Superherosplaining

Full disclosure: I’m writing this on my abbreviated lunch hour and I’m kind of annoyed, so I may not use my words at their best. Carry on.

Second full disclosure – I am not a comic book person. I am nominally a comic book movie person when the movie combines writers/directors/actors I like and seems to produce a story that looks interesting to me. I’ve seen maybe… half (?) of the MCU franchise films. Hard to say because I don’t know how many there have been so far off the top of my head, but hey, I know what “MCU” means! I have like, one toe in the club, right?

So I feel okay talking about this off-message PR tour for “The Avengers: Age of Ultron” from the perspective of someone who’s outside enough not to have opinions about whether, say, Iron Man’s characterization is consistent with a previous storyline. I don’t know if the cast is ill-prepared or just really tired after approximately 47 MCU films in a row, but it seems that the press tour has gone off the rails a bit. Unless a debate about when it’s okay to call someone a “whore” was among the talking points for a billion-dollar family-friendly franchise… which I doubt.

Since I brought him up, let’s start with Mr. Renner. The actor I used to jokingly call Movie Boyfriend. (Emphasis on “used to.”) A week or so ago Renner and Captain America did an interview where they were asked about Black Widow, who has been romantically linked to both of their characters, and apparently now to Hulk in AoU. They both joked that Black Widow was a “slut”and a “whore,” and then Renner went on to say something about Black Widow having a prosthetic leg (Huh?).

The actors rightfully got a lot of criticism on social media for their comments, and immediately issued apologies. Well, one of them did anyway. Chris Evans’ statement was perfect – a succinct “I screwed up and I’m sorry” apology that ended the story. (Takeaway: Everyone should be more like Chris Evans.) Renner……. Yeah, he needs new people. Because “I am sorry that this tasteless joke about a fictional character offended anyone. It was not meant to be serious in any way. Just poking fun during an exhausting and tedious press tour” is a BS attempt at actual contrition and everyone who read it knows that he is not at all sorry.

AND THEN he doubled down on Conan this week, first whining about getting into “internet trouble” and then saying “Mind you, we are talking about a fictional character and fictional behavior, Conan, but if you slept with four of the six Avengers, no matter how much fun you had, you’d be a slut. Just saying. I’d be a slut. Just saying.”

Okay, Jeremy? Shut up. No, no – you don’t need to reply. Just stop talking. You look like an ass. Just saying.

The issue is not one person’s off-the-cuff stupid comment. The issue sure as hell isn’t that he said it about a fictional character. The issue is that actual real-life non-fictional women get this BS thrown in our faces EVERY DAY. Renner’s remarks are basically Why I Don’t Go to Bars Anymore Bingo:

-          You like men, therefore you are a slut.

-          Oh, you don’t want to have sex with me? Fuck you, you’re ugly anyway.

-          What, can’t you take a joke?

-          I mean, I would call a dude a slut, too…….. (except that I don’t.)

Part of the reason this bugs me so much is that Jeremy Renner has always seemed like a thoughtful guy who respects the women in his life. So for that guy to so deeply not get why what he said was hurtful, to the point where he’s eye-rolling fans like me on national television, feels like a betrayal.

Hold on, I need to go back to that “prosthetic leg” thing. I think that might bug me more than the slut/whore thing. That was… really, really awful. Maybe if, the day the Interview Where Stupid Things Were Said had come out, I hadn’t just been reading about the Boston Marathon bombing trial, which included testimony from women my age who are now missing legs and who are coping with life-altering change in their perception of self……. Nope, it would still be really, really awful, regardless.

I must’ve been madder at Jeremy Renner than I thought, because what I really started to write about was Joss Whedon quitting Twitter.  The AoU writer/director took down his profile a few days ago. There was a lot of speculation that he’d been driven away bysocial media criticism of the movie, including the depiction of Black Widow and the merchandising – which largely leaves out the female characters (and over which Whedon has no control btw). Yesterday Whedon told Buzzfeed that he just needed a Twitter break to focus on work. Cool. But then Whedon said this:

“Believe me, I have been attacked by militant feminists since I got on Twitter. That’s something I’m used to. Every breed of feminism is attacking every other breed, and every subsection of liberalism is always busy attacking another subsection of liberalism, because god forbid they should all band together and actually fight for the cause.”

Um. No.

First things first, Joss Whedon is awesome. He’s a role model for writers who want to develop interesting female characters. He’s one of the good guys. And since he’s one of the good guys, I hold him to a higher standard than I would, say, Mike Huckabee. What a lot of male feminist allies don’t seem to get is that being an ally doesn’t make you immune from criticism. If anything, it opens you to more because you’ve basically raised your hand and said “Feminists! You’re awesome! How can I help?” You can’t do that and then get mad when we tell you.

So, a few things – I need to know what Joss means when he says “militant.” Individual women tweeting snark at you is not militancy. And the other thing is – he’s not wrong about people in the same camp picking each other apart. The problem is that what looks like nitpicking when you’re the one being nitpicked is actually how you educate the others under your particular big tent to check their own privilege and be more inclusive of other points of view. And I WISH I could get across to men how rage-inducing it is to be told that the thing you’re concerned about is not worth anyone’s attention because of Other More Pressing Issues, Little Lady. Kind of like with the Bar Bingo above, women get this ALL THE TIME, and we are really tired of constantly having our concerns be brushed aside because a dude doesn’t feel like addressing it.

