“What we have here, fellow citizens, is a crassly egocentric, raving twit. The Norman Podhoretz of our gender. That this woman is actually taken seriously as a thinker in New York intellectual circles is a clear sign of decadence, decay, and hopeless pinheadedness. Has no one in the nation’s intellectual capital the background and ability to see through a web of categorical assertions? One fashionable line of response to Paglia is to claim that even though she may be fundamentally off-base, she has ‘flashes of brilliance.’ If so, I missed them in her oceans of swill.” Impolitic, by Molly Ivins, sometime in 1991 in Mother Jones
If God really cared, we could go back and swap Paglia for Molly. Damn, I miss Molly.
“Finally, there are the “Tier 3″ sex workers, who can charge in excess of $10,000 per rendezvous. They may have only four or five clients, and they typically charge their clients an additional monthly surcharge for their various needs—rent, clothing, medicine.
“Both Tier 2 and Tier 3 workers can typically do more to safeguard a client’s privacy. There are no guarantees, of course, but they tend to shun contractual relationships with agencies that advertise their services. There is less of a paper trail. They typically will only take a john via a referral, and even then, they may require that the john ‘date’ them for weeks before deciding to offer up sex. I have heard of Tier 2 and 3 sex workers who vet prospective clients for months, sometimes hiring a private detective to see if the john is stable—psychologically and financially. As a former attorney general, Spitzer must have known all this.
“What high-end clients pay for may surprise you. For example, according to my ongoing interviews of several hundred sex workers, approximately 40 percent of trades in New York’s sex economy fail to include a physical act beyond light petting or kissing. No intercourse, no oral stimulation, etc. That’s one helluva conversation. But it’s what many clients want. Flush with cash, these elite men routinely turn their prostitute into a second partner or spouse. Over the course of a year, they will sometimes persuade the woman to take on a new identity, replete with a fake name, a fake job, a fake life history, and so on. They may want to have sex or they may simply want to be treated like King for a Day.” Skinflint, by Sudhir Venkatesh, Slate, March 12, 2008
I mean, wtf? guys? I hate to tell you this but there’s more to life than your dick and you ego.
And Spitzer, you threw away your chance to make the world a better place. You, your dick and your ego can rot in hell as far as I’m concerned.
And, sisters, $10K a month to prop up some guy’s ego and maybe blow him? Advantage capitalism. Christ. I know women who work two jobs for the luxury of doing that. Oh, but they’re in love, so that’s different.
“An informal poll of my US female friends revealed that they spend roughly $700 (£350) a month on what they consider standard obligatory beauty maintenance. That covers haircut, highlights, manicure, pedicure, waxing, tanning, make-up, facials, teeth whitening etc. They will spend a further $1,000 (£500) a month on physical conditioning such as military fitness, spinning sessions, vikram yoga, Pilates, deep-tissue sports massage, personal training etc. On top of that, add the occasional spa day, a week-long ‘bikini boot camp’ in Mexico at the start of every summer and seasonal splurges on personal shoppers and clothing. I’m not sure any of my British female friends spends £700 during an entire year on her appearance. American women see these costs as a simple and sensible investment in their future.” American beauty? Having observed females on both sides of the Atlantic, our correspondent claims British women are unkempt and lazy about grooming. By Tad Safran, TimesOnline, December 11, 2007
I don’t know anyone who spends that much on grooming. Of course I live in reality, so I wouldn’t know anyone spending that much. I mean, how could you hold down a job, have a life, and do all that?
Best quote in the comments: “Well done, ladies! Evidently Tad has failed to detect and override the Boor Repellant that every British women keeps in her grooming kit. Perhaps it’s time to be charitable and share the secret with our American sisters.” Brava, Bella!
“But most important, I think, is the golden rule that all revolutions get stuck at some point. Every revolution contains within itself the pull towards its own demise. And usually this demise is symbolized by one person.
“Think of the French Revolution, which brought all kinds of new democratic ideas, but was corrupted by the advent of the dictator Napoleon. Napoleon brought the achievements of the Enlightenment to the rest of Europe yet ruled like an old-fashioned monarch, installing his family on thrones across Europe. The Russian Revolution was halted in the same way by Lenin’s violence and particulary by Stalin’s crazed powerlust.
“The Napoleon or Stalin of the sexual revolution was called Hugh Hefner. This Playboy magnate appeared to be a supporter of the counter movement. For example, he helped to sponsor the district court cases that eventually led to the famous American lawsuit Roe versus Wade. But he also signalled in the derailing of the sexual movement. Playboy magazine standardised sexuality on a gigantic scale. The women featured there were stripped down to the bare essentials in more ways than one. Like the famous playboy bunny, Hefner turned them into completely predictable images of sex. His enterprise made him incredibly rich and made sexuality incredibly boring.
