Shakesville

Assvertising

Shaker Jean forwarded me Philips' latest newsletter to its subscribers, which features the following image at the top of the email:

[If you can't view the image, it's a picture of a thin white woman lying on her back behind a Philips laptop. She is wearing clothes that are the same colors as the laptop and the image on its screen, and the majority of her head and face are cropped out, leaving only her mouth viewable. The text reads: "Latest Product News. Anywhere, anytime. Enjoy the full range of Philips Notebook and Netbook Accessories anywhere, anytime.]

So, I guess we're meant to understand that an essentially disembodied woman's torso is also a Philips accessory that can be enjoyed anywhere, anytime...? Swell.

Too bad. I had a Philips television I really liked that I may have replaced with another one. But I guess they don't want my business. Fair enough. I'll take it elsewhere.

Contact Philips.

[Assvertising: Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104 105, 106, 107, 108.]

America's Got Talent

So, I don't usually watch "America's Got Talent," because UGH Piers Morgan, and UGH Howie Mandel, and UGH the exploitation of nice people blissfully lost in their delusions of grandeur, but I happened to see part of it last night, when I was introduced to a soft-spoken and baby-faced 32-year-old store clerk named John from Virginia (pictured at right).

He explained: "I've had a lot of day jobs to pay the bills, but what I really want to do is to be a singer. I've been singing my entire life, ever since I can remember, but I'm not from a musical family; my parents really didn't know what to do with me. When I sing, I'm definitely able to forget about my troubles, my day-to-day struggles. If I could be able to sing for a living, and quit my day jobs, it would be a dream come true."

Oh, Maude. He was so sweet, and so charming, and so earnest, and I desperately wanted him to be good. Even this shitty show couldn't set up a guy so seemingly decent and gentle for humiliation, right?

When John walked onstage, to the sound of a scratching record, he had transformed into Prince Poppycock, "the prince of a fantastical realm," clad in 18th-century French court dress and kabuki-drag make-up, to perform "Largo al factotum" from The Barber of Seville. I held my breath.

The audience went wild. Sharon Osborne gave him a standing ovation. At home, I cheered for him. Howie Mandel, ever the helpful bozo, told him, "This is a show about finding great talent—and THAT was talent!"

I'm sure that people who are experts in such things are already aching to point out the flaws in his performance, but I don't particularly care that it wasn't perfect. It gave me chills and made me smile. I hope John feels like he is a singer today.

Open Thread

Hosted by Wilbur.

Question of the Day

Suggested by Shaker Esme: If your life was a movie, who would narrate (and no, Morgan Freeman can't narrate everyone)?

(As the allure of this question may be lost on some hearing impaired Shakers, please feel welcome to adjust the question to who would write the movie of your life, or who would star, if you prefer.)

If I couldn't do it myself, with my weird amalgamated New York-Hoosier accent and peculiar drawling cadence and idiosyncratic lexicon, which I can't imagine anyone being able to approximate, I'd choose Patricia Clarkson, because she's got just an awesome voice.

I Write Letters

Dear Straight Cis Male Movie Reviewers:

I have not seen Sex and the City 2, but, based on the marketing, it appears to me to warrant some legitimate criticism about excess and privilege (multiple sorts), and perhaps some valid criticism of the writing, or direction, or costuming—you know, the usual stuff movie reviews are made of.

But I'm really going to have to call bullshit on the ubiquitous, reflexive, nasty, and usually gleeful contention embedded in nearly every negative review I've read (and I'm not alone in noticing) that Sarah Jessica Parker is ugly. Not only is it mean and irrelevant; it's simply not. fucking. true.

Actress Sarah Jessica Parker arrives to attend the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) fashion awards in New York June 7, 2010. [Reuters.]

I don't give a shit whether you don't want to fuck her. And I don't give a shit whether your dicks get hard about the other women of Sex and the City 2, either—because your titillation isn't the point.

Of course, that's the real issue, isn't it? The whole this-movie-wasn't-made-for-you thing. The first one brought out the misogyny and homophobia in heaping fuckloads, and now we're getting the sequel of that hot retrofuck mess. This film even brought out the inner misogynist in Roger Ebert, who couldn't help but reductively refer to Samantha, one of the few iconic female characters with total sexual liberation and agency, as a "sexaholic slut."

And even those among you who manage to stick to justifiable complaints about the film's celebration of consumerism or perpetuation of racist tropes are acting like it's the FIRST AND ONLY AND WORST EVAR!!!elventy! film that's ever done such things, because it's white women and white gay men doing it.

