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Andy: Should Obama Be Worried About Growing GOP Support for Gays?
Scatx: Girl, you are TOO tall to ride the school bus
Advocate: Tasmania to Recognize Marriages
Roschelle: Who Gets Credit For Iraq...
Joe. My. God: SAS To Host In-Flight Gay Wedding
Leave your links in comments…
Wednesday Blogaround
lolsob
Elle sent me this article (which is about the failure of this summer's rom-coms to draw female viewers to theaters in large numbers) with the note: "Girl, I swear the last paragraph was written just for you." LOL!
The last paragraph:
"Women like today's bromances better than the movies aimed at them. They're funnier. They're smarter. Especially Judd Apatow's movies. He understands women. 'I Love You Man' and 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall' did really well with women," [Paul Dergarabedian of Hollywood.com] says. "We're selling women short just thinking they want traditional romantic comedies."lolsob.
Yes, that's certainly always been my complaint: Hollywood not assuming hard enough that I want MORE THE HANGOVER!
Today in Body Policing—Now in Blue!
[Trigger warning for body policing, gender policing, fat hatred, and dehumanization.]
by Shaker Erica
Approaching the newsstand this morning, I had a suspicion I wasn't going to like what I was about to read.
[Image Description: The cover of Metro with a "headless fatty" color photograph of a fat white man from neck to waist, with his arms wrapped around himself, covering his breasts. The headline and subhead read: "Ashamed of your moobs? …You're not alone." Below that is the text: "With obesity rates rising, more men are turning to surgeon's knife to fix man boobs. What was once a private shame and laughing matter has become a problem that's easily fixed."]
A full-sized image of a naked and headless body on the front page with big bold letters that say 'ashamed' never really leads to any good place.
My friend immediately pointed out the gender policing. Moob? (Man+boob.) Because having breasts (having female qualities) is a serious source of shame, right? Of course, being fat in and of itself is also obviously a 'private shame and laughing matter' according to whoever is writing cover copy for the Metro.
In the corner of the cover, there is a text poll ("WIN $250!"):
What's the biggest turnoff in a guy?What!? Is this really a front page story? What exactly is the point in promoting all this body shame?
a: Man boobs
b: Unibrow
c: Hairy back
d: Bad breath
That's rhetorical.
The next full page devoted to this story (yes another full page—accompanied by an image of another headless body) reveals that "men with full breasts like these can have them surgically removed with a simple procedure." The article (viewable online here) goes on to discuss how easy and cheap it is to have surgery on your lunch break. "They don't need to take a lot of time away—just a couple of hours in the afternoon."
Leaving aside the inherent problems in promoting plastic surgery as a quick and easy way to 'fix' your body, why why why are we always meant to feel our boobs are too small or too big? That we are too fat, too thin, too hairy, too bald, too pale, too dark, too whatever else to live without shame?
That's rhetorical.
Meanwhile, hidden in a short blurb elsewhere in the paper, we get the news that New York Governor David Paterson signed into law a bill that protects domestic workers' rights and affecting overtime, weekly time off, and protection from sexual harassment.
I guess that's not important as fat-shaming though.
Email the author of the piece, Heidi Patalano, here. Email the editors here.
I Write Letters
Dear Time:
Does the news that "unmarried, childless women under 30 who live in cities" and work full-time jobs have slightly higher salaries "than those of the guys in their peer group" really warrant the headline "Workplace Salaries: At Last, Women on Top"?
Leaving aside your crass, thinly veiled sexual reference, I fail utterly to see how a very small cohort of working women making more than their male peers justifies the assertion that women are, at last, "on top."