“You might say that we are living in the hefnerist era now. The liberal achievements of the sexual revolution exist in name only. Its creativity and playfulness have been destroyed by huge industrial concerns like Playboy and other marketing companies that use sexuality and porn in a routine and commodified way. But this does not mean that we should return to the period before the sexual revolution. I think both anti-porn feminists and conservatives are wrong when they battle against the pornofication of society. The democratization of sex is a vast achievement which should not be reversed…. or restricted to ‘haute couture’.” Sexing the Handbag, by Dylan van Rijsbergen, Sign and Sight, October 31, 2007 (via 3quarksdaily)
“A retired Marine Corps sergeant could face (could face? SHOULD not ever be let out again GM) life in prison without the possibility of parole after being convicted today in Orange County Superior Court of torturing and killing his wife in their Irvine home in 2004, authorities said.
“James Herbert Speights, 50, is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 7 in the Santa Ana courthouse.
“Prosecutors said Speights, having learned his wife was about to leave him for another man, ‘meticulously assembled a series of torture and restraint devices’ that included chains, ankle cuffs, plastic ties, mace and a 300,000-volt stun gun.
“They said he chained Jeselinda Zill to a bed and used the stun gun on her before strangling her with a plastic tie.” Ex-Marine guilty of torturing, killing wife, Times Staff Writer, November 1, 2007
This is fucking insane. For God’s sake, just let her go. You can always get another one.
Filed under: feminism — Ginger Mayerson @ 11:06 am
“Next, we come to the purported hypocrisy of doing what they accuse others of doing. Feminism is not about replacing injustice with injustice. It is not about diminishing the humanity of anyone. It’s about unearthing the ways our traditional understanding of gender has unknowingly shaped beliefs in places we may not have realized and figuring out what more apt understanding of gender ought to replace it. This hardly seems like hypocrisy.
“But it’s the conclusion that warrants the closest discussion. ‘I’ll make a moral assessment of myself and others that is based on my religion, my values, and my experience, not some historical grievance theatre that is, quite often, more about revenge than justice.’ It’s the old, I’ll just treat people like people. Just like the ‘let’s not quibble over how we got into this mess in Iraq, let’s just focus on what to do from here’ canard, the idea is that somehow the history, the context, and the failures and injustices of the past have nothing to tell us about the details of the situation that we need to know to move forward successfully.
“Here is the one major point where Sweating Through Fog does radically disagree with the core of feminist thought and the one place where we really can explicitly set out that characteristic which is essential to feminist thought. Feminism begins with the acceptance of the existence of sociological facts involving sex and gender. They may disagree about what these facts are, how to determine them, where they come from, what they mean, and whether and/or how to change them. But the entire tradition is founded on the central claim that our concept of gender and our beliefs about it play a role in what else we believe, how we behave, and the how we design our social institutions, and what we see from Sweating Through the Fog is a denial of the existence of, or at least a sweeping under the rug of, sociological facts. It’s the conservative/libertarian move I’ve called ‘limiting the scope of discussion.’ Sociological facts are ignored and the scope of discussion is limited strictly to the personal. It’s the gender version of Stephen Colbert’s ‘I don’t see race.’ We deny that broader influences play any role in our understanding of the world by forcing the conversation to focus on ‘personal responsibility.’” Straw Feminists are scary, real ones…not so much, Philosophers’ Playground, October 26, 2007
“About 10 years ago, a group of graduate students lodged a complaint with Linda C. Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University: All their male counterparts in the university’s PhD program were teaching courses on their own, whereas the women were working only as teaching assistants.
“That mattered, because doctoral students who teach their own classes get more experience and look better prepared when it comes time to go on the job market.
“When Babcock took the complaint to her boss, she learned there was a very simple explanation: ‘The dean said each of the guys had come to him and said, “I want to teach a course,” and none of the women had done that,’ she said. ‘The female students had expected someone to send around an e-mail saying, “Who wants to teach?”‘ The incident prompted Babcock to start systematically studying gender differences when it comes to asking for pay raises, resources or promotions. And what she found was that men and women are indeed often different when it comes to opening negotiations.” Salary, Gender and the Social Cost of Haggling, by Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post, July 30, 2007 (via KSJ Tracker)
“Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.” — Joseph Wood Krutch
“I would like to believe that we are beyond sexism: that women do,in fact, get judged and treated exactly the way men do. But, it doesn’t happen. One of the ways this really hits me is how women are punished for ‘emoting’ in the workplace.
“I have a friend who is a psychiatrist. While she was in her residency, she had a real asshole as her chief resident. She is a very, very bright woman (with a Ph.D in Philosophy, specializing in Philosophy of Science and a MD). She is also likely to speak up when she finds reasoning or practices to be flawed. Because she had been dressed down multiple times when she expressed her reservations or criticisms, she held her tongue, yet her face showed what she was feeling. Her boss starting criticizing her display of ‘affect,’ which he said was not professional for a training psychiatrist. So, to deal with this situation, she did something quite interesting: she got botox so that she literally couldn’t show what she was feeling.” Why Does a Reformed Republican Chick Need Prozac?, Mad Melancholic Feminista, July 21, 2005 (via Feminism 101)
It. Could. Work!
