CNN.com asks: "Is raising a child free of gender roles a good idea?" As long as CNN's at it, there are all kinds of questions they might consider asking:
[On the left, the actual CNN.com poll, on the right, I ask if "polling the public on the merits of other families' personal choices is a good idea"]
CNN is, of course referring to the story of Storm, a baby whose parents have not publicly revealed their child's medically assigned gender.
If you like polls and transphobic headlines, NBC's Today has you covered.
[Commenting guidelines: The parents' choice is off-limits for discussion, and what is on-topic is CNN's decision to run a poll about it.]
Gov. Rick Perry said today he will consider running for president after Legislature adjourns. "I'm going to think about it," the Republican governor said today. [...] But Perry's name is an increasingly hot property in the political world as nobody in the Republican field seems to have emerged as a clear front-runner.
[...]
Perry got an endorsement this week from an Hispanic Republican group and has been praised in recent days by talk radio show host Rush Limbaugh. [...]
Well, if Rush Limbaugh is praising you, that should really tell you something.
Word of advice regarding "thinking about it", Rick: Don't.
Mitt Romney will officially launch his campaign in New Hampshire on Thursday, June 2. Rick Santorum will make his White House desires official with a campaign event in Pennsylvania on June 6. And Michele Bachmann is expected to follow suit with a formal announcement in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, sometime in the next several weeks.
Barf. However, no word yet on Shakesville's endorsed GOP ticket, Goat & Paperclip.
by Shaker BGK, who desperately wants the Vancouver Canucks to bring the Stanley Cup home.
[Trigger warning for sexual violence.]
As a citizen of a US city near the 49th parallel, I try to keep an eye on what our northern neighbors are doing. So in my morning click to cbc.ca, I was pleased to find the following news from Ottawa:
No consent in unconscious sex case: Supreme Court
Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, writing for the majority, said a person must be conscious during sexual activity to give consent.
Despite the countless people will slut-shame the victim, because clearly she wore that mini-skirt and therefore wanted it, or he had too many drinks that night and therefore was asking for it, it seems to me that the legal standard being applied here is much stricter, and I think Canadians of all genders will be safer for it.
I am, however, dismayed that the cbc author included some specifics of the sexual history of the two people involved in this case as the article itself is ostensibly a blurb about the ruling, not a full history of the case. It seems as though these specifics serve as a dogwhistle to slut-shame and diminish the integrity of the victim. It does not focus on the defendant's actions, but adds a layer of confusion to the article, subtly encouraging us to feel sorry for the defendant, instead of believing the prosecution—a common trick of the media in a patriarchy.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Chief Justice of the Cour Supreme du Canada is the Right Honourable Beverly McLachlin, that four of the nine judges were women, and that all four women voted in favor of the ruling. I am sad to say I have a hard time believing that the US Supreme Court would deliver a similar opinion.
[Commenting Guidelines: Comments debating the specifics of the case at the center of this decision are off-limits for this discussion.]
$1.5 billion: The cuts made to disaster preparedness, including $460 million in funding for firefighter grants and $1.1 billion in state and local grants administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), made by the GOP-led House Appropriations Committee, while trimming the FEMA and Homeland Security budget.
"In today's environment," said Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY), according to CQ, "we can't be subsidizing local governments to the extent we have." Parts of his district were declared a federal disaster area earlier this month because of catastrophic flooding.
For eight years under the Bush administration, Republicans talked nonstop about national security, and used hyperbolic fearmongering about terrorism to justify extraordinary expenditures in defense, including two endless wars.
Meanwhile, countless USians have lost their jobs, their homes, their savings, their possessions, their food security, their healthcare, and the physical security of solid infrastructure and robustly-funded disaster preparedness.
We have traded everything away, every piece of real security and material safety we actually had, in exchange for protection from the existential threat of a boogeyman.
[Trigger warning for gun violence, eliminationism, misogyny, vigilantism, Christian supremacy, and body policing]
On Wednesday night, police in Madison arrested a man who had come to town with plans to kill people at the local Planned Parenthood.
Ralph Lang, 63, told a Madison police officer at the Motel 6, 1754 Thierer Road, that he had a gun “to lay out abortionists because they are killing babies,” according to a criminal complaint filed Thursday in U.S. District Court.