Guys? Sometimes you just need to stop talking. Sometimes it’s not about you. If enough people are criticizing something you said or did that you notice, and if those people are all saying the same thing, that’s when you need to take a pause and just listen. It’s okay if you don’t completely understand WHY what you said/did was problematic, as long as you acknowledge that it was. Don’t lash out at the mean Internet people, don’t mansplain to me why I’m wrong. Just listen. You might actually learn something.

It’s always something

When I was about seven years old, my favorite movies in the entire world were “Clue” and “Haunted Honeymoon”… I guess because Kid Sara was very into nostalgic 40s-set comedies that look really cheesy now that I’m in my 30s, but that are still awesome.

Anyway, that’s how I knew who Gilda Radner was when she died of ovarian cancer in 1989 at the age of 42. Of course, for me she was “the funny lady from ‘Haunted Honeymoon’” and not “the original SNL cast member,” but I promise that I grew to appreciate her non-“Haunted Honeymoon” work as I grew older. I’m not trying to cast myself as a Radner super-fan, just to say that, when my mom told 9-year-old me that the funny lady from my favorite movie had died, it mattered.

My sisters and I were always pretty goofy. We had a stock of cast-off costume pieces and props with which we developed and performed all manner of skits for our parents, friends, or sometimes just our exceptionally patient Labrador Retriever. (RIP, Bailey.) I mean, most girls are goofy, but at some point a lot of them figure out that people are observing their goofiness and they start feeling self-conscious about it, and they get more into perfume and boys and anything that’s not goofy. But we were unabashedly goofy, and part of the reason for that* is that we had role models like Radner and, as I’ve written before, the cast of “Designing Women” and other TV shows to show us that women could be the goofy, stubborn, vulnerable, sexy and still somehow capable of running entire businesses, whether any men were watching or not.

(*And a giant amount of credit has to go to the amazing parents who exposed us to these movies and TV shows, and who endured our probably-noisy goofy playtime.)

When I wrote above that “it mattered” to me when Radner died, it’s because she was probably the first celebrity whose death I was aware of. What’s it like for a kid who’s told of a death? A kid who’s old enough to understand what death means, I mean. There’s this person you’re used to seeing on a screen and wanting to do what she does because it looks so fun, and you’re only vaguely aware that she’s a real person when she’s not on that screen – and then you learn that she won’t be there anymore. For a kid whose grandparents were still in their 40s and 50s at the time, it my first real sense of this kind of loss.

I thought of all that this week when the news came out that a chapter of Gilda’s Club, the cancer charity founded in Radner’s memory,was considering dropping her name from its title because, supposedly, too many younger patients don’t know who Radner was.

*profanity alert for the faint-hearted*

Damn, that’s some bullshit.

First of all, it’s pretty asinine for a charity to expect top-of-mind name recognition for the person on its letterhead. Pop quiz – Jane Addams, Susan G. Komen, Betty Ford: give me a 100-word bio, no Googling. You probably can’t, and it doesn’t really matter. If your nonprofit depends upon its namesake, as opposed to its mission, to raise funds and awareness, then you have issues and Gilda Radner’s enduring popularity ain’t them.

But the bigger bullshit (I’m making that a proper use of this noun now, okay? Okay.) for me is the idea that anyone under age 30 A) doesn’t know who Radner was, and B) shouldn’t, because, I mean, it has been 20+ years since she died and all.

John Belushi. Andy Kaufman. Lenny Bruce. All funny, and all dead for a long time. Richard Pryor and George Carlin – dead more recently, but still dead, nonetheless. But if you’re an aspiring comedy writer who’s not aware of the work of a single one of these men, pretty much anyone would consider you to be lacking.

Why isn’t Gilda Radner on that list? How is Radner not an automatic when you’re listing the essential comics of the late 20^th century?

The thing is – to her contemporaries, she was. Here’s SteveMartin hosting SNL right after Radner died.  And, folks, when Steve fracking Martin gets choked up over your passing, that’s how you know you’re a genuinely awesome and talented motherfucker.

If you’re reading this and thinking to yourself, “Gilda Radner? Who the hell was Gilda Radner?” then here’s what you need to do: Step 1 – shut up. Step 2 – school yourself. There’s fracking YouTube now, what’s wrong with your clueless ass?

Some women's choices are ok, others not so much

Boy, do I wish I had more time to spend on this one. Because when Democratic strategist-for-hire Hilary Rosen said that Ann Romney "never worked a day in her life," she opened a can of worms that deserves a lot of virtual ink to parse. Let's break it down:

- Rosen does not work for the Obama administration or the president's re-election campaign. The president's actual staff have denounced what Rosen said.

- Rosen has apologized to Ann Romney and clarified that she didn't intend to insult Romney's work as a stay-at-home parent - she says she was only trying to point out that Ann Romney is hardly qualified to speak for women who run households on a hell of a lot less than $20 million+ a year.

- Sorry to burst the bubble of the conservatives who've been desperately scrapping for some talking point to refute the GOP's well-documented and successful war on women, but what Rosen said isn't equivalent in any way to introducing and enacting laws that actually restrict women's freedoms, as opposed to bruising their feelings.

It's important that, once this news cycle blows over, we remember what's really at stake here. It's important that we don't allow one stupid remark by one registered Democrat overshadow the actual record and policy statements of someone currently running to be the Republican party's nominee for president.

Ann Romney's choice to be a full-time stay-at-home parent is perfectly fine, and that's what was best for her family. But let's not forget that a) her family's income is what allowed her to do so, a luxury most American families can't afford, and b) her husband and his party are doing everything they can to make it harder for other families to survive on one income. If Ann Romney really wants stay-at-home parents to be valued and to have the support they need, maybe she should lay off some cable news talking head and have a chat with her husband.

