Everyday woman-hating

So this morning I’m driving to work, and I’m stopped, as usual, in a line of bumper-to-bumper traffic that’s trying to perform like an 8-way merge to get onto the highway. And when my turn comes to creep forward another few inches, a guy in a giant pickup truck starts trying to force his way in ahead of me. And because I’m petty and I hate line-cutters with a fiery intensity, I take advantage of the fact that my car is miniscule—a two-door Yaris—to scoot around his front bumper, up to the back of the car ahead of me, blocking him from entering my lane and making him probably 4.2 seconds later for work.

As I continue to make my slow way to the on-ramp—a process that takes several minutes—I hear someone shouting. Through my closed windows. Over my not-very-quiet radio. And what he is shouting is “Stupid whore!” Over and over. Dozens of times.

It is, of course, the man in the giant pickup. Who then tailgates me onto the highway, cutting off someone else in a merge so that another car doesn’t come between us.

He follows me, never more than a car length behind, for a mile, onto the interchange with another highway.

He follows me onto this second highway, still never more than a car length away. He swerves in and out of lanes without signaling so that he can stay behind me. He waits behind me at toll booths, even when I pull up to the longer lines. He follows me, ultimately, for over 20 miles, over the course of half an hour. Never more than a car length behind, even when traffic begins moving at 80 miles an hour.

He does not honk. He does not flash his lights. He does not make rude or intimidating gestures in my rearview mirror, when I dare to look in it. He just follows me, very closely, for a very long time.

Finally, I approach my exit from the highway. I move to the right-hand lane, trying frantically to think of a place where I can pull over that isn’t my office parking lot (I don’t want him to know where he can find me again), where people would come immediately to help if, dead set on an in-person confrontation, he tracks me until I stop and screams at me, vandalizes my car, hits me with his fists, hits me with his car, pulls out a gun. I’m coming up blank. There’s a mall, but it’s probably not open yet. The post office is small and the workers inside are unlikely to hear anything happening the parking lot. The register attendant at the gas station may not want to get involved, and who knows whether there’ll be anyone at the pumps. If there’s a police station nearby, I don’t know how to get there. I am low on gas. I am very afraid.

Thankfully, although he follows me until the very last second, he does not get off the highway with me. I make it to work only somewhat shaken and a few minutes late. I am unharmed, but I don’t feel safe.

Which is the point, of course. To make sure I don’t feel safe.

I very much doubt that the man in the giant pickup would have been so angry if it had been a man who had refused to let him into the line of traffic. I doubt even more that he would have followed a man for 20 miles in what can only be taken as an implied threat of physical violence. It probably wouldn’t have scared a man, only annoyed him. Because the message wasn’t, “I am superior to you in every way,” which is the normal way to show up a man, and would have been better accomplished by speeding past me, flipping the bird.

No, the message was, “I see you, bitch. And I can hurt you any time.”

Ladies and jerks

An internet age ago (Timeliness is a lot to ask of me—my lunch breaks are only so long!) Senator Arlen Specter said this to Representative Michelle Bachmann when the two were talking over each other during a radio interview:

Now wait a minute! Don’t interrupt me, I didn’t interrupt you. Act like a lady.

Yeah, gross, obviously. And over at Broadsheet, Tracy Clark-Flory makes this perfectly valid point:

Many women interpret “act like a lady” to mean “know your place, little girl.” This comes from spending a lifetime being instructed in various ways to sit back politely, speak up only when called upon and defer to the male ego.

But “act like a lady” is more pernicious than that. It sets up a dichotomy between the “right way” and “wrong ways” to be a woman. The concept is ridiculous on its face—all women are real women—and it’s intensely limiting and therefore misogynist without further elaboration, but all that much more so when you realize there’s no similar proscription for men—”Act like a gentleman” is only ever said to toddler boys being told to let a girl go ahead of them on the slide. Good men are… well, they’re just called “good men,” but almost never gentlemen. Bad men are assholes, jerks, bastards, and lowlifes, but never not men. No one ever tells them they’re doing manhood wrong; no one ever threatens to revoke the status of “gentleman” from a man who annoys them.

And that’s exactly what this is: a threat. Ladies are treated as nearly human, and ladies are afforded special protection from all those dirtbags, creeps, cads, and sons-of-bitches out there, as well as from swearing, raised voices, and the burdens of intellectual endeavor. All those not-ladies? Those women? Well, without a man to protect them, without the deference accorded to ladies, they’re vulnerable to all kinds of repellent exploitations, and no man would sully his reputation by being seen to intercede with a reprobate, malefactor, thug, or weasel on behalf of some dirty, amoral, impertinent bitch.