Especially when said toppery has been achieved in large part due to the collapse of male-dominated industries or because of the institutional racism that disproportionately derails the lives of young men of color:
[James Chung of Reach Advisors, who has spent more than a year analyzing data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey] also claims that, as far as women's pay is concerned, not all cities are created equal. Having pulled data on 2,000 communities and cross-referenced the demographic information with the wage-gap figures, he found that the cities where women earned more than men had at least one of three characteristics. Some, like New York City or Los Angeles, had primary local industries that were knowledge-based. Others were manufacturing towns whose industries had shrunk, especially smaller ones like Erie, Pa., or Terre Haute, Ind. Still others, like Miami or Monroe, La., had a majority minority population. (Hispanic and black women are twice as likely to graduate from college as their male peers.)Not to take away from the individual personal accomplishments of any women, but, despite our reputation to the contrary, I don't know many feminist/womanist women who are anxious to celebrate women's successes that are built on economic clusterfucktastrophes and/or pervasive inequality.
And, given the number of caveats behind your misleading "on top" headline, a more cynical person than I, ahem, might suggest there is a deliberate mischaracterization of the sort usually found in the middle of a backlash against women's progress, to justify policies that bolster the male privilege such mendacity asserts no longer exists.
Just sayin'.
Love,
Liss
Quote of the Day
"I was asked recently which of the political leaders I had met had most integrity. I listed George near the top. He had genuine integrity and as much political courage as any leader I ever met."—Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, on former US President George W. Bush, in his memoirs.
Blair also calls Mondo Fucko a "true idealist" who is "very smart" while having "immense simplicity in how he saw the world."
That sounds more like a description of Forrest Gump than the sneering warmonger who spent eight years endeavoring to run this nation into the fucking ground.
The Honorable Citizens Restoring Honor to America
Yesterday, I gave this New Left Media video a quick link, but didn't have time to do a transcript for it. Shaker Mudkip was kind enough to transcribe all the dialogue; this morning I refined it and now the entire transcript is available here. Thanks very much to Mudkip for the help!
[The hat tip goes to Gabe, whose commentary I'll just second.]
So, the President Gave a Speech Last Night
And he declared an end to the combat mission in Iraq. (Gee, where have I heard that before?) The full transcript of the speech is here.
My response is mixed. It was successful for the reasons Steve details here, and yet I still found the bile rise on the reiteration of the lie that "A war to disarm a state became a fight against an insurgency." That there were no weapons in Iraq is not even a debated point anymore; if he'd even just said "A war ostensibly to disarm a state" that would have been something.
I grant my own bias, having typed my fingers to bloody stumps about the Downing Street Memo and other evidence the Bush administration cooked the case for war, but that is a bias of which I am proud, quite frankly. It infuriates me that the former president's lies are still having veracity breathed into them, no less by the current president, who ran on the claim that he was someone who knew better once upon a time.
There were a few other little (but not incidental) details like that, which stuck in my craw. But I won't belabor the point.
The war is (ostensibly) over. And the dirty hippies were right.
Good Morning! Ruth Bader Ginsburg Rules.
And Dahlia Lithwick explains one of the many reasons why:
The Ginsburgs not only prevailed at the 10th Circuit but also obtained—as Justice Ginsburg has detailed elsewhere—the solicitor general's Exhibit E, a "printout from the Department of Defense computer" that listed, title by title, every provision of the U.S. Code "containing differentiations based upon sex-related criteria." According to the brief filed by the solicitor general urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Moritz, the 10th Circuit decision "casts a cloud of unconstitutionality upon the many federal statutes listed in Appendix E." And as Martin Ginsburg noted in his speech, that computer printout proved "a gift beyond price" in his wife's future litigation career.Read the whole thing here.
The Moritz case launched Ginsburg into her association with the ACLU Women's Rights Project, and Exhibit E offered a roadmap for litigation. She scored five victories in six Supreme Court appeals, using the 14th Amendment to slowly and systematically eradicate gender discrimination in one law after another, pushing the courts to scrutinize laws that classify on the basis of gender with a standard higher than the deferential "rational basis" standard.
