to need it. The muslim extremists go on about the modesty of women a lot, and so do the American modesty folks. As far as I can gather, the idea is that if only women were really modest, never blowing their own horn, never revealing a breast or an eyebrow, depending on the culture, then men could be virtuous much more easily. It's the lack of modesty that is the real problem in this world, the lack of proper feminine modesty. I'm not at all sure why men can't be modest, but it seems that either they are so driven by animal lusts that they just can't stop for even the one second that it would take to look elsewhere from an immodest woman or that it's totally unfair to ask men to change anything in their behavior. That's what women are for.

I didn't make any of this up. There is a blog, enchantingly called Modestly, Yours, which addresses these types of topics. A bit of an odd name for a blog. I guess it's meant to be a reference to the way one might end a letter, but it's a teeny-weeny touch titillating.

The posts on that blog are all about how women should be more modest and how to get there. You can find pearls like this one:

I can't say I know much about Ann Coulter. She says some things that seem to make sense to me and the way she says other things makes me almost wish I didn't agree. But I have to ask: What is the deal with the cover of her new book? When I first saw it a few days ago I assumed that the sexy little black dress was a choice by her publishers that she didn't particularly agree with, but then I saw her on the "Today Show" with Matt Lauer and she had on what appeared to be the same outfit. While what I love about Modestyzone is that we don't go into the specifics of exactly what we and what others should wear (we leave that to the ladies at gofugyourself, right?) this is just downright confusing.

Modesty is all about clothes. It's ok to agree with Ann Coulter (who advocates genocide and suggests a baseball bat as the appropriate form of communication with us liberals), but not with her mini-dresses. It's confusing that Ann Coulter says outrageous things while being outrageously dressed? I have a long way to go before I can learn all about female modesty.

The whole modesty movement is linked to Christian fundamentalism, so it's no great surprise that a central pillar of modesty is the idea that women should withhold sex from men until the wedding night. Because nobody would buy the cow if they can get milk without owning one, and cows better carefully plan how they can get bought. Other metaphors that come to mind here are the "excitement of the hunt" which men are denied if the hunted animals suddenly hunt them instead. This worldview gives men very little credit for being adult human beings who can actually control their primal urges. But it gives women no credit for having any primal urges except a kind of sneaky urge to fish for husbands.

To be fair to the modesty folks, many of their commenters are fairly sane. That must have come as a bit of a shock to the ladies who run the blog.

I think that "modesty" is not a very different idea from "sexee". They both tell women that the way to dress is based on the demands of others. Depending on the culture, either you hide that hair or you bare that tit, and in both cases it's someone else's feelings which are hurt. Why not let women decide for themselves how to dress? Like comfortably, healthily and in a way that is fun?

Just as silence never saved anyone, neither will modesty. Look at the women in Saudi Arabia, dressed in the most modest way possible.
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The link to all that modesty is from Pandagon, where Amanda shreds another post on the modesty blog. I was pretty disappointed to find nothing about Modesty Blaise there, by the way.

Happy Fathers' Day

Something funny for today: Go here to find out where I come from. Then read how to tell your children about sex.

Some Plans for This Blog

First, I'm going to update my blogroll in the near future, I swear. Have already started, in fact. If I do only five a day it's not so painful. Why am I such a poor housekeeper? Isn't that supposed to lie deep in my female genes?

Second, I'm always happy to receive donations from those who have more money than they need, especially any wingnuts I have converted to the Way of Light. But there is no guilt in reading me for free. After all, I don't get paid, either. Heh. But more seriously, I'm still breaking even which is good, because I'm having fun most days.

Third, a new series is in the planning stages. It's about the world of Wingnuttia, and this time a serious investigation into what fundamentalists and others on the right lack in their lives which makes them so mad at us. My research so far has included going to a lot of Christian Lady blogs, only to find out that I can sew at least as well and probably cook better, and that this might be why they hate us feminists. Not really. But the idea is to see what their actual arguments are.

Another post will be about the divorce rates in the Bible Belt. I was shocked to find that seventy percent of Oklahoma marriages end up in divorce. Somehow it's very odd to blame us in the far-distant Massachusetts for this, especially us we tend to get divorced a lot less. But this is a very important topic and I hope to get somewhere with it.

Then I'm planning a post on the shallow and decadent culture, and how that has become something the liberals are blamed for when in reality I see almost as much frustration with it from the left as from the right.

You could propose other posts in the series. But I warn you about one of the consequences of not getting paid: I might never do the series if something else crops up. In any case, it won't happen in the next few days.

You can use the comments to make any other requests or scolding or whatever.

Just Possibly A Most Important Theory In The Universe

I fell asleep after reading the Michelle Goldberg interview on the sneaky ways we are all skipping towards an American Taliban, and when I woke up this observation was lying on the very top of all my thought layers, like a newly made egg in a nest. This must mean something, so I will tell you what it is:

Did you ever read books or articles on how the Islamists became so popular in muslim countries over time? What their real attractions to the ordinary people were? If you did, you know that they worked largely through "faith-based initiatives", by offering the health care and the food aid and the schools that the corrupt governments of those countries didn't bother with.