Specter is threatening to revoke Bachmann’s status as a lady, leaving her open to attack—from him and from others—with the strong implication that she will deserve whatever she gets. And I’m not just talking about having her political views mocked in the press. Ladyhood is set up as a status vital to the survival of women, that is granted, very rarely, by men of power, and can be revoked by any man for any reason at any time.

To tell a woman to act like a lady is not merely patronizing and dismissive, it is an overt reminder of women’s lower status in society and the fact that women require men’s assent to achieve anything and for men to behave in a “gentlemanly” manner at all times to avoid everything from social rejection to physical violence.

Major announcement!!11!!eleventy-one!

Hello, my dear readers! My darling, lovely, unfathomably patient readers! I am very happy and more than a little surprised to see both of you still here.

You may wonder where I have gotten myself off to, lo, these many months I allowed this blog to gather virtual dust, and I have an answer for you! The answer is: I was job-hunting.

I mean, I’ve been job-hunting since before I graduated almost a year ago, in a sort of my-this-is-unpleasant-maybe-I-should-just-go-play-some-Rock-Band kind of way, but right around the time my student loan payments started coming due, I decided to really buckle down. And after several months of aggressive, soul-sucking, mind-numbing, exuberance-repressing, swear-swallowing job-searching, I am very pleased to announce that I am employed! Or I will be, come early January. I’ll be copy editing and writing for a couple of specialty magazines that I will decline to name for the sake of both my own anonymity and their ability to not be associated with that crazy ball-buster lady on the internet.

Which brings me to what I really want to talk about: navigating the job market as a big ol’ scary feminist. I remain pseudonymous here primarily to preserve my hireability—not because anything I write here is so outrageous that it should cost me a job, by any reasonable measure, but because employers, especially media employers, can get skittish about people maintaining non-work-related blogs. And I’m just not willing to give this up, despite my occasional prolonged and unannounced absences. I need a place to vent, where I can say, “Just hearing the name ‘Stupak’ makes me want to emigrate,” or, “Has anyone else noticed that most of the ads scheduled to run on that Funniest Ads of 2009 special on TBS aren’t so much ‘very funny’ as ‘over-the-top sexist‘?” without apology or qualification. While I am perfectly happy to accept that the office is not the place for these conversations, I’m not willing to stop having them, or to stop having them with the widest audience I can reach. The easiest way to prevent a company from seeing a personal blog as conflicting with its corporate image is to simply never connect your blogging and professional identities.

But keeping the two separate on job interviews made me feel like I was in the feminism closet, like I was hiding myself and failing to perform the kind of quotidian activism that is often both the hardest and most immediately effective. Not that anyone said anything blatantly sexist in an interview and I let it slide, of course, just that, well, I could have put my blog on my resume. Maintaining a website, writing coherently, commenting incisively—these are skills media employers find useful. But I worried—what if they think I can’t play nice at the office? What if the blog helps get me the job, but then they monitor it and later tell me, you can’t say that, please delete this, would you consider not swearing so damn much? So I left it off.

And at interviews I asked questions like, “Can you describe your ideal employee for this position?” and “What’s a typical day here like?” instead of things I really wanted to know, like, Can I take a half day to go to a rally? Who is That Guy here—the one who will always treat me like a child, because every office has one—and how closely will I have to work with him? Will people take suggestions about changing sexist, racist, ableist, heteronormative, etc. langauge in stride, or will it be a huge fight every time? Can I just tell people that I’m an atheist feminist with socialist leanings, too liberal for even Massachusetts’ Democratic party, and expect acceptance, or will those parts of my identity be relegated to the internet and weekends?

I still don’t have the answers to those questions, but I suspect that when I get them, they’ll be ones I can live with. Although the process hasn’t been without compromise, I’ve been extremely lucky, and extremely privileged, in my pursuit of the dream of steady paychecks and decent health benefits. Now that I seem to have attained it, it’s time for Phase II: sneaking activism into the workplace. Oh, and buying office-friendly pants.

Roofies can be used to facilitate rape! This is apparently news to Double X

Robin Abrahams (a.k.a Miss Conduct) calls attention to a maelstrom of woman-hating insanity over on Double X. A woman wrote in to their friendship advice columnist wanting to know if she should forgive her friends, who, after she’d been roofied, half-assed a response when she called them from outside the club they were at asking for help, and then blew her off later when she called to ask them to keep her company in the ER. The columnist, Lucinda Rosenfeld, tells the letter writer that her friends weren’t obligated to get out of bed at 4 a.m. to come hold her hand, which, whatever. I might not agree, but it’s not clear what the friends knew when, so how they reacted when they got the whole story from her later might be more revealing than their actions that night, and the letter doesn’t mention that. So I’m not going to condemn her for the advice itself.

