Neurotics R Us

Why is it that making phone calls for appointments--haircuts, doctors, dentists, etc.--freaks me out and I'll put it off forever?

Couldn't happen to a nicer group of people

Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and Wolfgang Puck?

They deserve each other.

Women and Children First

Yesterday the NYT announced that the Bush administration plans to cut funding for uninsured children, and the WaPo let us know that the FDA intends to appropriate 30% of the money dedicated to the Office of Women's Health for general use instead. (The Office of Women's Health, by the way, also funds research into children's health, so it's a double whammy.)

But don't worry, the Bush administration has an answer for everything:

children do not have a legal entitlement to benefits.

Michael O. Leavitt, secretary of health and human services, said he would work with Congress to find “a short-term solution” for states exhausting their allotments this year. He said states could avoid shortfalls by managing their programs better.

In his experience as governor of Utah, Mr. Leavitt said, “when we were out of an allotment, we just discontinued enrolling people until we had room.” Likewise, he said, states could cover more people if they provided less comprehensive
benefits.

Similarly, since the FDA has already spent 70% of the $4 million for the Office of Women's Health (and we're only two months into the year!),

the office must effectively halt further operations for the rest of the year.

The Democrats intend to fight the funding cuts for uninsured kids, and the FDA is sending out signals that they "INTENDED" [sic] to spend all $4 mil on the OWH, so there's a possibility that kids (at least) will be covered--though I'm not inclined to trust what the FDA "intended" to do, what with even the best laid plans (not to speak of the FDA's) ganging aft agley and all.

So, everyone: don't get sick for the rest of the year, 'kay?


Update: Holy crap, this is depressing: a WaPo story about a 10 year old who died because he didn't have dental insurance.

Permanent, not temporary, health care, please

In a past, pre-grad school life, I used to work for Kelly Temp Services--initially as a temp, and then they hired me (on a temporary basis, natch) to work in the main office, interviewing people, sending them out on jobs, etc. One of the things that really got to me on that job is how many of the people coming in weren't like me, a recent college grad just looking for some kind of paid gig while I figured out a "real" job, but were actually people who were temping because it was their only way into the work force. I interviewed (and sent out on jobs) people who lived in homeless shelters and called in, first thing every morning, from a pay phone to see if we had work; people who'd just been fired and needed a paying job immediately because the rent or the mortgage payment was due; and a woman who interviewed beautifully and then, as the interview went rather long because she had so many qualifications, asked, shamefaced, if she could run out to "plug the meter"--which I learned later meant "check on her two children who she'd left waiting in the locked car because she was too professional to take them into an interview but the whole family was living in a domestic violence shelter and she didn't have anyone she could leave them with." (That woman, by the way, had a full-time job with the fire department within two weeks of interviewing with me. Man, she was motivated.)

All of which is to say that despite growing anxieties about the temping of the American work force, I've got kind of a soft spot for Kelly; my sense was that the folks there knew very well who their workers were, and really did try to get them good gigs, at least in the office I worked for. They kind of seemed to serve as a cross between business and employment agency.

So I'm really not surprised--though I am pleased--that a reader who works for the company sent along this message from the company intranet:

I've been engaged in dialogue with others that share my concern for the state of U.S. health care and my passion for change. Over a period of several months, we discussed the actions that have to happen. On February 7, a partnership was announced. In addition to Kelly Services, founding members include: AT&T, the Howard H. Baker, Jr. Center for Public Policy, the Center for American Progress, the Committee for Economic Development, the Communications Workers of America, Intel, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and Wal-Mart.

We believe that business, government, labor, the health care delivery system, and the nonprofit sector must work together to deliver health care that is high quality, affordable, accessible, and secure.

The founding members have signed a document that includes the following principles:
We believe every person in America must have quality, affordable health insurance coverage;
We believe individuals have a responsibility to maintain and protect their health;
We believe that America must dramatically improve the value it receives for every health care dollar; and,
We believe that businesses, governments, and individuals all should contribute to managing and financing a new American health care system.


The founding members are committed to this campaign. Each of us has pledged personal involvement in order to ensure success. We will convene a national summit by the end of May, and we will recruit additional leaders to join us in forming a wide-ranging coalition.

In case you'd like to read more, I'm attaching titles of a few articles that describe this initiative:
Christian Science Monitor- Burdened by Healthcare Costs, US Businesses Seek a Shift
Washington Post- Wal-Mart, Union Join Forces on Health Care
USA Today- Wal-Mart Calls for Change in Health Care
Arkansas News Bureau- Wal-Mart, Union Foe Unite for Health Care Reform
Cincinnati Enquirer- Can Biz Reform Health Care?
Philadelphia Enquirer- Employers Cooperate for Health-Care Initiative

Can "biz" reform health care? Honestly and practically, they're really the only ones who can. Much as I am not a fan of Wal-Mart, I also think that if we had universal health care in this country, being poor would suck a lot less, and the problems of low wages, job outsourcing, and even temporary work would be much, much less of a big deal. And given that people's job situations can change rapidly, initiatives like my own Governator's plan are needlessly complicated and ridiculous. (Mandating health insurance? Providing assistance for people whose incomes fall below a certain amount? What happens when you go from a job that provides health insurance to one that doesn't? How are you going to "punish" people who don't buy health insurance? Why in god's name do we need to set up a new series of bureaucratic means testing and applications and proof of lack of insurance coverage elsewhere and all the rest of it when we could just fucking guarantee everyone a basic single-payer health plan funded through some kind of payroll tax?) Maybe with businesses pushing, including businesses that know a lot about the work patterns of people who can't move right into a 9-5 job, we might finally begin to see some sanity on this issue.

