A Conservative Man Advises Women About Men

If you have ever cruised the misogyny sites you get a pretty good idea how woman-hating men want women to be: They must kowtow to The Man, they must never put on weight, they must not talk much at all, they must stay at home and clean house and cook (but if they do they are still sucking off the man like a leech).

They must have their vaginas (and mouths) always available for the men who own them but other men must not have access to the said vaginas. And even then they are still horrible bitches and fat slags who only want the Alpha Males when the Omega Males who want to be treated as alpha males demand equal vaginal rights. But most of all women are seen as horrible on those sites. Nothing women could do will ever alter that.

Given this background, I was somewhat surprised to see a bowdlerized version of all this on a conservative site as an advice column on how women should behave if they want to date a man or get married to one.

The column is much gentler than the hate sites, almost humorous, but it is based on the same extreme gender caricatures. Women are emotional wrecks who bubble and bubble and bubble, men are silent and simple lords of the universe who just want to get laid and obeyed. Men do not have emotions! But women: Remember not to try to manipulate those nonexistent emotions of men! And so on and so on.

It's that Mars/Venus bullshit with some slight updating. Here's one snippet:

Men are not as comfortable with their emotions as women. Typically, we don’t use our emotions as often or as fully as women, we don’t get in as many emotional situations, and we feel extremely uncomfortable with the idea of crying or getting choked up.
So, ramped-up drama can take a much harder toll on men than women. For example, men have it drilled into them from the time they’re young that they’re supposed to protect women. So, if a man says something that makes a woman cry, it may be no big deal for her. Depending on their mental state, there are a lot of women who can break into tears if a waiter brings them the wrong kind of salad dressing. But to a man, a woman crying over something he did means that he FAILED as a man to protect her and worse yet, he did the opposite and inflicted pain on someone he cares about.

This means that women are not allowed to cry. It reflects badly on a man, you see, and then he won't want to protect the woman or provide for her!

I had to read the whole column several times, what with being a feminazi and all, until I realized that this is not an advice column on romance, not even a humorous one.

This is a job application column where women can look for the job of a wingnut wife. In Wingnuttia men protect women and provide for them, in exchange for something which this column leaves undefined. But once I realized that this is about a job the column started making sense. How to dress for the job interview, how to deal with the boss. That there is no advice for the boss goes without saying. He is not applying for the job.

Some of the comments are lots of fun, too, as you might expect. There's general agreement that feminists have caused all the sexual and marital problems of wingnuts, and that men are at least as oppressed as women, most likely more so. That, too, sounds a lot like those misogynistic sites.

Then there are the people commenting-as-female who agree that men are by far the better gender and that they themselves have never felt comfortable with those odd creatures called women. These comments always leave me dizzy because other people won't give the honorary-man-women an out when it comes to this kind of mud-slinging on a whole gender. However hard they try to earn that. Because the advice is to all women, my dears.

It's sadly true that columns like this one are not unheard of on the other side of the political aisle, though they tend not to be quite as misogynistic. It is equally sad and true that we don't get many (if any) columns where a woman tells men how they should act to find a woman to date or marry.

Is there then no advice for lonely heterosexual men? Sure. You can find several sites on the net which tell men how they can cheat women into going to bed with them without getting at all emotionally entangled while doing that.

That's a little odd. All the advice we are offered tends to have a whiff of woman-hating in it!

The gender caricatures in these kinds of pieces are offensive, and not only to women. It's shocking how much misandry is hidden inside the basic story (men are simple and strong but fall apart if a woman cries) and how acceptable it appears to be as long as the gender dominance hierarchies are not threatened.

It's not that I mind silly humorous-intended pieces of the sexes though everything those say will fail to apply to the large majority of individual relationships and in that sense turn out to be sexist. What I mind is the opportunity they give for those little stabs of loathing, aimed at half the humanity, really, and the idea that the humor somehow makes them OK.

A Deep Thought For The Day

I was going to write that very long rant about how horrible it is to blog-while-a-feminist, what with the nasties out there and the circular firing squads inside the movement and the incredible (nonexistent) financial rewards.

But that wouldn't interest you and I love the expression on the faces of those horses. And the kiss. No, I have no idea if the horses are anything more than friends. But kindness seems to come easier for other mammals.

From The Wingnut Legislators Files

Have you ever wondered what wingnut legislators might really think about us wimminfolk? You know, in general?

Duh. But I'm still going to post a few things I collected in the last week or so.

Here's something from the great state of Wisconsin:

A thoughtful, sensitive male Wisconsin legislator has proclaimed that he is against divorce under all circumstances — even spousal abuse. And he's got a message to all those ladies out there getting the shit beaten out of them by their husbands: remember the good times, back before things took an abusive turn, and maybe you'll fall in love again. There, isn't that better? Now, chin up, and go back out into that awful marriage of yours like a champ.
The obtuse anti divorce champion is Republican Don Pridemore. And this isn't the first time the Heartless Cheesehead has acted in a manner most unbecoming.

This is an absolute pearl thrown before us swine, from the great state of Georgia:

Rep. Terry England compares women to cows, pigs and chickens. from Bryan Long on Vimeo.

The Republican lawmaker Terry England used those informative animal comparisons when advocating that dead fetuses should be carried to term:

England was speaking on the floor of the Georgia legislature in favor of HB 954, a bill which makes it illegal to obtain an abortion after 20 weeks, which is fine for him to take that stance and many people would even agree with that. However, he was pushing for that law to also apply to women who are carrying a stillborn fetus or one that is likely to die before it reaches term, making it illegal for women to have the dead fetus removed until their bodies do so naturally.

In comparison the Pennsylvania governor's advice to abortion seekers who don't want additional ultrasounds for no medical reasons (Just Close Your Eyes) is really the height of courtesy.

Did The Democrats Go Too Far? Gender Wars Concern Trolling.

J. Bryan Lowder asks at Slate: Are Democrats in Danger of Looking Too Political on the Violence Against Women Act?

What do you think? A snippet:

At the end of the Times piece, Senator Roy Blunt suggests that the new champions of women may be “in serious danger of overplaying their hand,” and I actually think he has a point. While I certainly praise the support that Democrats have displayed for women’s issues in this election cycle, I’m starting to be turned off by the giddiness with which they’ve taken on the mantle of lady defender. I admit that the issue of political tone is small potatoes compared to the very important programs and services at stake in these debates, but I’m still a little uncomfortable with the unequivocal friend-or-foe rhetoric that has come to dominate this conversation.

Digby's comment:

That's right, it's a tough election fight and the last thing Democrats need is to look like all they care about is a bunch of whiny bitches. Let's not lose our heads here.

I could put on my doctoral hat and write on the underlying issues in a semi-erudite way. For instance, it's certainly true that the Democrats are making noise about the war on women mostly because it's election year. Many of them are Johnny-come-latelies (or whatever the term is) and that shows. And there are all sorts of ways the Violence Against Women Act could have been explained better in general.

But that's not the deepest of the underlying issues here. That one, my dear readers, is the fact that women are still The Others, and spending too much time on trivial concerns of The Others gets you excluded from the Big Boyz' Treehouse.

That's what creates the unpleasant frisson of discomfort in Mr. Lowder, I think. Picking something unimportant and then spending so much time on it! This MUST backfire! And what about civility and bipartisanship and respecting the opposition's point of view?

See how well I can do that stuff? What makes courtesy and civility and such a bit harder is that the opposition's point of view is that women belong in the kitchen and the baby-making factories, so we must give equal space for those views, too.

Could being the "lady defender" backfire on the Democrats? Perhaps, given that the future is unknown and politics is complicated, and given that people like Mr. Lowder describe what is going on as "lady defending." Something deep in the reptile brain is causing the choice of those words.

Heh.

These responses to a few of the forced birther governors.

I don't think the forced birthers realize how very fed up many women are over this continual focus on women-as-ignorant-sluts.

Mother Russia Finally Waking Up?