Lang said he planned on shooting the clinic’s doctor “right in the head,” according to the complaint. Asked if he planned to shoot just the doctor or nurses, too, Lang replied he wished he “could line them up all in a row, get a machine gun, and mow them all down,” the complaint said.
And of course, that was just the beginning of his plans:
Sgt. Bernie Gonzalez looked around Lang’s motel room and saw a box that contained several documents, including a map of the U.S. with dots in each state and the handwritten words “some abortion centers.”
Also written on the map was “Blessed Virgin Mary says Hell awaits any woman having an abortion.”
Police only found out about the plot because the man accidentally shot his gun off in his hotel room.
Of course, this wasn't the first time Lang had threatened Planned Parenthood. He was cited for disorderly conduct in 2007 after standing outside Planned Parenthood's Madison clinic calling for the assassination of everyone inside. That happened three years before he bought a gun for the purpose of doing "what [he felt] police officers fail to do.”
I can't imagine where Lang [TW] got the idea that this sort of behavior is appropriate. Oh [TW] wait, I do.
Interestingly enough, just yesterday President Obama signed a four-year extension of the Patriot Act, an act designed to give the US government absurd powers that many politicians claim are necessary to protect its residents from acts of terrorism.
Yet the president has been silent as virtually every state (Louisiana is still on winter break) [Correction: they're back!] has seen the introduction on legislation seeking to restrict women's rights to abortion.
Yet the president acts as if there are two equal sides to this "issue".
Yet police are unable to do anything about a known anti-choice terrorist until after he buys a gun and shoots a hole in his hotel.
Obviously, I'd like to think that the arrest of yet another violent vigilante will finally alert those with political power to the dangers of their (at best) indifference. Sadly, I'm afraid I know better.
President Barack Obama, who is attending a summit in France, directed the use of an autopen late Thursday to sign key provisions of the Patriot Act that were due to expire at midnight.
By a 250-153 vote, the Republican-led House agreed to extend the expiring provisions of the law passed after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
...One of the three provisions, Section 206 of the Patriot Act, provides for roving wiretap surveillance of targets who try to thwart Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance. Without such roving wiretap authority, investigators would be forced to seek a new court order each time they need to change the location, phone or computer that needs to be monitored.
Another provision, Section 215 of the Patriot Act, allows the FBI to apply to the FISA court to issue orders granting the government access to any tangible items in foreign intelligence, international terrorism and clandestine intelligence cases.
The third provision, Section 6001 of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act of 2004, closes a loophole that could allow individual terrorists not affiliated with specific organizations to slip through the cracks of FISA surveillance. Law enforcement officials refer to it as the "lone wolf" provision.
Legislators opposed to the extensions claim that the provisions -- particularly related to wiretapping -- are intrusive and unconstitutional. Supporters argue that they are a critical component of U.S. anti-terror operations.
Oh well! Two sides to every story! Guess there's NO WAY of figuring out who's right!
Hey, remember when Obama was against roving wiretaps and retroactive warrants and the executive branch using debates about national security to expand its own power...? Those were the days.
I've got a new piece at The Guardian's CifA about their evident policy of policing misogyny only when it's apparent in naked slurs, and how that policy not only teaches their hosts how to Do Misogyny and Get Away With It, but also entrenches the culture in which feminists who object to covert misogyny can be silenced with accusations of seeking out offense.
The effective result of MSNBC's double standard is that, far from discouraging its employees from engaging in misogyny, it actually rewards them for conveying their prejudices by dogwhistle sexism. Ostensibly banning the use of rank slurs, without penalising the sentiments behind them, elides the real and serious problem of gender bias in favour of a policy that essentially reduces to "don't get caught".
The consequence of the PR-sensitive but female-insensitive MSNBC policy, which tolerates misogyny as long as it contains no undeniable slurs, is to ensure that the most insidious brand of women-hatred is broadcast on their network, via plausibly deniable wink-wink implications, objections to which can be dismissed out of hand by labelling critics as "over-reacting" and "hypersensitive", "reading into things" and "looking for stuff to get mad about" – all the usual silencing techniques wielded against feminists who challenge institutional gender bias.