But a bunch of white straight men get together and produce two hours of racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, disablism, fat hatred, and every other conceivable bigotry laid against a backdrop of heinous rape jokes and treating WOMEN as a commodity (at least the SATC girls and gays are buying SHOES and CLOTHES, which are ACTUAL COMMODITIES), and Judd Apatow's considered a comedy fucking genius.

Which is not an argument that the makers of Sex and the City be held to a lower standard, but offering the suggestion that perhaps everyone ought to be held to a higher standard, even the filmmakers and actors who look like you, who make you laugh by treating characters that look like the SATC gang (minus the haute couture) like sex objects and punchlines.

Because, seriously. The double-standard is truly, truly breathtaking.

Fail all around, friends.

Contemptuously,
Liss

"Get Back to Normal"

It's just suddenly hit me why the commercial for Tylenol Rapid Release bugs me so much. It's always about various apparently TAB people taking a couple of OTC pain meds, and being able to "get back to normal", as the repetitive jingle has it.

Y'know...pain is the normal for me. On Sunday, for the first time in I really, really can't remember how long, I woke up, and my meds were able to give me a day that was more or less painfree (I played soccer later, and was so much more mobile I actually made my knees hurt the next day). It was, honestly, glorious.

But that's not my usual day. My usual day is:

1 Wake up.
2 Take pills.
3 Wait.
4 Try to stand.
5 If not standing, go to 2.
6 Do some activity.
7 Get horizontal for a while, then go to 2.
8 Feed self.
9 Do some activity.
10 Get horizontal for a while, then go to 2; if it is past 02h, skip this step next time and go to 12 instead.
12 Sleep for a while, til the meds wear off.

That's normal for me, Tylenol. So thanks for putting a commercial on my TV that reminds me on a daily basis how abnormal I am, because hey, no healthy amount of your product will let me approach the normal you show.

But I'm sure the majority of people taking your meds aren't people with differently-abled bodies, right? After all, who could expect any of us to maybe need pain meds?

Good Reporting. Well Done.

This article in the Telegraph is a total trainwreck. Two (unscientific) polls of pregnant women have found, unsurprisingly, that commuters don't generally give up their seats to pregnant women.

From there, the surveyors seemingly extrapolate (and the Telegraph unquestioningly repeats) the conclusion that the reason commuters aren't relinquishing their seats is "because they are uncertain if women are really pregnant or not."

From where did this assertion—important enough that the subhead of the article reads "Pregnant women are being left standing on public transport because commuters are too afraid to offer their seat in case they are simply overweight, researchers claim"—actually come, if the people polled were pregnant women and not people who refused to give up their seats?

The way the article is written, it appears the "researchers" simply pulled the explanation out of their asses, and I'm not sure they didn't. (The Daily Mail article, which the Telegraph cites as a source, is, naturally, no help, either.)

Anyway, irrespective of whence came the claim, there it is: People don't offer their seats to pregnant ladies, because they can't tell them apart from fat ladies (I like how those are mutually exclusive categories in this framing, btw), and they don't want to risk the embarrassment of accidentally offering their seat to a fat lady who they assume will axiomatically be offended.

There's so much shit wrapped up in that, I don't even know where to begin.

I will say this, though: The fat woman who gets loudly offended on public transit because someone has offered her a seat thinking she's pregnant strikes me as the straw-woman star of an apocryphal tale.

I took public transit twice a day for 10 years during Chicago rush hour, and I never once heard anyone offer a woman a seat by explicitly saying it was because she was pregnant. "Would you like my seat?" That's how it happens. I offered my seat to pregnant women dozens of times, and never once did I reference their pregnancy in any way.

The legend of the fat woman who gets loudly offended on public transit because someone has offered her a seat thinking she's pregnant only works if the offerer somehow communicates "I think you're pregnant," which is improbable, at best.

Almost as improbable as a fat woman making a scene that calls attention to a humiliation related to her fat. (Not that being mistaken for a pregnant woman is objectively humiliating, but someone making a scene about it would clearly regard it so.) Fat women who suffer humiliations related to being fat don't generally cause huge public fusses about it (even when we should), despite what slapstick exploitation comedies starring men in female fat suits would have us believe.

So color me dubious that there are legions of people who've experienced offering their seats to a fat woman who gets loudly offended on public transit because someone has offered her a seat thinking she's pregnant. I strongly suspect she is a conjured figure, used to justify keeping one's ass firmly planted where it is, her existence never questioned because we are so used to telling lies about fat people to make them our scapegoats for a host of social ills and inconsideracies.