Well, we have gone a step better here in the good ole U.S. of A. We pay the religious extremists from tax money so that they can then look as good to the ordinary Americans as the extremists did in those muslim countries. Don't have enough to eat? Go and ask the church for help! A cousin with drug-addiction? The Christian dominionists will help you! Not the government, note, even though the tax money comes from all sorts of people, including secularists. No, it's the religions that are doing good while the government can't even cope with the aftermaths of hurricanes.

So the possibly most important theory in the universe is that we are in the early stages of Christianization, just as Egypt was in the early stages if Islamization a few decades ago. To see how the future will look just check what's happening in Egypt right now. There are differences, of course, and those differences will make the extreme radical Christians' task harder. But not impossible.

Friday Evening Reading

Please go and read this interview where Michelle Goldberg talks about her book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. It's important.

Friday Lip Blogging

An ad promises to make your lips like this by stuffing them with silicone. I'm sure that you can discuss the feminist, health and other political implications of this, and how it relates to the fellatio post (two posts down). In other words, I'm too knackered to write a longer post on the topic. Or too pooped to pucker, as Americans used to say.

Danger! Blogs Ahead

This opinion piece warns politicians of falling too much in love with blogs. Just look at what happened to Howard Dean! The yell, oh the yell. Had he just gone to the blogs for money and then stayed away with the moderates and other sane people he would not have yelled.

Well, that's my version of the message, but it doesn't veer very much from the real one:

Memo to aspiring Democratic candidates: The blogs can be a good first martini. Don't let them be your second.

As a first martini, left-wing sites like dailykos.com and mydd.com can lift the spirits of a new candidate. They boost confidence and raise some quick campaign cash. These blogs are good for democracy and Democrats, because they force the party to open its primaries to promising outsiders.

As a second martini, though, the blog can be a real problem. All that enthusiasm and love can cloud a candidate's political judgment. The contender starts thinking that these kids represent more voters than they do — and is sucked into left-wing dogma that doesn't play well in the bigger-than-Berkeley world. Even good liberal stances get dressed in a rhetoric that's unbecoming.

After the second martini, a blog-besotted candidate can get sloppy. The hopeful spends too much time around the blogosphere regaling the congregation with what it wants to hear. The Republican foe makes sure that America's bus drivers, janitors and data processors hear the vaguely (or at times overtly) anti-American tone that emerges from some of the radical "critiques."

Anti-American radicals. It's not just our name; it's what we do, to quote a recent recurring commercial on my local Air America station. There's something a little flattering about this; I never thought that I'd be called a radical by anyone ever. I'm the Goddess of Milquetoast. And don't tell me that the author didn't mean me but the powerful lefty blogs. She didn't make that distinction in the piece, and I take whatever excitement I can these days.

But really. To call the blogs anti-American if they criticize George Bush's war lies and the other policies of his administration! How exactly should such criticisms be presented for them not to be labeled anti-American by the Republicans? We might as well just shut up already.

When It Blows It Rains

My meager attempt to tell you that this post is about blowjobs. As Interrobang noted in my comments, blow jobs are suddenly the big conversation topic on feminist blogs. Twisty told us that she doesn't like giving them at all and Amanda shredded Christopher Hitchens's paean to the American blowjob.

I'm going to hang on to Amanda's pigtails and borrow a little from Twisty, too. Hitchens is going to be the dinner tonight. So sit down and enjoy. No, you don't have to kneel, my dear reader.

This might be a good time to get the children out of the room, as I'm going to define a blowjob for you, gentle reader. It consists of one person taking another (male) person's penis in her or his mouth, and then sucking on it and such. If you want to talk about blowjobs without seeming to do so, you call it fellatio. In either case, it's something where the receiver can only be someone with a penis. There is a corresponding form of oral sex where the woman is the receiver of another person's tonguework on her clitoris and labia. Fancy people call it cunnilingus.

The reason for that long explanation is not that any of you would need it. But it delayed getting to the actual topic a little, and I had more time to think what I might dare to write next. Let's start with Hitchens's article.

He begins saying the most astonishing thing about Nabokov's Lolita: that the farewell scene between the protagonists Humbert and "his very own Lolita" is the most tragic thing he can think of (after all, Humbert kidnapped Lolita). He then goes on with the homily to the homely blowjob:

"The magic and might of her own soft mouth … " Erotic poets have hymned it down the ages, though often substituting the word "his." The menu of brothel offerings in ancient Pompeii, preserved through centuries of volcanic burial, features it in the frescoes. It was considered, as poor Humbert well knew, to be worth paying for.

Well worth paying for. Shown in brothel paintings, where women got paid for sex. Hmmm. And note that the American term for fellatio contains the word "job". Something you might not want to do unless you get paid for it.