In terms of patriarchy. This article on the band Pussy Riot offers some faint hope:

One day in October, three women in fluorescent masks and minidresses mounted a scaffold in a Moscow metro station, grabbed guitars and amplifiers, and began to play their first hit, “Loosen the paving stones!”
“Egyptian air is good for the lungs! Let’s make Tahrir in the middle of Red Square,” they sang, punching the air in unison, as alternately bemused and shocked commuters watched and filmed them with their mobile phones.
Five months later, these lyrics seem clairvoyant, after Moscow was convulsed by street demonstrations following flawed parliamentary elections in December. The all-female punk group, known as Pussy Riot, has become a household name in Russia, embodying a brazen push for female emancipation in the country’s stiflingly macho, conservative society. To their critics, they are simply publicity-seeking blasphemers.
The group declined to be interviewed in person, fearing for their safety but agreed to chat with the Financial Times over Skype. A band member who gave her name only as Shayba described them as adherents of “third wave feminism” and the Riot Grrrl movement of underground feminist punk rockers in the US. Their lyrics target in equal measure Vladimir Putin, authoritarian government, sexism and rape.

...

Shayba said Russia’s president-elect had become a symbol of all that was wrong with the country. “[Putin] has repeatedly made sexist statements that the main task of women is child bearing and being in a passive position relative to men,” she said.

They are brave women, given what the Russian state can do to them. And yes, Russia is a stiflingly macho and conservative society. Of course the list of such societies on this earth is a very long one. Much feminist work remains to be done.

How's The War On Women Doing? Some Reading for Friday

This story about "the right not to know" and the Texas version of the war on women. Be forewarned as it is sad.

This story about the advice the governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett (R) gives to women who don't want to go through all those extra woman-shaming steps when seeking an abortion: Just Close Your Eyes.

E.J. Graff debating inside herself on the meaning of the new contraceptives battle in the war on women.

A Musical Interlude

This is wonderful. Big Mama Thornton: Everything Gonna Be Alright.

Plural Marriages And Other Sleights of Hand

The treatment of polygamy in the popular media is weird. Big Love and all that. I have also seen people confuse polyamory with polygamy. They are mostly not the same because the latter assigns almost all power to the one single man in the relationship and because women in traditional polygamy are not allowed to have more than one partner.

Well, they don't even have one partner. They have a fractional share of one partner. Which brings me to the point made in the title of this post: We call the marriages of people like Warren Jeffs (and the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter-Day Saints he led) "plural marriages."

They are that only from the married man's point of view. From the married women's point of view they are fractional marriages. That they are not called that is pretty informative. It tells us whose point of view is applied here.

But it's not really a general men's point of view because one outcome of fractional marriages is the Lost Boys. If only a few men are to get all the women, then one must somehow get rid of the surplus boys. This means that many men in such sects would end up unmarried for life if there was no outside world for them to settle in.

So what do we get here? Plural marriages? Fractional marriages? Boys tossed onto the garbage heap? And which approach seems the favored one in the popular media?
-----
This is the article which caused these musings.

Guess Who Got Most of The Bananas?

The US is still marching towards a feudal economy or a Banana Republic. Even the bananas themselves are shared very unequally:

National income gained overall in 2010, but all of the gains were among the top 10 percent. Even within those 15.6 million households, the gains were extraordinarily concentrated among the super-rich, the top one percent of the top one percent.

Just 15,600 super-rich households pocketed an astonishing 37 percent of the entire national gain.

My bolds,

OK. That wasn't bananas. It was money.

This society is becoming increasingly unequal. That bodes increasing instability in the future which is bad news even for those who wouldn't otherwise mind living in the enclosed and guarded communities for the handful of the super-rich.

And at least some of this development is by design. The attacks against Social Security, against Medicaid, against public schools all contribute towards the feudalization of the USA. The demands for minimal taxing of corporate profits and minimal taxing of unearned income similarly contribute towards a future Banana Republic and globalization mostly benefits the multinational firms which can easily shift their production to areas where worker protections are nil and wages just cover the day's nutritional requirements.

Taxes pay for civilization, as someone smart once said. And they do. Civilization is a public good, meaning that it benefits us all by making it safe to go outside and by offering interesting reasons to go outside. But reverse that and you might notice that destroying the civilization is a public bad. Life in a feudal society is not fun. Not even for the rich.

Today's Action Alert: Bei Bei Shuai

First read Katha Pollitt's column on Bei Bei Shuai if you are not familiar with her case. Then act. You can use Twitter and Facebook as Katha points out at the end of her column and you can sign this petition.

From Katha's piece:

“These laws say there’s one law for pregnant women and another for everyone else,” says Linda Pence, the energetic Indiana lawyer representing Shuai. “For everyone else suicide is a mental health issue. For a pregnant woman, it’s a crime. That’s a violation of women’s constitutional right to equal treatment under the law.” If Shuai is convicted, Pence notes a further paradox: “If you’re two months pregnant and try to commit suicide, you can be charged with feticide, even though you could have a legal abortion.” Although maybe not for long.

Today's Weird News From The War on Contraception

This proposal (via Jezebel) will not pass but it's still worth scrutiny:

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 6-2 Monday to endorse a controversial bill that would allow Arizona employers the right to deny health insurance coverage for contraceptives based on religious objections.
Arizona House Bill 2625, authored by Majority Whip Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, would permit employers to ask their employees for proof of medical prescription if they seek contraceptives for non-reproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment.
“I believe we live in America. We don’t live in the  Soviet Union,” Lesko said. “So, government should not be telling the organizations or mom and pop employers to do something against their moral beliefs.”
Lesko said this bill responds to a contraceptive mandate in the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed into law March 2010.
“My whole legislation is about our First Amendment rights and freedom of religion,” Lesko said. “All my bill does is that an employer can opt out of the mandate if they have any religious objections.”

Two immediate thoughts came to my mind. First, this is the kind of mess we get when health insurance is provided through our bosses. A really bad system, on many, many levels. Second, what about Viagra? Will employers want to see proof that Viagra is not prescribed just so that someone can have more sexytime? What if it is prescribed to unmarried men? That goes against lots of religious rules.

My third thought was this: Could something like this be limited to only contraception? That is unlikely, which means that any employer could scrutinize any employees' medical histories to determine if some treatment might go against the employer's private moral beliefs.

That sounds pretty totalitarian to me. It would also offer a wonderful profit-enhancing opportunity to all firms who are willing to convert to Christian Scientists!

My fourth thought was that this whole debacle tells us much about the freedom and rights of firms but pretty much nothing about the freedom or rights of workers. Which is, of course, business as usual.

Echidne Volunteers for Kevin Drum

Kevin is looking for people willing to criticize science:

In any case, think of it as after-the-fact peer review with an attitude. The winning candidate for this position will have a pretty good mathematical background, a sneering contempt for sloppiness, an obsessive attention to detail, a willingness to read mounds of tedious crap, and probably a fairly severe case of insomnia. You'd also need to be really fast, since debunking bullshit a month after every news outlet in the country has hyped it does no one any good. It needs to be debunked the day it hits the streets. (Or praised, of course. We're looking for rigor here, folks.)

He also points out that this endeavor does not pay!

Well, I have been doing quite a bit of that type of work over the centuries on this here blog, mostly on gender studies and evolutionary psychology but also on some types of medical studies.

And that gives me the experience to suggest that money for the work might not be a bad idea. But there are, indeed, proper blogs (not mine which is an improper blog) focused on criticizing research. The problem is with the mainstream summaries of research, based on whatever would cause the most fervor and clicks. That's where we need a more careful eye and a tightly pressed set of angry lips and so on.

Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner On MSNBC

Nina Turner introduced a Viagra bill in Ohio. She is interviewed here. Well worth watching.

‪Cutting Off the Nose To Spite The Face‬

That saying seems to have an interesting history. But it applies well to this decision:

Following opinions on public funding of contraceptives, the New Hanover County Board of Commissioners unanimously voted to turn down a state family planning grant that would cover contraceptive supplies along with other medical services related to family planning.
Commissioner Rick Catlin, who represents the commissioners on the county’s health board, said he also voted against accepting the funds when the item was on the health board’s agenda.
He said he was concerned with answers to questions he asked about the funds.
“The answers that I got were that there were patients that were not being responsible with existing family planning that was being offered and that this would provide a more reliable solution for those people,” Catlin said at Monday afternoon’s commissioners meeting.
He added that he had an issue with “using taxpayer dollars to fund someone’s irresponsibility.”