Thus is the "I don't see it, so you're a feminist hysteric" nature of public conversations about misogyny in media perpetuated, as if sexism cannot be objectively assessed. (Spoiler alert: it can.)
Below is the trailer for the upcoming Kevin James film Zookeeper, a film about animals at a zoo breaking "their code of silence in order to help their lovable zookeeper gain the attention of one particular woman." Sure. Despite the fact that animals revealing an ability to speak, concealed for millions of years, because their highest priority is getting Kevin James laid is one of the most depressing plots ever conceived, this film is allegedly a comedy.
Video Description: Kevin James, who is an extremely handsome man by mainstream standards but is supposed to be regarded as an ugly buffoon just because he's fat, and his tall, thin, white, blond girlfriend ride a horse down a beach at sunset. Kevin James "notices" a bottle in the sand. His girlfriend pulls out a note, which is a proposal. She turns to see Kevin James kneeling in the sand, holding out a ring. "Will you marry me?" he asks her. "No," she says, shaking her head. "I know it shouldn't bother me that you're a zookeeper, but…it kinda does." Cue the wacky music!
"Five years later," intones a male voiceover, over scenes of Kevin James zookeepering, "the world's most devoted zookeeper is getting a second chance." He bumps into his former girlfriend at a party at the zoo (sure), where she says she hopes her presence doesn't make him uncomfortable, and he unconvincingly assures her she doesn't, while holding a porcupine that shoots a quill into his face.
We are 40 seconds into this trailer, and we've been expected to laugh merrily at a man's heart being viciously broken and his body subjected to physical pain and emotional humiliation. The fact that he's fat makes it SUPER-hilarious, no doy.
Some David Spade wannabe (good lord) tells Kevin James to come work for him at the car dealership—you know, the one that all dudes with career crises are told they should work at with their sleazy friends in shitty movies. "That is how you get a girl like Stephanie," says Spavid Dade, and he means working at a car dealership. Because, little known fact, women who don't like zoologists totes love car salesmen. It's science, look it up.
Kevin James realizes, "I gotta get out of the zoo!"—because if ever there were a good idea, it is giving up the career you love in pursuit of someone who thinks you're garbage for loving that career.
OH NOES! thinks some monkey who overhears him announcing out loud his intent to leave the zoo to impress some woman with whom he's had no contact in five years.
The male voiceover explains: "The animals of the Franklin Park Zoo will have to do the unthinkable." Cut to a lion telling Kevin James they "need to talk," and Kevin James screaming, running away, hitting his head on a metal bar, and collapsing to the ground. HILARITY!!!
Animals talking. Bad CGI. Requisite exposition about how Kevin James is "the best zookeeper" the animals "ever had," so they had to break their legendary streak of NOT TALKING in order to talk to him about how to get laid. "You listen to us; we'll show you how to get the girl." If you guessed that he has to get the girl by acting like an animal, give yourself 10,000 points! Kevin James acts like a bear.
Uh-oh! Rosario Dawson, fellow zookeeper, catches him acting like a bear and looks confused. Gee, she is very pretty. I hope he gets her as a consolation prize when his attempts to woo the white blond lady who is an asshole are not successful!
Various scenes of Kevin James interacting with his former girlfriend's current suitor, whom the talking animals call his "rival." Of course. He humiliates himself in front of his former girlfriend again. Naturally. In the most shameless product placement of all time, a gorilla asks him if TGI Friday's is "as incredible as it looks." For sure. Montage of various garbage scenes, while The Talking Heads' "Wild, Wild Life" :( plays in the background. Cool. Kevin James growls like a bear at Spavid Dade. Yep.
A lioness tells him, "The best way to attract a female is to be seen with another female." Totes. Kevin James shows up at a wedding with Rosario Dawson on his arm, but only to make his former girlfriend jealous, which is why OBVIOUSLY he has to soar around the room on large strips of white fabric, then humiliate himself in front of her yet again (not to mention ruin the wedding) by knocking over the bride and smashing the ice sculpture.
It is at this point that maybe Kevin James should consider the whole "it bothers me that you're a zookeeper" thing was just a way of avoiding the whole "it bothers me that you are a dipfuck of epic proportions who cannot seem to function as a responsible adult human being despite having no impediments to that objective besides your irrepressible jackassery" thing.