Heroines of the Week; or, Sisterhood is Powerful

I'm not a fan of sororities, for reasons that this article makes clear: but I'm a big fan of the sisters at Delta Zeta in DePauw.

Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit. (My emphasis.)
....
This is not the first time that the DePauw chapter of Delta Zeta has stirred controversy. In 1982, it attracted national attention when a black student was not allowed to join. . .
. . . Delta Zeta’s national leadership . . . tried unsuccessfully to block a young woman with a black father and a white mother from joining its DePauw chapter in 1967.

Despite those incidents, the chapter appears to have been home to a diverse community over the years, partly because it has attracted brainy women, including many science and math majors, as well as talented disabled women, without focusing as exclusively as some sororities on potential recruits’ sex appeal, former sorority members said.
....
A few days after the interviews, national representatives took over the house to hold a recruiting event. They asked most members to stay upstairs in their rooms. To welcome freshmen downstairs, they assembled a meet-and-greet team that included several of the women eventually asked to stay in the sorority, along with some slender women invited from the sorority’s chapter at Indiana University, Ms. Holloway said.

“They had these unassuming freshman girls downstairs with these plastic women from Indiana University, and 25 of my sisters hiding upstairs,” she said. “It was so fake, so completely dehumanized. I said, ‘This calls for a little joke.’ ”

Ms. Holloway (the former chapter president, and one of half dozen women who were apparently pretty enough, but quit out of solidarity with their less-Barbiesque sisters--ed.) put on a wig and some John Lennon rose-colored glasses, burst through the front door during the recruitment event, and skipped around singing “Ooooh! Delta Zeta!” and other chants.

The face of one of the national representatives, she recalled, “was like I’d run over her puppy with my car.”

I love Ms. Holloway, and all the De Pauw women who decided not to put up with Delta Zeta's sexist bullshit. If you read in between the lines of the news story, it's fabulous: they kicked out a computer science major with the research skills to go track down evidence of past discrimination in the library; a junior with the organizational skills and chutzpah to put together an open meeting at the student union to tell the DePauw student body what had really happened; and the editor of the DePauw student paper (what were they thinking?!?).

If Delta Zeta wanted to do a scientific experiment to raise the consciousness of smart, ambitious, accomplished young women, they couldn't have done a better job. I predict that the DePauw students will go on to kick ass and take names for the rest of their lives.

(I couldn't find pictures of the entire sorority chapter; the university--which is on the side of good here--seems to have disabled or moved the page, understandably enough. The two pictures above were the only ones I could find of women named in the article. Meet Kate Holloway (top left), a media fellow at DePauw and the former chapter president, she of the John Lennon glasses and wig--the picture's taken from an announcement that she's doing an internship at USA Today, leading me to suspect she's got something to do with the story hitting the NYT; and Erin Swisshelm, a science research fellow at DePauw, for chrissake (take note, Larry Summers), who is one of the six that quit out of feminist solidarity. Kudos, ladies: you're an example to us all.)

Sorry about the picture

That's gotta be excruciatingly painful. Be warned that the top pic in this link is potentially even worse--although the link itself is to a fairly interesting thumbnail sketch of the history of bras and boobs, by a woman who has just written a forthcoming book on the subject. (Why didn't I get an advance copy? Hmph.)

Link courtesy the lovely Miss Belle over at John & Belle's place. And yeah, I know it should be "Ms," technically, but somehow "Miss" with people's first names just sounds right, regardless.

Game, set--match

Finally women will be paid the same as men in at least one field--Wimbledon. Kudos and thanks due to Billie Jean King, who's been fighting for this forever, and Venus Williams, who took it up in the last few years according to the NYT.

With any luck the world will be as gracious as Bobby Riggs was when Billie Jean kicked his ass down in Texas.

Le sigh

Annoyed, again, by Pseudonymous Kid's teacher. PK has apparently been hiding unfinished schoolwork in his desk, which she discovered on Tuesday and sent home a bunch of stuff to be turned in today. Unfortunately, PK's homework was also due today, and it's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the primary problem with homework is not that he blows it off, but that if/when he does it, he's incredibly conscientious and takes hours drawing detailed little pictures, making up spelling sentences that are far wordier and more complicated than they need to be--but funnier or more interesting than "The boat went up the coast" (my suggestion for a twofer sentence dealing with the "oa" sound).

