Women's Public Hair

No, that's not a typo. Women's pubic hair is now public hair and subject to the same cut-and-burn rules as all body hair on women. An August 2010 piece at Salon talks about this:

Sasha Grey made my day -- and I don't just say that to rhyme, I swear. Apparently, the porn star appeared naked on last night's "Entourage" and caused quite the commotion among the show's dude-bro contingent. Not because she was naked on-camera (which is, mind you, a relatively common occurrence) but because she went naked with a full-on bush (which is also a relatively common occurrence for her, actually). Judging from the resulting hysteria on Twitter, it was the Pube-pocalypse. Behold, a few of the standout tweets:

Yea she had a sicko BUSH

Sasha Grey had an ENORMOUS f***ing 70s bush. WTF

That s**t was so uncalled for

Sasha Grey really should shave her bush

Entourage was wild. So was Sasha Grey's bush. #EW

did anyone else think that was disgusting. ITS 2010!

(Stars inserted by me in the vain hope that this will slip past the censors at places of work.)

Now, those comments may not be representative. But what is certainly true is this:

The no-hair look was made popular by porn, as the biggest porn star of the moment is no doubt aware.

There you have it, all of you who think that porn has no impact on anything outside the private games the viewers play with themselves. It has made some heterosexual men develop a vomit-reflex when they see natural pubic hair on women and it has made the shaving of the pubic area fashionable for at least some women. And for some odd reason it has made some guys think that pubic hair stopped growing on women in the 1970s. Now that was funny.

My point isn't to approve or disapprove of whatever people choose to do to their bodily hairs but to point out the role of popular culture, including pornography, on something presumably as biology-driven as desire. If men unaccustomed to seeing female pubic hair find it sufficient to turn them off, how on earth could that desire be based on pure biology? Adult women in the wild do, after all, grow pubic hair.

All this proves the powerful role of culture (including the pornographic parts of it), in case you didn't get the message already.

And yes, this post was provoked by that Gawker story.

Utterly Hilarious Caveman Stories

Iowa Republican Steve King has linked the defense of "traditional" marriage (which isn't very traditional, of course) to the defense of "life" (which means only pre-birth life):

"I think that if we can't defend marriage, that it becomes very hard to defend life," King said. "Marriage is the crucible by which we pour all of our values and pass them on to our children, and that is how the culture is renewed each time. So, if we lose marriage — for instance, if our children are raised in warehouses, so to speak. There have been civilizations that have tried to do that. The Spartans did that. They took the children away and taught them to be warriors. It's a good way to defend a country, but not much of a way to run a civilization.

"So, I'm afraid if that happened — if we lose the marriage, we lose the home, we lose the nuclear family then we can't teach our values. We won't be able to teach our faith. We won't be able to teach life. We won't be able to teach our Constitutional values either. That's why I'm afraid it's going to be very, very difficult to defend life."

I'm not sure how he plans to lose marriage. Has he looked under the sofa cushions? But neither am I at all sure that he has had much to do with that instillation of values in the "traditional" marriage. That's other people's job in the kind of world he inhabits.

Still, it's always funny when people make their arguments based on absurdities: Either we have the "traditional" marriage or children are warehoused.

But that's not the utterly hilarious bit. It's this comment by some guy who doesn't like gays and lesbians and who has deeply delved into the field of Evo-Psycho:

Randy Crawford of Iowa City said he intends to vote for the removal of the justices because he is concerned about the judiciary overstepping its reach and also about the propensity of homosexuals within his community.

"My primary reason for being here is because I believe the Supreme Court should not be legislating from the bench. But I also believe that homosexuality is bad thing," he said. "It used to be useful when we were cavemen and we needed people to guard the caves full of women and children. If I'm a guy out hunting, I want to leave someone back at the cave tending to my wife and kids, and I don't want a normal guy having that kind of access to my wife and kids. So, in our evolution, you can see that there use to be a utility for homosexuality, but that was when we were cavemen and we aren't cavemen anymore. So, homosexuality is obsolete."

The caves full of women and children while the cavemen go out hunting! That doesn't sound like any hunter-gatherer society I've ever read about. But it's truly funny.

Though of course his silly theory doesn't explain lesbians...

Keith Olbermann's Special Comment

This time it was about the Tea Party and what some of its candidates stand for. You can watch the whole Special Comment here.

I guess the nicest thing I can say about the tea partiers is that some of them may not have thought through the consequences of getting rid of most of the government, privatizing Social Security and otherwise turning this country into a banana republic.

Tea For Two?

This article in last Sunday's Washington Post is well worth reading, because it deviates from the usual plot-driven discussion of politics and takes up the much more difficult task of actually acquiring information! I applaud the writer, Amy Gardner, and all those who worked on this. Information is what we need, not fictional story-lines about politics or the opera critic approach to political campaigns. Did that guy scream too loudly? Off with his head! How about that hairdo? Better vote for someone else.

Gardner writes about the Tea Party movement in a refreshing way, by trying to find out how many people belong to it and what they wish to achieve. A snippet or two:

The findings suggest that the breadth of the tea party may be inflated. The Atlanta-based Tea Party Patriots, for example, says it has a listing of more than 2,300 local groups, but The Post was unable to identify anywhere near that many, despite help from the organization and independent research.

In all, The Post identified more than 1,400 possible groups and was able to verify and reach 647 of them. Each answered a lengthy questionnaire about their beliefs, members and goals. The Post tried calling the others as many as six times. It is unclear whether they are just hard to reach or don't exist.

...

The tea party's biggest successes this year have come only after one of a handful of well-funded national groups swooped in to mobilize local support. In upset victories in Alaska and Delaware, for instance, the Sacramento-based Tea Party Express spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising for Republican Senate candidates Joe Miller and Christine O'Donnell, respectively.

Other national groups, such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, have also built organizations and spent millions of dollars on advertising, high-profile bus tours or other direct campaign tactics.

Getting information is hard work, and these findings don't mean that the Tea Party movement wouldn't exist or have political power. But some of that power appears to be media-created.

Selling Youth Sexuality

The title of an On Point radio show with Tom Ashbrook. Except that the show is about selling teenage girls' sexual availability, not about selling youth sexuality. It has to do with Glee and those GQ pictures of the two female actors dressed as porn starlets while still being dressed for their roles as teenage girls at school. Ashbrook had several experts on the show, all women.

I listened to the whole show while cleaning the kitchen. I'd scrub the stove top while waiting for the obvious to be said. It never was said. I washed the fridge while euphemisms flew around the room, coming from that radio program, and I scrubbed the floor with the anger it all developed.

You may not wish to listen to the whole show to see what made me so furious, and perhaps you wouldn't be furious at all, because the causes of my anger are not blatantly obvious but rather something lurking in the shadows of an otherwise well-lit room.

The show wasn't bad in terms of addressing the pressure for even tiny girls to dress as if they were looking for someone to give a blow-job to, and it wasn't bad in terms of pointing out that there should be more to the female life than that, even after the girl grows up and turns into an adult woman. Indeed, my guess is that the pron-lovers would find the show quite disconcerting.

But two things made my eyes light up and blink red.

The first, and lesser one, had to do with all those euphemisms, beginning with the title of the show and this line in the blurb: "We look at the debate over kids and marketed sex."

Then one of the experts argued that teenage girls always have had to learn how to cope with "male attention" on the street and to "negotiate" it. That, my friends, is an euphemism for street harassment. It's just something that happens and women must learn to negotiate it successfully, in order to get home in one piece, I guess.