Daring to Discuss Women and...Yawn

Shaker Candace forwarded this piece the always charming John Tierney penned for The New York Times about women in science. I'm not sure I have anything to say on this that hasn't already been said by Anna, or Janet, or Christiana. For that matter, I think the "daring" idea that women are innately inferior to men at various Important Things--and indeed the preposterous notion that the idea is "daring" to begin with--has been answered quite competently in the past, recently by Deborah Cameron. A brief snippet from The Myth of Mars and Venus:

Writers in this vein are fond of presenting themselves as latter-day Galileos, braving the wrath of the political correctness lobby by daring to challenge the feminist orthodoxy that denies that men and women are by nature profoundly different. Simon Baron-Cohen, the author of The Essential Difference, explains in his introduction that he put the book aside for several years because "the topic was just too politically sensitive". In the chapter on male-female differences in his book about human nature, The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker congratulates himself on having the courage to say what has long been "unsayable in polite company". Both writers stress that they have no political axe to grind: they are simply following the evidence where it leads, and trying to put scientific facts in place of politically correct dogma.

Yet before we applaud, we should perhaps pause to ask ourselves: since when has silence reigned about the differences between men and women? Certainly not since the early 1990s, when the previous steady trickle of books began to develop into a raging torrent. By now, a writer who announces that sex-differences are natural is not "saying the unsayable": he or she is stating the obvious.

Cosmologist Sean Carroll ably addressed the infamous Larry Summers talk over five years ago in these three posts: Sex and science, The scientific method, and Bell curves. That Tierney is still writing about the Summers talk as though it's fresh material says a lot.

And of course, Stephen Jay Gould's 1994 response to Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve is relevant here, as Summers et al.'s argument is just the old bell curve bit. Gould's 1981 masterpiece, The Mismeasure of Man, remains relevant as well.

Some very smart folks have been pointing out the flaws in essentialist arguments for a long time. The New York Times expects us to ignore that fact. And as long as we continue to ignore that fact, a few workshops won't close the gender gap in STEM.

Share your thoughts and links in comments.

Blog Note: Disqussion

Now that a little time has passed since the recent Disqus upgrade, I wanted to create a thread for posting about any technical issues that you are still experiencing with Disqus. Consolidating the issues in one thread will make it easier for me to present to their support staff. To that end, I'd appreciate your keeping the tone civil, even for an issue that's really bugging the crap out of you. ;)

Please be as descriptive as possible and don't forget to include your operating system and browser version, both of which are extremely helpful in diagnosing the issue.

One item that I'm already aware of is that the comment permalinks don't work (i.e. clicking on one will bring you to the top of the thread instead of the actual comment).

Daily Dose o' Cute

Dudley

Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"

See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[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 (Liss) and a biracial queerbait (Deeky) telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]

If It's Tuesday, It's Zamfir!

Gheorghe Zamfir shreds up "The Lonely Shepherd".

Bob Herbert Says Brilliant Things (Again)

I know the president has a lot on his mind, but the No. 1 problem facing the U.S. continues to fester, and that problem is unemployment.

...For all the money that has been spent so far, the Obama administration and Congress have not made the kinds of investments that would put large numbers of Americans back to work and lead to robust economic growth. What is needed are the same things that have been needed all along: a vast program of infrastructure repair and renewal; an enormous national investment in clean energy aimed at transforming the way we develop and use energy in this country; and a transformation of the public schools to guarantee every child a first-rate education in a first-rate facility.

This would be a staggeringly expensive and difficult undertaking and would entail a great deal of shared sacrifice. (It would also require an end to our insane waste of resources on mindless and endless warfare.) The benefits over the long term would be enormous.

Go read the whole thing.

How Hard Are Opponents of Marriage Equality Losing?

So hard. So very hard. So hard that progressive John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress, and libertarian Robert Levy, chair of the Cato Institute, have signed on as co-chairs of the advisory board to the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which will be appealing the case of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, currently before a federal district court in California, all the way to the Supreme Court in pursuit of marriage equality.

Although we serve, respectively, as president of a progressive and chairman of a libertarian think tank, we are not joining the foundation's advisory board to present a "bipartisan" front. Rather, we have come together in a nonpartisan fashion because the principle of equality before the law transcends the left-right divide and cuts to the core of our nation's character. This is not about politics; it's about an indispensable right vested in all Americans.

…The decision in Perry depends, of course, on values far more permanent and important than opinion polls. No less than the constitutional rights of millions of Americans are at stake. But the public appears to be catching up with the Constitution. Just a little more leadership from the courts would be the perfect prescription for a free society.