So the poor kid's in an absolute anxious crying fit all morning because his extra schoolwork isn't done today, I'm reassuring him repeatedly that it really will be okay, I've sent a note explaining to the teacher, everyone falls behind sometimes--did you know that Mrs. Smith herself confessed to me before Thanksgiving that she told us not to send the Tgiving week homework back because she was too behind to grade it? (this, at least, elicited a laugh), her job, like mine and Papa's, is to help you learn and so when she reads the note it will all be okay, don't worry honey--and it's just not working. So finally I end up just saying, look, sweetie, you need to be brave and we'll go to school together and I'll talk to Mrs. Smith and you'll see, it'll be okay.

Which basically it was, of course. What is she going to say to a parent who says the work will be done over the weekend? But she also does the raised eyebrow, "but don't hide any more work in your desk" thing, and when I say to her, he's been very scared of getting into trouble, she says, "oh, I don't think he's scared, I think he just wants to go out to recess instead of staying in to finish his work."

Bah, I want to strangle her. Obviously, in the moment of hiding the work, that's the case; but the problem is that as it builds up, he starts to feel incredibly guilty and terrified of getting in trouble, and the last thing that's going to help him is scolding him about it instead of being good humored and telling him not to be silly and hide his work but to let her know and she and he and we will somehow come up with a solution (he can finish it at home, he can sit at a table away from his friends while he's working, whatever).

All I can do is keep repeating to myself: "next year he'll be in the open classroom program. Next year he'll be in the open classroom program."

In the meantime, though, I have to figure out how I'm going to make sure he gets all this goddamn extra work done over the weekend without traumatizing him.

He's so destined for graduate school. Poor kid.

Are men the problem with porn?

Okay, time for the porn discussion, part two: what about the guys--who are, after all, the usual producers and customers of the stuff. Personally, I'm less interested in discussing whether or not mainstream, presumably man-focused porn is aesthetically revolting (no duh) than whether or not the simple fact that men control the industry as both suppliers and consumers is the major problem, and if so why and what does this mean? Do y'all think that men = "the patriarchy"? Is it that men, by and large, fear/dislike women's "control" of sexuality and this expresses itself in gross misogynistic imagery? Is it theoretically possible for porn to be "woman friendly," or is porn's indivisibilty from the patriarchy a function, as the blessed Twisty would say, of the fact that "sex, in our culture, is about the sublimation of the male boner"? (Here's another good Twisty post about strip clubs, by the way.)

For the record, I think Twisty is a damn good analyist of patriarchy as cultural construct, and though--in the end--I am not the radical feminist she is, I agree with her intellectually about a lot of things, though I differ from her primarily, I think, in terms of being more realistic (pessimistic? defeatist?) about the false consciousness gap. Which is to say, while strictly speaking she's right that sexuality in the world as we know it is irretrievably compromised by sexism--so much so that imagining a brave new world of feminist sexuality is probably beyond our abilities, at least for us straight chicks--I'm usually more interested in the ways that we negotiate this state of affairs more than I am in pointing it out. Which is to say, no bashing of feminists, radical or otherwise, as sex-phobic or any of that nonsense, please.

Check it out

If you don't already know about the WIMN site--that's "Women in Media and News," by the way--you should go check it out. High time someone started a site for feminist media analysis and criticism. (That's criticism in the academic sense, meaning analysis and critical thinking, rather than the colloquial meaning of griping and complaining. Not that there's anything wrong with that.) They've even got a blog.

So far, so good

I have to admit I am having a whale of a time stirring the shit over at my new gig. And I'm quite willing to concede that, so far, the bulk of the male commenters are, indeed, fairly run-of-the-mill judgmental jackasses.

Which serves, I hope, as a nice segue into the topic demanded by a few of you: porn, and its discontents. I wonder if we can talk about it from the point of view of women, rather than trying to channel (or infer) the p.o.v. of male consumers. Let's write them off (for now) as pricks. I realize that many folks are going to want to argue that it's *impossible* to discuss porn without thinking about the male p.o.v., since it's inherent in the system; but let's hold that off for part two of the discussion, if we can, and use this post just to talk about porn* from the point of view of women, as either subjects, consumers, or implied subjects, if anyone wants to make that case. Of course, guys can be the subjects of porn, too, so if any of you have been male strippers or whathaveyou, feel free to weigh in.

*Let's agree from the outset include soft core and hard core visual images, films, stripping, and phone sex--that is, sex work that involves real people's real bodies, but doesn't (necessarily) mean prostitution. I realize it's a blurry line, especially if we're talking about hard core porn, but let's at least try.

Those Words Are Not For Children

Oh look, there's a new furor over children being too delicate to know what their body parts are called. This time, it's about a book--a Newbery Award winner, no less--that uses the word 'scrotum.' Once.

“I don’t think our teachers, or myself, want to do that vocabulary lesson,” says one librarian.

That right there is who they're protecting. Bah. I hate these people.