Because, really, what teenage girls must learn to do is to deal with the power they have over men! The sexual power. This power can be turned on and off, naturally, and every teenage girl will be completely safe if she just says no to everyone finding her erection-inducing!

Now, I'm not saying that sexuality wouldn't have a power aspect or an attraction aspect. But possessing that kind of power is a bit like possessing an expensive diamond necklace. It can simply be taken from you. It's not always the kind of power which makes other people do what you wish them to do.

And what about the sexual power of teenage boys? Ashbrook tried a few times to draw out comments on the effect of all this (the soft-pron pictures in GQ) on teenage boys, but the only answer he got was that it's like the boys' dreams turned into flesh! That's where the boys were left, just learning that girls are sexual receptacles, and nobody seemed to have a problem with that.

This brings me to the second ire-causing aspect of the show: That invisible elephant again. This time sexuality was all about what teenage girls do and what their parents might be able to do to talk them into something else than porn starlet outfits.

Nobody else was asked to change anything at all! Pron would still determine what an attractive woman or girl should look like and what she is expected to do, and sexual harassment on the streets is something that every woman must learn to negotiate. Places like GQ would offer soft-pron pictures of actresses pretending to be teenagers to adult men but we would somehow block teenagers from seeing them. Or from watching pron in general.

All this reminds me of the advice women get on how to prevent rape. Both focus on individual solutions aimed at the victim and leave the rest of the picture the same.

But that wasn't the only odd thing about this program (and many, many others like it). As I scrubbed I started thinking that surely the experts would soon tell me at what age teenage girls become fair game for the pron culture, that they'd finally tell us at what age teenage boys can start watching the hard-core pron on the Internet.

Because the system itself was left completely untouched in the discussion. Only the age at which one should enter it was debated.

Head Stomping. Warning: Violent Images.

I'm pretty sure you have read all about the violent attack which happened before a Senate candidates' debate in Kentucky.

Note: The YouTube video I linked to earlier has been removed but you can still watch the earlier video at TPM.

The stompee is a MoveOn activist Lauren Valle. She suffered a concussion but appears to be OK now.

Barefoot And Progressive first identified the stomper as Tim Profitt, a volunteer with Rand Paul's campaign. I have not seen the identities of the other attackers mentioned anywhere.

Profitt's excuse for the attack:

A supporter of Republican U.S. Senate nominee Rand Paul is apologizing after he was seen on video stepping on a liberal activist's head.

Tim Profitt, a volunteer with the Republican's U.S. Senate campaign, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the camera angle made the scuffle Monday night appear worse that it was. He criticized police for not stepping in and says other supporters warned authorities about the activist.

The camera angle he mentions is the one in the first video shown on television and not the one I had posted here until YouTube removed it (which indeed does prevent a gentler and kinder form of violence).

The police should have done what Profitt chose to do, I guess, to stop Valle from presenting her award to Rand Paul. Not sure what the libertarian creed says about taking violence in your own hands if the police won't do your bidding?

Is there a gender aspect to all this? Several guys tugging and pulling a young woman over? Would Profitt have done the same to a male MoveOn activist?

----------
ETA:

Profitt has now been served with criminal summons:

A supporter of Republican U.S. Senate nominee Rand Paul is being served with a criminal summons after he was seen on video stepping on a liberal activist's head at a rally Monday night, according to Lexington police.

Tim Profitt, a volunteer with Paul's campaign, said he was concerned the woman was trying to attack Paul and acted only to subdue her.

"The way she went after him it looked like something bad was getting ready to happen," said Profitt, 53, of Bourbon County.

He said he put his foot on her shoulder, not her head. "I said, 'Now you stay down,' and called for police. The only thing we were trying to do was subdue her."

I guess she could have suffocated Rand Paul with her wig or something.

Meanwhile, in Iran

Women's studies and human rights will probably be eradicated from university curricula:

Iran has imposed new restrictions on 12 university social sciences deemed to be based on Western schools of thought and therefore incompatible with Islamic teachings, state radio reported Sunday.

The list includes law, philosophy, management, psychology, political science and the two subjects that appear to cause the most concern among Iran's conservative leadership — women's studies and human rights.

"The content of the current courses in the 12 subjects is not in harmony with religious fundamentals and they are based on Western schools of thought," senior education official Abolfazl Hassani told state radio.

Sigh. This is the reason why theocracies are a Very Bad Idea.

Meanwhile, in Colorado

The elections will have a question about the personhood rights of American embryos:

Next week, people in Colorado will be voting on Amendment 62, a ballot measure sponsored by PersonhoodUSA. This organization seeks to establish the "pre-born," including eggs, embryos and fetuses as separate "legal persons with protection under the law."

This organization claims that its goal is to end the "injustice of abortion." In fact they are promoting a Fetal Separatist movement, one that is trying to legally separate pregnant women and the fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses inside of them. Their efforts are dangerous to all pregnant women including those who go to term, those who expect confidential medical care, and those who want to preserve their right to life and liberty.

And why are these attempts dangerous should Roe v. Wade be overturned in the future?

As the author of the linked piece states, treating embryos and fetuses as legal persons will immediately reduce the personhood of pregnant women, and perhaps also the personhood of all women capable of pregnancy. Treating the "pre-born" as "legal persons with protection under the law" logically and unavoidably means that all fertile women are turned into possible residences for these "pre-born."

It is hard to see how amendments like this one could ever be applied selectively to abortion and not to all the other ways women (the residences) might endanger potential legal persons by engaging in some activity known to be harmful to fetuses. A woman getting drunk in a bar! What if there is a legal person inside her (then her drinking would be child abuse)? How can we tell? Better have all fertile women tested every month.

I used to preface comments like the above one with some gentle note about "in extreme cases" or "taken to the logical extreme" but I can't do that any longer, because granting a fertilized egg the same legal rights as a pregnant woman (AND juxtaposing those sets of rights) IS extreme and DOES have dystopian consequences.

The more immediate of those dystopian consequences are the ones the linked article discusses: Women's reproductive rights would be diminished not only in terms of abortion but also in terms of rights during pregnancy and childbirth.

Forbidden Images

I found this YouTube video while looking for stuff on Sarah Bernhardt. It consists of snippets of film from silent movies a projectionist cut out in Pennsylvania, presumably because he regarded the images as too shocking or thought the audience would regard them so.

The way the video is discussed, both in the blurb and in most of the comments is interesting. Very few notice that every single of these images is about women's bodies and none make the point that nothing having to do with just men seems to have been cut. But most interestingly of all, the overall theme is one where women's bodies are conflated with "daring sexuality," and the blurb urges people to think about what one might censor today, given that such innocent scenes were censored in the past.

In one sense, of course, absolutely nothing has changed. Sex is still all about women's bodies and people either want them covered up and hidden or freely available for public consumption.





For a very different image of sex in those olden days, I prefer Bessie Smith.

Today's Deep Thought

Is this: Social media is not news-and-information, and news-and-information should not try to be social media, just for the money.

We are rapidly moving towards the concept of social media in everything: Have Your Say! What Do You Think? We Want To Hear Your Opinion.

It's Facebook everywhere and it's about equally confusing, silly and trivial as most of those Facebook quizzes and games and messages about what someone ate for breakfast (English muffins, burned in the toaster, Swiss cheese and ginger marmalade), and it confuses the consumer more than anything.

Fox News is all opinion shows with false data, and its competitors are approaching the same format. That is the reason why we get stuff like this:

"Climate change is real, and man is causing it," Mr. Hill said, echoing most climate scientists. "That is indisputable. And we have to do something about it."