Mm. Let's set aside the question whether these patients really are irresponsible about family planning. Let's assume that they are. Will this moral decision by the board of commissioners really keep taxpayer dollars from funding the outcomes of any further irresponsibility? Will it stop all irresponsible behavior?

This is cutting off your nose to spite your face. Without contraception the outcome will be children. And if the parents of those children truly are irresponsible then the children will have to be supported by taxpayer dollars.

Tighten Your Belts, Please. Austerity Bumps In The Next Few Years.

Atrios links to this story about the economic tragedy that is today's Greece:

It has been a common secret among PE teachers for some time now that they don't expect pupils to do PE any more, because many of them are underfed and get dizzy.

They need to be discreet, as these underprivileged children don't wish to be exposed to their peers. In my previous school, the teachers arranged among themselves to give the school canteen some money, so that the canteen could give the child a snack, without embarrassing the child.

However, this was not enough. In many schools today, it is the parents' associations who come together, gather food and discreetly arrange to allocate it to those families of the school who are suffering. In co-operation with the teachers, they know which children in the school are hungry and in need of help. Again, they try to do it as discreetly as possible.

"Many families, suddenly left without work, are in shock and there is nowhere to turn. Social services are collapsing. They are not professional beggars. They are ordinary people like you and me, suddenly left with nothing. I know one area, where schools have specialised in what they gather: 1st primary school gather rice and legumes, 2nd vegetables, 3rd meat and chicken etc.

The nasty aspect of "shared austerity" is that it is never shared equally and whatever sacrifices the wealthy have to make do not amount to hunger.

But even if the sacrifices were shared equally their impact would be catastrophic on those who earlier were just hanging on to some kind of a life by a finger nail or two. It is the frailest among us who suffer the most under these austerity fits, unless the policies are very, very carefully crafted to avoid that very outcome.

When state governments in the United States gut their budgets, the kinds of things to go are the kinds of things which affect the weakest among us. The developmentally handicapped, the mentally ill, the families with multiple health problems, the frail elderly and the poorest children. These are groups who cannot fight back very efficiently and who do not have large enough of a voting bloc to defend them.

In exchange for all this, those state governments offer lower taxes to the firms and tax breaks to the so-called job creators.

This is morally distasteful, given that these groups of the neediest among us never caused the economic recession in Greece or elsewhere. But it is also bad economic policy, in particular when combined with stripping the schools and civil service of jobs that pay enough to live on. Who will be left to buy all those goods and services? Why would the so-called "job creators" create jobs if there are no viable markets for the final products?

Why I Love Blogging. Or On Socks.

Because I can write about socks and someone (err, me) publishes it! And right now I want to write about socks.

Is there anything more endearing than a pair of used socks, tossed on the floor or the armchair? They still retain the shapes of the feet which wore them but they also sag, as if really tired after all that hoofing around. They look lost and tired and tiny, even when they are Big Socks:

And then there are all those widowed socks whose partners got eaten up by the Monster that hunts in the washing machine. So much drama and loneliness. I almost can't take it.

I have a pair of socks which have knitted in them this message "reading is always worthwhile." Elitist snobby socks!

They encompass the whole universe, socks do.

The Scariest Side of Forced Birthers

There are more than one candidate for that label. But right now these stories might win the competition:

Rennie Gibbs is accused of murder, but the crime she is alleged to have committed does not sound like an ordinary killing. Yet she faces life in prison in Mississippi over the death of her unborn child.
Gibbs became pregnant aged 15, but lost the baby in December 2006 in a stillbirth when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy. When prosecutors discovered that she had a cocaine habit – though there is no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby's death – they charged her with the "depraved-heart murder" of her child, which carries a mandatory life sentence.

Tut, tut. An unclean aquarium!

The linked article gives a fairly good summary of several similar cases. They all treat pregnant women with substance abuse problems or with mental problems as cold-hearted criminals who go as far as trying to commit suicide just so they can kill the fetus!

Imagine the world forced birthers want. Every problem in a pregnancy or childbirth could be fodder for an investigation into the behavior of the woman. What would the most likely response of any potentially at-risk woman be to that kind of policing?

Not to contact the health care system at all, I'd think. This is not a good outcome.

Today's Rush News

On the nasty kind of rush. Media Matters has put together Limbaugh's use of the term "feminazi" over the eons.

I have reclaimed that term, natch, and often use it here to describe myself. Imagine me wearing the triple-horned helmet and steel-toed boots, marching in goose-step with myself, making all misogynists dream nightmares of long armpit hair on women and a world where men must wear eye shadow and lip liner and have feelings.

No other group fighting for civil or human rights has been given a moniker associating them with Hitler in such a successful way. What makes this especially poignant is that the real Nazis preached "Kueche, Kinder und Kirche" for women and limited the role of women to breeding lots of little Nazis.

So far Rush has lost (at least temporarily) 141 advertisers.

Every Dollar is Created Equal? Again.

As I've written before, nobody mentions the class wars when the rich are running them because that's just business as usual. But even one teeny-weeny mention of the ever-increasing income inequality in this country and its bad consequences (Banana Republic, here we come!) makes you into someone who preaches class warfare. Which is quite hilarious if you have my sick sense of humor.

And the same sense of humor made me laugh loud at this comment by a wealthy sponsor of Mitt Romney:

In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Ken Griffin, founder of the hedge fund Citadel was asked if he thought rich people had too great of an influence on politics.
"I think they actually have an insufficient influence," he responded. "Those who have enjoyed the benefits of our system more than ever now owe a duty to protect the system that has created the greatest nation on this planet."
He also told the Tribune that he believes he should be able to donate an unlimited amount of money to Super PACs.

The whole interview is here.

That sentence by Mr. Griffin is a lovely little sentence. It argues that those who have made out like bandits from the globalization scam and the financial markets scam should be allowed to have major influence on the continuance of the same.

Kathleen Parker Wrote Something Pro-Women? Gasp.

Kathleen Parker usually carries the anti-feminist bucket for the wingnut boyz but this time she has written a pretty critical piece about the misogyny of the Republican Party base. She gets hate-mail from woman-haters, too, I guess.

Still, at the end of her piece she tries to salvage her party:

But Republicans are waging war on women only if you believe that the morality of abortion should never be questioned or if you believe the federal government can order people to pay for something that violates their conscience. These issues are not so simple, nor are Republicans simpletons for trying to protect the unborn or challenging what they view as government overreach.

Duh and duh.

First, the government orders people All The Time to pay for something that violates their conscience! I pay taxes and taxes are used to finance wars and killings I do not support. I pay taxes and Rush Limbaugh gets paid to ship his crappy opinions to the US armed forces abroad. I have no say over that.

Second, the Republicans, wherever they dominate the states, are not just "questioning" the morality of abortion! They are inventing more and more humiliating ways to turn pregnant women into mere aquaria for egg-Americans.

The Republican pundits are not having erudite and thoughtful conversations about abortion, women in powerful positions and so on. They are all like Rush Limbaugh, albeit in somewhat diluted or disguised forms.

Indeed, being a sexist is a job requirement in the right-wing media. There are sexists on both sides of the aisle and I have criticized them in the past and will again in the future. And yes, Bill Maher is a major league level sexist.

But the liberal pundits are not required to be anti-feminist, for instance. The conservative pundits are, and the Republican Party itself is dedicated to making sure that women cannot gain equality. Thus, however bad the Democrats are when it comes to women's rights (and they are bad enough), they win these kinds of fights without even trying, simply because the alternative is Taliban American Style.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan. Men Are Fundamental, Women Secondary.