...Those who like to believe they have picked themselves up by the bootstraps sometimes forget that they wouldn't even have boots were it not for the women who came before. Listening to Palin, it's almost impossible to believe that, as recently as 50 years ago, a woman at Harvard Law School could be asked by Dean Erwin Griswold to justify taking a spot that belonged to a man. In Ginsburg's lifetime, a woman could be denied a clerkship with Felix Frankfurter just because she was a woman. Only a few decades ago, Ginsburg had to hide her second pregnancy for fear of losing tenure. I don't have an easy answer to the question of whether real feminists are about prominent lipsticky displays of "girl-power," but I do know that Ginsburg's lifetime dedication to achieving quiet, dignified equality made such displays possible.
[H/T to Shaker Phyllis.]
Question of the Day
[Trigger warning for discussion of rape in film.]
Okay, a little background here. A while back, Liss and I were talking about Clint Eastwood, a conversation spawned by this photo I took.
Liss: That is so awesome.
Deeky: Seriously, when I first saw it out of the corner of my eye, that's what I thought it said.
Liss: I might buy something called "CUNT" starring Clint Eastwood.
Deeky: Speaking of Clint, have we discussed the über-creepy recurring theme in his movies of him hooking up with barely pubescent girls?
Liss: I don't know if we have. Which movies are you thinking of?
Deeky: Beguiled, for starters. At the beginning of the movie, Clint's character asks a young girl how old she is. Twelve, she says. "Old enough for kisses," says Clint right before jamming his tongue in her mouth.
Liss: He's another one who frequently using women getting hurt/raped/killed to motivate a man to action, too. See: Play Misty for Me, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Gran Torino, etc.
So, question time: Clint Eastwood has appeared in over 60 movies. Which one is the creepiest?
(Liss votes for Play Misty for Me, just FYI.)
Dudz Is Gonna Fly Now
Video Description: Footage of the canine rocket at the dog park at the weekend, set to Bill Conti's "Gonna Fly Now" (aka the theme from Rocky). Plus Dudz running around with Iain, and, for a change, I asked Iain to shoot some video of me with Dudz, so there's some of my fat arse (literally) at the end of this one!
Dudley was full of piss and vinegar at the dog park last weekend. We took him twice, and he was just a blur each day. For five minutes. Then, as always: Collapse. LOL.
I made this for Iain, as it's one of his favorite songs, but since the plumber has arrived to fix our shit, and I'll be otherwise occupied for a bit, I thought I'd share it with the whole class.
Blaze of GLOLOLOLOLOLOLory
Shaker RedSonja just emailed me (which I am publishing with permission):
The banner headline at Glenn Beck's new website, The Blaze:Yeesh.
Explicit Poetry GPS Phones Help Illegals
It's like a fucking madlib!!! Or maybe the result of word association games? Who the fuck edits this shit???? Oh, and sponsors include, SHOCKINGLY, that fucking gold investment company. They're really not getting their money's worth.
P.S. If you haven't seen this yet, watch it ASAP. (My apologies; I don't have time to do the full 13-minute transcript this afternoon.)
Words (Yes, All of Them): I Do Not Think They Mean What You Think They Mean
Remember Satoshi Kanazawa? If not, I will tell you all you need to know about him to understand his scientastical views: he's an evolutionary psychologist. He also seems to have a pathological need to gain attention by saying things that even he would know make no sense, if sense-making were a consideration for him. He does this in his blog at that fount of finely-reasoned intellectual discourse, Psychology Today, a blog which, he claims, constitutes "A Look at the Hard Truths About Human Nature". I guess he means "hard" as in hardee-har-har.
He and his stuck-out-tongue previously appeared here at Shakesville just over a year ago, in Liss' post lol your understanding of feminism. Today, we pause to lol Kanazawa's understanding of genetics. Really, he should just stay away from biology altogether. It's clearly too hard for him. Maybe that's what he means when he claims to be taking a "hard look at human nature". He's looking; he's finding it very, very hard; but as long as he can reach his ass, he can by gum come up with some conclusions which meet with his own satisfaction.