A rain of boos showered Mr. Hill, including a hearty growl from Norman Dennison, a 50-year-old electrician and founder of the Corydon Tea Party.

"It's a flat-out lie," Mr. Dennison said in an interview after the debate, adding that he had based his view on the preaching of Rush Limbaugh and the teaching of Scripture. "I read my Bible," Mr. Dennison said. "He made this earth for us to utilize."

That, and the he-said-she-said format combined with the fact that things used to be different: television used to at least give the basic information and people still partly think it does, is the father and mother of our problems.

We are poorly informed and we are misinformed.

On Clarence Thomas

I have read the stories about Ginni Thomas' call to Anita Hill, asking for an apology for something that took place so long ago it could now vote if it was human. There was nothing more astonishing I could write about any of that so I did not.

But the story had legs and wings and wheels, even, and Maureen Dowd wrote about it recently:

Years later, some of the Democrats on that all-male, all-white Senate Judiciary Committee told me they assumed there must have been a consensual romance between the boss and his subordinate. McEwen assumed so, too, because Clarence took Anita with him when he changed agencies. Hill has made it clear she felt no reciprocal attraction.

Joe Biden, the senator who ran those hearings, was leery of the liberal groups eager to use Hill as a pawn to checkmate Thomas. He circumscribed the testimony of women who could have corroborated Hill's unappetizing portrait of a power-abusing predator.

For the written record, Biden allowed negative accounts only from women who had worked with Thomas. He also ruled out testimony from women who simply had personal relationships with Thomas, and did not respond to a note from McEwen — a former assistant U.S. attorney who had once worked as a counsel for Biden's committee — reminding him of her long relationship with Thomas.

It's too late to relitigate the shameful Thomas-Hill hearings. We're stuck with a justice-for-life who lied his way onto the bench with the help of bullying Republicans and cowed Democrats.

Mmm. And guess what? In every single one of his decisions, Thomas has been avenging his public humiliation on the women of America. But nobody seems to notice that bit, except for poor old me.

The Clarence Thomas hearings turned many women into feminists. It was fascinating to watch all those men reveal how little they understood of the lives of women, fascinating to watch them groping for an explanation that would make sense to them.

A rejected woman out for revenge was the favorite one, I think. Those men simply had no experience with being the receiving party of sexual harassment, none whatsoever, and they showed it openly.

All that offered a pretty good reason for wanting more women in the Congress. To make sure that someone on those types of committees actually had some experience on the issue. Well, experience as the victim, at least.

What Price Ignorance?

Jesse Kelly wants to go to Washington D.C. to fix the government. His approach is simple and stupid. Watch it:





A transcript is available at Think Progress.

Simple-and-stupid has a certain appeal, don't you think? For instance, it's very simple to lump all kinds of regulations into the same bucket and then to spit into it, despite the fact that different types of regulations are aimed at quite different goals. Simple but stupid.

It's also simple to assume that the financial industry was heavily regulated before it decided to implode and explode. Simple but incorrect, because we spent the last two decades pulling out the teeth of any regulatory beast still padding along the corridors of power. It was simpler that way. Also much more stupid.

Finally, it's really stupid to assume that consumers could go out and test all the foods and medications out there, and it's really really stupid to assume that no manufacturer would ever wish to adulterate the product to save some money. The recent Chinese experience tells us that if our ability to remember doesn't reach further past.

Simple-and-stupid is the fashion this election year, sadly.

Sunday Critter Blogging

Baby parrot.

How To Make Cardinal These Days

A good bet is to fight against women's rights. Which is very funny what with those long dresses and gaudy colors and so on.

I smell religious competition, too. The Big Boy Religions are contending for the top prizes of misogyny. Those prizes are nothing to sneeze at, having to do with the control of fertility.

Democracy Is Under Attack By the Republican Majority on the Court [Anthony McCarthy]

This is the dirtiest election campaign I can remember. All you have to do is turn on the radio or TV to see massive evidence that Samuel Alito was lying, yet again, when he mouthed “That's not true” at Barack Obama pointing out the dangers of the “Citizens United” ruling during the State of the Union message. The hundreds of millions of dollars funneled into promoting lies around the candidates and issues of this election didn't get in there just by clever lawyers finding a loophole in the ruling, it is the clear and logical result of the ruling, it was fully intended by the five members of the Supreme Court who made that anti-democratic abomination the current meaning of the Constitution. It is just one of a string of rulings by right wing Republicans on the court with the clear intention of subverting honest elections.

For people my age, who were brought up to revere the Supreme Court during the Earl Warren years, facing that reality is very difficult. It's the high priesthood of “justice”, holding seats on the Court which used to be held by far more just people, which is actively and deliberately dismantling, not only the progress in civil rights of the past century, not only destroying protections from wealthy corporations and the robber barons that own them, they are actively and intentionally subverting the possibility of self-government by a population on the basis of accurate information.

This move began under the Burger court but it didn't really accelerate until Rehnquist took over as Chief “Justice”. It's no mere fluke of history that William Rehnquist's early role in public life was as a Republican “poll watcher” , which really means as a thug who intimidated black voters as they tried to cast votes in the wake of the civil rights rulings under the Warren Court. That he lied about it when it became an issue in his confirmation, only to have it brushed aside by the all white, male, Senate Judiciary Committee is hardly to be wondered at. The same committee would later try to ignore Anita Hill's information about the sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas and would passively absorb the lies of both Alito and Roberts during their confirmation. One of the most outrageous ads mounted by the Republican lie machine this year, are explicit instructions to Latinos to not vote "to teach them a lesson", destroying democratic government at the most basic unit of it, the vote, is the clear goal of the party of oligarchy.

The Senate is the least democratic, most unequally representative elected part of the Federal government, intended as an elite damper on democracy, originally appointed, only elected after constitutional amendment. Its role in confirming the entirely unelected Supreme Court, which for most of its history has functioned as an enabler of injustice and against democracy, can only surprise the willingly naive. The court which the Senate has given us today is one which feels little if any sense of restraint in its open attack on democracy, in favor of the Republican Party and the filthy rich which it serves above even the country itself.

We can't remain as a democratic republic if the streams of pollution flowing from the Republican majority of this Supreme Court are allowed to control our elections and our media. It is as simple as that. The cowardice and corruption of the Senate has prevented the patch of forcing disclosure of election donations in this cycle and the resultant House and Senate will be less likely to fix or overturn it. The House, the most representative, most accountable part of the federal government, has passed that legislation, as it has hundreds of other bills only to have it blocked by the Senate, which is the source of the corruption. But it is the Court which they have confirmed which is the active agent of destruction. If that doesn't change, there are two alternatives, we will either become an ever worse, ever more corrupt, ever more despotic country or there will be a civil war. The relationship of the Senate and the Court which they have confirmed to this crisis is direct, they have not blocked some of the worst appointments to the Court in the spotty history of that most unjustifiably revered institution.

The original Constitution which contained the disease of slavery wasn't strong enough to abolish it, it took a horrible civil war to do that. The part which the defects of the sacrosanct Constitution played in that was too clear, too obvious and too direct to remain an unmentioned, embarrassing secret. The present crisis is also the result of defects in the Constitution, defects which are the direct cause of it. The cumbersome amendment process, which provides low population states with a disproportional veto power over even an overwhelming majority of the population will make changing it under the Constitution extremely unlikely. Short of a miraculous and previously unexhibited sense of morality and responsibility by an effective majority in this Senate, we are on a one way road to disaster. In the past a sense of morality overrode the cynical dishonesty of Senators just often enough to avoid another civil war. I look at the present situation and see the 1850s more than the 1950s. People should prepare accordingly. They should certainly vote. If people informed of reality don't then they are no better than the Senate.

