Writer Jessica Wakeman recently had an interesting study published by media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting on the present number of bylines belonging to women on Huffington Post.
After two months of tracking the number of bylines on the homepage, she found that only 23% of them belong to women:
The Post does seem to be making a conscious effort to include women’s voices; despite the low percentages, the study found at least one female byline on the home page at all times. But if there is indeed such an effort, it stops far short of parity. Of the 89 times bylines were checked during the study, not once did the number of women’s bylines equal those belonging to men. Only eight times did women account for more than a third of all bylines. And Arianna Huffington, appearing 57 times, accounted for more than a fifth of all women’s bylines; 45 of those occupied the most visible top post. Only once, in fact, did a woman other than Arianna Huffington get her byline in the most visible top slot–Post editor-at-large Nora Ephron (8/26/08).
I’d like to see a larger study around this; too many of us feel that women bloggers are undervalued in the progressive blogosphere, but hard evidence is always helpful.Thoughts?
Yeah here’s a thought, you whiner: A utopian’s work is never done. There’s always a scintilla of unfairness left lying around. Utopianism, therefore, whether it’s feminism, “civil rights,” hyper-environmentalism or general left-wing thuggery, will always be the packaging of extremism behind a veil of phony compromise.
When I think of a hybrid construct of all the HuffPo bloggers of whom I’ve read, be they male or female — and I probably speak for quite a few who have dabbled in that corner, here — the general picture that emerges, closely resembles a stereotype of women that might be tossed out by careless piggish men, right before feminists like you start waving around their patented theatrical outrage.
Products of lifetimes spent getting attention, and not trying to accomplish too much else.
Thoughtless. Spoiled. Snarky.
Cute to the point of irritating.
Thinking well of themselves, while never straying too far from, or reigning in too tightly, a streak of viciousness.
Unhappy if everyone in the room isn’t watching them every second.
Full of punchlines, with absolutely no solutions to the problems of which they like to complain so much, showing absolutely no effort to find any.
And so it occurs to me that you’re caught up in a cyclical protest here, feminists: You’ve been spending all these years demanding people think of women as rationally thinking, strong, reliable and capable beings — and that women take this to heart as much as anyone else. Maybe, just maybe, when women started to comply, that’s when the female-authored posts to HuffPo took a tumble.
Let’s face it. You really don’t have to wait that long for a post written by a woman to emerge from the depths of the cistern that is Huffington Post. And if I want to think more positively of women and the contributions they can make to our society, I have a lot of other things I can look at besides that. No, the real flesh-and-blood women I know, inspire much more confidence in me about what they can do, and cause me to look forward much more positively to the next time I’m called on to work on something with a female, compared to the average female-written contribution to HP.
Or to Feministing, for that matter, now that I give it another think or three.
Right Wing News has put up a list of unliked conservatives, as voted-upon by “right of center” blogs such as this one. First, a minor quibble — this is not quite consistent with the way we see things here. What other folks call “conservative” is something we would call centrist. We see it as a personal practice of replying “Let’s Not Do It And Say We Did” to…you know…dumbass ideas that have already been tried lots of times before. Gun grabbing, pulling manufactured “rights” for special interest groups out of your rear end, eugenics, bloated welfare state, making atheism the official state religion, spreading the wealth, et al.
Opposing that is not right of center. It is the center. Most if it is written right into the U.S. Constitution. We just pretend it isn’t, by throwing around the word “constitution” as a figure of speech, and allowing it to be used by people who haven’t even glanced at that document, let alone studied the history and meaning of it.
I wouldn’t even bother with this quibble — except it has to do with what follows.
I found the list of despised conservatives, that I submitted, had only a small overlap with the “popular” list that was published in the end. I did not include, for example, Ann Coulter, George Bush or Peggy Noonan. I do not think you become “bad” at anything dealing with an exchange of ideas, when you simply become popular. That would imply conservative figureheads have a duty to stay popular. And if conservative figureheads have a duty to stay popular, we might as well call ’em liberals because that’s how you get popular and stay popular; by being a liberal.
I also didn’t include congressmen who’d cast pro-choice votes, unless they’d cast a vote on some other issue to call their credentials into serious question. I’ll not fault someone for applying their personal druthers, even when they represent hundreds of thousands of others, to an issue that is deeply personal to some, complex as all get-out, and cannot have an outcome that is completely fair to everyone. Not unless they’re pretending to be thoughtful and really following in lockstep to someone else.
On the other hand — I did include one or two “conservatives” who voted for gun control. To me, there is absolutely no logical reason to support gun control. It isn’t that I have a huge gun collection, or even that I like guns that much. It’s that, if you favor even “common sense” gun restrictions, you’ve missed an important point about what it means to be an American. You’ve revealed a sympathy for centrist authority that is quite incompatible with the intended spiritual underpinnings of our nation.
Ditto for tax increases. I don’t favor tax increases when governments are out of money. I’ve heard the argument before…”it’s a serious shortfall, and we aren’t gonna get it from anywhere else.” Eh, no. You raise taxes, people and businesses leave, next year the problem is worse. I’ve not yet seen it fail. On this point, conservatism is nothing radical — nothing over & above common sense. It is, simply, having a functional memory. Nothing more than that.
I have mixed feelings about what Mr. Hawkins is trying to do here, I must say. On the one hand, it is valuable for conservatives to inspect the list of individuals who have shouldered the responsibility for getting the message across, and what kind of job they’re doing. You’d have to be nuts to think everything is ship-shape in this department right about now.
On the other hand, whatever you might call us — tighty-righties, common-sensers, Great Americans — we do not worship popular people just because they’re popular. As I’m often fond of saying: An excellent product can be sold by an adequate salesman just as well as it can be sold by an excellent salesman; you don’t need the excellent salesman, unless you’re selling a substandard product that people really shouldn’t be buying. Since the conservatism I know is simply the possession of a decent memory, common sense, and the will to act upon those…it doesn’t have much use for excellent salesmen. Or it shouldn’t. If it does, something’s bollywonkers & gunnybags.
One other interesting point: John McCain is #1.
I can’t help but wonder what’s going on in a parallel universe in which Fred Thompson secured the nomination. And then lost. And then the Mirror-Universe John Hawkins gathers together his list of repellant conservatives. Think the former Senator from Tennessee would be Numero Uno? Think he’d even be on the list?
Hah!
This has a lot to do with another thing I’m often fond of saying. When people invite you refute something unflattering about you, it’s a mistake for you to think, by the energies you’re about to channel into doing this, you’ll get ’em to do what you want. That’s the mistake conservatives made this year. The talking point got trotted out that conservatism was a consistent and unwavering excercise of bad ideas…so John McCain became the nominee, so that Republicans could show off how adept they were at wavering. See? Look at us. We can waver.
And the electorate patted the Republicans on the head, said “that’s nice,” then toddled off to vote for the other guy.
And muttered a few words as they toddled, here & there, about what in the hell it was the Republicans were trying to say.
Life is like that. That’s the way people react when you dilute yourself, and your message. Whatever reservations people had about you before, remain; all you really dissipate by doing this, is the confidence that was there before.
…but blogger friend Gerard picked up a tiny sliver of one of our ramblings that he thought was worthy of repetition. We did not think so in the moment in which the snippet flowed from our undulating fingertips, and we still did not think so when we went snooping ’round the “blogosphere” this morning to see the reactions to last night’s Big Event. But when we saw it snipped out and hung up in his sidebar, we had to admit that, once again, our older and wiser friend was correct and we were wrong.
People will flock, like moths to flame, to a way of showcasing some inner decency that is costless.
One the one side of the spectrum is laying down on a plank of wood so a bunch of Roman assholes can nail your hands and feet to it, and hang you on it all afternoon until you’re dead.
On the other side of the spectrum is voting for Barack Obama.
On the cross-hanging side, you have something nobody does willingly.
On the voting-for-Obama side, you have something “everybody” does. In fact, that’s really about the only good thing they themselves can say about the decision they made. Popularity. Togetherness. They stuck it out and battled a boogeyman…whom now, logic and reason must doubt was ever there in first place.
On the cross-hanging side, the inner decency is undeniable, for the side-benefit of having people squawk away about what a swell guy you are, surely must be discounted as a motivating factor. That’s a true sacrifice. It was done for the benefit of others and not to get props.
On the voting-for-Obama side, it is the childlike hunger for positive strokes from others, that is undeniable…it is the concern for others, that must be exposed to scrutiny, question and skepticism. We know they did it “to be a part of this thing” and to exchange high-fives with others who were part of it. We heard them say it all year long; last night, we saw ’em doing it. We don’t really know if they were motivated by anything else.
History is just, and ironic too. Those who act solely out of a desire for thumbs-ups from total strangers, deprive themselves of any other benefit, and soon lose that as well. Those who sacrifice their personal well-being out of a desire to make things different for the total strangers in a positive way, and not to showcase this inner decency, end up showcasing it — and they receive the thumbs-up denied to others, that didn’t even motivate them.