So Islamic religious scholars, all men, tell Afghan women:

The Afghan government was ‘too busy' for International Women's Day on March 8th, so it postponed official acknowledgement until the 11th. It was not a great moment to celebrate, anyway. A week earlier a council of religious scholars - the Ulema Council - published guidance that declared "men are fundamental and women are secondary."  It called for women to travel with mahrams (male escorts), and to avoid mixing with men in offices, markets and educational facilities. The statement also said that beating a woman is only permissible with a "Shariah-compliant reason."
The Council's edicts have no legal standing, and were not unprecedented from this conservative body. What was more troubling was that the Office of the President published the statement, and President Hamid Karzai appeared to endorse it, by telling reporters that it was "in accordance with a Sharia view of our country, which all Muslims and Afghans are committed to."  With women activists already anxious about the potential impact of deals with the Taliban, Karzai's words served as a sobering reminder of his poor track record on women's rights. 

That's all cleared up then.

The rest of the linked article has a few spots of light among all the horrors:

After the Ulema Council published their statement, I spoke with several women's rights activists in Kabul. They were dismayed, but immediately turned to strategizing about the most pragmatic means of responding. Afghanistan now has a generation of women activists who have earned a quiet confidence born of successive achievements.  But if a deal with the Taliban is to avoid dramatically shrinking their space, it will require leadership from a president with the courage to recognize them as his equals.

These events in Afghanistan show an extremely condensed and explicit form of a particular prejudice, the idea of women as the second sex, the helpmeet sex, the sex which should be silent, modest, chaste and biddable. But a kinder and gentler form of that same prejudice is well and alive among all religious fundamentalists.

Heh. I only just realized that they might be called religious fundamentalists because they believe men are the fundamental sex!

A Personhood Amendment for Women

Corporations now have personhood (though only when it's good for them) and many want egg-Americans to have personhood, too.

Melissa offers a personhood amendment for the aquaria of egg-Americans women.

Calling All Lawyers: Is Lying To Pregnant Women OK in Arizona?

I've started doing some research on the wrongful birth laws which are valid in several states, given that Kansas now seems to be trying to make it AOK for physicians to withhold health information from pregnant women if that information could lead them to choose to abort the embryo or fetus. "AOK" here refers to the fact that the proposal would rule out later malpractice suits in most cases.

Arizona has just passed an apparently similar law:

Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Arizona:
Section 1.  Title 12, chapter 6, article 12, Arizona Revised Statutes, is amended by adding section 12-718, to read:
12-718.  Civil liability; wrongful birth, life or conception claims; application
A.  A person is not liable for damages in any civil action for wrongful birth based on a claim that, but for an act or omission of the defendant, a child or children would not or should not have been born.
B.  A person is not liable for damages in any civil action for wrongful life based on a claim that, but for an act or omission of the defendant, the person bringing the action would not or should not have been born.
C.  This section applies to any claim regardless of whether the child is born healthy or with a birth defect or other adverse medical condition. 
D.  This section does not apply to any civil action for damages for an intentional or grossly negligent act or omission, including an act or omission that violates a criminal law.

The part I bolded is the one I don't understand. What is "an intentional omission" in this context? Could a physician refuse to tell crucial test results to a patient and get away with it? Or is this law just about unintentional omissions? If so, how is "unintentional" defined?

The Poptort.com appears to argue that the Arizona law would give physicians a pass if they enforce their own pro-life views on their patients and keep information from them:

Yesterday, the Arizona State Senate passed a bill that would ban something called “wrongful birth” lawsuits. 
“Wrongful birth” lawsuits arise when “physicians don’t inform pregnant women of prenatal problems that could lead to the decision to have an abortion.”  In other words, this bill would give doctors immunity for failing to give medical information about a patient’s health or the health of her fetus. 

All this is confusing. If it's as bad as it might be, it's an outrage, something much worse than conscience clauses for pharmacists and so on. If it's not that bad, what are these laws and proposals really saying.

And where is the American Medical Association (AMA) in all this? Honest.

Steven Landsburg Defends Rush Limbaugh. Brothers Under The Skin.

This is good Friday fun. Students at the University of Rochester are actually protesting Steven Landsburg's commments! Landburg is a wingnut economics professor, best known perhaps for this 2003 piece where he disseminates the view that having daughters is bad news for staying married. But I first learned about him as the guy whose economic textbook argues that polygamy (sharing one husband) is good for women.

Landsburg supports Rush Limbaugh's treatment of Sandra Fluke:

He said that that Fluke “deserves only to be ridiculed, mocked and jeered,” and that “Rush stepped in to provide the requisite mockery” with a “spot-on analogy.”
Landsburg went on to write that Limbaugh wanted to brand Fluke a “slut,” but said he disagrees with that characterization and that a “far better word might have been ‘prostitute.’ ”
However, Landsburg added, that word also doesn’t fit.
“She will, as I understand it, be having sex whether she gets paid or not. The right word for that is something much closer to ‘extortionist.’ Or better yet, ‘extortionist with an overweening sense of entitlement,’ ” Landsburg wrote.

All that is a bit odd, given that Limbaugh did call Fluke a prostitute, too, and not just a slut. Almost as if professor Landsburg didn't do his homework there.

Landsburg later argued that the question is "when some of us should pick up the tab for others’ expenses." But that's what insurance does. If professor Landsburg goes skiing, just for fun, and breaks his leg, then all the other customers of his insurance plan are paying for his leg to be fixed.

The same applies to the use of, say, Viagra. Or the treatment of alcoholism or the consequences of reckless driving and so on and so on.

Sure, we could discuss all those cases and thousands of other similar cases. We could introduce moral considerations into all of them! But that's not what any of this is about.

International Women's Day Thoughts

Today is the International Women's Day. I don't feel any strong pressure to write on women on this particular day, given that I do it, errr, quite a bit.

My feelings about the day itself are somewhat mixed though mostly positive. I've seen it criticized as a sexist day because there is no International Men's Day. Though the need for one might not be terribly urgent given that all the other days of the year are pretty close to just that and given that we don't have the equivalent of a gender-reversed Saudi Arabia on this planet. So that's not the reason for my mixed feelings.

The day is useful because it gives a small opening for both pointing out major problems women face in this world just because of being women and for celebrating individual women's achievements. The latter is needed to counteract the still-common global prejudice that women aren't capable of much except that children/housekeeping/sex thing or shouldn't seek any other roles.

And of course this can also be a time to celebrate the advances women have made, both in this country and all over the world. Many of those are due to the hard work of feminists, by the way.

But the usefulness of this day is also a problem. What should we squeeze into this one day each year? What most deserves to get an airing? Concerns about women in the US? What's happening to rape victims in Congo wars? What's happening to women's rights in the Arab Spring? To the women who protested all over the Middle East?

Setting this one day aside is almost an invitation to ignore those issues the rest of the year. We can all return to ignoring the serious problems of medical fistulas in Africa or the way legally enforced gender apartheid is somehow not the same problem as racial apartheid was in South Africa.

It's not this particular day of the year that bothers me, in short. It's all the other days of the year and the way women's issues are usually ghettoized, despite the fact that women are roughly half of all people. That makes all this even weirder though it's weird enough with concepts such as Black History Month in the US. What are all the other months in history, then? White History Months?

OK. Enough grumbling from me. Ideally we wouldn't need an International Women's Day, but in this reality it can be a useful thing to have.

Meanwhile, in Kansas, The War Against Women Continues

Kansas Republicans are drafting lots of fun legislation to keep those sluts embryo aquaria abortion seekers under control:

The sweeping anti-abortion bill working its way through the Kansas Legislature would levy a sales tax on women seeking abortions, including rape victims.
Buried in the 69-page bill being considered by the House Federal and State Affairs Committee are several provisions, in fact, that opponents say would increase taxes on those who seek abortions. The tax sections do not include any exemptions for women who want an abortion after a sexual assault, to end a dangerous ectopic pregnancy or to remove the remains of a fetus following a miscarriage -- the latter of which is defined as an abortion under Kansas law, according to Sarah Gillooly

But that's not the really fun bit. Turns out that physicians would be legally protected if they withhold health information from pregnant women. They would also be required to lie to their patients about the debunked link between breast cancer and abortion:

Among other provisions in the proposed legislation are measures allowing doctors to withhold from patients medical information that might encourage them to seek an abortion and prohibiting malpractice suits if the woman or the child suffers a health complication as a result of information being withheld. A wrongful death lawsuit could be filed if the mother dies. The bill also would require doctors to tell women that abortion causes breast cancer and would prohibit state employees from performing abortions on the job.