Summertime, and the living is sleepy

God, all I want to do is nap. But it's too hot to nap. Pseudonymous Kid and I had a water balloon fight in the back yard, and now he's making Darth Vader look like a butterfly (with his cape) and singing a little song about butterflies flying very very high. Later perhaps we will go buy a freaking coffee table, which we've needed since FOREVER. And maybe go to the nearby monarch butterfly habitat. Or the beach. Or something.

Also, honestly, I so don't want to reopen the "you suck, you exploitative whore" discussion, but wouldn't you think that folks who pay money to join SG would espouse libertarianish, what-people-choose-to-do-with-their-bodies-is-none-of-your-business values? And that folks with those values would realize that throwing drug users in jail for being pregnant is maybe a wee bit problematic?

Thus endeth another content-free blog post.

What to do with the kids?!?

Dunno about all you snowbound folks, but we're going to the beach this weekend. HAH!

Also, it's come to my attention that, hard as it is to believe, not every parent of small children has seen Lilo and Stitch. This is a heinous crime. In fact, even if you don't have small children, you should watch it. It's the most creative and terrific movie, I think, Disney's ever done.

Plus, it's a three-day weekend. If you're in snowland, you don't want to go outside anyway: pop some corn and make some hot chocolate and enjoy the beach scenes and dream of Hawaii. If you're lucky like me, use it to buy time to wake up in the mid-morning, or else watch it when you get back from the beach and have a couple hours to kill before bedtime.

Girly Man

My state's famed governator? A shrinking violet, by his own account:

Schwarzenegger said Thursday that if another gay marriage measure goes on the California ballot in the future, "the people can make the decision."

"They should make the decision," he said. "But it should not be me or the Legislature."

Translation: I'm a coward.

Annoy me and I'll kick your ass

. . . with my new pink Chucks! Which my doctor liked this morning, and which Pseudonymous Kid envies.

I've promised to take PK shoe shopping this weekend.

We've got it, but you can't buy it. HAHAHAHA!

Plan B is now legally available over the counter, and it's Wal-Mart policy to must stock it.

But there are still ignorant pharmacists who won't give it out.

This month, Tashina Byrd, her boyfriend and her 4-year-old son headed to a Springfield Wal-Mart to pick up some things, including Plan B.
....
When the pharmacy attendant asked pharmacist Brent Beams about it, "He shook his head and laughed," Byrd said.

The attendant told them the store had Plan B but that nobody would give it to them, the couple said.
....
Reached last week at the pharmacy, Beams explained his position: "I believe in preserving life, and I do not believe in ending life, and life begins at conception."

Neither the pharmacy attendant nor the store manager would sell it to her, despite Wal-Mart's policy that "any Wal-Mart worker who does not feel comfortable dispensing a product to refer customers to another pharmacist, pharmacy worker or sales associate."

Luckily, Byrd is a smart chica:

Byrd wrote Gov. Ted Strickland and contacted NARAL Pro-Choice America and Wal-Mart Watch, an activist group that seeks to change the retailer’s practices.

"I could go to church if I wanted to be told how to live my life," she said.

The Ohio journalists covering the case are smart, too: the reporter for the Columbus Dispatch points out that Plan B "prevents pregnancy and . . . is not the abortion pill, RU-486." Likewise, the Dayton Daily News reports that

The pharmacist could have used the same rationale to decline to fill Byrd's birth-control prescription. Plan B isn't the abortion-pill RU 486, which must be dispensed from a doctor's office. It doesn't end a pregnancy; it prevents a pregnancy from taking place.

Some pharmacists say that the problem is a hold up in an FDA educational plan to instruct pharmacists about the drug.

Reporters can figure it out. What's the hold up, pharmacists?

You can write a letter to Wal-Mart about this incident here.

Happy Valentine's Day

Hey, all you bitter singles and contented couples, crabby couples and smug singles! If you haven't spent too much already on hiked-up roses and overpriced chocolates, you might slip a few bucks over to the folks Scarleteen. If you can afford $75, Heather Corinna will send you a signed copy of her new book S.E.X.

You probably know already that Scarleteen is one of the few places on the web where young folks (or old ones, really--they don't discriminate) can go to get sound advice and information about sex and sexuality, the kind of stuff they don't teach in school any more.

So if you can, spare a few bucks to keep the place up and running.

Cross-posted over at Suicide Girls, because I'm a sellout.

Bill Donohue, abuser

From Frances Kissling's mouth to God's ears:

the glee with which he has gone after these women marks him as an abuser.

Indeed. And obviously, so are many of his supporters.

Fuck all those fucking bullies. St. Mary Magdalene is ashamed of your calumny and intimidation tactics. Get your asses to confession, you fucking tormentors.

For the record, Bill Donohue is a misogynist bigot

Given that the man's primary hangups are about abortion and fags, it's pretty clear that he's a sexist motherfucker. So his campaign against Amanda and Shakes Sis for supposed "Anti-Catholicism" (read: they both support women's reproductive rights, as do a lot of Catholics, including yours truly) is a naked attempt to smack down uppity women who dare to be angry at men who want to use "God" to control us.

Donohue the misogynist:

Tirade against Joan Osborne for daring to suggest that God might become human--which is, after all, at the center of Catholic belief.