Let December 25th be a reminder of this powerful irony. Because that’s exactly what it is.
We now return you to the pre-coronation festival of Ozymandias.
Summer ended in my corner of the union on Thursday. This morning, I’m considering the addition of a resource to the sidebar, and out of the clear blue my mind started wandering and settled on a question:
What exactly makes the singular form of the word “thigh” so much less appealing than the plural?
Be thankful for your girlfriend (or boyfriend, for that matter) who enjoys having fun. Be thankful for friends still in possession of a decent sense of humor, and a willingness to share same.
And spare a little bit of pity for the fellow with a feminist gal-pal.
Ok, so my boyfriend and I are kind of kinky. He got the idea to wear sexy costumes for each other on halloween, and I think it would be fun. So I did some investigating, and as I expected, most ‘his and her’ costumes consist of a fully clothed man and half-naked woman. This is issue number one.
Issue number two is the lovely outfits I will post at the end of my rant. They are the ‘Coroner’ and ‘Sexy Jane Doe’ or whatever. In otherwords, a man who’s job is to deal with dead people is looking at a sexy dead stranger. Yeah, I couldn’t find a costume where the man is dead. After seeing a whole one outfit for men being skimpy and the rest being complete while the girls are all showing at least some skin, this just set me off.
So, am I right being mad about the whole coroner and Jane Doe outfit? Am I just looking into it too much? Or is there a deliberate power dynamic being displayed?
Feministing is the long, tough, personal-record-setting eighty-mile bike ride under a blazing sun on a hot summer day. Hooters is the ice-cold mug of lager right afterward.
Can you imagine being around a “lady” like this on a regular basis? She demands the partying and revelry take a back seat to cultural reform…on the thirty-first of October fer chrissakes.
Where is this world. Where is this fantasy planet, in which an unpleasant, complaining woman holds more appeal to a gentleman than a damsel with a more pleasing disposition and a skimpier costume. This is the utopia you want? This is what you think you can bring about? What sort of lobotomy must take place upon the male mind to make your dreams come true, battleaxe. Men are visual creatures. We like looking at you, and your various parts, if you take the time and effort to make yourself look nice. It’s been that way for hundreds of years, perhaps thousands, and the true irony is that during that time it has been an unspoken fountainhead of real female power in our various societies, around the world.
Here you “feminists” are trying to get rid of it. Jousting at windmills. And doing a fairly stop-and-go, here-and-there, half-assed job of it.
Begone from my sight, you snarky grumblebunny thoroughly unpleasant termagant. Bring on the hot wings and ale. Wenches! The Emperor’s palate is parched! Step lively!
Sometimes I just have to wonder where we’d be if the angriest and most bitter feminists were naturally inclined toward reaching out toward and empathizing with those of a different mindset, rather than toward preaching to the converted. Heteronormative? Who the hell do you know who talks that way?
And the lack thereof. Michael Malone at ABC beautifully, if tragically, with shame, reports on the ”get-a-room” performance of the national media in this presidential election year and his own awakening:
The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game — with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.
The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.
But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun — for the first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer,” because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist.
Yeah, well here’s my advice on that point, Mike. Call yourself a reporter, an editor, a columnist, a commentator, whatever it is you actually do. “Journalist” is a bogus word for people who are trying to make it sound like this wretched business is something exalted, something professional, something that requires arcane, secret knowledge hard come by. All things it never was, as amply demonstrated on a regular basis by some of the best in the business working at some of the finest publications in the nation. Yes, there are some skills, knacks and tricks of the trade. It helps to be familiar with stuff like … your subject matter … the English language … telephones and computers. Bloggers, untrained, in a couple of years have shown that millions upon millions of dollars have been wasted in this country on journalism degrees.
Dadgummit, but I do love reading about people spending good money to get degrees in things, and then regretting it.
No, that’s not really true. I don’t like reading about that at all. I do like it when going through rituals, is a process thought to be equivalent to actually learning something, or achieving something, and then at the eleventh-hour one or several folks have light bulbs go off in their heads…duh…hey, maybe this wasn’t a good thing we did here. And if ever there was a ritual exalted inappropriately, placed on the same level as learning something or doing something, inappropriately — this stuff we nowadays call “journalism” is a wonderful candidate for such a problem.
We’re waking up.
Don’t know if it’ll be enough of us, or whether it will be in time. But we are waking up.
Unfortunately, I think it’s safe to say now that journalism is changed forever. Irredeemably. All because of Obamamania. Some eighty or ninety percent of this slow erosion — and that’s a conservative estimate — took place within the calendar years of 2007-08.
It CAN be, you know. Case in point…another female slut bellyaches away about being called a slut, right after calling herself one…
The idea that sexual women are worthless derives, pretty clearly, from a time when women were property; yes, ye olden days. Days when your father could trade your virginity for a goat. In that time, if you had the gall to bone someone before marriage, you damaged Dad’s goods, and might therefore cause him to get a low-quality goat, or no goat at all. It wasn’t really a moral question so much as a question of ownership; your body belonged to Dad or Husband, not to you, so using it for your own pleasure was equivalent to borrowing someone’s car and bringing it back with a broken headlight and a big dent in the hood.
*sigh* Here we go again…ye olde facts of life…
Women, whether they choose to be insightful about this stuff or not, are in a position to be spoiled rotten here. If & when they have a child, it’s their’s. There is no question. Therefore, some of the more ignorant ones are a little slow to catch on to the pitfalls of too much “experience.”
Let’s sum it up this way. If you were a guy, ladies — IF you were a guy — how much money would you have to be paid, to father a child you had good reason to believe was not yours? And so, yes…what was jotted down above about fathers and daughters and goats, while a crude summary, remains a fairly accurate summary of how things worked. Ignorant truth. Back in ye olden days, a man trying to marry off his sexually seasoned daughter was placed into a compromising position. That’s the way an economy works. Econ one-oh-one. Sorry, feminists, that’s just the way it is.
And it works that way now, too. If a lady says a gentleman is good enough for her, for marriage, for a movie, for a cup of tea, for a roll in the hay…that’s a pretty big compliment, even if she’s been granting the same privilege to other suitors. But it’s a much, much bigger compliment if she’s been showing some discretion. If she discriminates in favor of the fella. Yeah, discrimination. It’s usually a good thing if you’re on the pleasant end of it, especially if you’re wanting to get some attention from a lady who already has a good bit of yours. And so when one of the Sex in the City girls motions for that night’s stud to come on up, well…it’s not going to cause too much of a thrill for him, compared to the same gesture from another lady who asks more questions first.
In other words, if a lady accommodates casually, she is appreciated casually as well. She’s no longer capable of extending to her various beaus a true compliment. So this strain of feminism longs wistfully for a time and place and plane of existence, in which sluts are valued as much as, more more than, the girls who are more chaste.
Not gonna happen. Sorry.
Wow, we sure have a lot of people stumbling around, dreaming of perfect fantasy societies that never have been, and can never be.
What a painful awakening. A bunch of loyal liberal readers of Feministing are just starting to figure out that the word “liberal” has absolutely nothing to do with liberty. It’s quite the opposite. It’s all about large mobs of people telling each other what to do.
The activist side of liberalism is truly a loose cannon on deck. It is a cannon ball rolling around on deck. There is no telling what will end up in the crosshairs next. It’s like a frenzied chubacabra…no, a Tazmanian Devil. A Terminator robot that has somehow fried a circuit and is consequently convinced that everything in earshot or line-of-sight is somehow Sarah Connor.
The next cultural activiity in the path of the juggernaut: Long-distance dating. It’s that green thing again. Long-distance dating is bad for the environment.
The Census tells us there are about 100 million single people in America over the age of 17. We don’t know how many of those folks are in long-distance relationships, but the available research suggests that at least a quarter of all college students are dating out of town. Since the rate is going to be much lower among the general population, we’ll make a conservative estimate of 1 in 15 for all single adults. That gives us around 6.7 million unmarried Americans in long-distance relationships. Add in the 3.4 million married people who told the Census that they live separately but aren’t “separated,” and our total rises to more than 10 million individuals—or 5 million LDRs.
If all of these people made like our two-career couple and drove the distance from D.C. to New York City every two weeks, they would produce a total of about 18 million metric tons of CO2 a year. For comparison, 6.9 million metric tons would be added to the atmosphere if we suddenly eliminated all the public transportation in the United States.
:
No, our Date Local movement won’t be overbearing. It shouldn’t try to break up every cross-country love odyssey. Instead, it will discourage this special type of conspicuous consumption at the margins, nudging people toward the realization that breaking up is in their own, and enlightened, economic self-interest.
So let’s give it a try. Date Local’s message is a simple one, in the best traditions of liberal reform. All you have to do is date here. Date now. Date sustainably. And if you absolutely have to date long-distance, do it via Amtrak.