But the way she gave it! Holy fuck am I going to condemn her for that! Here’s a few choice quotes:

For one thing, it’s not even necessarily safe—depending on where you live and how far you live from the hospital—for a woman to head out alone at that hour. [...]

Here’s a little secret. BFFs are great when you’re upset about a boy/sick cat/whatnot. But there are limits to friendship—limits that don’t apply to our romantic partners or close family members. [...] I also wish they’d been a less critical of what was, by your account, a freak incident. Why were they so unforgiving? I’d wager a guess that they think you’re lying about the mickey, tales of which are sometimes used as a cover for irresponsible behavior. (Only you know the truth.)

Shockingly, at least to Rosenfeld, the comment section erupted with people disagreeing with both the substance and delivery of her response. Many pointed out that people who ignore pleas for help from someone who may just have been raped are not that person’s friend*. Others pointed out the massive vortex of victim-blaming and slut-shaming that is rapidly sucking away my ability to form complete sentences. So she apologized! Wow!

Except, not really at all! Fuck!

I was struck by how many readers seemed to be hearing echoes of date rape or sexual abuse in “Drugged’s” story. I have to admit, I did not think of that at the time. There is no evidence in her letter that she was a victim of a sex crime. And I believe that if she had been, or thought she had been, she would have alluded to it in the letter. All we know is that something she drank caused her to pass out. Moreover, had I believed for a second that she’d been assaulted, I would have responded in an entirely different manner.

A woman was roofied in a crowded bar and woke up hours later lying in the middle the sidewalk with no recollection of where that time had gone AND RAPE NEVER OCCURRED TO YOU? Well Jesus Fucking Christ, if that’s actually true you should really just resign right this fucking second, because you have the insight and perspicacity of a particularly slow-witted carp, which makes you spectacularly unqualified to give advice on interpersonal relationships.

And, you know, it seems to me that when someone helpfully points out that the number one cause of getting an incapacitating drug slipped into your drink in a public place is that a RAPIST is trying to RAPE you, the correct response is not to act say, “Even though I never thought of that possibility, I also carefully weighed the evidence and concluded that didn’t happen.” Even if she wasn’t raped or otherwise assaulted—and I fervently hope she was not—it seems pretty fucking clear that someone wanted to have access to her when she was in such a state that she could neither consent nor resist, and that’s pretty fucking scary in my book, whether that person succeeded or not.

She also seems to have a lot of rape on the brain for someone who never even considered the possibility that the LW had been sexually assaulted. That stuff about how it may not be safe for a woman to go out alone at night means she is thinking about gendered violence in general and probably of stranger rape in particular. And then there’s that charming little bit about how maybe the LW is lying about the drugging to cover “irresponsible behavior,” which MAKES ME BARF MY FACE OFF, but which also implicitly acknowledges that there are women who are drugged in the exact same way that the LW describes expressly so that some rapist will have an easier time raping them. So if the possibility that someone raped or attempted to rape the LW never crossed her waterlogged fish brain, why is she so afraid that the LW’s friends will get raped by a stranger jumping out of the bushes and into their moving cars somehow? What makes her so concerned that the LW might be one of those slutty-slut-sluts who makes up a story about drugs and rape to cover up for her shameful sluttitude? What mysterious external force that had not one fucking thing to do with the letter she was reading caused her thoughts to turn repeatedly to rape? WHATEVER COULD IT BE WE WILL NEVER SOLVE THIS UNSOLVABLE RIDDLE OF MYSTERY I AM SURE.

There is more extremely stupid shit that really deserves a takedown, but I don’t have the time or the patience. I will say that this kind of shit is exactly why I go out of my way to never, ever click on a Double X story, even if it’s by a blogger I really like. Pageviews make them bigger and stronger, and imply that people accept them as a feminist, or at least woman-friendly, website. The bigger they are, the more weight it carries when they reinforce stereotypes and repeat anti-feminist arguments, because they’re spreading this tripe from a position of authority. I’m not going to fight for social justice here and out in the world only to undermine myself with my clicks.

*In reality, many rape victims find that their friends and family refuse to believe them, blame them, and even become angry them when they share their experience. Anecdotally, it seems women are especially prone to this kind of reaction because many of us want to believe that if we follow the rules, it can’t happen to us, and being confronted by evidence that this is nothing more than a lie we tell ourselves so we can feel safe is extremely frightening.

Saturday afternoon miscellany

Because I am lazy, here are some internet things I have liked recently.

This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic:

For those who can't see/read the image, it's titled "Logic: The Domain of Men," and it's a man saying to a woman, "It's not misogynist! I paid that stripper with Susan B. Anthony dollars!"

