In a new interview for PlayboySeth MacFarlane outs infant Stewie Griffin:
Ultimately, Stewie will be gay or a very unhappy repressed heterosexual. It also explains why he’s so hellbent on killing [his mother, Lois] and taking over the world: He has a lot of aggression, which comes from confusion and uncertainty about his orientation.
Yeah, because being gay means you're confused and agressive and want to kill your mother. Makes total sense.
Hey, here's a nice story about a couple of celebrity parents who seem to have the whole egalitarian partner thing down:
Now prepared to begin regular filming on her series, [Rebecca Romijn] says that [Jerry O'Connell] has taken a hiatus from his own career to take care of [their seven-month old twin daughters Charlie and Dolly]. "Now that we've gone back to work, Jerry has taken off" the last three weeks, she says. "So he can be the parent on diaper duty!"
That's really cool—cool for the parents who now each have equal chance for career and full-time parenting, and cool for the kids who have the rare opportunity to know both their parents as full-time caretakers.
Not cool? The headline: Rebecca Romijn Recruits Jerry O'Connell As Mr. Mom.
Um, nope.
There's no such thing as a "Mr. Mom." Yes, I know—but hilarious '80s movie starring Michael Keaton fighting a rogue vacuum cleaner aside, that role actually has a real name, which is "Dad." (Or Father, Daddy, Pops, Old Man, Pater Familias, or some other variation thereof.) "Mr. Mom" implies that parenting (and/or cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, etc.) is only something women can do, which is factually incorrect.
It is not even factually accurate that women are intrinsically (or naturally! or organically! or biologically! or genetically!) better at parenting than men. (Though they are certainly socialized to be better parents.) And, see, asserting that it's true women are inherently disposed to parent more successfully treats women who are awesome parents as nothing special (just doing her job!), and treats men who are awesome parents as some kind of paradoxical anomaly (what an exceptional and weird and maybe sorta icky fellow!), and robs them both of their due props for being so awesome.
And, like most tropes emanating from the Patriarchy, it keeps the bar set mighty low for the average man, so no one expects too much of him (full-time job and parenting?! no one can live at that speed!), while keeping the bar set mighty high for the average woman, so anything less than perfection is failure (what's wrong with you that you don't have perfect children and a perfect house and the perfect job and the perfect body and a smoking hot sex life?!). See how that works?
I don't guess I even need to elucidate how this entire concept sneers at the idea of single fathers and two-parent families in which both parents are men.
Finally, let us look at that word "recruit." Did Rebecca Romijn really have to "recruit" her husband Jerry O'Connell's participation in equal parenting? Well, lawdy, I don't profess to know, but "Jerry has taken off the last three weeks" sounds more like someone who volunteered, if you ask me. I certainly wouldn't have gleaned "recruitment" from the included quotes—unless, perhaps, I was the sort of ding-a-ling who just assumes that all men have to be wrangled into childcare by women, the sort of person who might, say, refer to a man looking after his own children as "babysitting."
Strip One, Strip Two, Strip Three, Strip Four, Strip Five, Strip Six. In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman and a biracial queerbait telling it like it actually is from their perspective. Hilarity ensues.
What the hell kind of person brings a gun to a confirmation communion? What the hell are you doing dressed like a cowgirl at a confirmation communion anyway?? What the hell is with that jaunty little lilt to your hat??? What the hell????
Suggested by Shaker Kevin Wolf, in reference to today's Medal of Honor ceremony: You are awarding the coveted Shakesville Teaspoon Award for this year. On whom would you bestow this high honor?
I'm going to bestow mine on Kevin Wolf, for regularly providing me with good Questions of the Day.
U.S. President Barack Obama (R) presents the Medal of Freedom to veteran actor Sidney Poitier during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington August 12, 2009. Obama presented the nation's highest civilian honour to 16 recipients during the ceremony. [Reuters, via.]
There's an article about the 16 recipients of the award here (thanks to Shaker Kevin Wolf for sending that) and CNN has a photo gallery of all of them here.
I've gone through two attempts at writing a post that attempts to communicate with those opponents of health care reform who are still open to some small level of rational thought. As you can imagine, it has gotten more frustrating with each draft because I'm left wondering how they justify what it is they're fighting for.
I tried writing a letter to Diane Campbell, a protester in New Hampshire who is convinced that health care reform means killing off the weak and becoming evil socialists. Part of what is triggering Diane's fear is the fact that her mother and sister are both receiving constant medical treatments which is currently being covered by Medicare (i.e. a government run health care program that is funded by taxpayers).