Donohue the anti-Catholic:

Campaign against the televison show Nothing Sacred (See also this.)

Attacks on Kevin Smith's film Dogma.

Donohue the homophobic apologist for priests molesting children:

the crisis in the Catholic Church was "a homosexual scandal, not a pedophilia scandal. . . .It's homosexuals" who are responsible for the abuse.

Donohue the anti-Semite:

"Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular"

"The Bush administration has suffered a loss of will and... they have capitulated to the worst elements in our culture"

Donohue the racist:

"And then they wonder why so many people don't trust the Muslims when it comes to liberty, because they will abuse it. In this country, we prize freedom of religion. They abhor it."

Donohue the bully:

"there are people in Hollywood, not all of them, but there are some people who are nothing more than harlots" who "will do anything for the buck. . . . If you asked them to sodomize their own mother in a movie, they would do so, and they would do it with a smile on their face."

"Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions." (?!?!?)

If you're a Catholic, and a feminist, it's time to write some letters to your newspaper, or to the NYT, or to the Edwards campaign, or to Donohue's own fucked-up organization, saying clearly that he does not speak for you.

Excellent news!

Napping 3x/week reduces your chance of heart disease!

So if I smoke a little (down to 3-4/day, before y'all start jumping my shit), but also nap several times a week, it all evens out, right? I'll live forever!

Legal marriage for all

An actual, if anonymous, lesbian asks:

May I humbly suggest to whomever may be the naming-powers-that-be that name of this week be changed to "Freedom to have one's marriage legally recognized" week?

I've *been* married for 15 years. I just live in a part of the world in which my marriage is not legally recognized. What's missing is neither commitment, nor 'social recognition' (my friends recognize my spouse as such, and those who do not are not my friends).

What is missing is the legal protection involved in knowing, e.g., that I will be able to see, get medical information about, and be able to make decisions on behalf of, my spouse if she's ever in hospital, g-d forbid have her body shipped home for burial if something should happen to her while she's away, knowledge that our wills will be respected for what they say (in e.g. Virginia there have been threats by certain groups to have even such things as wills declared invalid on their face, on account of their being attempts to create through contract something "similar to" the legal institution of marriage, and/or attempts to create through contract "the legal incidents of marriage"), etc. etc.

We are lucky enough to be well off enough to afford a stack of legal documents (we're upwards of 25 each, at this point) that would provide some leverage in court under such horrible circumstances. But leverage is far short of the guarantee afforded couples whose marriages are legally recognized. Brass tacks, folks.

Indeed. Let me also add a few things I've learned from talking to lesbian friends with kids: having to (pay to) "adopt" your own children, if you're not the birth mother; having to pay for separate health care coverage for your partner (who isn't your legal "husband" or "wife") and children, if your employer offers it at all; having to limit where you can accept jobs based on whether your family is merely denied legal equality, or likely to be actively persecuted by legislators who want to take your children away.

Pseudonymous Kid's first kiss

In honor of Freedom to Marry Week, this story:

PK came home the other day from TaeKwonDo, which he went to with the 13yo girl across the street (who has started babysitting three afternoons a week after school, gracias a dios!). After she'd left, he said to me, "um, Mama?"
Me: Yes?
PK: You know Tai?
Me: Your TKD friend, yes.
PK, whispers: We kissed each other today.
Me: You did?!?
PK, a little embarrassed, a little proud: Yeah--he kissed me first, and then I tried to kiss him, but he wouldn't let me, but then I kept trying, and eventually I did.
Me: Well, good for you boys. Why'd you do this?
PK: To embarrass each other.
Me: I see. Did anyone notice?
PK: No, I don't think so. Tai said he was going to tell, but then he didn't.
Me: Well, cool. I'm glad you boys like each other.

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Announcement time! I've just started a new gig as a Culture Editor at the Suicide Girls News Blog. By way of drumming up hits, my first post there is a summary of how, exactly, Plan B works, something I've wanted to write up in one easily linked post for a while now. Mostly I'll be writing about repro rights stuff over there; I'm already thinking it'll be an interesting task to find my voice for a different kind of site.

I've also started doing the occasional post over at The Valve, where I can already tell that my voice is going to be sort of tongue-permanently-in-cheek; we'll see if the Very Serious Project of Literary Blogging can handle a monkey in the drawing room once in a while. Both there and at The Long 18th, another academic blog, I'm writing under a different name; halfway observant readers will figure it out, but for the record (and as per my MLA talk), the writer-persona distinction is one that matters to me and that I enjoy playing with, so here's hoping no one conflates the two or ruins the fun of the game of "everyone who wants to, knows, but we all enjoy pretending not to."