You ever watch a group of young kids play together? I mean, barely just past toddler stage? You know how there’s always one girl, who’s figured out how to string syllables together…and because she’s just so adorable, she’s become accustomed to people doing things she tells them to do? And so for the time being, this has become her mode of communication — do this, do that, don’t do this, don’t do that.
That’s modern feminism there. That’s modern liberalism. What people are told to stop doing, doesn’t really matter. The important thing is the knuckle-rapping. It’s like a shark swimming — they can’t stop doing it. It’s an inherent contradiction, because within the twenty-something set, when most people have been recruited into being good liberals, they rallied to the cause for the express purpose of not being told what to do.
That’s probably why the comments under the Feministing post, are just a tad…scathing.
I don’t like the idea of anyone telling me who I should love.
Posted by JenTheFem | October 24, 2008 11:12 AM
I think the problem with this is that if you love someone enough to opt for a long distance relationship, you love them enough to try to keep your relationship together against all odds. As bad as I feel for the environmental ramifications in this situation, I do not think I could just break up with the person I love more than anyone in the world just to date someone closer. I don’t think there’s anyone on this planet who could hold a candle to my loving, brilliant feminist boyfriend. This waiting will pay off someday.
Posted by Sparkles | October 24, 2008 11:13 AM
“if we have a local food movement, why not a date local movement?”
Not exactly the same, yeah? I mean, okay, some people are in long distance relationships for the wrong reasons (I have been), but that doesn’t mean we should shame the rest.
Posted by MaggieF | October 24, 2008 11:16 AM
uhhhhhhhhhhhh.
this is ridiculous. i dont even know where to start.
Posted by Aint I A Woman | October 24, 2008 11:18 AM
Ok, no, I’m a lot pissed. A large number of good friends are in life-long partnerships that started as long term relationship. And a more than fair number of good friends have been raped by “local” boy dates. Including my SO twice.
From this should I assume that all local relationships are doomed to failure and guaranteed to end in rape? That they’re filled with misery and cause an endless expenditure in gas costs for driving endlessly around the city?
I’m sorry, but this is ludicrous, offensive, poorly thought out and dismissive for no worthwhile reason. I don’t care why Slate thought it was a brilliant idea, but for you to try and expand on it with a disgustingly short-sighted and exclusionist post really demonstrates a lack of forethought and empathy.
Posted by Cerberus | October 24, 2008 11:27 AM
This is an awful post. I never thought i’d see a post on feministing about how one should lead their love life. Thanks a lot.
The love of my life and I have been together for almost 7 years (anniversary in November). Last year I had to move 3 hours away to continue my education. I now commute back and forth once a week (spending 3 days in Toronto, 4 days in Kingston). I refuse to own a car, so I take either the bus or the train, and buy ticket packets ahead of time.
… and you want me to feel GUILTY for trying to sustain this long-term, supportive, positive relationship?
OR would you rather I gave up my dreams of achieving a PHD so i could “stay local”?
Yeah, basically, you can take this post and shove it.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a bus to catch.
Posted by kitty stockings | October 24, 2008 11:29 AM
Liberal feminists. They exchanged one institution of self-important, strutting martinets — for another one. And they don’t even know it.
They delved into just about just about every aspect of [Joe] Wurzelbacher’s life, and, lo and behold, they found out Joe was an unlicensed plumber — this bit of information being gleefully provided by the plumbers’ union, whose bosses undoubtedly had their own reasons for wanting to get Joe. It wasn’t just that he had asked the wrong question of a Democratic candidate — an absolute no-no in union circles — but the union hadn’t gotten that slice of Joe’s income, in the form of union dues, to which the bosses consider themselves entitled. But Joe’s standing as a plumber is not the issue here. The issue is a candidate who, in an off-script moment, told both Joe The Plumber and the rest of America who he really is and what he really stands for.
That there above, all of it, is wind-up.
Smackdown follows…
The fact also that Joe The Plumber, a lifelong workingman, is now under persecution by the political party that continuously has portrayed itself as the workingman’s party, makes the hypocrisy of it all particularly odious.
…but blogger friend Cassy Fiano just compared us to the Sarahcuda. Wow, now THAT is a compliment. Kinda headed in the opposite direction from where it needs to go, though, ya know what I mean? Like having Dracula call you a vampire, or Yoda call you a Jedi Master, or…or…
…those metaphors are all lame. I get that way when I’m all giddy and overwhelmed. Wow, you could fry eggs on my big red ears right now.
She threw us all that attention on her way out of town. Letting go of the wheel. We already said we’d get a post ready to go, for our “guest blogging” stint sometime tonight…and wham, bam, here it is Friday already. We’ll get something locked & loaded, because hey, we said we would. And it’s not as if there’s a shortage of nonsense stuff going on already.
Seriously…we are just humbled, and overwhelmed. No, Cassy, you are the Sarahcuda! YOU are!
Ah…fame is on its way. Perhaps in the next month or two, we’ll make Keith Olbermann’s Worst Person in the World. For now, we’ve been identified by a flog, or feminist blog, as a terrible person who must be stopped. So says Ethical Slut.
Once again, we’re reminded that our modern-day feminists don’t actually disagree with anyone about anything. They identify targets, announce to all within earshot how the target makes them feel like barfing, and then demand moral and spiritual support from their peers in their quest to virtually destroy it.
As you can see, mkfreeberg judges women for a behavior that hurts no one. Sure, he tries to make a straw man argument, that Jessica Valenti is bitter and angry and disorganized in her life (we have to protect her from herself!), when simple facts (extremely successful career as a writer at a very young age, good relationships) all say otherwise.
Jessica Valenti’s schtick is to be bitter and angry. She runs a website that is dedicated to bitter and angry behavior. If she isn’t bitter and angry in real life, and has no desire to be seen as bitter and angry, then her communication skills must be truly abysmal.
As for being disorganized — hey, here’s a challenge. Name one single curriculum…or elixir…or some other agent…possessing an inimical relationship to sexual recklessness, particularly within young people — that does not simultaneously earn for itself an inimical relationship with post-modern feminism in general, and the Feministing flog in particular. Name five of those. You probably can’t even find one. To call for sexual discretion, good judgment, monogamy, standards in selecting a partner, et al, is to become an enemy of our modern feminists. Their words say they are all about privacy, people minding their own business, etc. etc. etc. Their actions say something else.
Feminists are not about privacy. Here’s a typical flog post:
1. Embedded YouTube clip, this commercial just started airing
2. It makes me want to vomit
3. When drunk horny dangerous men watch this, they will want to…etc…etc…etc…
4. It objectifies women
5. Did I mention it makes me want to vomit? What were they thinking??
6. Here’s the contact info for you to lodge your protest. Let’s whack ’em now, and make it look like we all got offended at the same time over the same thing, without actually collaborating on this.
But “Ethical slut” isn’t lashing back in the same way as Valenti herself. No, her whole thing is to whine and moan about the double standard.
We’ve been talking about neo-conservatives as if the “neo” meant that their arbitrary condemnation of people is something new. Anyone who has studied the role of religion in our world knows that this sort of thing is as old as time. Women as commodities is as old as time too. You see it in things like honor killings, women killed because their “value” has been damaged, even through rape. Would mkfreeberg ever write a long diatribe about men who use their dicks as jackhammers, cheap meat, who disrespected their own chastity? Never. (Except in the context of “ruining” a future man’s wife).
Yup, men and women are treated differently in our society, Ethical Slut. And, as long as our society remains somewhat strong, it’s gonna stay that way. One stigma for male sluts, a different one for female sluts.
Oh, and yeah, if I saw someone put up a blog about men using their dicks as jackhammers, and then follow it up with several books on the same — especially if the books were about a societal obsession, while the individual writing said books clearly suffered from a counter-obsession — yes, I’d write a long diatribe about it. Male sluts do suffer from a stigma. It isn’t the same as the stigma for female sluts…real people don’t treat the sexes exactly the same, any more than post-modern feminists with feminists blogs do (!). But out here in the world of reality, we recognize that male sluts aren’t exactly elevated to tall pedestals and then worshipped, as feminists seem to think they are.
There’s a certain urgency involved in desiring to cool the behavior of a female slut, and there’s a good foundation of reason for this urgency. There are reasons why their family members are ashamed and sad. There’s the whole thing about women getting pregnant, something men can’t do. Feminists know that, right? And then there’s the time honored position women have in our culture, of resisting. Slowing things down. Putting the brakes on things.
That’s their role. You may not like it, but who cares…you don’t like that men have penises and women have vaginas, but that’s just the way things are. A man is sexually reckless — his behavior is put into check by the lady he is attempting to seduce. A woman is sexually reckless — that’s different. There’s nobody to put that behavior in check. I mean, what…you think the man will do it? Seriously?
I like it when feminists decry that double standard. I like it a lot, because it enables others to see how silly and ridiculous feminists really are. The keymaster-gatekeeper relationship dates back to biblical times, those times when feminists claim women were being treated like property and cattle and dirt and what-not…when in reality, this particular social custom that has spanned so many continents, in which men make things go and women make things stop, is perhaps the one social custom that has conferred the greatest respect upon the fairer sex. And put them in charge of something rather important. Civilization itself, one could argue.