In my letter, I tried explaining that if she wanted to ditch socialized health care (i.e. Medicare), there would not be one single insurance company that would provide coverage for either her mom or her sister.
Not one.
OK... maybe one, but the premium would be so cost prohibitive that they wouldn't be able to afford the coverage. But as I was continuing my attempt to explain things, I eventually just stopped. I convinced myself there would be no getting through to her. So, I decided to change tactics.
Instead of explaining what she's fighting against, perhaps it might be more productive to highlight what she's fighting for. And so, I came across this interview on Rachel Maddow's show with Wendell Potter, Cigna's former head of public relations. Among other things, Wendell shed some light on why he decided to leave Cigna after 15 years:
The other thing that really made me make this final decision to leave the industry occurred when I was visiting family in Tennessee a couple of summers ago, and I picked up the local newspaper and saw a story about the health care expedition that was being held across the state line in Virginia, in the coal mining area in southwest of Virginia. So, out of curiosity, I just went up there to check it out and was absolutely dumbstruck when I went through the fairground gates. This is being held at the Wise County fairground.
And what I saw when I went inside the fairground's gates were hundreds and hundreds of people who were lined up, waiting in the rain, to get care that was being provided to them by volunteer doctors throughout the state of Virginia in animal stalls. Other volunteers had come previously to scrub down the animal stalls to make sure that they were sanitary enough for these doctors to treat people who otherwise couldn't get any care.
And then I got pissed off again, because I was at a loss as to how to effectively communicate that this scene that Wendell encountered is what people like Diane Campbell are actively fighting to maintain? How is it that all of the gun-toting and nazi-poster-displaying protesters feel pride at wanting to keep insurance companies rich while people in Virginia stand on lines to be treated by volunteer doctors in animal stalls?
As I give this more thought, my fundamental question goes beyond the health care debate. It's the win/lose mentality that our society fosters that makes this difficult. It seems to me they're just interested in winning, whereas I just want them to think and understand.
If anyone has any ideas on how to move forward as a country (or species), then fire away, because I sure don't.
This is currently at Yahoo, advertising video of Hillary Clinton's response to a question, reportedly mistranslated, about her husband's thoughts on a trade deal:
Clinton is described as having "blown up" and "snapped," because of one terse response to what was, by any estimation, a rude-ass misogynist question as it was posed to her.
Let's take a ride in the Wayback Machine to revisit a Bush press conference from 2006, during which he infamously declared himself "the decider," after being asked an important question about national concerns re: Donald Rumsfeld's continued service as then-Secretary of Defense:
You don't even need a transcript, if you can't hear the video, because Bush is, as Spudsy memorably deemed him, the King of Obvious Body Language.
Not only was Bush not described by the mainstream media after this incident as having "blown up" or "snapped"—his newest malapropism was, at worst, turned into a punchline, just another joke from a harmless clown (Oh, that kooky Bush! What a jokester!), but generally cited as more evidence of what a jus'-folks sorta brush-clearin' and straight-shootin' guy you'd like to have beer with. Just like all the rest of his bullying was by a fawning media.
Bush routinely affected an equivalently belligerent demeanor when questioned during press conferences. Never was he given the media treatment Clinton's received over the past few days. Not even close.
The double standard is gobsmacking, if totally unsurprising.
"And if having a skinny princess pack on pounds during the game is laughable ... it hardly seems malicious."
"Millar points out that the princesses are in no way objects of ridicule within the game as critics had suggested. Whether they are skinny or fat, they are venerated ladies for whom all characters will lay down their virtual lives to save."
—From this review of Fat Princess, in which the writer dismisses criticisms as so much insular, pseudo-feminist handwringing.
According to the quoted review, the creators of the Fat Princess game were surprised at the negative reaction from bloggers.
They'd expected a negative reaction to the game's violence. And perhaps they would have seen one if anyone thought that gamers would be tempted to transfer fantasy bloodshed into their real lives. On the other hand, malicious attitudes toward fat people easily make the leap back and forth between game and life.
I'm not worried that a gamer might want to give me a potion to turn me into a chicken. But I'm troubled that a gamer might be a professional peer who is reinforced in seeing fat female colleagues as out-of-control burdens, liabilities.
I'm troubled that a gamer might be a T-for-Teen with the beginnings of an eating disorder that, as mine did, looks and feels sickeningly similar to the captive life of the Fat Princess. I want to ask the creators: Do you know how hard it is to shake the idea that you have no choice, no control over your disordered eating? How terrifying to have your mind and body become a prison? How horrifying to see yourself, day after day, eat all the cake, even when it makes you sick?
