What's your favorite short story?
Mine is Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." If you've never read it, it's here.
Question of the Day
There's the Old Wingtip-Breathed Biden We Know and Love
Although, I guess he can't be accused of sticking his foot in his mouth when telling alienated progressives to shut the fuck up is official administration policy.
Vice President Joe Biden on Monday urged Democrats to overcome their differences and support their candidates at the polls by telling them to "stop whining."Stop whining and look at the alternatives, huh? Well. I'm pretty sure Vice President Joe Biden just told me to vote for the Green Party.
During a fundraiser for New Hampshire Democratic candidates for the House and Senate, Biden said that Democrats should "remind our base constituency to stop whining and get out there and look at the alternatives. This president has done an incredible job. He's kept his promises," according to a pool report.
You got it, chief.
Daily Dose o' Cute
For BrianWS.
Video Description: Footage of Dudley being playful at home, and at the dog park this weekend, both with Iain and with other dogs. Set to The Rescues' "Break Me Out," because Dudley continues every day, since he's been rescued, to break out of the shell that dog racing created around him.
My sincerest thanks to Shaker BrianWS who not only bought me the breathtaking CD whence this amazing song comes, but also bought Dudley an awesome new rainbow gayhound collar, and who lives for videos of Dudley at the dog park.
"Oak Is My King"
[Trigger warning for transphobia.]
The bad news is that Oakleigh Reed, aka Oak, a transgender honors student at Mona Shores High School in Muskegon, Michigan, has been stripped of his Homecoming King title because school records still identify him as female.
The good news is that he won in the first place, his fellow students are rallying to his defense, his friends have started a Facebook page titled "Oak is My King," his mom is awesome, his teachers support and respect him even if the school administration doesn't, and the ACLU may champion his case. And the article about the whole thing is pretty damn good, to boot.
It's always shitty to have to post something about someone being denied some basic bit of equality, even something as "meaningless" as a homecoming title. (The fact that someone is being denied the title shows how not meaningless it really is, when it can still be used as a weapon of marginalization.) But damn if doesn't make me a wee bit blubby that the administration's fuckery seems to be getting the most support from transphobic internet trolls who don't even live in the state and bravely hide behind anonymous IDs.
The people who matter are (mostly) standing up for Oak.
[H/Ts to Shakers PeggySue and KathleenB.]
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.]
Photo of the Day
Deeky, in a self-portrait he just texted me from work, published with his permission.
Gee, that look of bored contempt, cut with a steely bolt of exasperation, is awfully familiar. Where have I seen that before?
Oh. Right.
This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.
I don't even know where to begin with this New York Times article about Isaan, the northeastern region of Thailand which has become a destination for Western men who are "drawn by the low cost of living, slow pace of life and the exotic reputation of Thai women." And, of course, the fact that it's a lot easier to be a misogynist fuckhead to a woman who has far fewer options for financial independence:
"Thai women are a lot like women in America were 50 years ago," said [54-year-old Joseph Davis of Fresno, California, who is married to 30-year-old Nui Davis], before they discovered their rights and became "strong-headed and opinionated."Endemic extreme poverty, an economy in which even a small US pension makes you a rich man, and a vulnerable and easily exploitable population of women whose education, if there was any to speak of, didn't exactly introduce them to feminist concepts. Just your basic MRA paradise.
"The women now know they are equal," said Mr. Davis, a retired Naval officer who has been divorced twice, "so the situation is not as relaxed and peaceful as it is between an American and a Thai lady."
[H/Ts to Shakers somebodyoranother and Kim.]
Monday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, publishers of the memoir Ban Dis! by Misty O'Misty.
Recommended Reading:
BTD: The Limits Of Triangulation
Historiann: Democrats to Women: Drop Dead
Renee: Image from the Muslim Pride Parade
Resistance: Oh, and Arnold Palmer
Andrew: New Yorkers March for Marriage Equality
Drum: Quote of the Day: No Solutions Please, We're Republicans
Leave your links in comments...
Banned Books Week 2010
Saturday marked the start of Banned Books Week this year, as celebrated by the American Library Association. About Banned Books Week:
Banned Books Week (BBW) is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.Most recently, on September 8th, a Stockton Missouri school board voted 7 - 0 to uphold the ban on Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian:
Intellectual freedom—the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular—provides the foundation for Banned Books Week. BBW stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them.