To what can we sign our names? (by Suzie)

Two newspapers in the Tampa Bay area ran the same writing, one as a letter to the editor and another as a commentary, saying that domestic-violence shelters put too much emphasis on women, often ignoring male victims. The letter and commentary touted the national nonprofit Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men and Women, and both were signed by Elka Zwick of St. Petersburg.

In researching the Maine-based organization, I found a Utah newspaper that had printed the same article, signed by Jan Brown and Heather Fortune, co-directors of DAHMW. I left a message for Brown, asking who wrote the original. I called Zwick, who referred me back to Brown, who acknowledged writing it. (I just found another letter, pared down a bit, signed by Mary Browning in the Birmingham News.)

The article went out to volunteers across the country in hopes they would submit it to newspapers, Brown said. “We were afraid people wouldn’t print it if it didn’t have a local name on it."

She’s correct – the media prefers a local angle. As an editor, however, I would never have printed something with someone’s name attached if that person had not actually written it. As a blogger, I would not want to see a post with one person’s name on it on one site and another person’s name on it on a different site.

The domestic-violence program in St. Petersburg is CASA (Community Action Stops Abuse), and Brown recalls them being better than others. She said she worked with a man who also got help from CASA. So, why seek to print an article criticizing DV shelters in a city that has a good one? Brown said she didn't mean to target CASA.

I’m concerned about the damage this article might do to local DV shelters, and I’m irritated by media that publishes information that it has not verified.

The incident also made me think about what writing we claim as our own. If I steal someone’s writing, that’s plagiarism. But what about when the writer and signer work together? People sign their names to emails, written by nonprofits, that are then sent to Congress. Politicians speak words crafted by their staffs. Assistants write letters that their bosses sign.

We need to learn to look past the signature.

P.S. Please save the discussion of the DV issues until my next post. I'm finding some interesting stuff.

Rehabbing Mike Tyson's image, part 2 (by Suzie)

When sports figures commit crimes, the news often runs in sports sections. The logic is: The sports reporters and readers will have a greater interest in and knowledge of the offender. The problem is: They often care more about his ability to return to the game, and any victim may be seen as an impediment.

On 9/3, I wrote about male journalists rehabbing Mike Tyson's image. Then came the latest, by award-winning AP sports columnist Tim Dahlberg, who wrote about "the meteoric rise and fall of the ferocious fighter the world was always so infatuated with." Who comprises "the world"? Not Desiree Washington after he raped her. Not Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who represented her in her civil suit. Not the other women who have accused him of assault.

In 2009, after Tyson's daughter died in an accident, Dahlberg wrote: "A changed man or not, he’s still reviled by many as the fighter who once bit off a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear and threatened to eat Lennox Lewis’ children." Why isn't he reviled for rape? Because fans revile Washington, threaten violence against her, and insist she's a liar? Or, is it that what male sports heroes do to women is beside the point? What role do sportswriters play?

In a 2007 column headlined "Maybe it's time to give Mike Tyson one last chance," Dahlberg argued that Tyson shouldn't have to go to jail for driving under the influence and cocaine possession.

Prosecutor Andrew Thomas cited Tyson's rape conviction in Indianapolis and a 1999 jail term in Maryland in labeling him a repeat offender with a violent past. That's his job, but it got laughable when Thomas said he believes Tyson must be put in prison to "properly protect the public."

One look at the bizarre tattoo on his face will tell you Tyson is a troubled soul, but he's about as much a danger to the public as he is a threat to win the heavyweight title once again. ...

Before his latest arrest, he hadn't gotten into any real trouble in eight years. And an argument could be made that had he hired Kobe Bryant's attorneys he might have skated on the sexual assault charges that landed him in prison for three years in a "he said, she said" case that was strikingly similar to the one faced by Bryant.

In those eight years, three women accused him of rape in 2001 and another accused him of beating her in 2005. Perhaps Dahlberg didn't count this as real trouble because it was only women's words against Tyson's, and he skated. Dahlberg feels no threat from the man he has come to know over the many years that he has written about him. I guess that means an attractive female sportswriter should not hesitate to pal around with Tyson, just like the guys have.

Friday flower blogging (by Suzie)

What a nice hiding place this would make.

This week, Echidne wrote about fall up North. Fall has arrived in Tampa, too, but nothing is actually falling yet. The temperature dips into the 60s in the evenings, with lower humidity. It's great to be able to wear a sweater outside, as opposed to just in office buildings that are cold year-round. Now, if we can just make December without any hurricanes.

Remember "No Means Yes, Yes Means Anal?"

The pledge chant of the DKE fraternity at Yale?

Here's what the Boston Globe says about the chant and the events that followed:

Yale fraternity under fire for alleged misogyny

By Stephanie Reitz, Associated Press Writer | October 19, 2010

HARTFORD, Conn. --Members of a Yale fraternity that counts both Bush presidents among its famous alumni and whose pledges were ordered to chant obscenities against women are getting a visit from concerned officials of the national organization.

Delta Kappa Epsilon, which was founded at Yale in 1855, has been under fire since amateur video appeared online of pledges marching through the New Haven campus on Oct. 13, chanting about women in the context of necrophilia and a specific sexual act.

Am I the only one who feels this way of addressing the chant bowdlerizes it? What "specific sexual act" does yelling "no means yes, yes means anal" refer to?

It would seem to be rape. Calling that a "specific sexual act" is just stupid and so is defining all this as something to do with obscenity. The obscenity is the misogyny of the chant, not the fact that sex was mentioned, and the misogyny is not "alleged."

Still, I guess it's good that some attention is drawn to the events, however half-brainedly.

China's New Sex Workers

When I first read this piece about young female students hiring themselves out as mistresses I noticed several things, some perhaps only existing inside my own head:

1. The title of the piece is "For some Chinese college students, sex is a business opportunity." But the business opportunities then discussed are a) a rich male pimp and b) lots of female students whom the pimp calls gold-diggers.

2. I then noticed that the article gives no numbers. We have no way of knowing how common this upper-class prostitution is or how common prostitution in general might be in China. It's impossible to tell whether this is one of those pseudo-trends or something intended to fascinate readers because it's about paid sex. Paid male-focused sex, naturally.

3. The value judgments in the article are of obvious interest:

Ding calls himself "an agent, a fixer," but his job is all pimp. He started out small: fliers passed on the street to the chauffeurs of expensive cars. He has found his niche arranging long-term, cash-for-sex arrangements between wealthy men and aspirational students, taking a 10% commission off the top.

He is nonchalant about the work, even vaguely proud. He insists that he is doing a service to the men who don't want to hire streetwalkers, and to his middle-class, ambitious and frostily pragmatic college friends.

"Most of the girls are financially comfortable, but they see their classmates carrying Louis Vuitton or Gucci bags, and they're jealous," he said on the phone from Shanghai. "These girls want to have better lives."

...

But the motivation is strong. The young women are coming of age at a time when China's family structure has eroded and staggering class divisions mean living, for the first time, in a country where shiny things are dangled carelessly under the noses of those who can't afford them.

In China, everybody seems to be selling something these days. Advertising crowds the skyline and the roadsides. A closed country has opened up in a span of decades, and is experiencing an economic boom that has introduced new desires and an "anything goes" mentality.

Note that the pimp in the story sells women. But he gets off fairly lightly, compared to the women.

4. The article wears the usual eye-patch, the one commonly applied in these kinds of stories so that we focus on the women selling sex, not on the men buying sex, and so that we don't ask why the men have the money that the women so desperately appear to want:

Just a few decades back, premarital sex was looked down upon by respectable families. Now, some members of those families are not just having premarital sex; they're selling it.