Feminists want to get rid of it. I find that ironic and interesting.
Homosexuals can be wonderful parents. Sluts can be happy, productive people. People who follow religious rules to a T can stone a person to death and watch them die slowly of internal injuries and starvation. This is why you’re a terrible person who must be stopped, mkfreeberg. Is that simple enough for you to understand?
Uh…it will be, as soon as you show me some examples of those, and “prove a negative” with regard to the opposites: That homosexuals can be crappy parents, sluts can be unproductive, people who follow religious rules to a T can do wonderful things for those less fortunate. As to whether I understand how this shows I’m a terrible person who must be stoped, I’m having trouble making the connection because I didn’t say too much with regard to homosexuals being good or bad parents or sluts being productive or unproductive.
But nevermind. I think I understand why Ethical Slut would think I’m terrible, and why I must be stopped. I said something outside her value system. Time for the fire-ant treatment. Let’s all attack mkfreeberg, and can I get an amen here from my fellow nattering-nabob feminists?
Post-modern feminists, for people who are supposed to be champions of freedom, liberty and free expression, are, in their own way, quite puritanical. As I’ve said about other factions of grumbling, snarky outspoken people — they’ve exchanged one religion for another.
It’s tough to remember right now with all this talk of bailouts and subprimes and economy this and jobs that…but killing terrorists is still the most important issue of this election. The more the better.
Now, they’re telling me, in that authoritative way “they” tell me things when there are no real faces or reputations or identities behind the “they”…that history’s verdict is in on Bush. We don’t like ‘im, and while a lot of folks didn’t like him from the get-go, the big hairpin turn by which “all” of us decided “we” don’t like him, was when he invaded Saddam Hussein’s turf.
“They” tell me “we” hate George Bush because he lied to us to make it happen.
Because he didn’t have “proof” Saddam Hussein was developing or storing WMDs.
Because he didn’t have a more legally sturdy delegation of authority from Congress with an actual declaration of war.
Because if we knew the facts, we wouldn’t have supported the invasion of Iraq.
Because the U.N. didn’t bless it.
Question: Are these, like, either-or things? It’s an important question. Our country’s going to have to know the answer to that next time this has to be handled.
If the next ne’er-do-well around the world is caught engaging in his skulduggery and hijinks, what’s President Obama or McCain or Palin supposed to do, exactly? Get the approval of the electorate? Of Congress? Prove the shenanigans beyond the shadow of any doubt? Get the approval of the United Nations Security Council?
All of those? One of those? Two of those?
This is the trouble with that nameless faceless “they.” “They” are great at stating an argument or a case, but not in such a way that it makes sense. Is our lesson for future events that you can’t invade a nation until you P-R-O-V-E that you have to…and then…get U.N. approval? Why? What if you prove it, irrefutably, and then one deliberative body approves it and another one doesn’t?
Shouldn’t someone be debating that somewhere? Preferrably, out in the open with some high profile and visibility? Like before November 4th? I mean…”they” tell me “everybody” is really concerned about this. Seems like the question should’ve come up before now.
I was just wondering when, exactly, it became known as “going negative” to rattle off one or several reasons why people should vote for you over the other guy. Along comes Thomas Sowell…
When the truth about what he actually did as governor was brought out during the Presidential election campaign, the media were duly shocked — not by Dukakis’ record, but by the Republicans’ exposing his record.
John Kerry, with a very similar ultra-liberal record, topped off by inflammatory and unsubstantiated attacks on American military men in Vietnam, disdained the whole process of labeling as something unworthy. And the mainstream media closed ranks around him as well, deploring those who labeled Kerry a liberal.
:
…those in the media who deplore “negative advertising” regard it as unseemly to dig up ugly facts instead of sticking to the beautiful rhetoric of an election year. The oft-repeated mantra is that we should trick to the “real issues.”
What are called “the real issues” are election-year talking points, while the actual track record of the candidates is treated as a distraction — and somehow an unworthy distraction.
Yup. Invariably, when someone says “let’s get back to the real issues” the next two or three sentences that come after have something to do with “eight years of Bush.” These are people who credit themselves with looking boldly forward into the future. And so seldom do I get to see ’em do it.
Nor is anyone accused of “going negative” when they spew their bile and venom about “Bush.” Somehow, that ‘un gets a pass.
The demands of the feminists have not been met here, but they got the very next best thing: A man, one not particularly sensitized to feminist complaints, who sincerely admits “I understand what women are enduring, now that I’ve been put in their shoes.”
I’m married. Been married for 14 years. I moved away from my family to be with my wife’s family, left my career, friends, & family behind. I now work out of my house because my wife got a “better” job else where and now I do ALL of the cooking and cleaning and take care of my 3 kids. She’s the typical MALE now…comes homes, I have dinner ready. She works more at home. I play with the kids. She goes to bed, I have to go to bed. My whole life revolves around her now. She’s the Sun and I’m Uranus. She leaves dirty clothes on the floor. Trash on tables. HAIR everywhere!! I SIT to pee now cuz I hate to clean up pubic hairs off the toilets….it’s disgusting. I feel I’m being converted to a female in some sick way. I AM NOT A WOMAN! I love women. But I now know what they put up with. It sucks. No thanks for dinner….not even “dinner was great dear…how ’bout I clean up the dishes”….NNOOOOOO. Just a couple of grunts and it’s off to work….kinda like a guy going to the garage for the evening. I have tools. I’d love to go to the garage and work. But I think my kids come first. I’d love to have an affair but don’t think I can deal with the guilt. If I start to PMS…….I’ll scream. Oh…and don’t think she’s “MAN” enough to mow the yard or shovel the drive…nope…that’s me too. Who gets the groceries….ME. My nipples stick out in the frozen food section too by the way. No one tries to pick me up though. I did get asked by the cashier what was for dinner once!!! I must have something written on my forhead. So women, ladies, how do you put up with it??? I read an analogy once about a cup. Love is like a cup of water. You give some to people in need. But eventually that cup goes dry with no one to refill it. MY CUP IS AS DRY AS A 100 YEAR OLD BONE.
Go ahead — explore the comment section. How many notes of congratulation to you see? How many notes of “Welcome to the Fold”? How many feminists treating him as a compatriot?
How much “Go forth, my son, and help us spread the word”?
Please note…if feminism was about equality, and increased empathy between the sexes, that’s pretty much all you’d see. But here in the plane of reality that is not what you see.
What you see is spite.
Let the record show — as far as my own, not-so-humble opinion is concerned — there is a problem with men appreciating the household contributions of women. It’s not altogether possible to be resolved; it’s part of our internal design. Men are built to manage enclaves of responsibility only so large, and only to a certain limited extent. We exchange depth and breadth of such an enclave, for the potential of the elements within it. We lack the organizational skills women are built to have; and, of course, there’s the matter that we can’t see dirt.
Feminists, however, are not women who seek a resolution where it may or may not be possible. A resolution is not what they want. What they want is to be angry.
And if, when you skimmed those thirty-plus comments, this did not become obvious to you — you need to skim them again. Here’s a guy who sincerely understands the problem, admits it, and all he gets from the feminists is a bunch of bullshit and snark.
And then there’s that other matter.
How many feminists do you know, who threw their feminist temper tantrum and tirade, got those household chores equitably distributed, and then proceeded to whistle an ecstatically satisifed happy tune as they scrubbed the toilet bowl but only fifty percent of the time? How many feminists do you know like that? How many feminists can you name, like that? Doing half the chores, but happily, because it’s only half and the stud of the household is doing his half?
Can you name even one?
I can’t.
They’re just inherently nasty people who like to complain about things, and be angry.
And they don’t want fifty percent of the household chores. They want zero. The bitches are just lazy.
Lazy…and angry. And if they get every little thing they want, they will not stop being angry. They’ve had forty years to stop being angry, and it’s never once happened. Anger is part of the identity. Anger, and laziness.
I was looking up Jake Tapper’s column and in that very instant, Mr. Tapper pops up on channel 10 as a “political correspondent” or some such.
Maybe he’s balanced and centrist the rest of the time. He isn’t here.
I can’t do a better job of fisking his list of complaints than this fellow did.
Hey Jake, it’s not that simple of a matter. It started out pretty simple…but then Stephen Branchflower put out a report in which his factual conclusions went in one direction, and his opinionated conclusions went in the other direction. For whatever reason. And now we have a mess.
Great report, Mr. Branchflower. You started out with one question, now you’ve generated a whole fistful of ’em.
Tapper did do something fair, though: He included Taylor Griffin’s comments at the end of his own column in an “update” (albeit, while misspelling Griffin’s last name). These comments of Griffin’s do a serviceable job of addressing both sides of the issue fairly, I find:
The investigation set out to determine whether Gov. Palin had acted properly in reassigning Walt Monegan, it concluded that she absolutely did. The Legislative Council’s investigation offers an opinion based on a very tortured reading of the Ethics Act, but, as Legislative Council Chairman Kim Elton pointed out yesterday, it has no force in law.