“My career choice was to be a mother and I think all of us need to know we need to respect choices that women make," Ann Romney said today. I have some ideas on where we could start.

Quickie: trouble digesting a digest

Maybe it's too early in the day to be reading stories on federal policy fights... I just just stick to scanning headlines over my first cup of coffee, I guess. Because I've read parts of this article five times and I still have questions.

It's time to reauthorize funding for the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, and - as with basically everything these days - that means a lengthy, bitter partisan fight in Congress over something that most of us thought was pretty well settled some time ago. I can sympathize with Republicans who have issues with new provisions in the legislation and who rightly worry that voicing any criticism will lead to yet another week of "Republicans Hate Women!!!" headlines. (Here's where having some capital with women could come in handy. Capital y'all maybe shouldn't have wasted on forced ultrasound bills, personhood amendments and calling us sluts. Just saying.) So, what are the Republicans' objections?

The legislation would continue existing grant programs to local law enforcement and battered women shelters, but would expand efforts to reach Indian tribes and rural areas. It would increase the availability of free legal assistance to victims of domestic violence, extend the definition of violence against women to include stalking, and provide training for civil and criminal court personnel to deal with families with a history of violence. It would also allow more battered illegal immigrants to claim temporary visas, and would include same-sex couples in programs for domestic violence.

Republicans say the measure, under the cloak of battered women, unnecessarily expands immigration avenues by creating new definitions for immigrant victims to claim battery. More important, they say, it fails to put in safeguards to ensure that domestic violence grants are being well spent. It also dilutes the focus on domestic violence by expanding protections to new groups, like same-sex couples, they say.

Okay, I can see why the GOP would take issue with anything immigration-related, because that's just one of their things. But it's the "diluting the focus" thing I don't understand. How does reaching MORE domestic violence victims "dilute" a program whose sole purpose is reaching domestic violence victims? That's like turning away starving children from a soup kitchen by saying, "Sorry, kids. This is only for starving children." Change the name of the bill, if it's that big a deal, from the Violence Against Women Act to something like Extra Funding for Programs to Help Anyone Who's Getting Physically Abused at Home Act. EFPHAWGPAHA should work just find for the literal-minded Senator Blunt, I'd think.

Again, because it's too early in the morning, I can't tell if I'm the only one who had this reaction, or if the reporter who wrote it would've dearly loved to have had space to pin down Senator Blunt, et al. I want a longer story about this, please. One that I can read on my lunch hour.

What's so scary about the Girl Scouts?

You know, I don't like the stereotype that a little of liberals have that conservatives are anti-woman. Like any stereotype, it's unfair and oversimplified. But people like Republican Congressman Bob Morris of Indiana don't make it easy on me.

The same week that my long-anticipated Thin Mints and Shortbread cookies finally arrived (yay!), Rep. Morris wrote a letter to his Congressional colleagues encouraging them to oppose a resolution honoring the Girl Scouts on their 100th anniversary. They call these "nonbinding" resolutions because they have pretty much zero effect on anything other than making whoever's being honored feel "Aw, Congress gave me a shout-out!" They usually pass unanimously, and are often good ways for Congresscritters to do non-political favors for one another, i.e., "Well, if I vote for your oil pipeline incentive bill my progressive constituents will fry me alive, but I can totally get behind your resolution to recognize the contribution of Western Pennsylvania llama farmers to ska music." So, in other words, opposing one of these is kind of tacky. Very bad Congressional etiquette.

Morris doesn't want to high-five the Girl Scouts because, per his letter (based on his highly thorough Internet research), they are the tactical arm of Planned Parenthood - whatever that means - and that the organization sexualizes young girls.

The Girl Scouts have no relationship of any kind with Planned Parenthood. Period. And yet lots of people besides Morris seem to think otherwise. Why? Why is it so easy to believe that a social/service group for young women is in league with a medical provider? And why would someone make that connection in the first place?

I think the answer lies in Morris's "sexualization" comment (also not true), and in another statement from the letter, that the Girl Scouts have "been subverted in the name of liberal progressive politics and the destruction of traditional American family values."

I was a Girl Scout starting in fifth grade, up through maybe eighth grade. My mother led our troop, which also included my older sister Maria; a few years later Mom would help lead my youngest sister Elizabeth's Brownie troop. Mom was from Georgia, and her ultimate goal was fort he troop to raise enough money to take a trip to founder Juliette Gordon Low's birthplace in Savannah, like her own Girl Scout troop had done.

I don't know how other Girl Scouts did things, but our troop was in everything together. We earned patches together, did service projects together and went camping together. Looking back, I can better appreciate how many different types of girls were in our troop. We didn't all have mothers who had the free time to volunteer with the troop's activities, and most of our families didn't have a lot of money. If we couldn't figure out a way for everyone to take part in something, than we didn't do it.

Wait, that probably sounds socialist to Rep. Morris. What it actually taught me was to understand that not everybody had the same privileges that I did. It taught me not to say, "Well, I can afford to do this, so forget you."

Here's what else I learned:
- how to change a tire, something I recently discovered most of the people in my office can't do (and which came in handy not long after we earned our automotive car patch when we got a flat tire on a group trip to Carowinds)
- that women are perfectly capable of hacking rattlesnakes to death with a rake
- how to entertain ourselves in a cabin with no TV
- confidence, or whatever it takes for an 11-year-old girl to ask perfect strangers to buy your - it has to be said - overpriced cookies.