See how the buyers of the sex were disappeared there? I'm pretty sure that they, too, come from respectable families.

You know what I find odd? How very ahistorical all these commercial sex pieces tend to be. If you don't know the history of prostitution, pornography and so on you will not be able to write about the topic with both eyes open. And if you ignore the invisible-but-huge elephant (perhaps masturbating in the background?): the fact that these sex markets are for men while the workers are mostly women, you are also going to ignore the huge imbalance of power, the one which hides behind that eye-patch.

Reality Imitating Cartoons

I found this piece at Jezebel fascinating:

Would you trade hip, butt or belly fat for somewhat larger breasts—if safe and "natural" feeling? The discovery of stem cells in fat tissue could make this more than hypothetical, and implications go beyond the beauty myth.

There are medical reasons to be delighted by that possibility. But it also reminded of the cartoon my dear little Artful Asp once created, this one (left-click to make it bigger):

Can I Call You Names?

Juan Williams has been fired by the NPR for this:

"O'Reilly has been looking for support for his own remarks on a recent episode of ABC's The View in which he directly blamed Muslims for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Co-hosts Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg walked off the set in the middle of his appearance.

"Williams responded: 'Look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.'

"Williams also warned O'Reilly against blaming all Muslims for 'extremists,' saying Christians shouldn't be blamed for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh."

You can watch this, as well as Williams' reaction to being fired at Mediaite.

What's fascinating about these kinds of news is that everyone and their great-uncle will have an opinion! Every pundit will come out with arguments for or against this firing, and then every pundit can compare this case to the earlier cases to see if the punishment stays logical and if all ethnic/religious/racial groups are treated the same.

You can do all that without much research! I just did minimal research and found that Rick Sanchez was fired by the CNN for his anti-Jewish comments, Laura Schlessinger resigned after copious use of the n-word and Helen Thomas lost her front-row seat in the White House briefing room for making negative comments about Israel. Even earlier Don Imus was suspended (indefinitely?) for calling African-American female college athletes nappy-headed hoes. In that case most pundits noted the racism, few noted the sexism.

Now, none of this lets us decide if the reasons for firing or suspending or allowing someone to resign were equally serious. That's the funny bit! We can all argue whether what Juan Williams said is bad enough for firing, we can argue about the freedom of speech and we can argue about the typical political crap, too, such as whether the NPR should be pulled off the life-support for not being more right-wing than the current Nice Polite Republicans standard they cling to.

I'm as ready for all that ballgame with opinions as the next goddess. But ultimately the debate will not provide much clarity. Sure, one could argue that it was time for someone's head to roll for the anti-Muslim discourse in some parts of the U.S. media (Fox). On the other hand, one could argue that all Williams owned up to were his own prejudices. He didn't really slur the religion of Islam. And of course Bill O'Reilly hasn't got fired and will not get fired for saying much worse things.

What I also found in that research is something odd about a much younger Juan Williams:

A Washington Post reporter who wrote a widely quoted column criticizing the accusations of sexual harassment against Judge Clarence Thomas has been disciplined by the newspaper for his own conduct toward female colleagues and has apologized to the staff, The Post reported today.

The 37-year-old journalist, Juan Williams, said in an open letter to The Post's newsroom on Friday that his conduct had been "wrong" and "inappropriate."

Several female employees had complained that Mr. Williams had harassed them with sexually explicit and hostile comments, and the newspaper investigated those complaints.

The newspaper's executive editor, Leonard Downie Jr., also issued a letter to the staff. "The complaints were found to be serious," it said, "and, as Juan acknowledges, he was disciplined for his conduct and intends to apologize to women he offended."

This was way back in 1991. But I doubt he would have been fired for something like that even today. A manly apology would be quite adequate, thankyouverymuch.

The Scott Sisters. A Question Of Injustice

Jamie and Gladys Scott were each sentenced to two consecutive life sentences for an armed robbery in 1993:

Jamie, 38, and Gladys, 36, are serving life sentences in Mississippi for their role in a 1993 robbery that netted $11, despite having no prior criminal record. The three men also arrested in connection with the robbery pleaded guilty and have served their terms. Two of them testified against the sisters in return for lesser sentences.

The Scott sisters were accused of orchestrating the armed robbery of two men on a rural road near Forest, Miss., on Christmas Eve 1993. According to court documents, the sisters enticed the two men to take them on a ride to a nearby nightclub. Witnesses testified that during the ride Jamie Scott complained of nausea. When the car pulled over three men in a following car robbed them at gunpoint. After the robbery, the victims testified the sisters left with the three men. Both the victims and the accused are black.

Neither Jamie nor Gladys had prior criminal records and the robbery netted a total of 11 dollars.

The sentence the Scott sisters received is out of all proportion with other sentences for similar crimes, and the men accused for participating in this crime have long since been released. Yet Gladys and Jamie are still in prison and Jamie's kidneys are failing.

These sentences are an injustice. Several commentators have pointed out the possibility that race affected the harshness of the Scott sisters' sentence. But their (alleged) co-conspirators are also African-American, yet they got a much lighter sentence.

It is also possible that the sentences were caused by bad legal counsel:

Pastor C.J. Rhodes of Mount Helm Baptist Church in Jackson said there are larger concerns at work.

"Here you have the trinity of race, class and gender playing itself out in our system," he said. Poor and black, Gladys and Jamie Scott did not have the resources to adequately defend themselves in court or to pursue the case through the appellate system, he said.

The sisters did not testify at their trial and no one testified on their behalf. They were represented at trial by Firnist Alexander, a local attorney disbarred two years later on charges unrelated to the Scott sisters. The Mississippi State Supreme Court rebuked Alexander for "lack of diligence" and failure to communicate with clients, according to court documents.

Were the men accused for the same crime able to get better counseling, and if so what was the reason for that?

I could not help noticing that the local public radio station addressed the issues of race and poverty but nothing was said about the issue of gender. Yet the one thing that clearly differs between those who got a lighter sentence and those who did was gender. It might well be that the Scott sisters would not have gotten life sentences had they been the Scott brothers.

It is time to let Gladys and Jamie out of prison before it is too late for Jamie.

Autumn

I love this time of the year. The colors of the falling leaves: Yellow, orange, red, burgundy, sudden silvery highlights, even a very cold violet-pink.

Like jewels. I rake all the fallen leaves together into a large pile, check that nobody is watching, then dive into the pile. Such fun!

This Is Hilarious. And So Sad.

Have a look at this story at Frisky and the associated picture from GQ. More pictures are available at Jezebel.

I'm trying to think how I'd explain that Frisky story to my Dear Alien From Outer Space. Yes, that is a human female. Yes, she is dressed in underwear and pretends eating something red and round. No, she's not desperately poor and hungry, she's portrayed as ready for some fertility behavior, including sucking the male human's seed inserter. Yes, the text discusses how large her air-intake valve should be for optimal fertility attractiveness. But she's a feminist because she decided to go with the size her body came with.  Well, yes, this IS how female human beings are often portrayed.

Moneyed Speech, Honeyed Speech

A silly title but I'm just getting going today and deserve to have a silly title.

This post is about speech and money. The famous lefty philanthropist George Soros has donated Media Matters of America a million clams! As Atrios points out, why shouldn't Soros do that? After all, the wingnut blogs have accused him of funding everything on the "left" for years.

Sadly, Mr. Soros is not funding this blog. I even wrote him an e-mail when I first got started as a Divine Blogger and asked for a donation. Never got an answer.