And then how devastating to have people, both those who love you and those who want you for target practice, pick apart your body's changes as undesirable failures? When you know that not everybody who's fat has a compulsive eating disorder, but you do, there's no relief from the shame of being an undesirable failure.
It's monumentally difficult to learn how to make choices in disordered eating. It's impossible if you don't believe it can be done.
I dearly wish you would have given the Fat Princess some choice, some strength of her own. Why did you have to turn her into a zoo animal, unable to refuse food, unable even to walk, unable to help in her own rescue? Why did she have to be a brainless lump of flesh?
Do you not know how many young girls are just learning to see themselves that way?
I speak to groups of women who live with eating disorders and to professionals who help women with eating disorders. One of the hardest ideas to get past in recovering from the disorder is that your own body is nothing but a miserable, swollen mass that you are sentenced to carry through life.
So yes, it's unpleasant when a game gives its players practice rounds for this particular malformed thought toward themselves or toward fat women.
As Millar points out above, the princesses are not objects of ridicule within the game. They are objects of ridicule outside the game.
Outside the game, male and female gamers are in actual relationships with actual fat women — their mothers, sisters, classmates, co-workers, partners, and acquaintances. Whatever gamers say and think about fat characters affects real people.
And what of the fat girl gamer? To whom must she be a traitor? To herself, by remaining silent when gamers spew cruel, humiliating comments toward fat women? Or to the gaming community where she wants to belong?
To have been unaware of the capacity for a charmingly drawn, colorful game to help unleash vitriolic, devastating insults, threats, and death wishes out loud in real life may have been naive, careless, or disingenuous.
To ignore it now — to ignore the T-for-Teens who secretly and with the growing, paralyzing shame that fuels an eating disorder, identify with the Fat Princess, not with her rescuers — would be callously negligent.
I would challenge this talented, creative team of game designers to create Fat Princess 2: a game in which the Fat Princess has power, some agency in her life, no matter whether she is fat or slender. Create for her a world where her body does not reduce her to merely a burden — where those girls who look at the Fat Princess and see themselves, see someone that the gamers talk about as well worth saving.
"Herein lies the genius of J. C. Penney: It has made a point of providing clothing for people of all sizes (a strategy, company officials have said, to snatch business from nearby Macy's). To this end, it has the most obese mannequins I have ever seen. They probably need special insulin-based epoxy injections just to make their limbs stay on. It's like a headless wax museum devoted entirely to the cast of 'Roseanne'."—Cintra Wilson, reviewing the new J.C. Penney in NYC's Herald Square for the New York Times.
The entire article is a masterclass in privilege—class privilege (which is always inextricably linked with racial privilege), primarily—but the thin privilege is the (overtly) nastiest stuff in the piece.
It's amazing to me there are people who can suggest with a straight face that fatties aren't shamed enough in this culture when virulently hateful and bigoted shit like this gets printed like some kind of hilarious but harmless hipster jeremiad in the pages of the New York Times.
TPM found out just how "spontaneous" some of the town hall demonstrations have been.
We've gotten a hold of some Tea Party planning meeting emails. Here's one that caught our eye. "We have a media request for an event this week that will have lots of energy and lots of anger. This is for CNBC."
Please be sure to book your riot well in advance so the networks can promo it and be ready to tell everyone how authentic it will be.
Okay, everybody on stage for the town hall number!
[Transcript: Harrison Ford in dozens of clips from various movies saying things like: "Where's my family?!" and "They've got my wife!" and "I didn't kill my wife!" and "Not without my family!"]
On the one hand, this is totes hilarious.
On the other hand, it is evidence that a straight white man can carve a fine career for himself out of playing characters in stories in which women and/or children are essentially reduced to stolen property and violently imperiled as a plot device to provide that straight white man with an opportunity for heroism.
And RMJ is still soliciting submissions for her 50 Books for Problematic Times series. Today's entry is a submission I made, for a book I've recommended here many times, and I apologize, as always, for being a crap reviewer!
Directed by Terry Gilliam. Starring Heath Ledger. It was his final film; he died before it was completed, and, as you may recall, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law stepped in to complete the work, each playing Ledger's character in a different dimension, and pledged to donate their salaries to Ledger's daughter Matilda.
Note, there is something profoundly disturbing about seeing one's own face on someone else's differently-shaped head. Also, it's almost as distrubing that I have no idea from where that image of me was taken. Also also, just FYI, Liss started this prior to John Hughes passing away, adding a bizzaro lattice of coincidence to the whole thing.
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...because he wanted to kill his mother.
Contact the New York Times' Public Editor here.