Podesta and Levy make excellent points about the role of the courts and the responsibility they carry to balance mob rule that denies what ought to be constitutionally protected rights (e.g. Loving), arguments that will surely be familiar to anyone who's been hanging around here for five minutes. It's really quite a stunning thing to see, right there in the Washington Post. That CAP and Cato are both on board with marriage equality, no less on the same damn train, quite genuinely means marriage equality is soon to be reality; it's just a matter of time.

Last weekend, I was watching the documentary Same Sex America (trailer here), which followed seven same-sex couples through the historical Massachusetts constitutional convention and associated legal wrangling which eventually resulted in legalized same-sex marriage in the state. I saw the film when it first came out in '06, and even then the juxtaposition between the opponents of marriage equality caterwauling about the end of society as we know it, and life carrying on approximately as usual, save for the long-denied benefits of marriage finally being enjoyed by same-sex couples, was hilarious. Four years later, the doomsayers look positively absurd.

By the time Perry reaches SCOTUS, I can't imagine that the "society has a vested interest in privileging a traditional family structure" bullshit that has been used in lower court decisions won't be regarded as wholesale disingenuous poppycock, the province of no one but the intellectually dishonest and the immovably bigoted.

Which doesn't mean that the court won't find yet some stupid way to delay the inevitable—but it's going to be harder than it used to be.

Quote of the Day

"It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don't know quite why this is true but it just is. Don't ever be responsible for it."—Christopher Hitchens, part of his "simple pieces of advice for the young" about drinking, excerpted from his new memoir Hitch-22.

[TW] Aside from the overt misogyny of his statement, the curious admonishment to "the young" (by which Hitchens clearly means young straight men) to never "be responsible" for a woman being drunk disturbingly brings to mind his younger brother Peter's penchant for victim-blaming women who are raped after drinking.

There are many things in this life for which I am grateful. Among them is not having been raised in the Hitchens household.

[Related Reading: Christopher Hitchens: Minister of Funny.]

Two Minute Nostalgia Sublime

Emilíana Torrini: "Jungle Drum"

On Helen Thomas

Like Josh Marshall, I feel obliged rather than eager to address White House correspondent Helen Thomas' retirement following comments in which she said Israeli Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine" and "go back home to Poland, Germany, America and everywhere else." She later apologized for the comments.

Her comments were, suffice it to say, profoundly disappointing to me—and the brevity of that response should not be mistaken as indifference. It is, frankly, not easy to write in a measured way about people one has admired when they behave in ways unbecoming one's expectations.

On the content of her statement, I will simply note that there principled arguments against occupation of disputed territories: I've heard them made by progressive American Jews, among them a friend who survived the Holocaust, rescued as a child with his mother and brother from a camp in France with forged papers, after which they escaped to the US. But telling Israeli Jews to "go home" to countries from which they (or their families) fled under the threat of extermination isn't one of those principled arguments—and not just (or chiefly) because Israel is not exclusively populated by Jews of European extraction. My aforementioned friend does not consider France his home, for reasons which should be evident, and the many Israelis who share his history do not consider, for the same reasons, their countries of birth "home," either.

This is not an issue of whether Israel can be criticized, or an issue of some sort of ideological litmus test: It's just flatly indefensible, and hostile, to exhort Israeli Jews to take up residence in countries that participated in a genocide against their Jewish populations. Thomas obviously isn't ignorant about that history, but she nonetheless disregarded it to deliver a smug and careless retort—on a subject about which flippancy, is, to put it politely, neither advisable nor kind.

There are other things that could be written here, points being made in other spaces about double-standards and hypocrites, and questions being raised about whether the reaction to Thomas' comments would quite be the same if she weren't old, or female, or Lebanese, or the toughest nut in the White House Press Corps—but lingering on these things beyond this cursory mention would feel to me like an attempt to mitigate or obfuscate her comments and what was wrong about them, which I've no yen to do.

Helen Thomas never had any tolerance for bullshit or excuses, so I'm just going to leave it there.

What's Up With Elton John?

Anyone know? I'm trying to figure out why he would perform at Rush Limbaugh's wedding. He can't have needed the $1M paycheck. I'm totally confounded.

Study: Children of Lesbian Parents Have Fewer Behavioral Problems

Fundies: No! No! No! *feet stamping* No! NO! *doors slamming* NOOOOO!!!!eleventy!!

Open Thread

Hosted by a Westinghouse sign.