If all this is true (I have not checked the original proposal), it looks like the slut woman would lose her right to sue but at least those who really own her can get compensation if the withheld information causes her death!

Today's Funny Post

By Ann Friedman.

Today's "Women's Health" Study

This is an interesting story about a piece of research looking into the relationship between abortion and mental illness:

A leading psychiatry journal has distanced itself from a controversial study that it published in 2009 which suggested a link between abortion and mental illness, including such severe forms as post-traumatic stress disorder, panic attacks, and drug addiction.
In an unusual commentary, one of the Journal of Psychiatric Research's editors-in-chief and a co-author warned that the 2009 paper, which has been widely cited by legislators and advocates to argue that abortion raises a woman's risk of mental illness and to push for laws requiring providers to tell women that, in fact "does not support assertions that abortions led to psychopathology."

The reason for this unusual step has to do with a fairly major methodological problem in the original study:

Steinberg said that the biggest problem in the original Coleman study was that "many of the incidents of mental illness she included came before the abortion." That cast doubt on whether abortion triggered mental illness. Instead, women with mental illness might have been more likely to have an unwanted pregnancy and terminate it.

In other words, if the observed correlation is about causation, the most likely direction of the cause-and-effect chain is from mental health problems to unwanted pregnancies.

All this makes me wonder why the Journal of Psychiatric Research didn't require the author(s) to fix the problem before being given the green light for publication. But better late than never, right?

The linked Reuters article is interesting in another sense. It begins by pointing out a potential bias in one of the two critics of the Coleman study:

In 2010 Julia Steinberg of the University of California, San Francisco, and Lawrence Finer of the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute published their own analysis of the same data from the comorbidity survey. They identified a number of errors in the Coleman paper, including statistical ones.
The Guttmacher Institute is a non-profit research and education group that advocates for reproductive rights, including access to abortion.

But if you read far enough into the article you find that Coleman may also be biased:

Another concern has been whether Coleman fully disclosed any possible conflicts of interest. In a presentation she gave in 2011 to the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, she said, "I have a plan to develop a new non-profit organization devoted to understanding and publicizing the real risks of abortion. I would like to bring together many credentialed scientists with a research program pertaining to the physical, psychological, and/or relational effects of abortion on women and their families."

Interesting, right? But note if the journal had initially used the old academic concept of peer review properly (by asking a skilled statistician to read the article, say), then the question of possible bias would have been irrelevant.

It's good to remember that even academic journals make mistakes, and, just like the rest of us, should learn from them. I applaud the Journal of Psychiatric Research for trying to fix its mistake.

I don't really applaud all these attempts to turn opposition to abortion into some sort of an empowering women's health issue. Giving birth can have serious health risks, including the risk of postnatal depression in women who are vulnerable to depression. But no state requires pregnant women to be counseled about that.

Peggy Lee's Fever

I love the voice of Peggy Lee. Here's Fever:





Great.

But the lyrics are odd. She sings "you give me fever"..."everybody's got the fever"...
And she puts these words into Pocahontas' mouth: "He gives me fever."

But then at the end of the song: "Now you've listened to my story, here's the point that I have made: Chicks were born to give you fever..."

That is very odd because it was not the point the song made. I'm trying to think why that part was included at all. The song says that everybody's got the fever.

A Frustrated Echidne Thought

Some days every post I work on suddenly comes alive on the table, develops horrible claws and slobbering fangs and attacks me back. Today it's posts 3, Echidne 0.

Those are the posts that demand to be written, too.

Other than that, the life of a blogger is all roses.

Very Funny

This piece on the question whether women are people.

Added later: This, however, is only funny for a certain type of mindset.

But Rush Thought It Would Be All Right

That is the one point that has not been under the magnifying glass in this whole lets-bury-the-bugger campaign.

Limbaugh thought that his use of the terms "slut" and "prostitute" (about a woman whose crime was speaking out in public) would be acceptable, that they would fire up his misogynist listener base, raise his falling ratings and give him enough tiny pokes from the rest of the world to add to his millions. He thought it would be all just fine.

And the reason? Because he has been allowed to get away with this for decades. He's the man who coined the term "feminazi," he's the man you could always go to for the most woman-hating comments possible. The one-stop misogynists' media supermarket.

And he got away with it, year after year after year. The Republicans stood in awe of him. The Democrats complained, but just enough to get Limbaugh even more audience. Attempts to boycott his advertisers were not strong enough.

And time after time I was told not to spend my snake venom on Limbaugh. He was a freaky sideshow, to be ignored, not worth the effort to write about. Besides, if people on our side attacked him then people on their side would attack us! Can't do that. There must be honor among bloggers as among thieves, right?

But mostly Limbaugh (and other right-wing pundits such as Savage and Beck) turned into something seen as a force of nature. We can't fight those. Hence the pretense that he was isolated, safely tucked away in a sound-proofed room with the other misogynists and racists to whom he was preaching.

The fact that the Republican Party was afraid of him suggested that the sound-proofing had failed, that Limbaugh mattered, that he was slowly changing the air in the public debates, re-introducing racism and misogyny as socially acceptable. Nothing could be done about it, however.

So what is different now? It could be that Limbaugh's importance had been overestimated throughout the years, because of poor survey methods about radio listeners. Or it could be that Limbaugh's audience is beginning to die out, or both.

Those possibilities alone do not explain why at least 32 advertisers have deserted Rush after his most recent slut/prostitute tirades. No, what has changed is that enough women are finally paying attention*.

It began with the Susan G. Komen incident and continued with the contraceptives battle in the war over the uterus. It has spread to women noticing all those forced-birther schemes in states.

And because women are both voters and consumers the fact that they are paying attention affects the advertisers and affects the politicians. Pretty astonishing, eh?
-----------
*It's as if the Sleeping Beauty of the fairy tale finally woke up, and not because she was kissed by the prince. It was a thorn from one of the roses which grew to keep her imprisoned that pricked her finger. And she woke up furious.

Will she stay awake? That remains to be seen.

What's Good For The Goose Is Good For The Gander

I love this attitude, love it. It's high time to show how this crap feels to those whose genitals are threatened with legislation:

On Tuesday, Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner (D-Cleveland) will introduce a bill aimed at cracking down on prescription drugs like Viagra that treat erectile dysfunction. Turner’s legislation would make men jump through certain hoops — such as psychological screenings — before they could obtain the meds. The bill follows FDA recommendations to determine the underlying causes of erectile dysfunction — but that’s certainly not the only reason Turner is putting the measure forward.
“All across the country, including in Ohio, I thought since men are certainly paying great attention to women’s health that we should definitely return the favor,” Turner told TPM. Her bill is one of several pieces of legislation offered over the past several weeks by women lawmakers eager to prove a point about the raging contraception debate.
Their bills seek to regulate men’s sexual health, from Viagra to vasectomies, just as Republican-led state governments and Congress have zeroed in on access to abortion and family planning care.
Turner’s bill mimics language found in Ohio’s so-called Heartbeat Bill, which passed the Ohio state House and is now pending in the Senate. The bill would ban abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, sometimes as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. Turner’s bill, she says, offers men a taste of their own medicine — it would require physicians to inform patients in writing of the risks involved in taking erectile dysfunction drugs and requires men to sign a document acknowledging the risks, just like the anti-abortion bill does.
“I care about the health of men as well, and I thought it only fair that we illustrate that and make sure that a man is fully informed of the risks involved in taking these drugs and also the alternatives such as natural remedies or also celibacy,” Turner said.

What Turner is ridiculing here is the argument that all the forced-birth stuff is just about giving women better information.