Of course, the public/private spheres will overlap, and I realize that by blogging for Suicide Girls I've pretty much given up any chance I might've had to be hired by the 2016 Pelosi for President campaign. But if Gloria Steinem could be a Playboy Bunny, I can darn well write for a hipster softcore pinup site. As Ezra said not too long ago, anyone who wants to crap on a liberal blogger for getting paid can bite me. (Ezra didn't actually say that; I'm summarizing.) And, since I'm a mass of contradictions, I not only want to maintain the fiction of my writer/persona distinction, I also want to blur the lines between "appropriate" and "inappropriate" discourse--so it seems to me a noted bitchy feminist writing feminist content on a softcore site that itself is playing around with the issue of where, exactly, sexual desire and porn interact with and part ways from feminism, is an interesting and worthwhile project.

Heroine of the week

You know, I'm not a sports fan. So I'd never heard of Courtney Paris until I saw this article in the NYT, about women athletes and weight.

Which is too bad. The gist of the article is that some women's college teams don't publish their players' weight--some don't even measure it--because, as we all know, the issue of weight is a vexed one, particularly for women. Instead of focusing on the scale, these coaches say they prefer to focus on fitness and performance. Which is, imho, fan-fucking-tastic. If you're fit and healthy how much you weigh doesn't matter.

The N.C.A.A. recommends that women not be weighed on a regular basis, said Dr. Ron A. Thompson, a psychologist and eating-disorder therapist in Bloomington, Ind., who consults with the collegiate association. He said he opposed making weights public and the practice of weighing female athletes. Lining athletes up for weigh-ins is a form of “public degradation,” Thompson said.

“Weighing doesn’t accomplish anything, and it can cause undue anxiety and even trigger unhealthy weight-loss practices,” Thompson wrote in an e-mail message.

It's possible, of course, to be extremely athletic and still have underlying health issues, just as it's possible to be thin and hawt and be in absolutely abominable health. And surely athletes in demanding sports take a beating on their joints, which presumably is tougher if your body mass is greater. But those are health and performance issues; they have nothing to do with how your body looks or what the number on the scale says.

I wanted to link this article, initially, because I am sick and tired of getting into arguments with people who say "but being fat just isn't healthy" when you try to get them to knock off the fussing about their (or someone else's) weight. God knows newspapers, magazines, doctors, and researchers have emphasized the weight=health issue forever, so it's no wonder so many people believe this. Thank god, then, for women's sports, where finally we can talk about and admire women's bodies in terms of what they do, rather than in terms of what can be done to them, how they look, or what's wrong with them.

But once I started writing, I realized, damn, that's fucked up. Paris is a hell of an athlete--"last season as a freshman she became the first collegiate player, man or woman, to collect at least 700 points, 500 rebounds and 100 blocked shots in a season"--and the only reason I've heard of her is because I clicked on a story about women and weight in the NYT? We've got to, as a culture, get our heads out of our asses. Courtney Paris oughta be better-known than Paris Hilton.* Maybe in four years, when she's playing for the WNBA, she will be.

In the meantime, though, I'm going to make a point of looking at the sports pages before, maybe instead of, the style section.

*I tried to find a YouTube video of Courtney in action. Nothing. You don't want to know what I found instead.

All right, you pussies

The work day's now effectively over on the east coast, and surely those of you out west with me are well into your procrastination work day, but since a few people have griped . . . oh, the irony! It's educational! It's feminist! . . . about the image in the post below this one, those of you who have not yet read it are hereby warned that it is Not Safe for Prudish Workplaces.

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Now let's count how many comments it'll take before someone objects to my using the word "pussy" in the title.

Ironic

Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues" is such an established feature of campus life that it's become kinda boring. Sort of like the whole issue it addresses: women shouldn't be ashamed of their vaginas (or vulvas or clits or any of the rest of it), our society is fucked up, we're fucked up, etc. I have to admit that my attitude towards the play has always been "I'm glad it's there, and good for the undergrads who will carry the flag for it, but, yawn." Maybe that makes me a bad person.

But whatever. Some people need to learn about vaginas, and other people need to learn about literary devices.

The Hoohah Monologues is a replacement title for The Vagina Monologues -- a well-known play about that part of the female body.

"We decided we would just use child slang for it. That's how we decided on Hoohah Monologues," Pfanenstiel said.

They did this after a driver who saw it complained to the theater, saying she was upset that her niece saw it.

"I'm on the phone and asked 'What did you tell her?' She's like, 'I'm offended I had to answer the question,'" Pfanenstiel said.

Some parents said they applaud the title change.

Um, my fellow parents? If you're embarrassed to name your daughters own body parts, or tell your sons where they came from, then you're precisely the audience for the play. Hire a babysitter and buy a ticket.


(By the way, do you know how hard it is to find an image of a vulva that isn't (1) a euphemistic drawing; (2) pornographic; (3) a scientific diagram? Probably I should just have gotten out the camera, but I'm lazy.)

(Also, I admit that "vagina" isn't my favorite word, but that's mostly because it sounds clinical and that whole sheath-for-sword thing. Cunt is a better word for it.)

More frivolity

I haven't done one if these in a jillion years, but this one strikes me as kinda nifty.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The West   Your accent is the lowest common denominator of American speech. Unless you're a SoCal surfer, no one thinks you have an accent. And really, you may not even be from the West at all, you could easily be from Florida or one of those big Southern cities like Dallas or Atlanta.
The Midland
Boston
North Central
Philadelphia
The Northeast
The South
The Inland North
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

I found it over at Stanley's blog.