Hitchens's take on this "job" aspect of fellatio is a very odd one:

Stay with me. I've been doing the hard thinking for you. The three-letter "job," with its can-do implications, also makes the term especially American. Perhaps forgotten as the London of Jack the Ripper receded into the past, the idea of an oral swiftie was re-exported to Europe and far beyond by a massive arrival of American soldiers. For these hearty guys, as many a French and English and German and Italian madam has testified, the blowjob was the beau ideal. It was a good and simple idea in itself. It was valued—not always correctly—as an insurance against the pox. And—this is my speculation—it put the occupied and the allied populations in their place. "You do some work for a change, sister. I've had a hard time getting here."

Dominance and contempt enter the story here, sneaking quietly into the article and settling in a corner, unnoticed, and dominance and contempt have entered the blogosphere with the blowjob, too. Every day I read about politicians "who need kneepads", every day I read irate commenters urging others "to blow them" and "cocksucker" is up there with "motherfucker" as the worst possible insult. Note that all the insults are aimed at the imagined giver of the blowjob,not its (grateful?) receiver.

How can you write as well as Hitchens does and never notice that the Great American Sex Act he lauds is very one-sided? How can he not notice that one party is serviced by the other, that there are men who find the idea of someone kneeling in front of them and sucking on their wee-wee (icky, because pee comes out of it) empowering because they secretly think that giving blowjobs humiliates the giver? It's possible that there are women and men who can orgasm while giving blowjobs, but most people, I suspect, expect something in return for this favor. Hitchens is totally silent about what this something might be. Because sex for him is something that is done to men, for their pleasure? I don't know. But he clearly assumes that the blowjob is a full and complete act of sex in itself, and this would mean that only one person comes.

This is the reason it's called a job, I think, even though it can also be pleasurable to the giver.

There is a difference between the pornographic images of sex and the actual sex people have. What I'm discussing here is really the former, and especially the myths that have grown around blowjobs in recent years, the idea that "servicing" men orally is what all women get off on, so that a quick blowjob in the school bathrooms is regarded as a full sexual act, every bit as fulfilling to the giver as to the receiver.

It's interesting to notice that Hitchens's article on the Great American Sex Act doesn't even mention cunnilingus. The closest he comes to this is a quick reference to sixty-nine (a couple simultaneously engaged in fellatio and cunnilingus). Alas, cunnilingus doesn't qualify as American as apple pie, Nabokov didn't rhapsodize over it and neither did any of the other guy authors Hitchens likes to quote. It's really quite an odd thing: that something as mutual as sex can be converted into an experience not that different from getting the car washed.

Health and Morality

Health and morality are closely linked in the American society. It has something to do with the Puritan roots, I wager. Every few years the sin aspect of poor health habits crops up, and because of that Puritan smell in the air the solutions offered are always fairly punitive. We don't give people carrots (or chocolate) to live healthier lives, we whip their butts sore.

One of the underreported aspects of all the health warnings we get is that they are often taken as licence to interfere in the lives of total strangers. I remember reading a story about a pregnant woman in a bar who was refused the glass of white wine she ordered, because of the Government Health Warning about drinking while pregnant. Never mind that the French and the Italians and the Spaniards have been drinking wine for centuries and don't have countries inhabited by people with the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and never mind that it's actually legal for pregnant women to drink an occasional glass of wine. The health warnings about alcohol and drinking have morphed into something much bigger: the right to morally judge pregnant women's behavior and to even interfere.

Then there is the recent article about breastfeeding in the New York Times, an article which talks about a new campaign urging women to breastfeed, a campaign which seems to turn breastfeeding into yet another moral question. Not a health question, but a moral question. Mothers who don't breastfeed, for whatever reason, even a good medical reason, are bad mothers. They are risking their children's health. There will be helpful bypassers now with wise words of advice to give to every mother who feeds a baby from a bottle, you know, even if the milk in the bottle was pumped from the mother's very own breasts.

The same article doesn't tell us what mothers should do about nonexistent maternity leaves or the problems caused by many people not liking women who lactate in public (one of the reasons for putting breastmilk into a bottle). Presumably "good" mothers just burrow in for four years, never leaving their homes and letting the rest of their families starve for lack of earnings. And these "good" mothers will not complain that they have lost retirement benefits and money and promotion chances on behalf of their children. No. As one commenter on another blog stated, it is the children that were breastfed who should take care of their mothers in later life. So take notice, all you breastfed people out there.

Then there is the guilt of those mothers who can't breastfeed however hard they try. Not only are they failures, compared to all those valiantly suckling women out there, but now it's also ok to judge them as bad people. All whip and no carrot.

I'm sensitive to insensitive health policing because of that morality angle and the angle of offering all busybodies a chance to go around judging other people and feeling smug and helpful about it. I realized just how sensitive I am when I reacted to today's articles about the American Medical Association (AMA) urging large warning labels on high-salt food by feeling unable to breathe. And I don't eat salt at all, really.

Neither do I drink soft drinks or even alcohol (never mind what Echidne might do with her nectar bottles). So where does that reaction come from? I was breastfed, so it couldn't be because of the sins of my mother? No, I think the reason is that buttwhipping again. No carrots for as peons: Firms are not told to make fast food with less salt, firms are not told to find better alternatives for soft drinks. Instead we, the consumers, are told that the foods we can afford and enjoy are bad for us and that we just need to search harder, grow our own produce, make bread from scratch and take a few decades off while doing all this and breastfeeding. And if we don't feel that we can do all this, well, then we deserve the disapproval we get and the illnesses, too.