A Public Information Message About The Contraceptive Pill

First, I've found out, to my astonishment, that whether Limbaugh knows how the contraceptive pill works or not, many on the wide and varied Internets do not seem to have that knowledge. So it might be worth stating that the pill works mainly by preventing ovulation:

Birth control pills prevent pregnancy through several mechanisms, mainly by stopping ovulation. If no egg is released, there is nothing to be fertilized by sperm, and the woman cannot get pregnant. Most birth control pills contain synthetic forms of two female hormones: estrogen and progestin. These synthetic hormones stabilize a woman's natural hormone levels, and prevent estrogen from peaking mid-cycle. Without the estrogen bump, the pituitary gland does not release other hormones that normally cause the ovaries to release mature eggs.

Bolds are mine.

Second, some medications can interfere with the pill and its efficacy. It's best to check with your prescribing doctor to find a list of those based on the most recent information, but these are some medications which might affect the pill:

Medicines that can interact with the pill include:

some types of antibiotics..
some herbal remedies, such as St John's Wort
some anti-epileptic drugs (AEDs) used to treat epilepsy, such as carbamazepine
some antiretrovirals (ARVs) used to treat HIV, such as ritonavir

And a bit unrelated, but here you can find the advertisers which have stopped advertising with Rush Limbaugh.

Look Who Supports Mitt Romney! From What-The-Cat-Dragged-In Files

Ted Nugent. He's like Limbaugh squared or cubed on how to talk about women. But never mind, that!

"[A]fter a long heart&soul conversation with MittRomney today I concluded this goodman will properly represent we the people & I endorsed him," Nugent tweeted.

Nugent has been a staunch advocate for conservative politics, appearing regularly on right-leaning television and radio programs.

An Economic Aside: What About The Workers?

Remember the conservative meme that people don't have enough "skin in the game" because so many earn too little to pay federal income taxes? The prescription to that is always to lower the taxes for the wealthy and for the corporations and to make the rest of us pay more.

Given that backstory, it is worth noting that the big societal income cake is now divided more unequally between capital and labor, to the detriment of labor, than it has since 1947:

The share of the gains going to everyone else in the form of wages and salaries has been shrinking. It’s now the smallest since the government began keeping track in 1947.
If the trend continues, inequality will become ever more extreme.
We’ll also face chronically insufficient demand for all the goods and services the productivity revolution can generate. That’s because the rich save more of their earnings than everyone else, while middle and lower-income families – with fewer jobs or lower wages – no longer have the purchasing power to keep the economy going at full tilt. (Before 2008 they kept up their buying by sinking deep into debt. This proved to be an unsustainable strategy.)

Robert Reich also points out something that should get much more attention, both here and in Europe, and that is the giant role insufficient demand has in this recession. People are not buying. If people are not buying, firms will not expand and hire more people.

It's a vicious cycle which is ignored because the economic arguments have become one-sided and biased.

I never thought I'd live to hear Serious People tell us that firms should face less uncertainty in general, before they do the business of risk-bearing! They are paid for that role, after all, while workers are not.

Define A Not-Slut Woman For Me, Please

If you step back from this last Rush a**holery a bit, what do you see?

That the old sexual double-standards are well and thriving! Women who like to have sex are sluts. Men who like to have sex are...? Studs? Even heterosexual men who have sex with many different women are admired. They "scored."

But women turn into sluts by having sex. A stud would be a positive label but a slut is a negative label, never mind all the attempts to take the term back and to expand it into concepts such as "book slut" for someone who loves reading.

The studs and sluts game is a zero-sum one, at least in the wingnut world. That's an important point to make. The studs can only "score" by turning many women into sluts who are then subject to contempt. But if the studs fail to score, the women temporarily escape the label of a slut but the studs lost. Sexual love as a war game.

These double-standards smell moldy like something brought down from the attic, something old. But nope. They are alive and kicking right now.

Hence the question I posed in the title of this post. What is a not-slut woman like? A virgin who has spent her whole live in a secluded convent? A married woman who has only had sex when wanting to get pregnant while making absolutely sure that the missionary position is applied and that she gets not one tingle of pleasure out of it all?

That's not the context in which Rush Limbaugh and others called Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute. That context is all about stopping women from speaking up, stopping women from participation in the public arena and stopping women from being uppity in general, and the weapon used there is to first equate a woman with her sexuality and then berate that sexuality.

Rush Is Sorry

So Limbaugh apologized for three days of woman-hating vitriol. Like this:

For over 20 years, I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity, three hours a day, five days a week.  In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.

...

My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.

Do you think that is a good apology, now that advertisers are deserting him in droves?

Here are a few of the things he said about Ms. Fluke:

“What does it say about the college co-ed Sandra Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her?” Limbaugh said on his radio show on Wednesday. “It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps.”
The conservative radio host continued on to joke, “OK, so she’s not a slut. She’s ‘round heeled.’”

Just a bad choice of words, eh? He should have called her what instead? A harlot? A whore? There are not very many words you can replace in those sentences without replacing his meaning.

Do a reversal on Rush's statements by substituting Viagra for the birth control.

Why should I pay towards Rush's Viagra in my health insurance premia? He's just using it to screw everything in sight, to become the ueberslut of all sluts. Ugh.

Indeed, why should I pay for his deafness treatments in my premia? It seems they are a consequence of his illegal use of drugs, after all. What does it make me if I pay for them? His drug provider or at least someone who enables his immoral lifestyle.

Well, if Rush's long diatribes against Ms. Fluke were not really intended against her, personally, who was he attacking in this comment:

“So Ms. Fluke and the rest of you Feminazis, here’s the deal: If you are going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. And I’ll tell you want it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

All us other Feminazis!

Continuing with that earlier reversal, Rush can keep those videos of him having Viagra-enforced/reinforced sex with the other earth worms. (I always think of him when turning over a new bed in the garden because of those white fat grubs in the soil.)

Speaking about turning over the soil, look what else cropped up?

The Perfect Limbaugh Storm?

Probably not, but suddenly his woman-hatred provokes condemning comments! I can't quite believe this.

To put that into perspective, I have written about that little turd in our societal punch bowl for years* and it has been like shouting into a barrel. I sound good to me and that's about it.

Now that I got that cup of bitterness down (and used up all proper vessel metaphors) let me share my happiness on Mr. Viagra getting into at least a little trouble:

True to form, Limbaugh responded to Fluke’s testimony by calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute.” And a few of his sponsors aren’t happy about it. In the wake of criticism, Sleep Train Mattress Centers is pulling its ads from the radio show. “Thank you for your concern. We are currently pulling all our ads with Rush Limbaugh,” the company tweeted.
Sleep Number beds also announced that it is pulling ads from the program. “Recent comments by Rush Limbaugh do not align w/our values, so we made decision to immediately suspend all advertising on that program,” an employee of the company tweeted. Quicken Loans later on Friday followed suit, pulling ads over Limbaugh’s “inflammatory comments.”

Whether ProFlowers will or not remains to be seen.

President Obama chimed in:

President Obama injected himself Friday into the controversy over Rush Limbaugh's comments about a Georgetown University student who testified on contraceptive coverage -- effectively elevating the issue, with some Democrats even trying to raise money off it. 
The president called the student, Sandra Fluke, on Friday afternoon to express his disappointment in the "personal attacks" against her, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said.
Limbaugh, on his radio show earlier this week, had called Fluke a "slut" following her comments in favor of mandatory contraceptive coverage. 

"The fact that our political discourse has become debased in many ways is bad enough. It is worse when it's directed at a private citizen who was simply expressing her views on a matter of public policy," Carney said. 
He said Obama called Fluke to express disappointment about the attacks and "thank her" for exercising her right to speak out. 
The phone call came as lawmakers across Capitol Hill were weighing in, and as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee incorporated Limbaugh's comments into its fundraising campaign.

And the Republican politicians are finally following suit:

House Speaker John Boehner's office earlier in the day scolded Limbaugh. Though Boehner opposes the mandate, spokesman Michael Steel said in a statement that "the speaker obviously believes the use of those words was inappropriate" -- in reference to Limbaugh's remarks.