Today's conclusion: Barack Obama is so a Muslim! Or halfway to it, at least, because he totes inherited Muslimosity from his Muslim daddy! It's in his genes, which have been scientifically proven to rotate toward Mecca and prostrate themselves five times daily! Where's the proof, you ask? Hah! Is Michael Jackson still black? I mean, besides being dead, and all? Was he still black when he died? Yes? Well, then, Obama is Muslim. It's so scientificalifragilisticexpialidocious! That no one can deny.
Not that there's anything wrong with being Muslim, Kanazawa obligatorily concludes. Let it not be said that he harbors prejudice of any sort. But that our president is lying in the face of his own genes (not that genes have a face, of course — or if they do, Kanazawa doesn't mention it, but he certainly does seem to know things about genes that no one else does), that Obama tells a different story about who he is and what he believes than his very own genes have told to Satoshi Kanazawa — that is not the behavior of an honorable* man.
*I use the word honorable in its new, modern sense of "describing something that voracious attention-seekers unconcerned with decency, logic or scientific fact, but who like to invoke such things to seem grown-up, claim for themselves and deny to any who don't support them."
Via
Photo of the Day
Taken by filmmaker Alizeh Imtiaz, who traveled to remote areas of Pakistan to document the effects of the catastrophic flooding there, for CNN.
"These areas I went to, no other media or NGO had been there," she said. "They were quite surprised to see us in the first place. If we gave them medicine, we had to tell them how to take it. They had never seen bottles of water before."Donations are still urgently needed. You can find out how to help here.
...Imtiaz says the Indus River is normally 1.2 miles wide but persistent rains have overwhelmed the area. The river has swelled to almost 25 miles wide, submerging many homes and fields.
"It was like a nightmare in Venice. The infrastructure has been completely wiped out. You can not tell where one person's land ends and where another's begins."
While Pakistanis have been generous in donations to flood disaster relief during the holy month of Ramadan, Imtiaz worries about the future. Once flood waters recede, she fears people will forget about the homeless who will need to rebuild.
"This is a very long-term problem," she said. "What I am worried about will people get the attention in the next years. It's also about two years down the line that people will be given land to call home."
Imtiaz plans to keep visiting other remote, hard-hit areas of the country where aid hasn't been dispersed. Her photographs tell a very personal story right from the flood zone.
[Previously: Support Flood Relief Efforts, Number of the Day, Quote of the Day, Photo of the Day.]
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.]
Quote of the Day
"I get a headache when I hear supporters of this endless warfare complaining about the federal budget deficits. They're like arsonists complaining about the smell of smoke in the neighborhood."—The brilliant Bob Herbert, in his most recent column, bluntly titled "We Owe the Troops an Exit."
The Telegraph reports today: "Twenty-one American troops have been killed in Afghanistan since Friday in one of the bloodiest periods of the summer."
End the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. President.
Stonewalling the UK LGB&T Community
by Shaker Andy Godfrey, a British student who has campaigned for LGB&T rights in several UK university societies.
Like many Shakers, I've supported a number of campaigns to petition reluctant governments to support marriage equality for LGB&T people. But recently, I've found myself in the more unusual and frankly rather bizarre position of campaigning to get a reluctant LGB rights group to support marriage equality.
We've been running a Facebook campaign directed at Stonewall, the UK's, and indeed Europe's, largest LGB lobbying organisation. (The LGB isn't a typo by the way - Stonewall campaigns exclusively for lesbian, gay and bisexual people, which as one friend has said is a bit rich coming from an organisation named after a riot started by a trans activist.) Stonewall have rooted themselves firmly in the establishment as an influential and media-friendly group that has overseen the introduction of legal rights that LGB people in most countries can only dream of.