Morality and health really are mixed in all this. This bothers me, because the same society that gives us mostly negative incentives towards a healthier life also thinks that Rush Limbaugh's hatemongering is a valid form of political discourse and that Anne Coulter's urgings towards violence are "just jokes". Something has gone quite wrong in how we define "bad behavior", when advocating hate is ok but giving your baby a bottle is bad. Hate also has health consequences. Ask those who died in the Rwandan genocide.

Perhaps we should get AMA to supervise the political media in this country. Instead of a large red exclamation mark as a warning on salt containers we'd get a large red exclamation mark all across Rush Limbaugh's face, with a statement about how bad hatred can be for your health.
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It's important to point out that I'm not arguing against the health advice here but against the methods used in its delivery.

Some Recommended Reading

For any early risers. This Kos diary is frightening and all too possible. It's about what might grow from our current hate-infatuated politics.

If you don't want to be scared you could check out the links I stole from BitchPhD, and her relevant comments on the breast feeding story, in particular.

Then there is this post by twisty on the desirability of some current sexual practices.

Enjoy.

A New And Improved Version Of An Older Post

Spocko sent this to me:





It's a better and more informative version of this post. Because of the nice frame.

Meanwhile, in Iran

Participants who were demonstrating for women's rights got beaten for their effort in Tehran:

About 100 women had gathered in central Tehran on Monday to protest against what they called the Islamic Republic's discriminatory laws against women. Some men joined them at the gathering which the judiciary said was "illegal".

A Reuters correspondent at the protest saw women and men being put into buses and others being beaten back with batons.

...

Some women had protested about the difficulties in getting a divorce and securing guardianship for their children after divorce.

Others decried unjust inheritance laws and the fact that their court testimony is only worth half that of a man's. Some women said men were abusing with impunity their right to polygamy, which allows up to four wives.

"I want to know why the blood money for a murdered woman is half that for a man," said a woman who wanted to be identified only as Leila. "I am against laws that openly discriminate against women."

"Blood money" is compensation paid to the family of slain person.

Most women at the demonstration were reluctant to speak to journalists because of the heavy police presence.

The Revealer (via Hecate) has an interesting post about the way this event was reported in various newspapers and why the different approaches to reporting matter. I think this is particularly important when a report is about a country we don't know very well.

Take the fairly small number of demonstrators, a hundred or so. Does this mean that most people in Iran have no opinion on women's rights? I doubt it. A more likely reason for the lack of numbers is what has historically happened to demonstrators in Iran. These are some courageous women, these protesters.

Wingnut Framing

Haloscan has gone nuts, by the way. The time stamp might or might not match reality, so you have the chance of inserting your comments somewhere quite different than the end of a thread. Think of the creative opportunities this offers! You can go backwards in time and change the discussion that already happened.

Wouldn't the Republican wordsmiths love this. They love framing in a way which makes a topic almost impossible to dissect without giving a long speech (see random liberal 581 in my comments for an admirable example of what is needed). This, from yahoo on Bill Clinton's recent speech, is another example of the problem:

"It is now generally recognized that while
Al Gore and I were ridiculed, we were right about global warming," Clinton said at a fundraiser for the Florida Democratic Party. "It's a serious problem. It's going to lead to more hurricanes."

...

In his critique of the GOP, Clinton also touched on the war in
Iraq, the rising federal deficit and high health care costs. The crowd of about 500 greeted him with loud applause and shouts of "We love you, Bill!" and "Four more years!"

That's what Clinton is reported as having said. And what was the Republican response? Heh:

Jeff Sadosky, spokesman for the state Republican Party, decried Clinton's rhetoric.
"Bill Clinton's class warfare and race-baiting message gets us no closer to solutions for the issues he brings up," he said.

Sadosky referred in part to Clinton's comments earlier this month in Arizona. At that event, Clinton characterized Republican Party leaders as right-wing, white Southerners.

Class warfare. Race baiting. Class warfare. Race baiting. Class warfare. Race baiting.

And so it goes, what is called public debate these days.

Who Can Pass The Tweety Test?

Ann Coulter doesn't. She's not hawt enough:

But over on MSNBC, the news anchors debated an issue much more pressing: Coulter's Hot or Not factor. From June 9th's Hardball:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Do you find her physically attractive, Tucker?

TUCKER CARLSON: I'm not going to answer that, because the answer, I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. That's not the point.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Positively.

RITA COSBY: Don't ask me that question.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Mike, do you want to weigh in here as an older fellow. Do you find her to be a physically attractive woman?

MIKE BARNICLE: I'm too old to be doing that. I had enough fights in my life.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: OK, Rita, do you find her to be a physically attractive woman?

RITA COSBY: I'll throw it back to you, Chris, do you find her attractive?

CHRIS MATTHEWS: You guys are all afraid to answer. No, I find her—I wouldn't put her—well, she doesn't pass the Chris Matthews test.