If you think "inappropriate" is a rather cowardly adjective to choose in this context, what do you think of Saint Ricky's comments?

Of Limbaugh, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum said: “He’s being absurd, but that’s you know, an entertainer can be absurd. He’s in a very different business than I am.”

So Santorum thinks that calling women sluts and demanding to see videotapes of them having sex is just absurd entertainment? This is the Saint Ricky of the late twelfth century who believes that women in the labor force was a serious mistake, who believes that artificial birth control is sinful?

He has sold out there as the moral conscience of us all, the throne he is demanding for himself.

We shall see what happens on this issue. It's pre-elections and women's votes matter. But that alone doesn't explain the sea change. I think that comes from some kind of partial awakening among the American women. I hope so, at least.
----
*Since 2003!

And Now For Something Completely Different: How Presidenting Is Done in Ireland.

Just because the rant of the Irish president is so much fun and because we never get to hear this type of a rant from the powers that be in this country. Via Daily Kos:

But Will The Republicans Do It? Condemn Limbaugh's Misogyny?

By publicly disassociating themselves from Rush Limbaugh's comments on women in general and Sandra Fluke in particular:

More than 75 Democratic lawmakers are calling on House Republican leaders to condemn radio host Rush Limbaugh’s controversial remarks on Sandra Fluke, the law student who was barred from testifying about contraception before a congressional committee.

On his radio show Wednesday, Limbaugh referred to Fluke as a “slut” and “prostitute” and accused her of demanding to be “paid to have sex” because Fluke advocated for easier access to birth control.

Sure, the Democrats are using this for political advantage at a time when some women, at least, seem to be waking up to the new Tealiban (Taliban+Tea Party) threat. Women are the crucial constituency for Obama's re-election, based on recent polls.

Despite this, the question of the Republican Party being in the pocket of Rush Limbaugh really needs airing. The man is a misogynist, racist bully.

And he's not only attacking Sandra Fluke. He's attacking much wider groups of women, as is his wont:

Limbaugh added, “So Ms. Fluke and the rest of you Feminazis, here’s the deal: If you are going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. And I’ll tell you want it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

Reverse that and apply it to the story about Limbaugh and his Viagra! On second thoughts, don't.

Today's Shallow Thought

I love new snow, especially when it falls at night and you can see the flakes drifting down against the darkness. It gives me joy.

Blunting the Blunt Amendment

This is good news:

The Senate voted 51-48 Thursday to set aside a measure letting employers omit insurance coverage for health services they find morally objectionable, part of a fiery debate that is reshaping the presidential race and congressional campaigning.
Democrats argued that the amendment, sponsored by Sen. Roy Blunt (R., Mo.) would allow employers to refuse coverage for any service they dislike, including vaccinations, mammograms and drug treatment.

...

Republicans said the issue was religious freedom. The Blunt Amendment, they said, would have carved out a so-called conscience exemption to a new requirement under President Barack Obama's health law that all health plans cover an array of treatments, including contraception, at no additional cost to workers.

What's great about that amendment is that it would have given all employers the legal right to figure out how various treatments might offend them morally and then just not cover them. As I wrote earlier, a Christian Scientist employer could refuse all health insurance which covers conventional medical services! Imagine the savings! Worth becoming a Christian Scientist for that.

But the politicians who supported the Blunt amendment did not see it that way at all. For them it was all about the harlots:

The only Republican to oppose the Blunt Amendment was Olympia Snowe of Maine, who announced her retirement this week. Three socially conservative Democrats supported it: Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania.

There's Dignity and Then There's Women's Dignity

The Republican governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, defining the term "dignity" for us:

In November of 2010, Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) joined the public outcry against the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) security precautions in airports by describing body scans and mandatory pat downs as crossing “the line” in regard “to people’s concerns about privacy” and “beneath the dignity” of air travelers.

And the Republican governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, defining the term "dignity of women" for us:

Following a public outcry, McDonnell revised the measure to exempt women from the more invasive procedure, but not before encountering the wit of comedian Jon Stewart, who characterized the bill as “a TSA pat-down inside their vagina.” McDonnell addressed the contradiction between supporting mandatory ultrasounds for women and opposing “invasive” TSA pat downs during a radio interview this morning on WTOP and claimed that there is no comparison between the legislation and the enhanced security procedures:
MCDONNELL: There are things that are required in the interest of public safety, like TSA procedures. There are ways to accomplish the same result without an invasive patdown. [...]
I believe this is something that respects the dignity of women by making sure they have necessary information.

Bolds are mine.

The definition of "dignity" has that odd gendered aspect among social and religious conservatives. I first came across it in the writings of the current pope (when he was still the youthful Cardinal Ratzo). He offered us wimminfolk "dignity" as opposed to rights, fairness or equality.

Given the seriousness of such a trade-off it's crucial to know what conservatives mean by "women's dignity."

Hence my gratitude for McDonnell who tells us that the state of Virginia must subject women who seek abortions to a medically unnecessary ultrasound because those women might not know they are pregnant!

I believe this is something that respects the dignity of women by making sure they have necessary information.

I did suspect that the conservative idea of "women's dignity" had to do with someone having to protect the little ladies from themselves. I've seen glimpses of this in earlier writings but they are disguised as "the essential nature of women" or similar gobbledegook.

Birds Of A Feather Fly Together

This recent poll is representative of almost all political polls I've seen in the large differences that exist between Republicans and Democrats on most any topic:

Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that climate change is real — the highest level in two years — as the public trusted its own observations of rising temperatures, a poll said Tuesday.

...

The poll showed a sharp gap depending on ideology, with 78 percent of supporters of President Barack Obama’s Democratic Party saying there is solid evidence of climate change compared with 47 percent of supporters of the rival Republican Party saying so.

Duh, you might say. As the title of this post says, similar birds (or people) gather together and isolate themselves from other birds (or people). Hence the differences between Republican and Democratic views.

But that "flying together" now has an extra aspect:

If, for instance, Republicans mostly get their information from Fox News, then what Fox News tells or does not tell becomes crucially important. If Republicans and Democrats now get different reports about that thing called "reality", then any initial value disagreements could become stronger, right? The birds which fly together develop more identical feathers.

That's bad news for political debates. It's one thing to disagree on values. It's a totally different thing to disagree on both values and facts.

Knock, Knock.

"Who's there?"
"A woman guest on a major Sunday political show? Please, let me in!"
"Not unless you are an extreme wingnut lady. Or the Secretary of State."


From Media Matters:

During a month when the issues of birth control and women's access to health care flared up and became major topics of debate on the presidential campaign trail and in Washington, the Sunday morning talk shows once again loaded up their programs by hosting newsmaker interviews with men. Lots and lots of men.
...

And of the four women booked this month, just one, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was associated with the Democratic Party, despite the fact Democrats currently control the White House and the Senate. "We complain about this all the time," a Democratic aide told Media Matters.

But they did have Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann on as guests!

All this is weird considering that the Republicans keep arguing that the mainstream media is biased against them. But perhaps it's their continuous growling and barking that has created a playing field so sloped that only Hillary Clinton managed to get invited from the Democratic side of the aisle.

And yeah, the lack of women in the political media becomes shockingly obvious when the topic is about women but discussed mostly by men.

Meanwhile, in Alabama. The Transvaginal Ultrasound is Baaaack!

From Rheality Check:

The Alabama legislature is considering a mandated vaginal ultrasound bill in an attempt to restrict safe abortion care, or as State Senator Linda Coleman (D - Jefferson) says "a state-sanctioned rape bill."
The bill explicitly includes mandated trans-vaginal ultrasound.

The proposed bill is out of the committee.

I love this:

The chairman of the Alabama Senate Health Committee said he doesn’t see a conflict of interest between his support for a bill that would require physicians to perform ultrasounds on women seeking abortions and his company, which sells the type of equipment the bill would require.
Sen. Greg Reed, R-Jasper, voted to move Senate Bill 12 out of committee last week because he said it’s a good bill that would help “a mother to understand that a live baby is inside her body.”