However, in an all-too-familiar story, gaining mainstream acceptance seems to have made Stonewall reluctant to rock the boat. At the moment, UK same-sex couples can have civil partnerships but not marriages (although they confer the same legal rights). Stonewall don't regard campaigning for full marriage equality as a priority because there is no "practical difference" between the two institutions. Which I'm sure you'll agree makes perfect sense - after all, if civil partnerships and marriages confer the same legal rights, what possible reasons could an LGB equality and rights organization have for objecting to the fact that there are two entirely separate institutions for same-sex and opposite-sex couples?
Quite a few, as it turns out. The segregation of marriage and civil partnerships means trans people have to divorce their partners for gender change to be legally recognised (but oh silly me Stonewall are only an LGB organisation, so of course they're allowed to ignore trans rights). Many same-sex couples do want their partnership to be recognised as a marriage - including couples such as Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger who have been legally married in other countries and rather reasonably want the UK government to recognise that their marriage is, in fact, a marriage. And conversely, there are some opposite-sex couples, such as Tom Freeman and Katherine Doyle, who wish to have their relationship recognised as a civil partnership without all the patriarchal baggage that comes with marriage.
Marriage equality is supported by an overwhelming number of LGB&T people (98% in a recent survey) as well as every major LGB&T organisation apart from Stonewall. Most leading politicians either support it or are not vehemently against it (the current Prime Minister is in the latter camp). In the light of this, Stonewall's refusal to openly acknowledge that marriage equality is fairer and better than the current situation is not just reprehensible. It's also plain weird. Some people have suggested that Stonewall's position is a result of political pressure, but I'm pretty sure that even the most extreme UK politicians wouldn't blink an eyelid if an LGB equality and rights organization came out in favour of marriage equality. After all, it's not exactly an extreme or surprising view for, you know, an LGB equality and rights organization to take. What seems to have happened is that Stonewall have become supremely assured that they know best about LGB rights, regardless of what the LGB&T community actually think. They do not deign to explain or justify their position even to the LGB&T press, leaving many people baffled and frustrated.
I founded the Facebook group "Why the silence, Stonewall? Marriage equality now!" so that the community's voice would be heard. Hundreds of people who don't think Stonewall are listening to them have joined, and our open letter to Stonewall has been signed by numerous activists, academics and student representatives. For any Shakers who want to help, this is one situation where simply joining a Facebook group could actually make a difference (after all, how hard can it be to persuade an LGB equality and rights organization to support marriage equality)? Join the group, link to the group, tweet about the group, ask people to sign the open letter (especially if you know people involved in UK LGB&T organisations) - there are plenty of ways to help without even standing up from your computer!
All in all, it's a cautionary tale for activist movements that achieve a degree of political power - groups that purport to represent LGB&T people need to remain answerable to the LGB&T community. LGB&T people in the UK are fortunate to have legal rights denied to most people across the world, but it doesn't mean there's nothing left to fight for - and it rankles to be ignored by the people who are meant to be representing us.
That's My Geek Girl!
My 5-year-old niece M.J. started Kindergarten last week.
The night before her first day of school ever, The AC at my big sister's house burned its motor out, so M.J. and her brother spent the night with me and the grandfolk. I got M.J. up at 6:30 for her first day. While her mother and I blurred around her--making breakfast and packing a peanut-butter sandwich, cheese-stick and raisin lunch--M.J. staggered through the kitchen in a saggy Pull-Up and a borrowed orange T-shirt of mine, melted cheese in her loose hair. "Mom, why are we up this early?" Her dad half-lay on the couch, altogether covered with dogs and guzzling coffee. Ten minutes later, M.J. was brushed and polished in her new first-day-of-school outfit and dancing for my camera, ready to go. Mom, Dad, and Big Brother took her off to school.
Around 2:40, her dad and brother went to pick her up. It was 108 degrees. She flew from the minivan, stripped all her clothes off and jumped, yelling and naked, into the pool.
I really like this kid.