Couldn’t hurt. Most men either don’t care what a woman is thinking (and saying) or get it wrong, so we might as well save a little collagen and grief. Emoting in the workplace, for God’s sake.
“Actually, the older woman carries just as heavy a load after 40/50/60 as she does when she is 20, her ‘load’ changes slightly. Would I have used the word necessity in that sentence? No. Perhaps I might have used the word ‘benefit.’” Evolution Depends on Crones Crone Speaks, October 17, 2007
I think the benefit of being in my late forties is that I’m so much smarter than I was in my twenties, it’s all just so much easier to deal with. So, the load is probably just as heavy, I’m just managing it better. Being invisible is a mixed blessing though.
And then there’s Joe Bob:
“I’ve been thinking about this because of a recent New York Times report on an international conference of anthropologists and ethnographers who are puzzled by recent research showing that families with a resident maternal grandmother are healthier than families without one, even if everything else about the family is normal. In some societies, the survival of the family–actual life and death–is more often preserved by the presence of a grandmother than by, for example, a mere father.” The Grandma Mafia, Joe Bob’s America, November 8, 2002
Ah, Joe Bob. Only you could write the words “mere father” with such aplomb.
I’ve been busy with other things so I’m late to the Tigra assault and JLA chamber of horrors pages party.
But, then again, I was trying not to notice them. Snuff and porn comics will always be with us, but usually as a micro-niche market. So what I want to know is who’s buying this stuff and why aren’t they getting the kind of help they need? JLA bondage, meh, okay; nobody seems to be bleeding. They all look kind of dead, so the necrophilia content ups the revulsion level.
But a woman beaten senseless on camera? What kind of sick pleasure is there in that? I’m not a boxing fan, but I can appreciate that there are rules to make it a more or less even match. But breaking into a woman’s apartment, (which is a real fear for many women as well as men in real life [and, no, I don’t want to know the backstory, I don’t care about the backstory]) superheroine or not, taking her by surprise and beating the shit out of her for the enjoyment of other men? I just don’t have any words for that except, please get some help.
And DC is making money off these images, well, that’s commerce for ya. No one is forcing anyone to buy this stuff. As for me, I will be dropping all Marvel and DC titles except Jonah Hex and All-Star Batman and Robin. I know those titles aren’t exactly Sunday school lessons, but I have Jonah Hex issues to work out and ASBAR makes me laugh.* Otherwise I’m just tired of giving my money to two male-dominated corporations that hate me. My comic shop will have to make up the dough they’re losing on me in doll, sorry, action figure sales.
(Images via Journalista October 16 and 22, 2007. Thanks, Dirk…I think.)
*Why does everyone hate ASBAR? For me, whose very first exposure as an innocent child to Batman was the TV show, ASBAR is like the Star Trek Original Series Mirror Universe version of that show. I expect a bearded Spock and Uhura’s midriff any page now. This being the case, ASBAR hits me on levels I’m just beginning to understand. Too bad they didn’t have Black Canary in the TV show. Any suggestions on which 60s blond bombshell the producers could have gotten for her? I vote for Mamie Van Doren.
“Like many people, I do end up killing some time reading websites such as Girl-Wonder and When Fangirls Attack. Mostly for the morbid curiosity value. Occasionally for the accidental humor caused by the postings or the reactions to the postings and so on and so forth. Very little of what I’ve read has ultimately changed my mind or made me feel a sense of solidarity with my fellow female humans in their struggles against The Man. To me, a black man born after the Civil Rights movement, you would figure I’d want to be on their side, to support their struggle.
“Yet nothing could have been further from the truth.
“Why was that?
“I mean, I’m not a feminist. That’s for sure.
“But I am a humanist.
“Shouldn’t I have wanted my fellow human beings of a different gender to be better represented, to have their share of wish fulfillment power fantasies on display? If for nothing else than for the fact a comics industry that’s more female friendly just might be more multiculturally friendly. So it would have been in my own best interests to be concerned with the various issues as they arose and were dealt with or not.
“Yet and still, nothing.
“That perplexed me.
“Until I read the opening section of Dale Carnegie’s book and the light went on in my head as to why I wasn’t moved by anything the fangirls were saying.” Why It Fails When Fangirls Attack, Vincent Moore, Late September (I’m not seeing a date)
How can you be a humanist and not a feminist when one of the foundations of feminism is that women are human, too, therefore humanism would would, by default, include feminism, neh?
Too bad his blog doesn’t have comments. He’d probably get some interesting discussion on this.