Both parts are fun. The former is a weird shadow of other Republican values, having to do with money, and the latter tells us what certain conservatives think of women's cognitive abilities.

Senator Reed seems to think that women who seek abortion don't know that they are pregnant! Perhaps that aquarium inside the woman (which really belongs to Senator Reed) could contain something else which gives similar symptoms. A shrimp?

Sigh. I also love the emotional manipulation (the terms "mother" and "live baby").

So what does the proposed bill do? A few snippets:

b) Prior to a woman giving informed consent to having any part of an abortion performed or induced, and prior to the administration of any anesthesia or medication in preparation for the abortion on the woman, the physician who is to perform the abortion or a qualified technician shall:
(1) Perform an obstetric ultrasound on the pregnant woman, using either a vaginal transducer or an abdominal transducer, whichever would display the embryo or fetus more clearly.
(2) Provide a simultaneous verbal explanation of what the ultrasound is depicting, which shall include the presence and location of the unborn child within the uterus and the number of unborn children depicted. If the ultrasound image indicates that fetal demise has occurred, a woman shall be informed of that fact.
(3) Display the ultrasound images so that the pregnant woman may view them.
Page 41 (4) Provide a medical description of the ultrasound 2 images, which shall include the dimensions of the embryo or 3 fetus and the presence of external members and internal 4 organs, if present and viewable.
5 (c) Nothing in this section shall be construed to 6 prevent a pregnant woman from averting her eyes from the 7 ultrasound images required to be provided to and reviewed with 8 her. Neither the physician nor the pregnant woman shall be 9 subject to any penalty if she declines to look at the
10 presented ultrasound images. 11 Section 4. (a) The provisions of Section 3 shall not 12 apply to an abortion provider or facility in the case of a 13 medical emergency.

There's that transvaginal ultrasound again! But this proposed bill would also let all sorts of people sue a medical provider who didn't perform the mandatory ultrasound! For instance:

Section 6. (a) Any person upon whom an abortion has 18 been performed without compliance with this act, the father of 19 the unborn child who was the subject of the abortion, or the 20 grandparent of an unborn child may maintain an action against 21 the person who performed the abortion in knowing or reckless 22 violation of this act for actual and punitive damages.

That aquarium belongs to a whole lot of folks in Alabama! Not sure why siblings of the woman (or the man) can't sue. The more the merrier, right? Could a rapist sue over the lack of an ultrasound in the abortion performed on the woman he raped?

The whole thing sounds very poorly written. Unless all ectopic pregnancies are defined as medical emergencies, the proposed bill would require an ultrasound and a description of the embryo even in that case. And in the cases of partial miscarriages.

On Fashion and Feminism

This was an eagerly discussed topic about a month ago. As is my wont I got all tangled up in the definitions and never wrote about any of it. Once in a while I took the topic out, thought about it, got confused and put it back. Now it's shop-soiled, tattered, the way some clothes in final markdown sales are. And, as usual, I'm way off in my timing.

The gist of the conversation, as I understood it, was whether fashion could be feminist and whether it is OK for feminists to be fashion-conscious. That's where things got tricky for me, because the term "fashion" is one of those terms ("freedom", "dignity", "democracy", "religious freedom") which have many different meanings, some almost opposite to each other. And given the way I am, I had to go on this long thinking trip about what people might mean when they say "fashion."

Defining concepts is a delightful enterprise for me but I get that others find it as appetizing as horse food. Still, if in my mind the word "fashion" is about the annual forced changes to make women buy more and more badly-made but expensive clothes which hurt and if in your mind the word "fashion" is about the human desire to decorate their bodies for the pleasure of others, well, we are going to have a very odd conversation.

So definitions are necessary. As I followed some of the discussions, I noticed that many people focused on the clothing industry and its exploitative nature. The people making all those fashionable clothes are usually poorly paid women. Others focused on the modelling industry, its message of extreme skinniness and its focus on thin white upper-class women as the most likely market for the final products.

Yet others seemed to speak about independent craftspeople creating wearable art. And many spoke about the way fashions are anti-feminist in promoting clothes which bind, hamper and make walking about difficult. Several comments were about the poor quality of much of women's clothing, even the expensive labels and about the difficulty of finding anything fashionable in larger sizes in general.

The reason I give you that summary is that if the original idea is about making fashion into something feminists can embrace its practicality clearly depends on what we mean by the term "fashion."

From that angle certain things about fashion will have to be dropped into the dustbin before I can embrace the idea as feminist. Well, probably most things about the actual fashion industries and how they work. No more labor exploitation, no more focus on only one body type, ethnic group and income level. Women should demand better quality in the clothes that are available. The average quality of men's clothes is higher than that of women's clothes, while the prices men pay can, in fact, be lower.

So what does that leave me? The idea of clothes as fun, as part of the decoration of the body for both information purposes and so that others get some fun from seeing you slither into the room. That part I can embrace! Indeed, I'm going to embroider some snakes all over the back of my old jeans jacket. Their heads will peak over my shoulders when viewed from the front!

But fashion is not quite that innocent if we expand it to mean "costume", the way human beings have used dress as a way of showing social hierarchies, group membership and other information about a person.

Clothes and accessories are still used for that purpose. A Rolex watch and a well-cut fine wool suit on a man are not just about keeping him practically covered and aware of the time. They also send a message about his wealth. In a similar fashion (heh), a woman wearing Prada or Chanel is telling us about her social class and income.

That social role of clothing has in the past led to laws which dictated how fancy the clothes of the lower classes could be. Only the aristocracy could wear silk and velvet in many European countries.

This is the sinister role of "fashion" (as in "popular clothing"): To keep people in their "proper" places.

It is especially sinister for women. Neither Saudi Arabia nor Iran require that men veil themselves before going out, for example. But even more generally, the dress of women has traditionally been used to interpret their sexual morals. This has not been the case for men.

I have veered quite far from the initial question of this post, but doing so has clarified my thinking (and bored you). I think fashion could, indeed, be something feminist and exciting, a way of showing to the world what your basic values are. But only some of us have the freedom to do so.

What are your thoughts?

Embroidery by me.

How The Ringwraiths Do Politics. Scott Walker in Wisconsin.

This Nazgûl governor of Wisconsin (Lord of the Rings reference) is facing a recall election. He thinks this is the pits because:

“Well, we’re focused,” Walker responded, “but it’s a huge distraction, not just for me, for the legislature. I mean, it’s $9 million of taxpayers’ money just to run this. Think about the number of kids we could help, think of the number of seniors we could help in our state with $9 million that we didn’t have to waste on this — this frivolous recall election.

Delicious! So very delicious if you have been following what governor Walker has actually done with taxpayers' money during his sinister reign.

Helping the children and the elderly? He probably would sell them if that helped the job-creating corporations.

Well, I may be going too far there. But knowing who funds these Ringwraiths (coughKochbrotherscough) it's pretty obvious that Walker has different priorities for the use of tax receipts than the care of the elderly, say.

He may not lose that recall election. Too many Wisconsinites (Wisconsinians?) have been mesmerized by those burning red eye holes. But he deserves to be recalled.

Women & the Academy Awards (by Suzie)

While many media outlets cover women's fashion at the Oscars, few will note that men dominate, especially in the more prestigious categories, and this reflects the filmmaking industry in general. Read Martha Lauzen at the Women's Media Center:

According to the annual Celluloid Ceiling study released by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, women comprised only 18 percent of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films in 2011. This represents an increase of 2 percentage points from 2010 but a decrease of one percentage point from 2001.

By role, women accounted for 5 percent of directors, 14 percent of writers, 18 percent of executive producers, 25 percent of producers, 20 percent of editors, and 4 percent of cinematographers last year. The abysmally low number of women working as directors is especially troubling, as women comprised 9 percent of directors in 1998—so much for creeping incrementalism.

Also, you should read Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood, who put together the video above. Feminists who don't care about Hollywood may still recognize that media from a male perspective shapes our culture.

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ETA: I've been checking on the Oscars at the NYT, and I was shocked by the large ad for Giorgio Armani. The models are frighteningly thin.