Unable to find wrongdoing under the original investigation, Mr. Branchflower tried to stretch the Ethics Act to fit facts that are well beyond the scope of the law. To say she is in violation because she did not stop Todd Palin from raising concerns with appropriate authorities about a rogue State Trooper who had threatened their family and abused the public trust really defies commonsense and has no basis in the law. Besides, as Todd pointed out in his interrogatory responses, she did ask him to “drop it.”
Also, the Council made clear that the vote to make the report public was not an endorsement of its findings. In fact, five members of the council spoke up to say they do not agree with the report’s findings. The lengths that were taken to stretch the scope of the investigation to find something damaging to say, when the facts bore out that the Governor acted appropriately, show that our concerns about the politicization of this investigation were entirely justified.
Trooper Wooten has a history of violent and intimidating behavior and threatened the life of Sarah Palin’s father. As anyone would, the Palins raised these serious concerns to the proper authorities. As Todd Palin said in his interrogatory responses, “I make no apologies for wanting to protect my family and wanting to publicize the injustice of a violent trooper keeping his badge and abusing the workers’ compensation system.”
Go on, moonbats. Tell me Taylor Griffin is owned by the Rothschilds and is spreading his lies in Karl Rove fashion…and how…and where he lied. Can’t wait to see it.
Anti-feminists tell me what my book is about: Turning teens into sluts!
I figured that my new book would get some negative attention from conservative blogs, but I kinda thought that would happen once the book was, you know…published.
But it seems that there’s no reason to wait for pesky things like the actual content of the book to start blogging about what The Purity Myth is all about. So apparently, the purpose of my book is to “turn America’s teenagers into raging whores.” Woo hoo!
: House of Eratosthenes: “Feminism, somehow, has come to be about everyone who can be a slut, being one.”
But Cassy Fiano’s post was my fave, “Putting out is SO much better for girls than abstinence.” (And it’s not just because her blog design uses a rose/gun combo that speaks volumes.)
Fiano writes that I have an “obsession with sluttiness.”
Why is it so many feminists are so obsessed with turning teenage girls into raging whores? How is that something you tell girls they should aspire to?
…I honestly think that what most of this is about when it comes to feminists like Jessica is self-loathing… you know, misery loves company and all. I can’t help but see someone extremely misguided, bitter, and angry in Jessica and the feminists like her. What’s truly pathetic is that they aren’t content with screwing up their own lives. No… they’ve got to ruin the lives of American teenage girls as well.
What I find most interesting about Fiano and the other posts is that they’re the ones who are talking about ‘sluts’, ‘whores’ and women being promiscuous. (In fact, one of Fiano’s classy commenters suggests that I’m promiscuous and that’s why I wrote the book.) The book cover says nothing about sex, promiscuity or the like – they make that jump. Why? Because for conservatives and purity pushers, the only alternative to being a virgin is being [a] whore. There’s no in-between for them, there’s no complexity or nuance when it comes to sexuality. And that’s why I wanted to write this book. Seriously, these bloggers are making my point for me!
Another thing I found amusing about these responses was that almost all of them took the subtitle to mean that I think virginity is hurting young women, when what when I actually wrote is that “America’s obsession with virginity” is what’s damaging.
So for the record: I think virginity is fine, just as I think having sex is fine. I don’t really care what women do sexually, and neither should you. In fact, that’s the point. I believe that a young woman’s sexual choices – no matter what they be – shouldn’t have a bearing on how they’re seen as moral actors. I also believe that slut-shaming and fetishizing virginity is not just about only valuing women for their sexuality (or lack thereof), but that it’s also part of a larger agenda that seeks to regress women’s rights and return to traditional gender roles. But if you want to know more about that, you’ll have to read the book.
Oh, I see, so it’s not virginity that is damaging, it is the obsession with virginity. Feminists aren’t about young girls having as much sex as possible, they’re about people minding their own business. It all seems so clear now!
Except…it doesn’t. As Yoda said, “This one, a long time have I watched.” We are frequent visitors to Feministing. It’s one of the most entertaining sites on the net. Back in July, the site chose to attack Brad Henning, who gives abstinence-only presentations at schools. Now, I don’t have much of an opinion about Mr. Henning one way or another, and I don’t know how you feel about abstinence-only presentations.
But I was fascinated at Feministing’s choice of spokesperson against Mr. Henning. It was a girl who used to sit through Henning’s lectures, grown up into an older girl who’d lost her virginity, grown up still further into a married lady living in an open marriage, screwing another eight guys since tying the knot. She didn’t make much of a point with her letter, other than that she didn’t believe in abstinance-only education…a point lots of others could make. But good heavens, all the pats on the back she got from screwing lots of other guys, with her hubby’s consent, and with that background daring to boldly confront that awful Brad Henning!
As a point of interest, our marriage is open. My husband was the seventh man I slept with, and now that number has almost doubled to 15. Our marriage is more happy and healthy since we’ve opened it than it was before. This is because it is not sex which binds us together, but our commitment to each other. We are not wearing sex blinders. The key to a good marriage is trust and communication, two things that HAD to grow exponentially when our marriage opened up. If you wish to prepare students for solid marriages, then exercises in building trust and communication skills will take you much farther than telling the kids to just wait to have sex until they’re married.
Huh. I know quite a few married couples. I haven’t made the acquaintance of any open-relationship folks, since my days in Seattle…some twenty years ago. Wouldn’t it have been easier to find someone in a normal, monogamous union to offer this kind of personal testimony? Wouldn’t that message then be much clearer? I’d say if Feministing is concerned about confusion between its attacks on virginity, and obsessions with virginity — it’s only concerned about this to a certain extent. Not exactly losing sleep over it.
I don’t think there’s been any such confusion at all. This is pure backpedaling.
It’s not really about minding your own business; it’s about anybody who can be a slut, being one. Feminists may want others to mind their own business with respect to whether a young lady is keeping herself intact or not. But that doesn’t mean they themselves intend to mind their beeswax with regard to same. And yes, we have more than adequate reason to believe third-wave feminists in general, and Ms. Valenti & fellow modmins in particular, are infatuated with the idea of nubile young ladies ridin’ the baloney pony. The more the better. Cassy’s words ring true, and I’ll stand behind my own as well.
They aren’t hostile to the idea of chastity? I’ll take on that debate. But only with people who are familiar with the Feministing website. In the world of Feministing, parents must take absolute zero interest in whether their children are coming to sexual maturity in a responsible way. If they pay any attention to this at all, it is called “fetishizing.”
I nearly lost my mind when I read this gushing piece from Time Magazine about purity balls.
What was amazing to me about the reporting of this article was despite hearing all of these creepy anecdotes – and admitting that girls as young as four are participating in a ceremony about their virginity – writer Nancy Gibbs still managed to be smitten over the whole shebang.
But first…a creepy anecdote.
Kylie Miraldi has come from California to celebrate her 18th birthday tonight. She’ll be going to San Jose State on a volleyball scholarship next year. Her father, who looks a little like Superman, is on the dance floor with one of her sisters; he turns out to be Dean Miraldi, a former offensive lineman with the Philadelphia Eagles. When Kylie was 13, her parents took her on a hike in Lake Tahoe, Calif. “We discussed what it means to be a teenager in today’s world,” she says. They gave her a charm for her bracelet–a lock in the shape of a heart. Her father has the key. “On my wedding day, he’ll give it to my husband,” she explains. “It’s a symbol of my father giving up the covering of my heart, protecting me, since it means my husband is now the protector. He becomes like the shield to my heart, to love me as I’m supposed to be loved.”
Paging Dr. Freud! But Gibbs is loving it.
Leave aside for a moment the critics who recoil at the symbols, the patriarchy, the very use of the term purity, with its shadow of stains and stigma. Whatever guests came looking for, they are likely to come away with something unexpected. The goal seems less about making judgments than about making memories.
And making sure young women think their worth is dependent on whether or not they’re sexual. So, no Ms. Gibbs, I think I won’t “leave aside” that very real and very dangerous message. Thanks anyway!
Gibbs continues to totally miss the point:
Purity is certainly a loaded word–but is there anyone who thinks it’s a good idea for 12-year-olds to have sex? Or a bad idea for fathers to be engaged in the lives of their daughters and promise to practice what they preach? Parents won’t necessarily say this out loud, but isn’t it better to set the bar high and miss than not even try?
Are families who don’t expect their daughters to promise their virginity to their dads promoting sex for 12 year-olds? Can’t dads be engaged in the lives of their daughters without worrying about the state of their hymen? And is telling women that their moral compass lays in between their legs really setting the bar high?
Flowery language and valorizing these days doesn’t change what purity balls are about: the ownership and fetishizing of young girls’ sexuality.