That is not important (except for me), but it's indicative of what is going on in political blogging on the left/middle and on the right. The right pays people to speak and to write, and they pay very well indeed, and usually this payment comes from the pockets of a few billionaires who fund the various think-tanks (and most so-called conservative grass root movements, too). If you are an anti-feminist you will make big bucks writing your creed (Christine Hoff-Sommers, say) at one of those philanthropic think-tanks, but if you are a feminist you are left to the market forces, poor thing.

Now think about that! The conservatives always adore the market forces but they don't let those buffet their magazines, newspapers or blogs. The funding of those has nothing to do with market forces.

The liberals and progressives often talk about the problems with markets but they let their magazines and blogs struggle in those cold waters of capitalism without much help. This split is not complete. But it exists, and the irony is painfully clear to me, especially because there are pretty good economic reasons why advocacy sites will never be a good candidate for market funding.

What it ultimately means is that the people on the right are moneyed and the rest of us must write with a honeyed tongue to get any donations at all. (See how I got that title into the post?) More importantly, it means that the right easily out-writes everyone else in volume.

Today's Obvious Political Thought

It's the problem with a two-party system when combined with voter dissatisfaction. If you wish to protest what is going on you can either not vote or vote for the opposition. Voting for a third party is like not voting, sadly.

This is a painful problem right now for any progressive/liberal, because it was the Bush administration which got us all into this mess. But people are not happy with the Obama administration, and the elections are supposed to be about that dissatisfaction, even though Obama is not up for re-election. To punish the current administration or Congress by putting the fundamentalists (of both the religious and the financial type) back into power is really really stupid. They will make the problems worse. This can be easily read from what they propose to do: To make the problems worse.

Then there are all those governors' races which will affect redistricting and thus affect politics far into the future:

Next month's governors' races also have big implications for U.S. House elections from 2012 through 2020. The House's 435 seats are reapportioned every decade, after each census. States will redraw their districts next year in a process that often is intensely political, with borders crafted to help or hurt a party, or even a particular politician.

Most governors have extensive power to influence the process, including the right to veto plans they dislike.

All of which boils down to me urging all of you to vote.

What Women Should Wear This Halloween?

As Suzie wrote, sexy Halloween costumes are now expected of women. But what happens when even that gets bo-o-ring? You can dress as a blow-up doll in search of a serial killer! Do read the blurb on that page, too.

The bottom of the page tells where to find the equivalent costume for men. It's this one:

I don't see the equivalency. But if it has to be Favre, surely there's more material to work with. Even I listened to that phone conversation and saw the pictures.

Reading In A Second Language

I'm bilingual, and sometimes it makes me look at words we use from a different angle. I didn't speak English as a child and I don't share the whole suitcase of connotations and memories which go with some words for native speakers. That is a loss which I can never make up, though I can learn what those connotations are. It's almost as clear but never the same.

But this kind of bilingualism may also apply across gender or race or ethnicity. Some of us speak a second language even when speaking our native tongue!

Here's an example for you: There's a band called The Gogol Bordello. What the name is intended to evoke might be the feeling of a loud party, the abandonment of oneself to the music and so on. It's also meant to shock, I think.

But for me, in my first language as a female human being, that word "bordello" means something quite different from its intended meaning there. Women have not had brothels to go to as a customer.

If a woman thinks of the words "bordello", "brothel", "cathouse" and so on, she cannot think of them from the point of view of someone going into one to have a wild party. She would have to think of the term from the point of view of either being a worker in the bordello or from the point of view of someone being excluded altogether.

Yet when I read I'm very good at getting the intended meaning, and that meaning is the idea of a bordello as a place where rules are broken, where people are enjoying themselves, where sex is not regulated. I also get the subtexts of bordello's being places in the hidden underworld. That is being bilingual.

This bilingualism doesn't go in the reverse direction. Try and you will see.

There are examples of reverses, naturally, such as anything having to do with child birth, and all of us have to read in a second language when discussing alien experiences. But whose experiences determine the overall connotations of a word are not the same across the field of terms. I think the term "sex" is being redefined in a way which makes it a second-language term for many.

The Gallup Social Security and Medicare Poll.

You know what? I'm beginning to think that Gallup may be an advocacy organization rather than a pollster.

Ezra Klein links to a new Gallup poll which asks Americans about their views on the future costs of Social Security and Medicare and what to do should those costs turn out too high. He points out that the Gallup findings, as shown in this table, support the view that raising taxes beats cutting benefits when it comes to the opinions of those polled:

But Gallup's own conclusions are not those of Ezra:

Implications

While few Americans name Social Security specifically as one of the most important problems facing the country today, the vast majority of Americans agree that the government's major entitlement programs are likely to cause major economic problems in the next 25 years. Americans' views on the topic are particularly noteworthy in a climate in which there is little consensus about what the government should be fully responsible for -- including providing a minimum living standard for all -- and a high level of concern about government debt.

Americans under 50 are most likely to foresee major economic problems for these programs, but even they do not express a strong mandate to raise taxes or cut benefits as a solution. Nonetheless, the need for action is clear, considering that more nonretirees in 2010 than in 2007 said they expect to rely on Social Security as a major source of income in retirement, and at the same time 60% already do not expect Social Security to be able to pay them a benefit once they retire. Legislators should note that while the issue is a widespread source of concern and draws clear political battle lines, Americans aren't clamoring for the main options on the table.

The bolds are mine, and were added to emphasize those bits which appear to cross the line between trying to influence policy and just gathering data.

But this alone wouldn't have made me write that first paragraph of this post. Note that the above table of results was obtained by asking this question (from "View methodology, full question results, and trend data"):

Now I' like to ask you about the major entitlement programs the government is committed to, including Social Security and Medicare. Do you think the cost of these programs will create major economic problems for the U.S. in the next 25 years if no changes are made to them, or not?

Is this a leading question? I'm not sure, but I can certainly think of better ways to frame it, ways which would not privilege one alternative over the other the way this phrasing does.

The Women of Congo Fight Back

This is good news, after all the horrors I have written about here before:

Thousands of women marched on Sunday against sexual violence in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where the miseries of war have been compounded by mass rapes.

About 1,700 women who had attended a week-long forum on peace and development the capital of Sud-Kivu joined in the march, which was led by Olive Lembe Kabila, the wife of President Joseph Kabila.

The atmosphere of the march was colourful and peaceful, and many demonstrators carried banners with slogans such as "No to sexual terrorism", according to an AFP reporter.

For more on the horrors these women protest, see here and here (TRIGGER WARNING for sexual violence).

We are #41!

In one ranking of fifty best blogs on women's issues.

High-fives the snakes.
-----
Note:  This post was edited on May 7, 2013, because I received a request from the website the link went to (MastersDegree.net), and that request was to remove the link to their site.  As far as I understand this, the link request removals were general ones, having to do with that site's attempt to clean up their linking practices.  What I received was a form letter. 

Misogyny on Twitter

This tweet appeared in the Top Tweets on Twitter's homepage Saturday afternoon:

The best women are like bowling balls: Three functioning holes, found in an alley, then thrown in the gutter. 16 minutes ago via web

I'm not sure if Twitter's Top Tweets are part of its own advertising campaign or if they are just the most popular tweets at that time. Either way, misogyny thrives.