Alexie’s novel about a teenage boy growing up on an Indian reservation who decides to attend an all-white high school was already banned from a Crook County High School classroom in Prineville, Ore., in 2008 after one parent complained that the protagonist’s discussion of masturbation was “offensive.” The book was challenged again in Illinois in 2009 by a group of Antioch High School parents who objected to its vulgar and racist language, but was ultimately retained on the school’s summer reading list.For the year 2009, the Top 10 Challenged Books were:
1. ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
Reasons: drugs, nudity, offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group
2. And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
Reasons: homosexuality
3. The Perks of Being A Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
Reasons: anti-family, drugs, homosexuality, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit, suicide, unsuited to age group
4. To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
Reasons: offensive language, racism, unsuited to age group
5. Twilight (series) by Stephenie Meyer
Reasons: religious viewpoint, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group
6. Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group
7. My Sister’s Keeper, by Jodi Picoult
Reasons: homosexuality, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexism, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, violence
8. The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group
9. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group
10. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier
Reasons: nudity, offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group
Here is a list of the Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books for 2000 - 2009. Google Books is also celebrating Banned Books Week.
Related: Banned Books Week 2006, "No, God hates morons!"*, Harry Potter and the Half-Brained Dumbass, But What About My Needs?, A Novel Approach, and march of the dumbasses.
This Just In: The Wage Gap Is Good for Marriages (Sure It Is)
By Shaker ExMo, who describes herself on Facebook as, "Full time sociologist, part time yoga tyro, all around awesome."
Look here, angry feminists. That wage gap you keep complaining about? The one that means that if you have a vagina (or look like you might have one), you will earn 75% of what someone with a penis (or who looks like they might have one) does? Even if you have comparable education and experience? Yeah, as it turns out, sociologists* have found that the gap is actually good for your relationship. At least according to the New York Times.
Men who were completely dependent on their female partner's income — the vaunted Stay at Home Dad, for example, and his less appreciated cohort, Laid-Off Dad — were five times more likely to cheat than men who contributed an equal amount of money to the relationship. And, in a cruel twist for women, men who earn significantly more than their female partners are also more likely to cheat. The safety zone, apparently, is when women make 75 percent of what men earn, which sounds suspiciously like the national average of women's salaries relative to men's.It does seem suspicious, doesn't it. There are a few reasons why this "suspicious" finding may have come about. First of all, the data used in this study is a nationally-representative study called the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, which is based on yearly interviews with young people who were between 12 and 16 in 1997, when the study began. Mansch's analysis focuses on respondents between the ages of 18 and 28 who were in long-term (more than a year long) committed (married or cohabitating) heterosexual relationships. Theoretically, then, a male respondent could be 19 and be in his first long-term co-habiting relationship and could also be in a situation where he was making less money than his female partner. The flaw in this is that the Mansch seems to argue that a 19-year-old and a 27-year-old have similar maturity patterns, and tend to have the same types (re: trust, intimacy, goals, commitment) of relationships, which I'm sure we can agree is not necessarily the case.
My first "serious" boyfriend, whom I lived with from age 18-20, cheated on me and while he was from a more affluent background than I, I always worked and he never did. Now, at the age of 29, I am in a 10-year relationship with a man who has been "unemployed"** for at least half of that time. He is not cheating on me. Do my personal experiences negate this finding? No. Methodology Lesson #1: Exceptions Do Not Prove the Rule. However, equating 18 year old and 28 year olds is problematic.
The second reason for this "suspicious" finding is our dear old friend Correlation Does Not Equal Causation (Coming next week in Methodology Lesson #2). Yes, it is interesting that men who earn less than their female partners are more likely to be unfaithful. It is also interesting that murder rates and ice cream sales both see higher rates in the summer months. And that people who wear larger shoes score higher on math competency tests. And that when more fire trucks respond to a fire call, there is more damage to the structure.