Let's reverse the test: Do you think that Tweety (Chris Matthews) is an attractive man? Do you get off on large, yellow heads?

Didn't that sound a little sexist, hmh? Well, the same applies to judging Ann Coulter's looks. There's plenty of really nasty stuff to talk about when Ann Coulter is the topic, without deciding to judge her feminine worth quotient.

I bet you anticipated this feminist commentary by now...

One Picture Worth A Thousand Framings?

We should have this picture quickly and handsomely framed. It's the heart of the Bush administration and tells us more than we ever need to know about the men who run our lives. And it's very funny.

The actual text goes like this:

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, left, and White House Counselor Dan Barlett, ride in a military helicopter wearing helmets and flak jackets for a trip from Baghdad International Airport to U.S. Embassy in the Greenzone.

Do these flak jackets cover their butts? I would think that any attack would come from below.

Then there is the expression of Mr. Barlett.

Really needed this one today. Thanks, gods and goddesses of ridicule.
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Link via linda on Eschaton threads.

Meet Mr. Spinmeister

His real name is Karl Zinsmeister, and he is Bush's new chief domestic policy adviser. An interesting guy, full of nice things to say about all his enemies, including us feminists:

For a dozen years until his appointment, Zinsmeister held forth on all manner of issues and personalities as editor in chief of the American Enterprise Institute's magazine. With a sharp pen, he skewered the left, taking special aim at environmentalists, anti-globalists, feminists, contemporary artists, university faculties, Hollywood, Broadway and particularly the media, composed mainly of "left-wing, cynical, wiseguy Ivy League types, with a high prima donna quotient."

A review of years of articles reveals a formidable thinker with a powerful sense of what he considers right and wrong. As Zinsmeister sees it, racial profiling by the police makes sense; the military, if anything, treats terrorist suspects too gently; and casual sex has led to wrecked cities, violence and "endless human misery." In a "soft, often amoral, and self-indulgent age," he warned, some children "will be ruined without a whip hand," and he assured that "things generally go better with God."

...

Foreign policy won't fall under his new portfolio, but he has written extensively on social issues that will, such as race, class and culture. He has condemned "feminist absolutism," "Green irrationality," "limousine leftists" and "the dreary left-wing, homophilic P.C. propaganda that has dominated Broadway."

Zinsmeister lamented a "forced diversity crusade" that fuels more alienation than it solves and argued that "Americans should jettison affirmative action and all racial preferences." He dismissed reparations for slavery as "a clear absurdity" because "the U.S. already made a mighty payment for the sin of slavery. It was called the Civil War." He traces wrongheaded political correctness to colleges that have become "virtual one-party states, ideological monopolies, badly unbalanced ecosystems."

The Clintons in particular are anathema. He is "a chronic liar, an out-of-control adulterer, an obstructer of justice, a draft dodger, an all-round morally challenged sleazeball." She has shown "a disturbing pattern of reflexive truth-stretching and reality-doctoring."

And so on. There are many more examples of the calm and collected good manners of this wingnut in the article I linked to, and also a little explanation for the hiring of Mr. Spinmeister. He got the job because he is to be the animal handler that takes care of the wingnut zoo, and we, my dear friend, are going to be the raw meat that will be thrown over the fence at mealtimes. We and our human rights and such absurd stuff.

Now we know the next step in the domestic political plans of the Republican party. It consists of pissing on anyone who is not white, fundamentalist Christian and male, though naturally the enriching of the rich will go on unabated. This is what I would call a badly balanced ecosystem, and this is what Mr. Spinmeister is hired to give all of us.

He is bad news. And people wonder why I dislike the policies of this administration. If they had their way this country would consist of two layers: the ultra-rich in their guarded compounds, jetting here and there as the whim takes them, and the rest of us, dirt-poor, but morally living in an American Taliban society, working our asses off for minimum pay. The blacks and the Latinos would be treated kindly but kept to their place and the womenfolk would take care of the cooking and the breeding but otherwise obey and ponder things only inside their hearts.

That was the rant part, to remind all of you, my dear readers, that politics is not just a game for overgrown wingnut boys but our lives. The analysis part consists of pointing out the obvious: that Bush is servicing his base, and also the interesting fact that lefty bloggers are supposed to be the ones who say nasty things about politicians and journalists. Not Bush administration insiders. Because wingnuts never suffer from irrational hate.

Some Sad News

It seems that Karl Rove will not be indicted in the Plame case:

The prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case on Monday advised Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, that he would not be charged with any wrongdoing, effectively ending the nearly three-year criminal investigation that had at times focused intensely on Mr. Rove.

The decision by the prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, announced in a letter to Mr. Rove's lawyer, Robert D. Luskin, lifted a pall that had hung over Mr. Rove who testified on five occasions to a federal grand jury about his involvement in the disclosure of an intelligence officer's identity.

In a statement, Mr. Luskin said, "On June 12, 2006, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald formally advised us that he does not anticipate seeking charges against Karl Rove."

Mr. Fitzgerald's spokesman, Randall Samborn, said he would not comment on Mr. Rove's status.