Funny. If you open up the Time Magazine article and read it for yourself, what you find doesn’t have an awful lot to do with four-year-old girls being told their “worth” is measured by whether they have sex or not. You don’t even read anything, contrary to what you might expect, about contingencies laid down upon a young lady’s worth as a person. Quite to the contrary, what you read about is such pre-conditions being removed…as in…the girls are made to understand they don’t have to hook up with a guy in order to be worth something. I guess Valenti didn’t want you to read that part for yourself.
Kylie talks with an unblinking confidence about a promise that she says is spiritual, mental and physical. “It’s something I’m very proud of. I plan to keep pure until marriage. It’s a promise I made to myself–not pressure from my parents,” she says. She speaks plainly about what she wants in her life, what she thinks she has the power to control and what she doesn’t. “I’m very much at peace about this,” she says, and looks out across the twirling room. “I don’t feel like I need to seek a man. I will be found.”
Irony. This used to be what feminism was all about. Jessica Valenti says it’s creepy. What she means by “fetishization,” I don’t know for sure, and I’m not sure shelling out a bunch of greenbacks for her latest book will clear it up for me.
Nope. Feministing’s brand of feminism has nothing to do with minding your own business.
Not unless the Feministing-feminists can keep an exemption from such a rule, for themselves.
About everything.
Having said that — glad they think us worthy of mention over there. Now we know we’ve arrived. Maybe by the end of next week we’ll be Keith Olberman’s Worst Person in the World.
James Taranto savages the “fact-checking” fad. It’s your must-read column of the day. Maybe even for the week.
The “fact check” is opinion journalism or criticism, masquerading as straight news. The object is not merely to report facts but to pass a judgment. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog ends each assessment with between one and four “Pinocchios,” just like movie reviewers giving out stars.
Like movie reviewing, the “fact check” is a highly subjective process. If a politician makes a statement that is flatly false, it does not need to be “fact checked.” The facts themselves are sufficient. “Fact checks” end up dealing in murkier areas of context and emphasis, making it very easy for the journalist to make up standards as he goes along, applying them more rigorously to the candidate he disfavors (which usually means the Republican).
Example: USA Today has a “reality check” of a McCain ad whose script runs as follows:
Narrator: “Who is Barack Obama? He says our troops in Afghanistan are . . .
Obama: “. . . just air-raiding villages and killing civilians.”
Narrator: “How dishonorable. Congressional liberals voted repeatedly to cut off funding to our active troops, increasing the risk on their lives. How dangerous. Obama and congressional liberals: too risky for America.”
The USA Today headline reads “Quote From Obama Taken Out of Context.” In a way this is a tautology, since a quotation by definition is taken out of its original context (and placed in a new one). But of course the phrase out of context usually connotes “used in a misleading way.” Is that the case here? Here is a longer version of the Obama quote, per USA Today:
“We’ve got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.”
One the one hand, Obama was making a broader argument, which the McCain ad ignores: that America should send more troops to Afghanistan. On the other hand, Obama clearly did assert that America is “air-raiding villages and killing civilians” (the subsequent clause makes that undeniable), though one could argue about whether he was asserting or merely worrying that we are “just” doing so.
We’re slowly going insane, you know; confusing the subjective with the objective is the first milestone to complete insanity.
Well, that was fishy from the get-go because anyone watching for themselves could see the special CNN panel was more-or-less deadlocked.
For those who care about consensus-politics…which is most people…Blogger Friend Phil has gone through and tallied up the votes. Hit the freeze-frame button just as many times as he needed to. And yes, indeed, it would appear that whether fourteen is a bigass overwhelming number or a teeny-weeny throwaway number depends…entirely, not just a little bit…on fourteen of what, exactly?
You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the CNN Zone!
This is why we have blogs, folks. You really have to wonder what kind of crap we were being sold by Jennings, Rather, Brokaw, Cronkite, et al. You really do have to stop and seriously wonder. This bullshit has a long history of working; if it didn’t, they wouldn’t be trying it.
Blogger friend Cas just drove her freakin’ monster truck over it. She also ‘fessed up, she is the “female friend” John Hawkins was talking about. We had that one pegged when we saw the female friend was asking the question we’d been asking awhile…
What is it with feminists and wanting to turn America’s teenagers into raging whores?
In spite of all the shredding that has been going on, however, there is one other point that has to be made. It lies precisely at the fork in the road, where reality veers away from what is politically correct:
For the last several decades, the feminist movement has upheld as an ideal that women of marriagable age should assume all of the responsibility of deciding on their couplings, and that Dad should butt out. This has been an unspoken agenda item, and it’s good for the feminist movement that it is unspoken, for the effect it has is to force feminism to indict itself.
A picture has emerged during the heyday of the feminist movement, of the desired male object-of-affection — the stud who is chosen most often, now that it’s all up to the liberated woman and Dad has nothing to say about it. It’s not a pretty picture at all. Tragically, most of the time, it’s a picture of a guy who’s no longer there. It’s “(Insert name of oldest kid)’s dad,” small-d.
Lots of fun. Never could hold down a job. Turned into an asshole a year after the marriage…or when the kid was born…and that, of course, is all his fault. Maybe this inspires the next question “If he’s a dick down to the marrow of his bones and he’s never been anything else, why’d you pick ‘im?” — which, in the feminist age, is the quitessential Question Of Rudeness. The answer to which is: He changed. Or the subject abruptly changes. Or both.
What does reality embrace, that political correctness does not?
Feminism was all about experimenting — having women just coming to an age of maturity, making decisions about their suitors that their daddies used to make for them, or at least influence.
And the experiment failed.
It failed because those young ladies were still virgins, in this age of eschewing virginity. Sure — perhaps they weren’t virgins in the traditional sense. But they were virginal to this world of going to bed early Sunday through Thursday and waking up fresh and energized so you could go to a job, and bring home a paycheck to buy groceries and pay a mortgage. They were virginal to that. And they picked their studs, before losing that virginity.
Their score overall? You’d have done a much better job calling heads-or-tails a thousand times in a row. They mucked it up. They screwed the pooch. They went out looking for a guy who’d be with them, help them raise the kids, help them pay off the house, and they selected as their criteria does he make me laugh. Fast forward a few years, they were forced to saddle some other poor schlub with all the responsibilities after blowing their own fun-filled younger years on some “fun” guy who got ’em pregnant and then ran off.
Which, irony of ironies…is not fun. They went lookin’ for something, and failed to find it, when they’d have stood a much better job finding it if they didn’t sacrifice so much to go lookin’ for it.
The book is called — wait for it — The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women. I’m thinking of buying it. I mean, I really don’t understand and I do have a need to have it explained to me. You ask me “How is America’s obsession with cheap and easy casual sex between young girls and scummy subprime guys hurting young women” and by this time I’m more than sufficiently informed, I think, to comment. Like Hawkins, I have to question whether we have a similar obsession with virginity. Must’ve missed that one.
Hawkins goes on to explore other ways in which this might be somewhat ridiculous…then goes in for the kill.
If you want to know why liberals and conservatives don’t get along, books like this tell you all you need to know.
People who long for “bipartisanship,” good as their intentions may be, miss the point. Somewhat, to completely. Conservatism versus liberalism is a conflict lacking any no-mans-land and cannot ever have any no-mans-land. It is order versus chaos. It is productivity versus dysfunction. Health versus sickness. Life versus death. No “gray area” is logically possible.
Don’t take my word for it. Head on over to Jessica Valenti’s turf, and read for awhile. “Equal pay for equal worth” has very little to do with the agenda. In fact, you’d be pretty surprised what has to do with the agenda. The PATRIOT Act — that’s a womens’ issue now. Same-sex marriage is a womens’ issue…although not in the way you might think. Young girls not having enough sex.
This is Third Wave Feminism and as you scan the Wikipedia article behind that link looking for a concise definition of what that is, you’re going to emerge from the exercise dizzy and frustrated. The common themes can only be expressed in terms that are derogatory to the third-wave movement itself…or else…not expressed. What it is, is controlling the opinions of the masses. Cracking a ruler over the knuckles of anyone who doesn’t think the right thoughts about feminism itself.
And “maybe girls who are just starting to become women shouldn’t sleep with any sleezy guy they happen to meet” is a decidedly wrong thought. Feminism, somehow, has come to be about everyone who can be a slut, being one. And anyone who says maybe it’d be a good idea not to be a slut, getting a nasty note on Jessica’s blog, a smartass comment thrown back in their face, or both. So yes. Of course. Anybody who needs to see how and why conservatives and liberals don’t get along…go ahead and check this stuff out.
What you’re seeing here, is communication — embarrassing communication — from those head-swooshers to other head-swooshers. “This is what everybody thinks.”
Who ya gonna believe…the teleprompter, or your lyin’ eyes?
It’s a YouTube clip. Comments have been disabled. Ratings have been disabled. Embedding has been disabled.
You see, as feminists set out to make the world a certain way, exactly how they want it to be…it is vitally important that the rest of us are exposed to their opinions, whether we want to be or not. That’s the way modern feminism is. Everything’s a one-way relationship. Forget all about reciprocity, and feminists will always live up to your expectations.