That does not mean that there is something about ice cream that makes people murderous, just as that does not mean that there is something about the size of one's feet that makes one good at math, or that fire trucks cause damage to burning homes. What it means is that there may be something about financial inequity in relationships, particularly inequity that results from the female partner out-earning the male partner, that increases the likelihood of infidelity. But we don't know that from this study. To her credit, Cristin Munsch, the original author of the study, points this out:
But even Ms. Munsch cautions couples not to take the data too much to heart. Tempering the findings is the overall low percentage of people who admitted to cheating — 3.8 percent of male partners and 1.4 percent of female partners annually, roughly in line with the national average, which runs from 3 to 4 percent of married spouses in a given year.Additionally, when what she calls "institutional and individual mechanisms" are controlled for, the relationship all but disappears. In simple terms, when the statistical relationship becomes more complex, the single variable of income inequality loses its significance. Taking into account things like relationship satisfaction, age, and level of education erases the effect of income inequality alone.
Of course, The New York Times does mention that, briefly. However, their screaming headline "By Her Support, Does She Earn His Infidelity?" (incidentally, in the Fashion section) puts the responsibility right where it belongs. On women. And, presumably, on uppity women who insist on earning their rightful wage for the work they do. And who have the gall to chose a partner not based on his earning potential, but on how he treats her and how their partnership works.
And what is the lesson here? If you are like most women and earn less than your male counterparts, see the silver lining: At least now your husband won't cheat on you. And if you are a shrew who has no time for relationships but somehow manage to wrangle a man who, let's face it, isn't earning more money than he is because of bitches like you, if he cheats on you it is all your fault.
---------------------------
*Not all sociologists. Just one. Who hasn't published her article yet. Or probably even finished writing it. Who, if she is anything like me, presented a half-finished piece of work at a professional conference so she could get some feedback on it while she enjoyed herself in Atlanta at a fancy hotel on her department's nickel.
**Of course, we are assuming here that all "employment" must be work done for wages. Interesting how this paradigm assumes that any work done in the home is work that has no value. Where have I heard this kind of thing before? Oh right.
Blog Note
Shakesville now has a Twitter account: @shakestweetz.
Or you can find the page here. There's also a Twitter feed in the righthand column, which shows my latest tweets and also includes a subscriber link.
I'll update with posts from Shakesville, but also links to other good stuff I'm reading and/or that people send me, about which I don't have time to write. There will almost certainly be some random bullshit observations, too.
I am, as anyone who knows me can attest, an irrepressible Luddite who says things like, "I like this mobile phone because it has a typewriter" (an actual quote), so forgive the inevitable awkwardness as I try to learn the lingo and culture of Twitter.
(This should be fun.)
Impossibly Beautiful
[Trigger warning for fat hatred and body policing.]
This is a picture of Christina Aguilera—who is, IMO, extremely talented and pretty damn cool—which the Daily Fail used as a launching pad to write this heap of fat-hating and body-policing horseshit.
Aguilera is said to have "piled on the pounds" and "ballooned" in size. She "was in great shape," but is now "curvier than ever," as if being a woman with curves is a bad thing. They guess at the exact amount of weight she's gained, and declare her "to be the heaviest she's ever been, barring her pregnancy in 2008."
All of this, as if it fucking matters. As if it's anyone's business. And as if Aguilera, despite being maybe 10 pounds heavier than she was earlier in the year, doesn't hew more closely to the Western Beauty Standard than the vast majority of women on the planet.
Which is kind of why this article is particularly heinous: It's about a classically beautiful woman with a face and body most people will find ridiculously attractive, being picked apart in a public way for a perceived flaw, thus implicitly communicating to all the women who read this article that even Christina Aguilera isn't beautiful enough.
Now buy these expensive beauty products and diet pills and exercise equipment and vitamins and liquid diet mixes and make-up and lunchtime cosmetic surgery procedures and skin firming potions and tooth veneers and hair extensions and girdles and spray tans and eyelashes and depilatories and everything else we can make to fix you up, you ugly bitches. Because you're sure as shit not as good-looking at Christina Aguilera—and even she's garbage.
This shit is despicable.
And Christina Aguilera rules.
[Commenting Guidelines: Please note that saying, "She looks better now!" or "Real women have curves!" (nope), or some variation thereof is just the flipside of the same type of body policing being criticized. This post isn't about creating a space to do more of the same.]
Today in Critiquing the Rape Culture
[Trigger warning for discussion of the rape culture.]