If I were a mean-spirited blogger I'd insert here something about how the devil takes care of its own.

On Euphemisms

A nonpolitical post, this time, as a way of getting warmed up. One on euphemisms, or weasel words, and especially on the way "resting" is used. We hear that a patient not likely to die right away is "resting comfortably", when the truth might be that the poor patient is in absolute agony. And then there is the "final resting place" and "being laid to rest" when one kicks the bucket. That's another euphemism though rather different in its connotations, by the way.

I doubt that being dead can be called "resting", but neither are "rest-rooms" places where we take a nice break from the day's activities. Or not just a nice break, ahem. Do tourists find this term difficult? Imagine standing there with your legs crossed and seeing signs only for boudoirs where it's easy to imagine that you might lie down for a bit.

"Resting" might be the most common euphemism of all. Actors "rest" when they can't find a job, and I let an article "rest" when it's bogged down and not going anywhere, even if it gets up all refreshed and ready to do battle.

"Resting" covers up things we'd rather not mention: illness and death, the need to pee, unemployment, failure. It really is too bad, because real resting is a wonderful activity, and one for which we have no far found no good euphemism.

The Scary, Scary Bloggers

Mainstream coverage of the Yearly Kos has been interesting for me. On the one hand, it seems to try to hold on to the myth of bloggers as nerdy maggots who have no life outside the internet, who are young men with pocket-protectors and who are scary. On the other hand, the pieces point out that the participants of the Yearly Kos were predominantly gray-haired and perhaps boring. And scary. Here is the Time magazine article commenting on Markos's speech:

By the time Moulitsas makes his first official appearance, it's after those cordial conferencees have been milling around at a buffet reception for an hour or so, drinking from the cash bar and getting glittery-eyed. The cartoonist Tom Tomorrow warms up the crowd, reading his cartoons aloud as they are projected on giant screens behind him. It doesn't seem that vital to pay attention, but halfway through the act, a Yearly Kos volunteer stops by the conversational knot I'm in and shushes us. It's the first sign of militancy and while they may not be reaching for the bayonets, the audience stomps and hoots when Moulitsas takes the stage. He smiles benignly and begins: "My name is Markos and I run a site called Daily Kos — maybe you've heard of it."

They greet his sardonic understatement with appreciative howls. The speech starts with a warm celebration of the site's achievements (including the somewhat dubious claim that Jon Tester owes his primary Senate victory in Montana to them and not to his opponent's zipper problem) and then becomes self-congratulatory, boasting about the insurgent primary challenge to Joe Lieberman, where the incumbent now leads by only 55-40. The message of these triumphs? That the "riff- raff" has triumphed over the elite. It's all very empowering, though the speech's crescendo is about how the liberal blogosphere propelled Stephen Colbert's White House Correspondents' dinner speech into the No. 1 spot on iTunes. As wins go, it seems symbolic at best. But what a symbol! The mainstream media is obsolete! "We don't need them!" "We can now choose for ourselves the media we consume!" The air, which had been merely charged, positively crackles. A gaggle of mainstream media reporters in the back grows nervous. "Are you worried they're going to blog us?" I ask someone. He replies, "I'm worried they're going to lynch us."

The smell of sweaty fear.

Then there is Maureen Dowd's piece on the Yearly Kos, where she decides that the bloggers don't want to devour the mainstream journalists but want to join them:

I tracked down the cult leader, wading through a sea of Kossacks, who were sitting on the floor in the hall with their laptops or at tables where they blogged, BlackBerried, texted and cellphoned — sometimes contacting someone only a few feet away. They were paler and more earnest than your typical Vegas visitors, but the mood was like a masquerade. This was the first time many of the bloggers had met, and they delighted in discovering whether their online companions were, as one woman told me, male, female, black, white, old, young or "in a wheelchair."

Mr. Moulitsas assured me he didn't see himself as a journalist, only a Democratic activist. "I don't plan on doing any original reporting — screw that. I need people like you," he said, agreeing that since he still often had to pivot off the reporting of the inadequate mainstream media to form his inflammatory opinions, our relationship was, by necessity, "symbiotic."

As I wandered around workshops, I began to wonder if the outsiders just wanted to get in. One was devoted to training bloggers, who had heretofore not given much thought to grooming and glossy presentation, on how to be TV pundits and avoid the stereotype of nutty radical kids.

Mr. Moulitsas said he had a media coach who taught him how to stand, dress, speak, breathe and even get up from his chair. Another workshop coached Kossacks on how to talk back to Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. "One of my favorite points," the workshop leader said, "is that the French were right."

Even as Old Media is cowed by New Media, New Media is trying to become, rather than upend, Old Media. Ms. Cox has left her Wonkette gig to be a novelist and Time essayist. Mr. Moulitsas and Mr. Armstrong wrote a book called "Crashing the Gate," and hit "Meet the Press" and the book tour circuit. Mr. Armstrong left his liberal blog to become a senior adviser to Mr. Warner. What could be more mainstream than that?

Which is it? Nobody seems to know.