Anyway, blah blah more bullshit, then Kevin James pulled up to TGI Friday's in a van with the gorilla in tow. Well, the gorilla's wearing a t-shirt. I'm sure no one will notice.
Do you still have any items from your childhood that are very meaningful to you?
I have a few things here and there I've held onto, toys and games and collectibles, but probably the things I still have that mean the most to me are a handful of books that I loved as a child. My most treasured book is an old copy of Beautiful Joe, literally held together with brittle tape, which was my mother's when she was a little girl, then passed on to me.
Beautiful Joe is based on a true story of an abused and rescued dog, and was written by Marshall Saunders—actually Margaret Marshall Saunders, who entered (and won) a literary contest sponsored by the American Humane and Educational Society under her middle name because female authors weren't getting published. It was first published in 1893; my tattered copy, which I read and reread and reread as a child, is a 1955 edition.
My first memory of really loving a book is loving Beautiful Joe—and it's no exaggeration to say that the book was a significant influence on my life; I owe a great deal of my capacity for empathy to Joe's tale.
"We have one [political party] that is really pushing toward centralization, collectivization, secularism—and we have some good people in that party; some of them are my best friends—but frankly they do not believe in individualism, they do not believe in the type of moral values that we do and we cannot compromise with them."—Senator Jim DeMint, (R-Ealcomedian), whose party likes one-size-fit-all solutions like "no abortion" and "marriage is only between one man and one woman," yet claims to be the great defenders of individualism.
[Trigger warning for misogyny, religious oppression, violence.]
She doesn't look like she's plotting to destroy an entire country.
She's just driving a car. [Description of video at link: A woman in head-scarf and sunglasses, speaking in Arabic while she drives.]
But for a woman in Saudi Arabia, that is nothing short of a revolutionary act. Manal Al-Sharif is currently in jail after posting a YouTube video of herself driving. As she waits in jail, her supporters are using Facebook, Twitter, and other social media to spread the word. Ms. Al-Sharif, who works as an IT security consultant, is being compared to Rosa Parks for her determination to challenge inequalities in the Kingdom's transportation system. The Women2Drive campaign is mobilizing women across Saudia Arabia in support of women's right to freely access healthcare, employment, education, and all the other human needs that are dependent upon transportation.
No other country on earth restricts women from driving. Public transport is limited, and proposals to make it accessible to women have stalled. Many women are entirely dependent on male relatives for transportation. Wealthy families may hire a driver. Poorer women may simply be stuck at home, especially if they are divorcees or widows.
Taking a taxi is possible, but it still leaves women in the company of unrelated men, a seeming contradiction to the argument that the driving ban preserves women from such mixing. Indeed, Al-Sharif and her supporters are pointing out such contradictions, making a case based on arguments relating to modesty and safety, as well as on inequalities of class and gender. For example, in the videoof herself driving that she posted to YouTube on May 19, Al-Sharif notes that women whose male drivers have a heart attack are put in an dangerous situation if they do not know how to take the wheel. The very name of the Facebook page for the campaign, called "Teach Me How To Drive So I Can protect Myself," emphasizes this. The pro-driving women of Saudi Arabia also emphasize their roles as mothers, daughters, and sisters. What is a daughter to do if caring for an ailing father who needs medical attention? How can a widow get her children to school?
Ms Al-Sharif and her supporters are organizing a mass action on June 17. In keeping with the tone of their campaign, it is meant to be a very civil protest, one that women can carry out without mass demonstrations or gatherings. The campaign simply calls for women with licenses from other countries to get in their cars and drive. That's it. (You can read a description of the protest, with background, from a supporter here. Pro-driving campaigners argue that they are not, in fact, even breaking the law, since the prohibition on driving came as a fatwa (religious edict), not the laws of the Kingdom.
I don't claim to be an expert on Islamic law, nor on the Kingdom Saudi Arabia for that matter, but I certainly want to give these brave women my support. Their campaign comes at a time when other challenges and changes are afoot:
• Samia, a Saudi surgeon, is going to court to challenge the guardianship system, which grants her male relatives have almost complete control over her life. She says her father takes most of her earnings and tries to force her to marry her a cousin whom she does not love, despite the fact that such forced marriages are against Islamic principle.