Time for a nonsense post

I'm having an anxious day, so let's all amuse me by doing something frivolous. Over at my not-so-secret online hangout, cerebrocrat suggested the collective noun "a pride of lesbians." I dismissed that as both patriarchal and way too rainbow flaggy, and countered with "a snatch of lesbians." The discussion continues.

Let's broaden it a bit over here, though. Collective nouns for groups of things or people that don't yet have them?

Freezing your butts off up there?

All y'all Twin Cities readers, think maybe a nice, hot breakfast sounds like just the thing? Maybe even with completely non-northern yummy buttery grits (no, seriously, grits are good) on the side?

Get yourself out of the house on Saturday, then, and stock up on the yummy, yummy carbs at an all-you-can-eat pancake benefit for the Women's Prison Book Project. It's freaking six bucks, people, for pancakes (buttermilk or vegan), grits, fruit salad, coffee, tea and juice. Three bucks for all the pseudonymous kids out there.

It's at the Walker Community Church, 3104 16th Ave S (Minneapolis), this Saturday, from 8-noon. Go, pig out.

Here's a little bit of extra info about the organization, for the curious. More, of course, at their own website.

Of the more than two million people confined in U.S. prisons and jails, over 150,000 are women. Eighty percent of these women are there for non–violent crimes, such as shoplifting, prostitution, drug related convictions, and fraud. Of the women convicted of violent crimes, the vast majority were convicted for defending themselves or their children from abuse. More than 1/2 of all women in prison are women of color, and two–thirds of women in prison have at least one child under eighteen. Most of these mothers had primary custody of their children before going to prison.

Prison issues are at the core of justice issues, especially for women and children. WPBP provides a link to thousands of women on the inside with people on the outside. We also offer a rare opportunity for a woman in prison to make a choice--what she reads. WPBP does not limit or censor what we send, like many other organizations that send books to people in prison.

factcheckers for everyone!

Not five minutes after the previous post, Amanda at The Center for American Progress drew my--and hence, your--attention to her post at Think Progress. Apparently Veronica Mars--a show I'm willing to bet is a favorite with y'all, it being kinda feminist and shit--is airing an episode tonight in which a character has a "miscarriage" after someone "secretly" gives her Plan B.

So. Let's all just say it together, now, shall we? PLAN B PREVENTS OVULATION. Again, just for good measure. PLAN B PREVENTS OVULATION. It cannot cause a miscarriage. It cannot cause abortion. You cannot miscarry if there is no ovum to fertilize. You cannot, in fact, become pregnant if there is no ovum to fertilize, which is why people take Plan B.

Take a minute to E-mail Paul Hewitt, CWTV's director for publicity (that would be the network Veronica Mars airs on), and tell him so. And remind him that there's a difference between fiction (good) and propaganda (bad). Feel free to include a link to PZ Myers' explanation--he's an actual scientist! Who specializes in embryology, even! Or you can link him to an earlier post of mine on the same subject.

Or you can just send him one of the tshirts over there in the near sidebar.

Never mind folks; someone just emailed me to say that the show's about RU-486.

Dear NRO: hire some factcheckers

God knows we shouldn't be feeding the right-wing distraction machine, but this is too ripe for mockery, and I can't resist.

Dear Kathryn: first, Plan B isn't an abortifacient even by the criteria of the Catholic church. It prevents ovulation. No ovum, no zygote; no zygote, no embryo. Admittedly the church isn't crazy about birth control, either, but Amanda's right that when folks like you try to muddy the water it contributes to the idea that Plan B "kills babies," which just isn't the case--even if you believe that a fertilized ovum is the moral equivalent of a baby. That little line y'all love to quote about how it "may" also prevent implantation? That, you see, is how science talks: there's no proof that it *doesn't* prevent implantation--such proof being impossible to get, since if Plan B works there's nothing to implant. Kinda like how science doesn't say that there's no such thing as god, either, what with it working in the realm of things that can actually be measured and tested. So they put that "may" in there just to be intellectually honest.

Which is a term you might want to look up, by the way. Either that, or you might want to bone up on your Catholic doctrine: the Church has pretty much given up the limbo thing. If you want to get all huffy about anti-Catholicism, you're going to have to find something that actually deals with the actual Catholic church.

I know it's not groundhog day any more, but I live in Southern California

Where are the women pundits? redux

Oh dearie me. We've got another scandal about people with titties daring to be political in public. Or have, dear god! feminist opinions. Or, uh oh, summarizing her position on something she said that people have been misrepresenting.* And, oh my god, she's angry!