I also learned more intangible things, like how important it is to pitch in so that no one person gets stuck striking the tent, carrying the heavy stuff, etc., or how to take responsibility for your actions. Unlike our local Boy Scout troop, we didn't get funding from a lot of groups in our town; that was a sad, but ultimately a valuable lesson to learn as well.

Speaking of the Boy Scouts, my understanding from my male friends, and from seeing my nephew get involved once he was old enough, is that scouting was just as empowering an experience for them as Girl Scouts was for me. But I never hear anyone say that the Boy Scouts are "sexualizing" young men.

If anything, the Girl Scouts do the exact opposite. We live in a culture that still teaches young women that our only value is as sex objects or baby-makers. The Girl Scouts was the first place that a lot of us learned that we could be so much more. (Maybe that's what Morris objects to?)

He's backed down from his earlier position, but not by much. Thankfully, everyone else in Congress had the sense to ignore him and vote for the resolution anyway. Cookies for them, but not for this very nasty man from Indiana.

Fellas, I love you... but it's time for you to shut up

So, this...



...is funny because it flips reality. It's also sad because of the reality that it flips. Namely, that in 2012, we have individuals, Congresspeople and actual candidates for the presidency publicly debating women's sexual health, when no one outside of America's comedians would broach doing the same for men's sexual health.

Don't shake your head at me, man-reader. You know what? I love my male friends, the feminist ally ones especially. But after a month that saw the Komen/Planned Parenthood thing, the health insurance provider/contraceptive thing and its sequel, the Congressional panel on contraceptives with no women on it thing, I'm pretty tapped out on male opinions regarding things that affect me and that don't affect them.

No offense, it's a free country, and blah blah blah, but I've discovered that even the most enlightened man has a point where he hits his "admitting my own privilege" limit and starts patting on my head and telling me how much worse the women in Afghanistan have it.

*profanity alert*

FUCK THAT. I am a human fucking being, and my citizenship and my vote count for just as much as yours do. When Congress and people who want to be in charge of negotiating the next Cuban Missile Crisis find time out of their days to waste taxpayer time on your testicles, then you can talk. Right now you can buy condoms in every goddamn gas station bathroom in this country and nobody gives a shit, so don't fucking pretend you know what it's like to be me.

You don't know what it's like to take it for granted that everything about your body is open for public debate, from how you have your children to how you avoid having children. (Unless you're gay, which is a whole 'nother category of MIND YOUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS.) When you ask your doctor for that little blue pill, you don't have to worry about swearing that you're only going to use it to fuck your wife. It probably never crosses your mind that your insurance company might not cover your boner pills. You don't think for a second that some fundie state representative will pass a law keeping your doctor from treating you the way his/her education and experience dictate. Because your body isn't up for public debate.

Mine is. And I'm fucking over it. If I decide, and my doctor concurs, that a medicine or medical procedure is best for me, there are individuals who would keep me from acting on that. More seriously, there are state and national legislators who would do the same. This is EVERY DAY in my life, and in that of all women in this ostensibly free country.

I didn't make reproductive rights a political issue. The people - sorry to stereotype, but pretty much universally Republicans - who swept into office promising jobs and fiscal restraint have instead wasted no time passing laws restricting access to abortion and contraception and, in Virginia last week, pretty much mandating state-sponsored rape-via-camera dildo*. They're the ones who made this political.

*watch if you think that statement was hyperbolicious

And they've done so largely without input from women. No wonder. In this country, when a woman points out that men are not, in fact, all knowing, we get that little head-pat. An eye roll if we keep it up. Maybe even the b-word. Most of us don't relish CONSTANTLY having to inform the men in our lives of the most basic facts.

Fuck that. I love you guys, but you don't know what you're talking about. If you'd like me to enlighten you about specifics, drop me a line and I'll be glad to do so. I mean, if women were 90 percent of the people making public policy decisions, and there were an issue that pretty much exclusively affected men, I'd consider it my duty to ask them what they thought.

So, men - I love you, but you need to shut up now. You need to listen to the women in your lives and that it's your job to represent. We don't all think the same way, sure. But we all know a hell of a lot more about this stuff than you do.

What color ribbon do cowardly BS-artists wear?

Last year at my new office's Christmas party, we did that "dirty Santa" game and I ended up with a pink fold-up umbrella. You can never have too many fold-up umbrellas, even though I'm not crazy about pink. But it turns out that it wasn't just any pink umbrella... it was a "breast cancer awareness" pink umbrella, complete with a little fuschia ribbon drawn on it.

And my coworkers were all "You got an umbrella! Oh look, it's a BREAST CANCER AWARENESS umbrella!" as if it's extra-good at repelling raindrops. And I was kind of... eh.

Here's something I've never written about because I honestly feel a little dickish saying it, I do: I frakking hate all those pink "breast cancer awareness" products. Pink kitchen utensils, pink shoes, pink purses, entire pink cars. Of course it's a good thing that people are aware of cancer and how to detect it early - particularly breast cancer, which women and their doctors were so squeamish about addressing until very recently. And the Susan G. Komen Foundation has become the most visible symbol of breast cancer awareness-raising. Their funding and, yes, all that pink, has saved lives.

But you know who else saves lives? Planned Parenthood. Every year, PP performs between 700,000 and 800,000 mammograms*, pap smears and other preventative exams on women, most of them low-income. PP serves the exact population who are more likely to die from treatable cancers because they don't get treatment until it's too late, usually because they don't have health insurance coverage.