• The government had promised to allow women a vote in the fall municipal elections. When it reneged, groups of women began attempting to register anyway, creating a Facebook page called Saudi Women Revolution. As one of the women put it in this story, "We just have to find someone who will let us do it — someone who, you know, sees his daughter in us or his wife, or believes in it."
• King Abdullah just opened the Kingdom's first women-only university, a campus which can serve up to 50,000 students, and will significantly increase access to higher education for women.
As the last item might indicate, King Abdullah has signaled some support for women's rights. He appointed Norah al-Faiz as deputy minister of women's education, the first-ever female cabinet minister in Saudi history. In his first interview with Western media after assuming the throne (granted, significantly, to Barbara Walters) he stated:
I believe strongly in the rights of women. My mother is a woman. My sister is a woman. My daughter is a woman. My wife is a woman. I believe the day will come when women will drive. In fact if you look at the areas of Saudi Arabia, the desert, and in the rural areas, you will find that women do drive.
Of course, this was followed, frustratingly, with:
The issue will require patience. In time I believe that it will be possible. I believe that patience is a virtue.
As I said, I don't claim any expertise in Saudi politics or Islamic law, but this article (recommended at the Facebook Group Woman Behind the Wheel) gives some background to the interplay between religion and state in Saudia Arabia, with specific attention given to the driving ban. It's well worth a read. In it, Sheikh Ahmad Bin Abdul Aziz Bin Baz, the son of the former Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia (the man who issued the fatwa against women driving), seems to indicate that the circumstances which drove the fatwa may no longer apply.
Yet it's also clear that the royal government needs the support of the religious leadership, including its hard-line elements. And make no mistake: The driving campaign has brought out some very ugly opposition. As this story notes, there is a Facebook campaign encouraging men to beat women drivers with cords on the day of the protest. The women campaigning to drive face genuine danger.
According to a commenter in the Saudi Women Drivers Facebook group, more attention from Western media would be helpful to their cause. There have been some stories covering the protest, but when (literally) the Muppets get top billing over Ms. Al-Sharif, then you know our garbage media is going to do its usual stellar job.
If you are able to do so, and would like to help boost the signal, you can use the tags #FreeManal and #Women2Drive on Twitter. In addition to the FB groups above, the large group We Are Supporting Manal Alsharif is providing many regular updates on Ms. Al-Sharif and other women supporting the driving movement. Although Ms. Al-Sharif's original YouTube posting and Facebook group were taken down, the Saudi government is learning that social media is hard to suppress. You can read more about the role of social networking in the campaign here. Further ideas for teaspooning are welcome in comments.
Regular readers at Shakesville will all be familiar with the ways that certain words and attributes are coded in different ways depending on the gender of the person to whom they're being attributed to, and I've long known this to be true – but I'd never truly experienced it until this past weekend.
One of the biggest events in the industry in which I work was held this past weekend, and hundreds of media folks gathered for it. One of my goals for the event was to meet a woman who works in my industry in a relatively high-profile position, making her name easily recognizable to those who work in our field. I've seen her speak and engage with others on TV before, and I've always been drawn to her by her confidence, expertise, and assertiveness. While I wouldn't call her my "hero," for the reasons Liss wrote about here, she's certainly one of the people I most admire in my industry, and I wasn't going to pass up a chance to finally speak with her.
Talking excitedly to the guys with whom I traveled to this event about meeting her, I quickly discovered that the ways in which we viewed her couldn't have been more different. I found her to be engaging, intelligent, and strong. They viewed her as high-maintenance, obnoxious, and grating to listen to – and they assured me numerous times throughout the weekend (every hour, on the hour, it seemed) that she would surely be frosty to me when we met. That she would be aloof. That she would be rude. All of these dire warnings, issued with assuredness, came despite the fact that they, too, had never met her, but they had "heard stories" (surprise, surprise!) about what a "bitch" she is.
So after the big event wound down on Saturday evening, we all attended a media/industry party, and I was finally going to get to meet the woman I so admired. I admit that after weeks leading up to this event, and all the jokes and grim predictions about how terribly my finally meeting her would go being made all weekend, I was starting to worry about how it would go.