Just don’t go looking for a way to let ’em know that.
Here’s something interesting about human behavior. The following clip was added by 1stAmendmentVoter who is apparently an Obama supporter. This person seems pretty sure that when Palin and Biden went head-to-head, the Senator from Delaware was a clear victor. It’s only two minutes long. Why don’t you scan it for some actual reasons that a neutral observer should think Sarah Palin lost the debate.
Did you see what I saw? A poll. A poll of strangers decided, 51-36, that Biden did a better job. If you go to the page for this clip you see a bunch of quotes from luminaries. Also strangers. But what neutral, objective, balanced and dispassionate strangers they are, huh.
Bob Shrum: “She Barely Kept Up”… “McCain Lost the VP Debate Too”… Madeleine Albright: “Biden’s Night… We Need A VP Who Can Be Persuasive With Foreign Leaders”…Leah McElrath Renna: “Biden’s Tears Did More For The Equality Of The Sexes Than Palin’s Presence”… Newsweek’s Fineman: Palin Like “A Wolverine Attacking The Pant Leg Of A Passerby”
Now, back in ’95 we saw our country’s racial divide open up just a bit, as O.J. Simpson’s trial entered the home stretch and then finally reached a verdict. What arose to confront us was the Rashomon syndrome; two people with different interests, especially different interests seldom discussed in polite company, see something. It’s a singular thing. They disagree about what it is they saw. They shouldn’t, but they do.
That’s what’s happening right now with this Palin/Biden debate. What interest me here, however, is what is presented by the two different sides as they each make the case why they saw things the way they think they saw them. In 2008, this is what makes the sides truly different; these different perspectives, speak to their character. Go back and watch that clip again. Study it, one more time, for reasons you should think Biden won the debate. What do you find? You should think Biden won the debate…because…this other person, over here, thinks Biden won the debate.
Compare and contrast. John Hawkins has a YouTube clip too. His clip gives reasons to think Palin won the debate. Except Hawkins does something pretty strange here: He allows viewers to listen to the debate themselves! Wow, you’re putting a lot of faith in the hoi polloi, aren’t you John?
For me, this defines a crucial difference between the way liberals and conservatives think. How they see things. What goes on in their heads when they see things. Liberalism is the last gasp of a dying age — the twentieth century, in which it was a novelty that one man could speak, and in that very moment be heard by thousands or millions. By the nature of that kind of technology it is impossible to unworkable for those masses to have any efficient way of letting the speaker know what they thought of him. Mass communication is not necessarily bidirectional communication. And so, having reached maturity on this imbalanced diet, liberalism has nurtured down to the marrow of its bones a reflexive proclivity to tell people what to think.
A liberal is not necessarily inclined to make the clip John Hawkins made. Some liberals do, of course. If you show a great level of competence and creativity in selecting the clips to include, and sequence them just so, so that your compilation eventually compels an uninformed viewer to reach conclusions directly opposed from what reality would suggest — what you have there, then, is a Michael Moore product. And isn’t Mr. Moore’s career just a damning indictment of liberalism itself. He became famous because he discovered ways to c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y show some footage in such a way that liberalism looked good. Question: If that’s Moore’s contribution, but liberalism is already supposed to be a good idea, then why was his chosen craft such an incredible novelty? Answer: Because there is some difficulty involved in getting that done.
Now, look at Hawkins’ clip one more time. There is no Michael-Moore trickery involved here; this is exactly the way the debate went down, just with a little bit less waiting. What he’s showing are, for all intents and purposes, random samples. Liberals must tell people what to think, conservatives allow people to make up their own minds about things. And this is the way things went. Palin would highlight in some subtle way the difference between the way people decide things inside the beltway, and the way people decide things in the rest of the country. Biden, if he is truly a master of expressing the best part of an argument through his words and his tone and his facial expressions, must have been making a counter-argument of “look how white my teeth are” because that’s all he had to say about it. Just a big ol’ crocodile smile. Nothing else.
That would be an effective and fair summary of most of what took place.
Palin: Something is wrong in Washington. Those people do not think about important problems the way people with real responsibilities think about important problems. Biden: Yeah, but look what a great smile I have!
Well, you know what my conclusion is about it? Biden and Palin both represented the grievances and passions of millions of their virtual constituents in this match-up. And that’s how debates are truly won. But Biden’s constituents are a bunch of peaceniks. Their battle cry, of an “illegal and unjust war,” is old and tired by now. We invaded Iraq; get over it. We can debate what to do going forward, but as far as going in in the first place, it’s a piece of history. Furthermore, Biden’s tent is way too big. Some of his constituents genuinely do hate the country. They do, they do, they do — some of ’em. Others have a more sincere desire to see peace. Some are pie-eyed absolutists living in utopian bubbles, and insist war should become a thing of the past. Others are more realistic and say war is sometimes unavoidable, but it should only be engaged when it is inevitable, and that was not the case here. Some are anarchists. Some are totalitarians. Some are isolationists. Others desire a one-world government with more authority invested in the United Nations.
Obama and Biden face an impossible task of uniting them…should they win this election. I don’t think it’s really do-able. These people have nothing in common with each other. Their egos are wrapped up in the Obama/Biden ticket because of Barack Obama’s personal charisma, and Obama’s charisma holds such an appeal for them because they’re uninformed on the issues. That’s their commonality. The only one.
Palin emerges as the true heroine here, fighting the good fight. She’s representing the rest of us. We’re out here in “flyover country,” living our lives…our normal lives…and Washington, DC is getting further and further away from us. Quite frankly, we don’t know what to make of it. We’re working and paying bills, and nobody’s bailing us out of things. This “Dick Cheney” guy Biden kept bashing all night long, calling him the most dangerous Vice President ever — what is the Cheney doctrine, anyway? It’s also called the One Percent Doctrine and it says if there’s a 1% chance that shenanigans are going on, sometimes you have to treat it as a certainty if you regard the potential shenanigans to be a sufficient cause for concern. This just goes to show how far apart the beltway is from the rest of the world, because out here, that makes perfect sense. It may very well be the most unpopular doctrine to ever have been voiced around the Patomac, since the day our nation’s capitol was located there. Out here, meanwhile, everyone who manages their own life’s business, believes in the One Percent Doctrine. It is how we do things. Everyone believes in it…except for those who are somehow sheltered from making decisions that matter.
One percent chance there are black widows under your kids’ play equipment, you treat it as a certainty.
One percent chance your wife’s car has a leak in the brake lines, you treat it as a certainty.
One percent chance you left the stove on when you left the house, you act as if you most certainly did.
It really all comes down to management styles. Palin won the debate, because the way she makes decisions about things that come under her executive management jurisdiction, flows seamlessly into the way she managed this debate; and that, in turn, flows seamlessly into her personality. She’s the mother bear protecting her cubs — but she doesn’t treat the rest of us as cubs to be protected. She treats us as other mother bears, who are also protecting our cubs. Because that is precisely what we are.
And we don’t understand voting for something before voting against it — as she pointed out (right before another impressive display of Biden crocodile teeth). We don’t see how it’s okay to lie about something under oath just because the question was “personal”; we don’t understand comments about “letting Wall Street run wild” when we know the regulators had much more of a hand making the problem in the first place. We don’t understand bailouts. We don’t understand saying all these nice things about John McCain, and then once you’re Barack Obama’s running mate, trying to get people to pretend you never said them. We don’t understand radical left-wing democrats when they protest a war, make up lies about the soldiers killing and raping civilians — and then claim to support the troops. We don’t understand all this brow-beating that global warming is a big concern, but the damage to our infrastructure from these carbon cap-and-trade initiatives are not…and these creeps all over the world putting fatwas on the United States and trying to develop nuclear weapons…are also not a concern. We don’t see how it’s any of Germany’s or France’s or Canada’s damn business who we’re going to elect as our next leader. We don’t understand that. We just don’t get that stuff, and we don’t want to get it. You have a job to do, you do it. If something comes along that might mess up that job, you treat it as a certainty that it will.
And you do not, do not, do not, ever lead people by giving them sanctimonious and poorly-informed instructions that they shouldn’t be worried about something, that in reality, should worry the dickens out of ’em. It’s a contrast between weak management and strong management. That’s what this election is really all about. So if someone is out there thinking Biden won the debate, and they’re voting, that’s just the latest piece of evidence that we have way too many people in this country voting.
Our candidates for high office shouldn’t be selling us weak management with slick sales pitches, emotional connections, mosh pits and crocodile teeth. They shouldn’t even be tempted to mobilize a campaign like that. Yet they are not only tempted, but acting on it.
Don’t blame the candidates, blame the people. But Palin won. Among thinking men and women who have real responsibilities, there can be no question.
Questions are being raised about the objectivity of Thursday’s vice presidential debate moderator after news surfaced that she is releasing a new book that appears to promote Barack Obama and other black politicians who have benefited from the civil rights struggle.