EDIT: PP doesn't do mammograms themselves, apparently. But they do basic breast exams and offer referrals to doctors who do mammograms.

But because PP also performs abortions and provides other reproductive care for (again, usually low-income women), Komen has announced that it's pulling funding from one of the largest health care providers in this country.

They have every right to do that; it's their money. But the next time you get an appeal for Komen donations that swears that this foundation is the No. 1 advocate for women's health, you'll now know for sure that they're full of it. Komen's leaders proved today that their top concern is politics, not preventing cancer. They're no different than the "pro-life" people who do everything in their power to eliminate funding for those programs that actually prevent unplanned pregnancy.

But, hey, at least now my pinkwash-hating conscience is clear. Your pink spatula did not save a single woman's life today. But Planned Parenthood did.

Men behaving badly, and all the other people who have to clean up after them

When I read yesterday for the first time an opinion commentator writing that Penn State doesn't have many other options other than to ask Joe Paterno to resign, and when I read today that this might actually be in the works, my first reaction was, "Well, this sucks." It's sad that Paterno's decades-long career might end because he may have helped cover up a former colleague's sexual abuse of children (which I refuse to refer to as a "sex scandal" - "sex scandals" are between consenting adults, not predators and children).

But then the other half of my Gemini brain immediately swooped in pointing out that sympathy should be reserved for the children here, not grown men who should've known better. Ok, other half, that's true. Sure, Paterno made choices and now he has to deal with the consequences. But I can still make room in my mind and my heart for the thousands of Penn State alums, former players, and of course the families of the people involved, because it's a terrible feeling to realize that the person you've admired for almost 50 years maybe isn't that admirable.

That's nothing compared to the loss of innocence that the children assistant coach Jerry Sandusky is accused of assaulting must have gone through. Sexual assault is always heinous, but especially so in cases like this, or the many Catholic priest abuse cases, where the child victim belongs to a culture that tells him or her that this particular grown-up has special authority. Because what goes through that child's mind is a litany of thoughts like "This person is always right, therefore I must have been the one who did something wrong." Even if the child realizes that abuse has happened, who's going to believe a kid over a minor deity like a Penn State football coach?

The more authority you have, the more responsibility you have not to abuse it.

This week, two of the women who accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment several years ago have "gone public" - one by choice, with an attorney and a press conference, and one against her will. This morning on the radio, there was a discussion of how this expanding harassment issue will affect Cain, and someone brought up Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers. Again, a consensual relationship is NOT the same thing as non-consensual comments or behavior... so Clinton/Flowers isn't at all applicable here.

There are plenty of places on the 'net to discuss what the revelations of these allegations might do to Cain's presidential candidacy, but I relate more to the women involved. I'm not in a position to weigh in on what happened all those years ago. But I can relate to going through something of that nature, doing the hard work of moving on with your life, and then dreading what will happen to your put-back-together life when, at any point decades from now, someone in the press gets ahold of it.

I can also relate to the children in the Penn State case. What's getting lost (or under-reported) here is that this abuse happened over a 15-year period. Y'all know what happened to me, a little over four years ago. The guy in my case also had very close ties to a college athletic program, with a lot of people who idolize and idealize the program. When I'd see those news stories about the great athletic tradition of blah blah blah, all I could think was - you have a rapist in the family. Do you know that? If you do, do you care? Do you believe what I said was true and are you ashamed, or are you sitting up there on your booster-funded pedestal thinking I'm a crazy liar? For 15 years, there have been at least eight children thinking something very close to that every time a Penn State highlight rolls across the ESPN ticker.

This is what's the most awful about abuse, or any crime... even when the perpetrator is caught and (rarely) brought to justice, it seems that the victims, their families, and any number of people who are just caught up in the ripple effects are the ones who truly end up dealing with the consequences in real, life-altering ways. Sexual abuse isn't just a one-time incident where someone in power takes advantage of someone else. It's a decision to permanently alter another person's life for the worse. That's why it's so obscene. The perpetrator might (rarely) end up in jail, but someone else is always going to have to clean up the mess.

Entitled

There's a post I've been wanting to write all week, but I just couldn't get it to gel. Sometimes I have no trouble articulating what I think about something, and sometimes I know that if I tried to write about X, all that would come out is a bunch of gibberish. A lot of the time, I just want to keep from writing three identical posts in a row, so I wait until I've figured out some way to unify a couple of different ideas. Basically, this week I almost wrote about a 40-something pro-lifer in Alabama and some BS Mitt Romney pulled back when he was a Mormon bishop, but it took a letter to Slate's "Dear Prudence" for me to bring it all together.

This week, a woman wrote Prudie asking how she could persuade her 21-year-old pregnant sister not to place her upcoming baby in adoption, and instead "impress upon her that she can, and should, take more responsibility for her actions." Prudie (rightly) responded that the woman needs to mind her own business and respect that her sister IS making a responsible choice, and in the process making a dream come true for the couple who will adopt the baby.

But what really jumped out at me is this: the letter-writing sister reports that the pregnant sister, a college student, could have plenty of financial and baby-sitting support from her parents and others while she goes to class (because, as everyone knows, children don't require any care or expense once they're out of diapers). And then she writes this:

"I simply cannot understand why she is choosing adoption when she has support, both financial and otherwise. I think she is being a bit entitled. After all, she got herself into this mess, and it doesn't seem fair that she just gets to put the child up for adoption and resume her life."

DING DING DING! There it is!