I had a look at the home lair of the creature who sent this tweet. It offers several other hilariously funny tweets, all sent to its 9000+ followers, such as

# Sometimes in love, the cause of silence, is some good ol' fashion, domestic violence. 12:43 PM Oct 15th via web

# "I just wanna be friends" says the lady in pink, "ok ok" as I spike her drink. 11:44 AM Oct 15th via web

# Show that you really, really, really love her with forced sex. 6:19 PM Oct 14th via Mobile Web

These are jokes, by the way. Because of that I should probably analyze them to see why they are funny and to whom, but I'll limit the analysis to the one which Twitter chose for its own homepage, the one about us women (all billions of us) being best when most like bowling balls.

The joke is pretty clever, honestly. It compares the essential aspects of a good woman to fuck as similar to a bowling ball: three functioning holes and returned into the gutter. The holes are to receive the penis, so those would be the anus, the mouth and the vagina. Nostrils and ears don't count. Neither does the belly button, nor all those skin pores.

Why would this joke be funny and to whom? You probably need to identify with its implicit assumption which is that women really are like bowling balls. Once you agree with that the joke is funny because it says it aloud.

Now, who would identify with that basic idea? Anyone who thinks the best women consist of three functioning holes. Anyone who enjoys misogyny and the objectification of women (yes, Virginia, there IS such a thing as utter objectification, and you have met it here). It never occurred to me that rapists and would-be-rapists must also use Twitter. But of course they do, and Twitter's rules don't ban any of that.

Liberal attitudes on (male) adultery (by Suzie)

Tracy Quan on the rescued Chilean miners:

Much was made over the miner whose mistress greeted him as he emerged from the ground. But if nothing else, it put normal, middle-class adultery in the spotlight in a most refreshing way. ...

While it's tempting to believe that people in other countries are more open-minded about infidelity, it's never simple. ... In cultures where things seem more relaxed, battle lines still form around legal status. ... At Camp Esperanza last month, a Red Cross worker spoke to the Telegraph about girlfriends who are surprised to discover their men are also married. A few miners have parallel families who didn't know about each other until they arrived at the site.

Do these liberal attitudes apply to women who commit adultery? Quan doesn't tell us. In her column, it's natural for men to want more than one partner and liberal women will understand that. But marriage is about more than love and sex -- there are financial and legal ramifications. Chile didn't legalize divorce until 2004, and the process seems complex and costly.

Mad Men Promoting Macho Role Models To a New Generation [Anthony McCarthy]

I've never watched a full episode of Mad Men, wondering why I needed to watch presentations of post-war, early 6os machismo that I'd seen when it was going on. I was left wondering if these guys were the ones who were going to be putting Richard Nixon in office in a few years, the prospect of a romanticized presentation of them * is pretty revolting. This was the Man's World that Betty Friedan was talking about.

Today's Boston Globe has a good article about the genre that presents the inner life of macho men, as the subtitle says, it's always men that TV looks at deeply. As if we needed that to continue into yet another decade.

What do you think of Mad Men, if you watch it, or the vastly over-examined pathos of the straight, white, middle to upper class male as seen on TV? Do you know of anything like this that looks at the inner lives of women? The article mentions that briefly and says, pretty much, that it's never done in the same way as it is for men.

*As in 24, which promoted torture done by a pretty white man as a positive thing, the presentation of beautiful men doing awful things should be seen as a promotion of what they're doing. Sex sells bad behavior as well as it sells deodorant, good looks cover up things worse than underarm odor.

Good News For A Change [Anthony McCarthy]

Sue Wilson's short article about the Fairness Doctrine at Buzzflash is the best news I've read this week, other than the rescue of the miners. Donna Brazile, of all people, has put her finger on what should have been among the first priorities of the Democrats once they regained power, re-instituting the Fairness Doctrine. Nothing will change for the better until the publicly owned airwaves are returned to the business of accurately informing The People, nothing.

Sue Wilson's article is an excellent history of the Fairness Doctrine, especially in how it was destroyed by Ronald Reagan and why. She also presents how Newt Gingrich, of all people, tried to restore it and why that proposal went the way of term limits once his situation changed:

But Fairness? Equal Time? Reasoned discourse? Those went out the window in 1987 with - drumroll, please - President Ronald Reagan.

Reagan was, of course, a consummate media man. Not simply the star of B movies like "Bedtime for Bonzo," Reagan also hosted television's "GE Theater." The so-called "Great Communicator" then went on to become President of the Screen Actors Guild, profiting from programs while robbing actors of royalties.

More than any president before or since, Reagan understood the power of TV and radio. So it's no coincidence that President Ronald Reagan, by fiat, eliminated fairness in broadcasting. He knew what would happen if one side - his side - could control the message.

(It's interesting to note that after Reagan's action, both houses of Congress immediately passed bills - co-sponsored by Newt Gingrich - to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. But both Reagan and George Bush the First vetoed those bills. For the 2009 documentary film I made on this topic, "Broadcast Blues," Gingrich refused to answer questions about why he's changed his tune. No great surprise: put simply, Gingrich must understand that Republicans can win elections only if they can control Radio.)

It was one of the first big disappointments I had in Barack Obama when I found out he wasn't going to try to restore the Fairness Doctrine and other measures to insure that the media monopoly by the corporate right didn't continue. I'd imagine it's because of his adoption of the predominant and absurd libertarian legal fads that have served us so badly over the past forty years. That libertarianism has become the dominant assumption of the entire spectrum of the political class, it is one of the biggest reasons that liberalism has declined. As many of you are probably tired of hearing me say it, the resulting ignorance and propagandizing of voters is even more of a danger to self-government than our corrupt voting systems.

The idea that the media which has shown it will always devolve into a service industry for the highest payer will ever serve democracy, without that requirement, is, I'd say, far more willful denial of the clear truth than creationism or climate change denial. And a surprising number of liberals, especially bloggers, buy that untruth, which is oh, so convenient for the Republican-corporate party. And, I'll point out in passing, I have noticed most of those people I've read are white males of higher income, generally the last group to get it.

It was part of the shock, for me, to see that it was Donna Brazile saying it in Oprah's magazine, but maybe that's something that shouldn't have shocked me at all.

Old Business: In contrast to the immediate firing of Rick Sanchez for his anti-Semitic implications, Brian Kilmeade will not lose his job for a far more seriously anti-Muslim slur he made on FOX last week. Apparently the Sanchez standard is not a matter of fairness. But FOX would probably empty out if those who spew it's nonstop hatred of women, Latinos, GLBT, etc. suddenly found out how wonderful the economic policies they've pushed are for those without a large salary and benefits.

Tal

Notice [Anthony McCarthy]

Yesterday's posts are so important and the one about rape is related to the topic I'd planned on posting on this morning. I'll hold that post till a later date because the aspects of it Echidne discusses are extremely important and need to be discussed more.

The post from Suzie about people losing their homes is also too important to let it go. Please read them and comment on them. Any of us could be facing those problems at any time, we need more practical ideas for dealing with them.

I will post something later today or tomorrow.

Mortgage crisis hits close to home (by Suzie)

Unlike Echidne, I'm not an economist. I have no great insight into what Paul Krugman called the mortgage mess in a column yesterday. But I hope you won't mind me telling my own story.

My sister owes at least $5,000 on a small home assessed at $90,000, a little less than what she paid for it five years ago. She has about $30,000 in equity. A few days before Bank of America declared a moratorium on foreclosures, it sent her a letter, threatening to foreclose on Election Day if she didn't pay her debt and double her house payments for the next six months. We're in limbo. I have done some research but haven't had the energy to do more.

Working with BoA has been a nightmare. I have power of attorney, and every time I called, I got someone different in a call center, often with different answers. For instance, one told me to total up my sister's medical debt. When I called back, another person told me that she had too much debt for BoA to work with her.