Nonetheless, once I found her at the event, I walked right up to her, beer in hand, and introduced myself, with two of my main antagonists from the weekend by my side. I explained who I was, who I worked for, and told her that I had always greatly admired her work, her expertise, and in a moment of fan-boy style flailing, I even blurted out, "Basically I just think you're completely awesome. I'm really glad we're friends on Facebook!" Seriously, what the fuck, BrianWS? Right?!
Here's the big reveal: she was everything I imagined she would be and then some. Not only was she kind, friendly, and not "too good" to talk to me – she was warm. She asked about my weekend and the work I had done, thanked me several times for introducing myself and telling her how much her work meant to me, and genuinely explained to me how difficult it could be sometimes and that it was great to get some positive feedback that people out there were enjoying the work she did. Even having been completely disarmed by her in those first minutes of our conversation, I still expected that she might not be willing to indulge my next request.
"Hey, this might sound kind of weird," I plunged in, "but I'm just so excited to have met you – would you maybe take a picture with me?"
She laughed, and said, "Absolutely!" And then she put her arm around me and took what I now consider to be one of my favorite photographs ever.
The entire experience was surreal in one way, because I was finally meeting someone I admired so much within my industry. On the other hand, it was so utterly predictable.
If a man acts confidently, it's because he's knowledgeable and has every right to be. If a woman does, it's because she's a "bitch." If a man acts assertively and doesn't like being interrupted when having a broadcast conversation, it's because he knows what he's talking about and should not be interrupted. If a woman does, it's because she's a "bitch."
Confidence, knowledge, expertise, and assertiveness are all coded in such a way that they're read as positive attributes in men and frosty, bitchy attributes in women, as if even though the woman I looked up to could hang with anyone when discussing our industry, she was a "bitch" because she wouldn't automatically defer to someone else's opinion.
That this woman whose (undeserved) bad reputation preceded her (to put it lightly) not only engaged me when I was probably not at my most eloquent due to my excitement about finally meeting her, but was genuinely warm and kind shouldn't have surprised me, and in a way it didn't. But for days leading up to this meeting, I had been so bombarded with the typical comments we always hear about confident, strong women (WARNING SIREN! BITCH ALERT!), that even I had begun to second-guess myself and wonder if I was wrong.
I wonder how many confident women get bad reputations because of the way people approach them. (My guesstimate: 100%.)
Perhaps if I had bought the line that she was a "bitch," and if I hadn't known any better, I'd have approached her in a different way than I did. Interactions are so colored by how they begin – what you put in is usually what you get back. If I had approached her as though she was going to be the rotten, cold woman I'd been told to expect she would be, I can imagine that she might have (quite understandably) responded in a way that confirmed those very prejudices. Instead, I approached her as a colleague who respected her for her work, and she treated me with great respect and kindness. Funny how that works, sometimes.
I'm thankful for the lessons I learned over the years about the way these things work, because without them, I might have really believed the things these guys were telling me in advance of meeting her and missed out on getting to chat with one of the kindest, smartest, most genuine people I've ever met within my industry. It won't be a conversation I'll soon forget, but it's also a reminder that I need to stay vigilant and remember to not forget the often small, often sneaky, but always insidious ways that misogyny works.
Even after our interaction, it was suggested that I only got along with her and she was only kind to me because I am gay, something she had no way of knowing with any certainty. See how that works? It's not that there are men who reflexively hate her on the basis of ancient narratives about strong women; it's that she irrationally hates men, and only makes special dispensation for the gay ones, who might as well be women.
To make a long story less long, I'll wrap this up with a short open letter:
Dear Misogyny,
You're always out there, and you're always working against us – but this time around, you lost.
Big time.
So fuck off.
xoxo,
BrianWS
Artist's recreation of the author's photograph with his admired colleague, using actual grinny BrainWS face from actual photo of actual awesomeness.
A new Sachs/Mason Dixon poll gets to the heart of the presidential choices in front of us. Who would you rather have lunch with? More than three times as many Americans - 53 percent - would choose to have a one-on-one lunch chat with President Obama over any of the Republican presidential conentenders. Sarah Palin placed a distant second, with 16 percent.