Shaker Greg emailed the link to Cracked's "Six Romantic Movie Gestures That Can Get You Prison Time," which, though not explicitly addressing the rape culture, nonetheless examines some common romantic comedy tropes that, in the real world, are criminal acts.
Meanwhile, Toronto Star columnist Antonia Zerbisias has written a great piece about the media's facilitation of the rape culture. I am always thrilled to be able to recommend an article that questions the rape culture, anyway, but this following so closely after Kira Cochrane's piece is awesome.
(Less awesome: That both of them were in foreign-to-the-US press, and I can't remember the last time I've read something like this in a major US paper. Hell, it's rare enough I read anything written by a feminist in a major US paper on any subject.)
Loathsome
Following up on the Quote of the Day...
Ann Coulter addressed Homocon, a gay conservative organization, this past weekend on the topic of marriage equality. You may remember that she got in trouble with her right-wing friends at World Net Daily for accepting the invitation, but based on what she said, WND will probably welcome her back.
First, she ran down the stereotypical stand-up comedian's list of reasons, including that lacking the legal right to marriage allows the less-committed partner to weasel out of it. But in a more serious note, she parroted the losing arguments of the lawyers supporting California's Prop 8 and told the crowd that the reason she opposes (and they should oppose) same sex marriage is that it is strictly for procreation.I used to think that Ann Coulter was some kind of an act; that her shtick was to be the Andrew Dice Clay of right-wing punditry. Or maybe that her nastiness was shaped by pain, and she was to be pitied. But she's an adult; she's capable of being responsible for what comes out of her mouth in public, and looking for some way to excuse her behavior is pointless. Some people are just assholes, and she's one of them.
In one of a series of racially insensitive remarks that pervaded her speech, Coulter added, "Marriage is not a civil right. You're not black." It was part of a larger argument on which she later elaborated, telling the crowd that the 14th Amendment only applies to African-Americans and that it does not, in fact, apply to women, LGBT people or other minorities.
[...]
Several attendees, who requested anonymity, were also startled by her racially-tinged humor: in addition to her comments about civil rights, she also accused single parents of breeding muggers and blamed the decline in marriage in the African-American community on welfare, "the subsidization of single parenting" and overly liberal child support laws. Coulter's comments about civil rights being "only for the blacks" rubbed many people the wrong way as well, though her joke about oppression and the amount of money in the gay community compared to other minority communities ("Blacks must be looking at the gays saying, 'Why can't we be oppressed like that?'") garnered plenty of laughs from the well-heeled crowd.
GOProud's executive director, Jimmy LaSalvia, told TPM after the speech, "I don't agree with Ann Coulter about gay marriage, but there was a real conversation here. That's what we're trying to start."
Um
Obama looks to reenergize youth vote, get late Democratic surge for midterms:
President Obama will swoop into the heartland this week in a high-stakes bid to boost enthusiasm for Democrats by reigniting the coalition of young and minority voters who were critical to his success two years ago.I'm just wondering what issues Obama thinks young progressive people are most passionate about. Because I'm pretty sure it's not bipartisanship and half-assed legislation that tries to look progressive while pandering to corporations. I'm under the impression that most young progressives are passionate about social justice and ending our two wars of choice and having healthcare and jobs.
With polls showing independent voters swinging toward Republicans in Wisconsin and the nation's other battlegrounds, Democrats are turning elsewhere to make up ground. So on Tuesday in Madison, Obama will stage the first in a series of rallies on college campuses designed to persuade what some call his "surge" voters - the roughly 15 million Americans who voted for the first time in 2008 - to return to the polls this fall.
But then again, I'm older than dinosaurs, so maybe I'm wrong and this whole idealism-crushing, warmongering, conservative-coddling, hippie-punching, totes fauxgressive shtick is what the kids are fist-pumping about these days.
(I'm not wrong.)
Meanwhile: Obama argues his assassination program is a "state secret". Sure. Great Democratic president. Very cool.
[Previously in Third Term of Bush: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, and there are about a zillion more, but you get the drift.]
Quote of the Day
"Marriage is not a civil right – you're not black." — Ann Coulter, speaking this weekend at Homocon, a meeting of gay conservatives. Whoops! I guess your heroes still despise you, GOProud.
See also.
Open Thread
For Shaker SugarLeigh, hosted by the Yo Yo.
This week's open threads have been brought to you by carnival attractions.