I like the kitsch aspects of Dale Carnegie. I read “How to win…” when I was having problems working with old corporate guys and it actually helped a lot. One of my favorite bits is “Nobody ever kicks a dead dog.” I wonder if Vincent reads Catherine Ponder and Napoleon Hill, too.
I have comments on this blog, but due to horrendous comment spam recently, comments are only open of the most recent 7 days of posts, sorry if you fall by and want to comment after that.
“Mainstream porn has come up with more ways than ever to humiliate and degrade women. Why then, is porn more popular? Includes an excerpt from Robert Jensen’s new book, Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity.
“In his new book, Robert Jensen forces the reader to face the music about the effects of a porn industry gone gonzo and the need to reassess the trappings of masculinity as the source of increased violence against and degradation of women.”
~snip~
“The Gonzo films, which have come to dominate the industry, also emphasize the newer trend of sexual acts, which include: double penetration — anal and vaginal — and ass to mouth, or ATM, where anal sex is followed by sticking the penis in the women’s mouth. In addition, many of these films include men, often in multiple numbers, ejaculating into the faces and mouths of the women performers. The women usually swallow the semen, but also can share it mouth-to-mouth with a female partner. For Jensen, the most plausible explanation of the popularity of these acts is that women in the world, outside of pornography, don’t engage in these acts unless forced. ‘Men know that — and they find it sexually arousing to watch them in part because of that knowledge.’” Pornography and the End of Masculinity, by Don Hazen, AlterNet. Posted September 22, 2007.
This is part of male rage in the Post-Literate society.
There is a bad joke in Hollywood that a would-be starlet with a bad agent ends up doing anal. It’s not really a joke, lots of girls come to LA to be a star and end up doing anal. Sometimes they get lucky and just end up getting a dayjob and out of the star mill. At least, that’s what I’ve heard.
“And I’ve finally figured out why - and it came from a conversation I had last Wednesday, where the clerk (a man about my own age) said he was lucky he remembered my name. And I countered with ‘How many middle-aged women in headscarves have a pull-list here?’ He grinned and acknowledged that I was unique there.” Comic book shops and me, Debra Fran Baker, August 19, 2007
Wearing headscarves, not wearing headscarves, personally I fancy ankle-length batik schmatas and rayon rebozos - Middle-aged women in comics shops do indeed rock the house.
“Buried among prairie dogs and amateur animation shorts on YouTube is a curious little mini-documentary shot in front of an abortion clinic in north suburban Libertyville. The man behind the camera is asking demonstrators who want abortion criminalized what the penalty should be for a woman who has one nonetheless. You have rarely seen people look more gob-smacked. It’s as though the guy has asked them to solve quadratic equations. Here are a range of responses: ‘I’ve never really thought about it.’ ‘I don’t have an answer for that.’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Just pray for them.’”
~snip~
“A new public-policy group, the National Institute for Reproductive Health, wants to take this contradiction and make it the centerpiece of a national conversation, along with a slogan that stops people in their tracks: How much time should she do? If the U.S. Supreme Court decides abortion is not protected by a constitutional guarantee of privacy, the issue will revert to the states. Some states, perhaps many, will ban abortion. If abortion is made a crime, then surely the woman who has one is a criminal. But, boy, do the doctrinaire suddenly turn squirrelly at the prospect of throwing women in jail.”
~snip~
“They never connect the dots,’ says Jill June, president of Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa. But her organization urged voters to do just that in the last gubernatorial election, in which the Republican contender believed abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest. ‘We wanted him to tell the women of Iowa exactly how much time he expected them to serve in jail if they had an abortion,’ June recalled.”
~snip~
“There are only two logical choices: Hold women accountable for a criminal act by sending them to prison, or refuse to criminalize the act in the first place. If you can’t countenance the first, you have to accept the second. You can’t have it both ways.” What would penalty for abortion be?, by Anna Quindlen, Chicago Sun Times, August 8, 2007 (via Mr. Dan Kelly)
I love YouTube. Where else can you see stuff like this? Defendez le YouTube.com!
“Radical feminism is a philosophy emphasizing the patriarchal roots of inequality between men and women, or, more specifically, social dominance of women by men. Radical feminism views patriarchy as dividing rights, privileges and power primarily by gender, and as a result oppressing women and privileging men.
“Radical feminists tend to be more militant in their approach (radical as ‘getting to the root’). Radical feminism opposes existing political and social organization in general because it is inherently tied to patriarchy. Thus, radical feminists tend to be skeptical of political action within the current system, and instead support cultural change that undermines patriarchy and associated hierarchical structures.
“Radical feminism opposes patriarchy, not men. To equate radical feminism to man-hating is to assume that patriarchy and men are inseparable, philosophically and politically.” 4th Carnival of Radical Feminists, Arooo, July 30, 2007 (via The Crone Speaks)