Now, Mitt... When he was a Mormon lay leader in the Boston area, Romney (as reported in a 1990 story in Exponent II, a magazine published by Mormon feminists, and this week in the New York Times) barged into the hospital room of a woman whose sixth pregnancy had produced a blood clot that threatened her life. The treatment for the blood clot would terminate her pregnancy, and so the church ok'd an abortion (for, again, a pregnancy that she planned and wanted).

"Her bishop got wind of the situation, she wrote, and showed up unannounced at the hospital, warning her sternly not to go forward," says the Times. According to Judith Dushku, publisher of Exponent II, the exchange went like this:

He said – What do you think you're doing?

She said – Well, we have to abort the baby because I have these blood clots.

And he said something to the effect of – Well, why do you get off easy when other women have their babies?

And she said – What are you talking about? This is a life threatening situation.

And he said – Well what about the life of the baby?

And she said – I have four other children and I think it would be really irresponsible to continue the pregnancy.

DING DING DING! There it is!

(By the way, if I'd been that woman and Mitt Romney - hell, if a member of my own family - had said this to me, they'd have left that hospital room with some teeth missing. Seriously, where the frak does he get off? "Easy"???")

I respect the people who genuinely don't want abortion to happen, and who therefore support better family planning and birth control access, and who support funding for those programs that help low-income families feed, clothe and educate their children. (For instance, the Mormon Church does an excellent job helping member families.) My problem is this undercurrent in every single conversation with an anti-choicer I've ever had, which in the above quoted passages spills right out into the open.

Sooner or later, once you've gotten through the debate about when life begins and the ethics of privileging one life above another, eventually it comes out. "Well, you had sex, so you deserve what you get." (Note: only if you're a woman.) Or, as Letter-Writing Big Sister put it, "it doesn't seem fair that she just gets to put the child up for adoption and resume her life." Or, Bishop Mitt: "Well, why do you get off easy?"

Perhaps it's the juxtaposition of "Mitt Romney" and "getting off easy," but this just occurred to me... When progressives talk about race or class privilege - the consequences of which cost actual, walking-around-human lives - we're shouted down as "class warriors" who want to overthrow America and outlaw apple pie or something. But when a woman exercises her natural and (at least for the moment) legal right not to have a kid, she's a selfish, cake-having AND -eating harpy slut who's dodging her scarlet letter and thereby callously subverting the entire human system of right and wrong.

And don't tell me this is about saving fetuses (fetii? I really don't know...). Letter-Writing Big Sister's pregnant sister is, on paper, doing everything that the social conservatives would want her to do: carrying the pregnancy to term and placing the baby for adoption. But still, she's "entitled." Mitt Romney had the gall to tell a married mother of four that she's selfish for having life-saving surgery that would keep her around to mother her real-life children. That was "getting off easy," apparently.

What this is about is shaming women who have the temerity to do what's best for themselves and their families. It's never an easy choice, and for that reason it's a highly personal choice. If the Letter-Writing Big Sisters, the Mitt Romneys and the other scarlet letter-assigners of the world really and truly cared about justice, or saving lives, or anything to do with making it easier for families to have and raise children, then the woman in that hospital room (or adoption agency) is the last person they'd be going after.

Instead, they'll tell you all about how much they cherish life, up until the moment that life emerges from the womb and needs food stamps, health care, after-school care and public school. Then that little rug-rat needs to start pulling herself up by the bootie-straps, 'cause with that slut single mother, you never know, amirite?

So, who's really the entitled one here? The person facing the most profound decision there is, who frankly assesses her life situation and ability to care for a child, and who seeks out the advice of her doctors and spiritual advisers, and who makes a choice? Or the person who's never met that woman, and who will lecture her about the wrongness of her choices without doing anything to actually help?

Quickie: The dad you want to be

I have long believed that God gives people the children they deserve. That is to say, the children that will teach parents the things in life they've missed along the way. This is why I don't fret too much when my guy friends get all bro-ish talking about "crying/throwing/running like a girl" or how their fantasy team "totally got raped" or likewise. Because I know that they'll eventually have daughters.

I've never thought that ESPN's Bill Simmons was misogynist, but it does seem that he's softened a bit since having a daughter a few years ago. In today's column, a running diary of the Lakers-Heat game, he got a little tweaked at Chris Webb's "bitching like little girl" remark. "Hey, I'm insulted by that! My daughter is almost 6, and she's never whined like these Miami guys! Take it back, Chuck," he wrote. It's a small thing, and probably at least partially motivated by the chance to dig LeBron, but still. It's a revelation that "like a little girl" is a lazy insult because it's just inaccurate.

I know, I know. If Simmons were to read this, he'd roll his eyes and write 4,000 words about why the WNBA sucks. And that's okay. But the first time his daughter comes home from school crying because some other kid used the fact of her girl-ness to put her down, he's going to go the hell off. And that's just as it should be.

And then there's Jezebel's Daddy Issues series, where a bona fide dad-of-a-girl explores the issues that come with being a conscientious father of a young daughter. In this installment, he worries over what his daughter might be learning from movie cartoon role models. I haven't seen any of the movies he's talking about, but I love that he's thinking about this.

What the (rhymes with "duck"), Huck?

A was going to do a "principles are hot" post about Natalie Portman severing her relationship with Dior following John Galliano's anti-semitic rant earlier this week - and I admire the hell out of her for taking a stand that way - but events, and Mike Huckabee's mouth, overtook me.