I wrote about this on 1/29/10, and some readers scolded me for not being more understanding of debt collectors. At least they have jobs. My sister got fired for petty reasons in May, and I can't help but think it had to do with her age and declining health. She worked in a hospital and had insurance, by the way.

Earlier, I reached a local BoA manager who told me that the staff was working on a solution, I didn't need to keep calling, and I should stop worrying about foreclosure. They would notify me before the case got that far, she said. They didn't, of course.

Right now, my sister's planning to move into an old trailer in the country with her son and his family. Her other son lives with her and works in a factory. On his wages, it will be hard to afford rent. I better remind them to vote while they still have a permanent address.

Nonsexy, but still fun, Halloween costumes (by Suzie)

Before Halloween last year, I decried the pressure on women to dress as a sexy something. (10/30/09) The women at the fabulous new site, Take Back Halloween!, feel the same way, and unlike me, they actually did something about it. They explain:

We’re a resource guide: we come up with the costume ideas, explain what you’ll need to pull off the look, and provide links to where you can buy the various components.

I should be able to come up with something because I'm now the proud proprietor of a small church thrift store.

It would be easy to dress as Mary Wollstonecraft, who published her "Vindication on the Rights of Woman" in 1792. The artwork above shows a neckline that has been back in style, and a ribbon could complete the look, at least on top. If you have a daughter, she could go as Mary Shelley, perhaps with a mini Frankenstein's monster.

Another interesting figure would be Louise Michel, a k a the Red Virgin. With a pea coat and an old nightgown, you could dress as her marching to Versailles after the fall of the 1871 Paris Commune.

I need to stop before I spend all day hunting up costumes on the Internet, but I'd like to hear your suggestions.

ETA: Thanks to Anna for this great link to Violet Socks as well as one explaining how to dress as Joan of Arc.

Friday flower blogging (by Suzie)

No Means Yes. Yes Means Anal.

AA sent me a link to this new fraternity pledge chant at the Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity of Yale University:

Around 9:30 pm, students were seen chanting, among other things, "No means yes, yes means anal."

The students, some of whom were blindfolded and being led in a line with their hands on each others' shoulders, were also heard chanting "My name is Jack, I'm a necrophiliac, I f--- dead women."

It's just a joke, naturally. Very funny if you like jokes about rape. Especially the bit where you get raped whatever your answer.

What makes it even funnier is that the objectives of DKE are:

The Cultivation of General Literature and Social Culture, the Advancement and Encouragement of Intellectual Excellence, the Promotion of Honorable Friendship and Useful Citizenship, the Development of a Spirit of Tolerance and Respect for the Rights and Views of Others, the Maintenance of Gentlemanly Dignity, Self-Respect, and Morality in All Circumstances, and the Union of Stout Hearts and Kindred Interests to Secure to Merit its Due Reward

Bolds are mine. They certainly wouldn't be by DKE.

What You Don't Know Can Hurt You

I have wanted to write about a study which found Americans uninformed about the actual levels of wealth inequality in this country for some time, but other things intervened. Hence this post is a little late.

Here is one write-up of the study:

Americans generally underestimate the degree of income inequality in the United States, and if given a choice, would distribute wealth in a similar way to the social democracies of Scandinavia, a new study finds.

For decades, polls have shown that a plurality of Americans -- around 40 percent -- consider themselves conservative, while only around 20 percent self-identify as liberals. But a new study from two noted economists casts doubt on what values lie beneath those political labels.

According to research (PDF) carried out by Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University, and flagged by Paul Kedrosky at the Infectious Greed blog, 92 percent of Americans would choose to live in a society with far less income disparity than the US, choosing Sweden's model over that of the US.

What's more, the study's authors say that this applies to people of all income levels and all political leanings: The poor and the rich, Democrats and Republicans are all equally likely to choose the Swedish model.

...

Recent analyses have shown that income inequality in the US has grown steadily for the past three decades and reached its highest level on record, exceeding even the large disparities seen in the 1920s, before the Great Depression. Norton and Ariely estimate that the one percent wealthiest Americans hold nearly 50 percent of the country's wealth, while the richest 20 percent hold 84 percent of the wealth.

But in their study, the authors found Americans generally underestimate the income disparity. When asked to estimate, respondents on average estimated that the top 20 percent have 59 percent of the wealth (as opposed to the real number, 84 percent). And when asked to choose how much the top 20 percent should have, on average respondents said 32 percent -- a number similar to the wealth distribution seen in Sweden.

"What is most striking" about the results, argue the authors, is that they show "more consensus than disagreement among ... different demographic groups. All groups – even the wealthiest respondents – desired a more equal distribution of wealth than what they estimated the current United States level to be, while all groups also desired some inequality – even the poorest respondents."

And one graph from the study (p. 12, left-click to make larger):

The study also offers the information in this graph by by the respondents' income levels, by their voting habits and by gender (p. 13). It turns out that men prefer a slightly more unequal wealth distribution than women but the differences are slight. And nobody prefers as much wealth inequality as the US currently has!

This is all quite astonishing. What's probably most astonishing is that nobody much seems to have cared to remove the ignorance these findings suggest:

Americans' ignorance about wealth (and, probably, income) distribution is encouraging in the sense that it offers hope that most voters might opt for government policies more conducive to equality if only they knew how unequal things were. But it's dismaying in the sense that people who occupy a position of relative privilege seem to go out of their way to avoid acknowledging it. A recent example is M. Todd Henderson, a law professor at the University of Chicago whose annual household income exceeds $250,000, putting him comfortably ahead of 98 percent of his fellow Americans. Henderson was foolish enough to write a blog post venturing that even though he and his wife earn more than $250,000, his Hyde Park neighbor Barack Obama shouldn't raise his taxes because "we can't afford it" after paying the mortgage, the kids' private school tuition, the nanny, etc. You can imagine the response he got.

I would have thought all this would be an obvious weapon for the Democrats to use when defending the Health Care Reform, for example, or the minimum wage or umpteen other possible political acts. But no.

HIV And Pornography

An actor has tested positive for HIV:

An adult film performer tested positive for HIV on Saturday, causing several pornography companies to suspend production.

A health clinic based in Sherman Oaks, California, reported the positive test result.

I guess now the task is to find out if this actor has infected anyone else.

Some activists argue that the industry which rarely allows condoms to be used is at fault:

Darren James, the adult film actor at the center of the 2004 HIV scare criticized the industry for again failing to protect actors from being infected.

James tested negative days before being filmed. Later, a test came back positive, and James learned that he spread HIV to three actresses who he worked with.

"I knew it was going to happen," James told the Los Angeles Times. "And how many years has it been? Again. They went right back to the same habits."

And why is the industry so reluctant to have condoms used? Hmmm.

I also wonder how much anal sex increases the risk of infection. It's known to be more dangerous than vaginal sex:

Anal sex means sexual activity involving the bottom – in particular, the type of intercourse in which the penis goes into the anus. It is often referred to as ‘rectal sex'. Anal sex does carry some health risks, so please read our advice carefully.

Our impression is that anal sex has become rather more common in heterosexual couples, partly because they have watched ‘blue movies’ in which this activity so often occurs.

One small study carried out in 2009 suggested that 30 per cent of pornographic DVDs which are on sale in the UK feature rectal intercourse. Often, it is presented as something that is both routine and painless for women. In real life, this is not the case.

...

What about infection? Most sexual activities carry a risk of transmission of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) from gonorrhoea and herpes to hepatitis B and HIV. There is evidence that anal intercourse carries a higher transmission risk than almost any other sexual activity. Information about these risks is given below.