All this is weird to me, including the focus on the few famous bloggers, rather than the vast number of us minor bloggers who keep on hammering away on our keyboards, and the selling of the concept that the people who read and write blogs are some kind of a new breed, never observed before, rather than just the same sort of folks who always used to exist, but only now with new toys. Then there is the whole labeling enterprise: Liberal and progressive bloggers need to be labeled, quick! What is it going to be? Extreme fringe element? Nerdy maggots? Tired 1960s hippies? Ravenous monsters who want to take over journalism without either the objectivity or the training needed? Ravenous monsters who want to gobble up all the journalists?

None of this sounds like me. No category for semi-crazy goddesses who dress impeccably and who just want to run this planet with a B-list blog (notice the self-promotion here?).

How To Write A Wingnut Opinion Column

David Brooks's new column offers such a good example of this. He writes about the conservative angle on boys' poorer school performance. Because his is a conservative angle, the causes of the problem must be innate differences in girls and boys. The solutions he advocates are, astonishingly, quite different from the usual solution winguts offer when they base something on brain differences between the sexes, which is to do nothing. But in this case it is the male sex that appears to be at a disadvantage, so action is needed, and action, which changes the environment. The horror! I thought that the environment never mattered for the wingnuts. Whatever.

Here are the rules for writing a wingnut column, as learned from David Brooks. And if you dare to note in the comments that I do any of the same things I shall smite you with my divine anger:

1. You will begin by stating that your opinion is common wisdom, nay, truth:

There are three gender-segregated sections in any airport: the restrooms, the security pat-down area and the bookstore. In the men's sections of the bookstore, there are books describing masterly men conquering evil. In the women's sections there are novels about ... well, I guess feelings and stuff.

I shop in what Brooks calls the "men's section" of the bookstore, and I have never been chased away from there because of my sex. And notice how he is defining emotions as something...embarrassing...something he knows nothing about. Has David never felt anger, then? Those masterly men conquering evil, are they robots?

See how cleverly the picture is painted? We already know that men and women are really, really different. And if you still doubt that you are told that rather extreme wingnut books on the question are "lucid guides" and that anyone who has questions of the wingnut interpretations of gender science is putting "intense social pressure" on those who just want to talk about neutral science.

2. You will pick studies to prove your point, even if they are not very good studies.

The same separation occurs in the home. Researchers in Britain asked 400 accomplished women and 500 accomplished men to name their favorite novels. The men preferred novels written by men, often revolving around loneliness and alienation. Camus's "The Stranger," Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" and Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" topped the male list.

The women leaned toward books written by women. The women's books described relationships and are a lot better than the books the men chose. The top six women's books were "Jane Eyre," "Wuthering Heights," "The Handmaid's Tale," "Middlemarch," "Pride and Prejudice" and "Beloved."

Note that these are not a random selection of men and women. These are "accomplished" women and men, women and men largely drawn from the fields of books, cinema and theater. And the study wasn't really about the "favorite" novels of these people but about novels that were life-changing for them. Why do you think women in those fields might have mentioned books by women, even if they actually liked some book written by a guy just as much? I liked Camus a lot as a teenager, by the way, but hated Catcher in the Rye because the protagonist in it muses about wanting to learn to play women like a guitar or something similar. I have no desire to read about me as a musical instrument, and I don't want my life changed in that direction.

3. You will condense and insert older arguments into the story so gently that they slip past your conscious brain straight into that "we all know" part where the emotions (which men don't have, natch) then work on them to make them part of our worldview:

Young boys are compelled to sit still in schools that have sacrificed recess for test prep...

Maybe. But is the bit about "sitting still" any different from the past decades or centuries? Remember how schools got started? Remember that girls weren't allowed in at all, so that the way schools decided to make students sit still was all intended for boys. This is not a new phenomenom, not a part of the "war against boys" that the conservative propaganda machine feeds us.

And so on.

What Did You Read At School?

David Brooks thinks that if only boys were given less gushy and emotional books to read they'd soon start doing so well at school:

Young boys are compelled to sit still in schools that have sacrificed recess for test prep. Many are told in a thousand subtle ways they are not really good students. They are sent home with these new-wave young adult problem novels, which all seem to be about introspectively morose young women whose parents are either suicidal drug addicts or fatally ill manic depressives.

It shouldn't be any surprise that according to a National Endowment for the Arts study, the percentage of young men who read has plummeted over the past 14 years. Reading rates are falling three times as fast among young men as among young women. Nor should it be a surprise that men are drifting away from occupations that involve reading and school. Men now make up a smaller share of teachers than at any time in the past 40 years.

Linda Hirshman has a good take on Brooks's article here, so let me just point out that it's not correct to assume that the small number of men in teaching is caused by the books boys read at school. I might as well argue that the small number of men in teaching is caused by the new red BMW the neighborhood stockbroker drives, and I'd be closer to the mark.

So Brooks argues that the books assigned at school are gooey yucky girl stuff. What were you assigned to read at school?

Bleeding Hearts

These are the flowers of a bleeding heart. Pick one of them and turn it upside down. Then pull the right and left tips at the top of the flower outwards. A little naked lady in a bathtub appears. This is sure to fascinate all children amongst us, including our inner children.