On Michael Medved's radio show the day after Portman won an Academy Award for Best Actress, Huckabee held her up as an example of Hollywood corrupting America's wholesome family values by setting a bad example (or something). Frankly, I'm not sure what he was going for. Let's figure it out together:

“People see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts, ‘we’re not married but we’re having these children and they’re doing just fine,’” Mr. Huckabee told the conservative radio host Michael Medved on Monday. “I think it gives a distorted image. It’s unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out-of-wedlock children.”

Hmmm... Here we have an example of someone staking a position on something other than facts. Or BS, if you want to think of it that way. In my job, when I prep people for media interviews, I stress that you should never veer off into areas that you don't know by heart, documentation included. If you start basing opinions on something you vaguely recall that you heard somewhere, then you risk looking like an idiot.

For instance, I don't think anyone could describe Portman as "boasting" about being a single mother. She and the baby's father seem to have gotten engaged as soon as they learned they were pregnant. Also, Portman's my age. Even if she weren't a highly paid film actor with a bachelor's degree fron an Ivy League school, most people our age are at the point where they can support a kid. The single mothers Huckabee talks about who find themselves limited in their education and work opportunities are typically younger. And, if one's going to pull out a prominent example of a young woman who got pregnant, say, in high school, and who's parlayed her notoriety into appearances on national magazines and reality TV shows, which probably reach a lot more impressionable young women than an R-rated art house film... I think that would not be Natalie Portman.

But there's a bigger problem with what Huckabee said that has nothing to do with an actor. More than one of them, actually. Let's start with this myth that no one had sex pre-marriage before the sexual revolution, when the awful feminists forced women to burn their underwear (or something). Not true. There's more than one person in my family who was born far less than nine months after their parents' wedding. (In the 50s.)There's also the memorable example of a relative born in the early 20th century more than a year after her "father" died. So don't blame sex on Hollywood.

But what's more troubling is his implication that unplanned pregnancies are all on the mother. Oh, those silly girls, going out and getting ideas from movie magazines and then running on down to the Knocked Up Store so they can be trendy and raise babies off the government. No men were involved in the making of this pregnancy.

And then there's real WTF. Let's let Huckabee explain:

My comments were about the statistical reality that most single moms are very poor, undereducated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death. That’s the story that we’re not seeing, and it’s unfortunate that society often glorifies and glamorizes the idea of having children out of wedlock.

If that reality is something that keeps Huckabee up at night, really and truly, then there are things he can do besides throwing up his hands and saying "Single mothers, whaddya do?" For starters, he could rethink his support of abstinence-only sex ed programs, which he supported as Arkansas' governor and as a 2008 presidential candidate. He could've eliminated the waiting period for abortions in his home state. (In 2008, Huckabee said he favored a Constitutional amendment banning abortion.) He could encourage other states and the federal government to promote healthy living as he did as governor. He could support raising the amount of Pell grants and other aid that make it possible for low-income people to attend college. He might consider supporting tax deductions for child care expenses. He would certainly prevail on his fellow Republicans to stop targeting safety net programs like the one that provides birth control and pap smears to low-income women.

But that might actually require effort, as opposed to casting judgment on people he doesn't know.

Have gun, will travel to a war zone to do the job y'all hired me to do in the first place

One of the reasons I love watching "Mad Men" is because it concerns the communications/marketing field several decades before I entered that field myself. It's amusing to me that at one point (not that long ago, either) women weren't considered capable of handling this work, only to go to any conference on PR/marketing/design, etc., and see that three-quarters of the professionals there are women.

That what this makes me think of. An advisory group has recommended that women in the armed forces be allowed to serve in combat roles (currently they're only allowed in "support" functions). Duh. Should've happened years ago. Why on earth would we not let people who are willing to serve on the front lines do so?

Oh, it's our good friend "unit cohesion"! "Unit cohesion" is what people say when they're too chicken to come right out and say what they mean. "Unit cohesion" was the reason that African American soldiers were once segregated, and one of the stated reasons for keeping DADT around. It's this deeply offensive idea that professional soldiers can't do their jobs unless they're serving with people who are exactly like themselves.

To me, that's terribly insulting to the people who have volunteered to protect our country. In any other job on the planet, you will have to work alongside people of the other gender, gay people, people with different religions than yours and people with different political opinions than yours. Are the "unit cohesion" people seriously suggesting that soldiers, sailors, coasties, airmen and marines are less capable of this than somebody who works at McDonald's? Damn, that's condescending.

No shit there are women who couldn't handle combat (me, for one). There are millions of men in this country who can't do it either, which is why they do not voluntarily accept a job where shooting is one of the required duties. But it's ridiculous to me that, when our country is fighting two wars, you're going to tell 14 percent of our fighting force that they can't help fight.

This is a tough one

Hmmm... Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory has an interesting piece up examining Naomi Wolf's argument in the U.K. Guardian that rape victims shouldn't be anonymous in media reports. (And now, a reaction to a reaction of the source document. Ah, the Internet.) It's standard journalistic practice not to print the names of alleged rape victims (though it's ignored plenty of times), and Wolf thinks this is a vestige of a time when rape victims had to be protected because they'd be considered "damaged goods."

First of all, I'd be a lot more inclined to hear Wolf out if she'd published this six months ago. But today, her opinion can't be divorced from her earlier published opinion that Julian Assange's two accusers are lying about him raping them. Is she really struggling over the ethics of this, or is she just trying to justify her own reaction to the Assange case?

Second, it's true that rape is treated differently from any other crime ---- usually to the detriment of the accusers, though. Mugging victims aren't asked what they were wearing, for instance. Someone whose car radio gets stolen isn't blamed for parking on the street in a bad neighborhood. It seems kind of BS to expect rape and sexual assault victims to bear the burden of unpacking all the puritanical baggage surrounding this crime.