Kindergarten has gone well so far, and M.J. even won two of the surprises that you get to draw from the treasure box on Friday if you've gotten As on your work all week.
Well, yesterday, M.J. got busted for taking the operation manual for the overhead projector from Mrs. G.'s desk and reading it aloud to her classmates while everyone was supposed to be playing with blocks. --See, she explained, it has a mirror in it!
The teacher told all of this to M.J.'s dad, and sent home a note: "while we appreciate M.J.'s personality, she should leave Teacher's things on Teacher's desk".
Have I mentioned that I like this kid?
They really should be teaching the kids PowerPoint, though.
Down the Rabbit Hole
The other night, Iain and I were sitting together, but separately engaged in different activities, and had the evening news on in the background. There was another—another, OMG another, there have been so many, and it's like what happened during and after Reagan all over again, fuck you George W. Bush—news story about a young black boy who'd been killed by crossfire in Chicago, and part of the narration included the information that he had gone to a party "with a female friend."
Iain looked up. "Why was it important to note it was a female friend? Why not just a friend? What are we supposed to understand about him that he was with a female friend? What are we supposed to infer about her?" He scowled.
"I was just about to say the same thing," I said. I resisted the urge to give him a cookie for noticing precisely the sort of thing his privilege has insulated him from having to notice. But it means something to me when he notices these things.
Still, I sometimes wonder how much he internalizes it. Does it touch him deep down in that place where it matters, the way it touches me? Does it linger?
Yesterday afternoon, he emailed me about the Worst Thing post, sarcastically expressing his dismay at how prevalent that kind of shit is. "Based on the Cosmo covers I see this crap is super interesting, or whatever."
I replied: "There is an entire industry dedicated to telling women what to think, which is really about telling women how to be good members of an oppressed class. And, I imagine the longer you read the stuff I write about every day, the more you realize that's not remotely hyperbolic."
Came his response (which I share with his permission): "No. It's like the other night when we heard a news story about that kid visiting a female friend, and we were both like 'why specify the gender.' You don't really recognize this stuff until you've gone down the rabbit hole."
Not long ago, Iain had asked me to find him a pill case for his stinkabetes meds. The case I bought him (which he loves) suddenly seems more appropriate than ever.
Last night, I told him, "Thanks for coming down the rabbit hole with me."
To feel known is a precious gift—and not an easy one to give. Knowing another person truly, as much as another person can ever truly be known, requires not just compassion, but empathy.
And in inter-sex relationships—as in any other between two people on either side of a privilege divide: interracial relationships, inter-gender (trans/cis) relationships, partnerships formed between a person with a disability or disabilities and a currently abled person, between a fat person and a thin person—empathy requires conscious effort, an authentic and committed willingness to self-examine, particularly on the part of the privileged person who has not, unlike hir partner, been socialized in a world designed to treat hir partner's perspective as the objective reality.
A privileged-by-society partner cannot begin to understand hir marginalized-by-society partner if the former can't begin to comprehend how the latter sees the world.
Teasing out those differences—and acknowledging it's not just down to "Well, I'm a man and you're a woman and we're different and that's why we see it differently and it's all just a matter of opinion, anyway," but down to the internalized prejudices and cultural narratives we have about women and men, and how those influence our perceptions—is the path to real intimacy, to the sort of knowing that honors the parts of a person hardest to articulate, the parts of the marginalized person the world outside your relationship endeavors to deny.
The most basic, and yet endemically disregarded, expression of esteem by a privileged person in a mixed-power relationship is simply this: Your perspective and experience are as valid and valuable as my own.
Examining one's privilege, going down the rabbit hole, is thus not merely an act of love; it is a radical act of respect.
it is a demonstration of fierce loyalty, not just to one's partner, but to the promise of egalitarianism and whatever work it takes to get there.
[Related Reading: Man Haterz, The Bargain, and Its Alternative, Angry Men, Searching Men.]