Mother Theresa for President!

Now wouldn't that be fun? I can't think of any other woman who'd be closer to the female ideal than Mother Theresa, and if she ran for the president of the United States surely she would win hands down (assuming she wasn't dead, of course)? Nah. Not gonna happen. She's too wimpy, and she would let the terrorist trample all over us.

Well, how about Ann Coulter then? She's not wimpy. She advocates violence most of the time. If she wasn't such a nutcase surely she could run this country? Nah. She's too bitchy, too mean, too vicious.

It reminds me a little of the old fairy tale about Goldilocks and the three bears. The first porridge is too hot, the second porridge is too cold, but the third porridge is just right and so on. The third porridge was probably man-porridge.

These ruminations, delightful as they are, didn't grow out of emptiness. An article in the New York Times entitled "The Ascent of A Woman" by Anne E. Kornblut was the impetus for them. She writes:

Those who study the larger trend, however, say there are concrete reasons no woman has ever come close to winning the American presidency. There are fewer political dynasties here of the sort that have given women the stamp of authority elsewhere, like the Bhuttos in Pakistan or the Ghandis in India. (Mrs. Clinton, of course, is a product of a mini-dynasty).

The electoral system here is more challenging than a parliamentary one, in which a woman (Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Golda Meir in Israel) is elected only by members of her own party, not the entire electorate.

Then there is the political pipeline in the United States, which now, with 8 female governors out of 50, and 14 female senators of 100, still offers a limited number of experienced candidates for the presidency.

"There are very few women in the pool when you think about it," said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. "The pool that candidates tend to come from in this country are U.S. senators and governors, and until recently we've had very few women in those positions. That's something that's really held us back. It's the whole pipeline that's been problematic, and frankly, our pipeline hasn't been doing that well lately."

Yet such statistics, long the foundation for conventional wisdom about the plight of women in politics, may not fully explain the resistance. Experts who scratch their heads over how many women are elected as chief executives elsewhere — including Ms. Bachelet, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia and Angela Merkel in Germany — point to sociological and cultural reasons why Mrs. Clinton is one of only a few women to have been viewed seriously as a presidential candidate. Ms. Walsh said American society has "not yet raised a generation of girls growing up and thinking, 'I can be president of the United States someday.' "

Do you know in what section of the Times this article appeared? The Style Section! That says a lot more about the whole question than anything else I can say in just one sentence. In the Style Section!

I'm going to write a long and erudite post on the topic of the absent female president of the United States in the near future, because I know much of the relevant literature and because I have wonderful and incisive theories about this, as I have on everything else in this world. And that's one of the reasons, by the way, why I'm not the president of any country. Nothing is as horrifying as a woman-know-it-all, said Tom deLay. But a goddess-know-it-all beats even that in horridness.

If you can't wait for my long post, check out this take on the Daily Kos and this one by archy. They both offer fodder for thought. What I'd like to write about this very minute is something I found in the comments of the Daily Kos post, something, that I've heard many, many times before, and something that deserves to be taken apart right now. This comment is a good example:

In any case, I'd love to vote for a female if she had the best qualifications.

Some other comments give long lists of all the qualifications a female candidate for presidency should have. Very long lists.

You might ask what is wrong with this statement. Doesn't everybody want to vote for the candidate who has the best qualifications? Well, if that were true, how did George Bush get in, assuming that he was elected? Surely he lacks almost all of the qualifications that the long lists tell a woman candidate must have, perhaps even all of them. Clearly we don't always vote for the candidate for the best qualifications. The history of politics makes that absolutely clear.

But what I really mean when I want to analyze this comment is the way "best qualifications" really means that the woman in question must be a superwoman, about ten times better than any other candidate we have ever heard about. She must be a perfect woman, with children, yet somehow never neglecting them while learning about politics. She must be happily married, yet somehow the husband must not look henpecked when she goes out and runs for the presidency. She must be bold and ready to attack any country that bothers us, yet somehow she must not let any of her female hormones swamp her cool and level head, and she should have been a fighter pilot at the same time as she was bringing up her children while staying at home.

She must not be attractive as it would distract from her presidentialness, but she must be the president everybody would like to fuck, too. She must not be shrill. She must not be weak and meek. And so on.

I made up that list, not the commenters on the Daily Kos, but I made it because it pretty much reflects reality. The standards to which women are held are not only higher but impossible, if we are to find "the best qualified" candidate.

Then there is the fact that saying something like this can also serve to hide the real reasons why a person might never want to vote for a woman: It's not sexism, it's just that there are no well-qualified women out there. Too sad, but that's how it is. And all the time we have George Bush running this country to ground.

Note that I'm not saying the Daily Kos comment I quoted was by someone who is a sexist, probably far from it, and it's also true that there is a pipeline problem for women in American politics. But these kinds of comments are exactly what a sexist would use in a public debate, and it behooves us to be wary of them for the reasons I mentioned. Just think of all the male politicians we have and how many of them have "the best qualifications" for the job.