Look. If you're going to accuse someone of doctoring evidence, best you make sure you yourself know what you're talking about (see the end of that last post, where Danny admits that (1) the 'deleted' posts seem to have been lost due to technical snafus; and (2) he didn't actually bother to ask Amanda about this before accusing her of being a liar. If you're going to accuse someone of being a slut, don't pretend that doing so is a feminist argument. If you're going to be a dick about intellectual honesty (hello, Professor Johnson), then demonstrate some yourself--the Duke rape case *was* "inspiring to rape apologists," the more so as it seems to have ended up being one of those rare situations where a false rape accusation actually leads to an attempted prosecution--and be careful about enabling commenters who say things like "were Obama Hussein a white person I'm 100% sure he wouldn't be a senator or presidential candidate" and Another strident feminist". These folks don't really help your case that those who were concerned about the racial/feminist repercussions of the Duke case were wrong.

Finally, if you're going to jump all over the shit of someone who's a feminist, and therefore "controversial," think about why you're doing that before you say something stupid.

*Personally, I think pulling the post was a mistake. But based on the snippets KC Johnson is quoting, nothing Amanda said (except leaving out the "alleged" in front of rapists) is actually out of line. The Duke case *did* raise a bunch of issues about credibility and race and feminism, and those things were worth talking about.

All the news that's fit to hide

This is Krugman's column from today's "Times Select." I get that they have to make money. But it fucking pisses me off that they do it by obscuring good journalism. A good op-ed ties together disparate information that, presented as pure "news," can be kinda boring and eye-glazey, and tells people why it matters. That kind of shit shouldn't be hidden. So here it is.

Dear NYT: make people pay to read the fucking Style Section instead.

The Green-Zoning of America

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 5, 2007

One of the best of the many recent books about the Iraq debacle is Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.” The book tells a tale of hopes squandered in the name of politicization and privatization: key jobs in Baghdad’s Green Zone were assigned on the basis of loyalty rather than know-how, while key functions were outsourced to private contractors.

Two recent reports in The New York Times serve as a reminder that the Bush administration has brought the same corruption of governance to the home front. Call it the Green-Zoning of America.

In the first article, The Times reported that a new executive order requires that each agency contain a “regulatory policy office run by a political appointee,” a change that “strengthens the hand of the White House in shaping rules that have, in the past, often been generated by civil servants and scientific experts.” Yesterday, The Times turned to the rapid growth of federal contracting, fed “by a philosophy that encourages outsourcing almost everything government does.”

These are two different pieces of the same story: under the guise of promoting a conservative agenda, the Bush administration has created a supersized version of the 19th-century spoils system.

The blueprint for Bush-era governance was laid out in a January 2001 manifesto from the Heritage Foundation, titled “Taking Charge of Federal Personnel.” The manifesto’s message, in brief, was that the professional civil service should be regarded as the enemy of the new administration’s conservative agenda. And there’s no question that
Heritage’s thinking reflected that of many people on the Bush team.

How should the civil service be defeated? First and foremost, Heritage demanded that politics take precedence over know-how: the new administration “must make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second.”

Second, Heritage called for a big increase in outsourcing—“contracting out as a management strategy.” This would supposedly reduce costs, but it would also have the desirable effect of reducing the total number of civil servants.

The Bush administration energetically put these recommendations into effect. Political loyalists were installed throughout the government, regardless of qualifications. And the administration outsourced many government functions previously considered too sensitive to privatize: yesterday’s Times article begins with the case of CACI International, a private contractor hired, in spite of the obvious conflict of interest, to process cases of incompetence and fraud by private contractors. A few years earlier, CACI provided interrogators at Abu Ghraib.

The ostensible reason for politicizing and privatizing was to promote the conservative ideal of smaller, more efficient government. But the small-government rhetoric was never sincere: from Day 1, the administration set out to create a vast new patronage machine.

Those political appointees chosen for their loyalty, not their expertise, aren’t very good at doing their proper jobs — as all the world learned after Hurricane Katrina struck. But they have been very good at rewarding campaign contributors, from energy companies that benefit from lax regulation of pollution to pharmaceutical companies
that got a Medicare program systematically designed to protect their profits.

And the executive order described by The Times will make it even easier for political appointees to overrule the professionals, tailoring government regulations to suit the interests of companies that support the G.O.P. — or to give lucrative contracts to people with the right connections.

Meanwhile, never mind the idea that outsourcing of government functions should be used to promote competition and save money. The Times reports that “fewer than half of all ‘contract actions’ — new contracts and payments against existing contracts — are now subject to full and open competition,” down from 79 percent in 2001. And many contractors are paid far more than it would cost to do the job with government
employees: those CACI workers processing claims against other contractors cost the government $104 an hour.

What’s truly amazing is how far back we’ve slid in such a short time. The modern civil service system dates back more than a century; in just six years the Bush administration has managed to undo many of that system’s achievements. And the administration still has two years to go.

Friday Cat Blogging

I need to do some blog maintenance stuff over the weekend, so there may or may not be actual new content up while I fiddle with templates, ads, and overdue email.

In the meantime, therefore, I give you this. (Screw it; I've spent 45 minutes trying to get fucking YouTube to add my blog, so you don't get embedded video.) I love big fat ol' tom cats.

Lest you worry about the poor boy, they did find his owner.