Gwen Ifill, of PBS’ “The NewsHour,” is expected to remain as moderator, however.
“The book has been a known factor for months, so I’m not sure what the big deal is,” said NewsHour spokeswoman Anne Bell.
Aw gee, Anne. I dunno. What a big mystery!
Here’s a question. What in the world would it take, for Anne Bell to see “what the big deal is”? What if Ifill wore an Obama tee shirt to the debate, would that do it? Or sold advance copies of her book before and after? How about if both podiums prominently sported the unmistakable Barack Obama presidential seal? Suppose if the first question put to Gov. Palin was something along the lines of “Isn’t it wonderful that Barack Obama is going to be sworn in this January?”
I’m not satirizing well; I’m satirizing somewhat clumsily. But all this has a basis in reality. Age of Obama. That’s what Gwen Ifill’s upcoming book is about. She’s on record wanting Obama to win, and she stands to profit from it. She’s a moderator. Does Anne Bell really think there’s nothing outta whack here?
She told FOXNews.com that there were no concerns about Ifill’s neutrality…
Liar.
…and that the debate Thursday between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden would go forward as planned. Ifill also moderated the 2004 vice presidential debate.
“We were pleased that the (debate) commission once again turned to Gwen to moderate the debate,” Bell said. “They’ve known and trusted her as a moderator and that’s wonderful.”
Apparently, they didn’t properly “vet” her.
“Do you think they made the same assumptions about Lou Cannon (who is white) when he wrote his book about Reagan?” said Ifill, who is black. Asked if there were racial motives at play, she said, “I don’t know what it is. I find it curious.”
You don’t know what it is — when you’re wanting one of the contenders to win, you’re on record wanting one of them to win, you’ve written a book that is obviously positioned to sell based on the prospects of one of them winning…and you’re the moderator. Not only do you think that’s proper, but you’re at a loss to imagine why anyone would think that’s improper.
Really? Seriously?
I thought you had to be smart to be a journalist. Next to this, Sarah Palin’s failure to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of John McCain’s voting record, is nuthin’.
Where do they find these people? Seriously. I seriously want to know. And I seriously want to know if they think dinosaurs walked the earth four thousand years ago.
Update: Newsbusters has a fascinating profile on evening news’ collective decline. I guess we find it fascinating to know what Manhattan’s take on things is from one year to the next…but not that fascinating. The plants need watering, ya know.
A READER AT A MAJOR NEWSROOM EMAILS: “Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. People cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working.” I asked permission to reprint without attribution and it was granted.
Truly a “Why We Have Blogs” moment if ever there was one. I wonder what we weren’t told all those years when whatever Cronkite/Rather/Jennings/Brokaw said, must’ve been the way things were, and there couldn’t possibly be any more to be learned of or said.
Anybody else see what I’m seeing here? Labor…working seemlessly with management…toward a common goal. Among Obama supporters, it seems to be something of a rarity to find anyone who can even believe such a thing is possible. And here, they make it look so easy!
Nevertheless, I eagerly await someone to approach me with an argument that this was a fair, enlightening interview around the 1:48 mark, at which point Mr. Bounds directly and substantially addressed the question put before him…something I rarely see Messrs. Obama or Biden do, ever.
And it’s pretty damned embarrassing when the Los Angeles Times does a better job than you do at being impartial, even-handed, fair and educational. Good on ya, LAT. When people talk about presenting both sides, I think most would agree this is what they have in mind.
Seeking to buttress the foreign policy credentials of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Republicans have repeatedly cited the vice presidential nominee’s experience as commander of the Alaska National Guard.
As governor, Palin oversees military units whose duties include serving overseas, search-and-rescue missions across the state’s vast landscape and manning key elements of the U.S. missile defense system at Ft. Greely. But foreign deployments of Guard units and the operation of national defense assets like the Ft. Greely missile interceptors are not the responsibility of state governors. Those functions come under the regular U.S. military chain of command.
:
Overseeing a state Guard is a “chief executive role” with real management responsibilities, said Mark Allen, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau, the federal office that coordinates state National Guards.
“I don’t think people should think it is a casual relationship, or is like the king putting on the medals,” Allen said. “It is not that at all. But the role of the governor is to use the Guard to help the citizens of a state, as opposed to declaring war on a neighboring state.”
See, that’s called presenting both sides. Pro and con. Letting the readers decide for themselves. Campbell Brown could stand to learn something from this…but why in the world should she? She’s proven herself so adept at giving a speech and making it look like an interview.
The article goes on to point out something that hasn’t received a great deal of mention in this little tempest-in-a-teapot —
The Alaska National Guard is unusual in that its jobs include manning part of the U.S. missile defense system. The 49th Missile Defense Battalion works on interceptor missiles designed to shoot down intercontinental missiles.
Members of the Alaska National Guard also were deployed to Iraq, and Palin visited their unit in July 2007. The McCain campaign has pointed to that experience as an example of Palin’s foreign policy background. [emphasis mine]
So it really depends on the point of comparison you’re trying to make. If you’re asking whether the Republican ticket substantially improved its foreign policy credentials the day McCain picked Gov. Palin to be his running mate, the honest answer is no, of course what she possesses in terms of this kind of experience is next to insignificant. If what’s being asked is whether the McCain/Palin ticket is superior to the Obama/Biden ticket in this area of experience, even if something should happen to President McCain on his very first day, then the answer is absolutely yes…and the responsibility as the commander of Alaska’s National Guard, is relevant to qualifying that.
Nevertheless, I do have to admit that where the conversation is going — McCain and Palin are sworn in on a Tuesday, McCain has to step down on that Wednesday, then a standoff emerges on Thursday with Achmadinijad. Can Sarah Palin negotiate with this guy? The answer is probably: Somewhat, but no better than anyone else who is somehow competent to communicate verbally, and briefed here-and-there in whatever way incoming Vice Presidents are briefed.
She has very little helpful experience here. National Guard Commander is worth mentioning elsewhere, but not quite so much here…just admit it. In fact, let’s have a national debate about just that.
But let’s follow through on this good habit, and be even-handed about it. Which means some firm, scrutinizing questions are directed toward the An Idea Bomb guys. Gone, forever, are the days of skating by with weak cliches like “we need to talk with our enemies” — please, Senators, if you could, elaborate on what would be going on in those talks. What would be asked? What would be granted? What would the goals be of such talks, exactly?
I mean, really, how many questions can you think of to ask, that are more important? It’d be only fair.
Yeah, I know. I’m dreaming. Well, back in the world of reality…we’ll be right back with the next soapbox-speech thinly disguised as an interview, after a brief word from our sponsors…
Speaking of Feministing: Ever wonder what the inside of a feminist’s house or apartment looks like?
In my relatively brief lifetime thus far, I’ve seen the perimeter of “Things That Honk Off Feminists” flung outward so far and wide, that I can’t think of a single idea that incorporates both “females” and “cleaning things” that does not fall within it.
To hear them tell it, when feminists live with men they bring their bitching and pissing and moaning to an abrupt halt once they have achieved “equality” as far as “help with the household chores.” But that would imply, would it not, that the feminist of the household is mopping the floor and scrubbing the toilets fifty percent of the time. It’s been over twenty years since my last romantic relationship with a real die-hard post-modern feminist now…I’m not even sure the phrase “post-modern” can apply to days so far gone.
But the image of a self-professed feminist grabbing those Windex wipes and happily scrubbing toothpaste droplets off the bathroom mirror, cheerfully whistling to herself because she’s only doing this half the time — it’s a bit much for me to envision. The message that’s been ground into my cranium, forcefully, for decades now, is that housework and feminine things do not go together. Not even for a moment.
And in case I should forget (warning, suggestive content):
Theory A is that they’re sincere, and they just want a more equitable divide in the household labor.
Theory B is the bitches are just lazy.
It occurs to me that if I was stuck with the household labor and ready to mount a mini-revolution for a more equitable distribution, starting a blog to be read by others, constantly carping away at total strangers what they should find disgusting and reprehensible in movie tropes and everyday television commercials and other blogs — this would have very little to do with what I was trying to do. Right? I mean, I’d whack that schmuck in the back of the head to get him to help out. If he goes for it, it’s just a piece of history, and if he doesn’t, I’ve got a choice. Blogging would be a completely unrelated activity. A distraction, even.
Palin emerges as the true heroine here, fighting the good fight. She’s representing the rest of us. We’re out here in “flyover country,” living our lives…our normal lives…and Washington, DC is getting further and further away from us. Quite frankly, we don’t know what to make of it. We’re working and paying bills, and nobody’s bailing us out of things. This “Dick Cheney” guy Biden kept bashing all night long, calling him the most dangerous Vice President ever — what is the Cheney doctrine, anyway? It’s also called the 
Questions are being raised about the objectivity of Thursday’s vice presidential debate moderator after news surfaced that she is releasing a new book that appears to promote Barack Obama and other black politicians who have benefited from the civil rights struggle.