"Overwhelmingly, Americans find President Barack Obama to be the most likable and lunch-worthy date compared to any of those hoping take his job in the 2012 election," said Ron Sachs, President of Ron Sachs Communications. "There is no baloney in this simple truth: the 'lunch pal' poll very likely reflects the significant advantage President Obama enjoys heading into his re-election against a party that has no 'candidate du jour.'"
The question that was actually asked was: "Among these announced or rumored contenders for President in 2012, which one would you most like to have a one-on-one conversation with over lunch?"
Assuming that people were axiomatically choosing the person they most like is completely unsound. I'm sure there are respondents who would never vote for President Obama but chose him nonetheless sheerly for the the opportunity to give the sitting president a piece of their minds.
Frankly, I'd have chosen Sarah Palin, and it sure ain't because I'm a fan. I am, however, interested in having a conversation with her.
Consider this the reminder to be extremely critical of polls purporting to wildly favor or disfavor any candidate, as we move into the Silly Season.
As I've briefly mentioned, I am way the hell into Adele at the moment. So is Iain, and when I put on her "Set Fire to the Rain" in protest of the bad weather on our journey east, she basically stayed in rotation through half of Ohio. We lurrrrrrve her.
Anyway, Tami's got a great post about Adele today, in which she expresses wonder at the number of people who try (and spectacularly fail) to cover Adele's stuff, especially "Rolling in the Deep." It's a sentiment with which I heartily agree; vanishingly few people are going to be able to tough Adele's version.
Meanwhile, Andy posts a video by three darling blokes (Alex Goot, Michael Henry, and Justin Robinett) who take on Adele with a sort of Glee-ified medley of "Rolling in the Deep," "Turning Tables," and "Someone Like You," and it's definitely one of my favorite covers of Adele's work so far. Enjoy!
UPDATE: Shaker erbie dropped into comments this video of PS22 Chorus singing "Rolling in the Deep," which is just ridiculously fantastic:
[Trigger warning for sexual violence; rape apologia; victim-blaming.]
Two weeks ago, I wrote about the New York Times abysmal coverage of a case in New York, in which a New York City police officer was on trial for raping a woman whom he had been summoned to help while his partner "stood guard." That article referred to the complainant in its opening sentence as "a drunken woman."
Today, the Timesreports that the two officers were acquitted of all charges except "official misconduct for entering the woman's apartment."
That article opens with: "Two New York City police officers were found not guilty on Thursday of raping a drunken woman who had been helped into her apartment by the officers while on patrol." Emphasis mine.
Even after the men who allegedly raped her have been acquitted of their crimes, the Times can't help but engage in victim-blaming and rape apologia, despite the fact that it's the proliferation of precisely such narratives in the media that is responsible for the biases that result in appallingly low convictions in sex crimes cases.
Email the Public Editor, Arthur Brisbane and/or submit a Letter to the Editor.
[Trigger warning for misogyny; body policing; colorism.]
Product Description, from the website (to which I'm not linking, but it's easy enough to find if you're so inclined): "My New Pink Button (tm) is a temporary dye to restore the youthful pink color back to your labia. There is no other product like it. This patent pending formula was designed by a female certified Paramedical Esthetician after she discovered her own genital color loss. While looking online for a solution she discovered thousands of other women asking the same questions regarding their color loss. After countless searches revealing no solution available and a discussion with her own gynecologist she decided to create her own. Now there is a solution!"
Comes in four shades: Marilyn ("the lightest of our colors; good for beginners who want to make a slight change fresh color change in their appearance or those who are very fair skinned"), Bettie ("This shade blends with a woman's own skin tones to bring out that 'sexy hot pink, I am fired up, look'"), Ginger ("will combine with darker skin tones to bring forth a real rosy tone"), and Audrey ("For the woman that loves to be daring, we bring you "Audrey"! This is the deepest, darkest color that we offer to give you a bold burgundy pink color. Perfect for everyone, and your own base color will determine the depth of this shade. Tonight its Show time!!").
What a wonderful way to honor our female icons—by appropriating their names to slap on a product designed to make women feel insecure about their vulvas.
I don't guess I need to mention that not every woman in the world has a pink vulva to begin with. (Or even a vulva at all.) There are many women—including many fair-skinned white women—whose vulvas are on the brown spectrum. Equating pink with whiteness and youth is flatly wrong.
But obviously a pretty common (and sinister) marketing ploy.
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