This is a tough one for me, as a feminist who fully understands the patriarchal dimensions of rape culture, as a rape survivor and as someone who's had more than one male acquaintance falsely accused of rape or abuse. Is it fair for a man charged with rape to have his name, address and occupation reported in screaming headlines, even though he may be perfectly innocent? Even when and if he's exonerated, his life will never be the same.

At the same time, I can assure you from personal experience that I would've been less likely to report what happened to me if I'd known that my name might've been made public. (But only if the Commonwealth Attorney had deigned to bring charges. Ha. I should've known better.) It didn't help that the guy was a literal Big Man on Campus, or that his family are minor deities in the jurisdiction where the crime occured and in his father's professional field. I've worked with the media long enough to know just how big THAT story would've gotten, believe me.

And, with everything else I was going through, just trying to function on a daily basis, I'm not sure I would've reported it if I knew I'd see my name in the paper. Or that all my co-workers, people I see three times a year volunteering for something or people I meet professionally years later will know every detail of what happened.

Is it crazy to suggest that the names of both the accuser and accused be kept private until a rape case goes to trial (which they almost never do anyway)? Is that even possible with our legal system? I don't know. But I do know that you shouldn't throw out all the rules because of one instance (ahem, Naomi). RAINN estimates that someone is sexually assaulted every two minutes in the U.S. None of them by Julian Assange.

Ain’t I a woman?

I’m not really sure what I just watched here.

This is a trailer for a new documentary about the so-called rise of women in the conservative movement – which I suppose you could more accurately call the increased influence of women in conservative politics and culture over the last 40 years or so. That in itself is curious… Didn’t Democrats nominate a female vice presidential candidate back in 1984? Aren’t the majority of female office-holders in this country Democrats? So why are we suddenly fascinated with the women that a gasping-to-death conservative movement is *finally* letting have a seat at the table?

That’s topic for another post. What I really don’t understand about Phyllis Schafly, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and even the popular motivational speaker Sarah Palin is this: It’s totally possible for a woman to be a political or social conservative, and even pro-woman. It’s patently illogical for a political or social conservative to claim feminism, or at least to claim that they’re better for women than any other political party.

I’m not talking about “what’s good for me personally” feminism. I’m talking about “what’s good for women as a whole” feminism. It’s blazing bullshit for an individual woman to be privileged enough to get a first-class education, be able-bodied enough to look good on TV, have a husband willing to watch the kids while you travel the world giving speeches, and then actively work against other women getting equal pay, having child care and being able to get student loans.

It’s this mixing of politics and culture-war horseshit that gets me. When I elect, say, a Senator, I care how she or he will vote when funding for Social Security conflicts with funding for a new fighter plane. I could give two purple shits what she thinks I should be teaching my future children about premarital sex.

But that mixing is exactly what some of the women in this trailer appear to be doing when they talk about how The Feminists™ have destroyed What it Means to Be a Woman. What the hell does THAT mean? Being a mother is a political act? What about being a father? Anything?

I’m a woman. I frakking LOVE being a woman, too. And I love men just about as much as I love being a woman. Every day, when I leave from the house I bought by myself when I was 25 and head to my job, I know how much I owe to the women who went before me. I know how different my professional life is from my mother’s or grandmother’s when each was my age. I know I didn’t do any of this alone.

I know that I can go to work dressed like a woman, and not (to quote Harrison Ford in “Working Girl”) like a woman thinks a man would dress if he were a woman, and still be taken seriously. I can direct a meeting full of men and take for granted that they’ll listen to me, because I outrank them. I can (though I choose not to at this point) do all that and still be a wife and/or mother. And the reason I can do all that is because of the work of feminists, not “mama bears” or whatever the frak they call themselves.

You know what else? My male co-worker can bring in his five-year-old son for an hour or so when his child care falls through, and it’s not an issue. That’s also thanks to feminism.

Seriously, what the hell is this “real woman” crap, and why the hell would I want to vote for someone who presumes to put me in a box that she’s defined for me? Especially when she serves an ideology that STILL uses gendered slurs to critique women it disapproves of?

And don’t even get me started on that “I’m not a victim” crap. Just because you acknowledge that there are systemic decks stacked against you (like, say, legal marital rape) doesn’t mean you submit to those systemic problems. Um, doesn’t the fact that we are calling out gender, race or class prejudice mean we ARE NOT submitting to them?

When hear the Schaflys and the Coulters and the Malkins and even the Palins talk, I flash back to middle school. I can’t be the only one who had several female classmates that had just discovered sexism, but whose “I’m just as good as you” quieted when the teacher needed someone to move something heavy, only to turn into “but I’m a girl, I can’t carry that, WAAAH!”

Look, feminism isn’t easy. If women want to demand that we’re treated as full human beings, that means we have to give up our pretty-princess-on-a-pedestal status. And, while some days I’d love to not have to worry about my retirement or cleaning the gutters or balancing the checkbook, it’s worth it to have control over my own life. It also means that I have a responsibility to pull other people – men and women – up behind me, not knock down the ladder I just climbed up.

You don’t get to claim that you’re pro-woman when you’re nominated for high office and then cry “skirt!” when it’s time to carry the proverbial overhead projector. You don’t get to claim with a straight face that having a functioning uterus makes you better at budgeting or writing legislation. And you really, really don’t get to tell me how to be a woman. I’ve been one for 30 years now. I’m good, thanks.