This Dinosaur Comic:

For people who can't see the image, it's, as always with this comic, T-Rex stomping things and talking to other dinosaurs. Full transcript below.

T-Rex: Some words are special, reserved for only the worst situations, and as such carry weight when we dare to use them! Some words have MEANING, cats and kittens! And because of all this I cringe when someone says a test RAPED them, or that a movie was so terrible it RAPED the excellent book it was based on. Being raped is totally way worse than failing a test!
Dromiceiomimus: “Being raped is totally way worse than failing a test.
T-Rex: What? It’s FACTUAL! People need to know!
Utahraptor: You’re walking on dangerous land, T-Rex!
T-Rex: I know that folks got opinions about rape! I’m one of ‘em! But MY opinions are about usage. Let us eschew all this metaphorical rape and only talk about LITERAL rape, okay??
Utahraptor: So, um, when you look back on this, I hope you realize that the reason I left is your phrase “let us…talk about LITERAL rape, okay??”.
God: SOMETIMES LIFE IS HARD FOR YOU ISN’T IT T-REX
T-Rex: Only when my friends quote me in a misleading fashion!! …oh wait nevermind it’s hard at other times too

OK, I’m not totally sure what’s up with that last panel, but then I don’t read the comic regularly.

This guest post at Shapely Prose: “Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced.” It’s a clear, unapologetic breakdown of why women are unlikely to trust strange men, however friendly, who approach them, and what kind of warning signals certain behaviors set off. It’s great in a million ways, but one the things I really love is how it makes so clear what offense I felt was committed in certain uncomfortable situations which, when I relate them to friends, garner not the sympathy and validation I hoped for but rather blank stares. “He sat directly across from me on an otherwise completely empty subway car,” I tell them. Or, “He insisted on helping me find the item I needed even after I said I was fine on my own.” Or, “He kept trying to chat with me about the game even though I was engaged in a conversation with someone else.” “Seems harmless enough,” people say. “What are you so worked up about?” “Never mind,” I mumble, and change the subject. Maybe none of those men had evil in their hearts, but they all knew that there’s a big space between “totally respectful” and “clearly dangerous,” and they took advantage of it. They sidled into my consciousness uninvited, being careful to do nothing to cross the line that would label them an active/obvious threat and therefore drive me to stop being polite and leave, or a spur an onlooker to intervene, or inspire friends to offer the support I was looking for on retelling. But it’s still a way of forcing yourself on someone, and in a world where women have to be painfully, perpetually aware that most men aren’t rapists but any man could be, little violations like that tend to put us on high alert.

Finally, here’s something sweet for you:

I went to the last game of the regular season on Sunday, and afterwards kids were allowed to run the bases. A few of them immediately broke for the pitcher's mound and started playing catch—or, as my brother more accurately termed it, "throw," since there was no catching involved—with the rosin bag. Very cute.

Sorry about the quality—I have a pretty nice camera, but it’s just not equipped for taking closeups of the mound from the right-field roof.

Here’s a pretty picture of the whole park, though:

Must… resist… “birdwatching” pun!

Blogging requires a lot of mental and emotional resources, and lately I’ve been devoting most of what I have to job-searching and paperwork-completing and angry-phone-call-making. I want to blog more, I hope to blog more, but “I’m sorry I haven’t been writing!” posts are boring to read and just make me feel bad, so I’m going to try not to do that. I do promise to post if I’m planning on abandoning blogging, so assume that any future incidents of radio silence will be only temporary. For my part, I’m going to try to make myself post more of the quickies that cross my mind most days, even if it means forgoing in-depth analysis on some posts. I don’t think I really have any Feminism 101 readers anyway, and besides, there’s already a blog for that. We’ll see how this resolution goes.

So! Here’s what got the ol’ noodle noodling today: A Girl’s Guide to Respectful Girlwatching on Jezebel. Sadie gives some anecdotes about creepy oglers and some reasons for why she likes people-watching women more than men. Both she and some of the commenters seem to feel that the curvalicious ladies are more pleasing to the eye than dudes. I’m actually somewhat sympathetic to this—I am a big fan of female beauty, and although I enjoy looking at naked dudes as much as the next straight woman, I see where people are coming from (…hee) when they make cracks about guys looking goofy naked.

But of course, this ignores that millions of ways that people, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, are trained to seek out, recognize, and appreciate female beauty. Ads, TV, movies, modeling, magazines, whatever, they’re all trying to associate their product with beauty, and beauty, they pretty universally tell us, resides in women. We have been taught to find beauty in women. Men, we are left to assume, are just sort of… there. They are not for display because they give us nothing worth displaying. But imagine the many varieties of male beauty we might suddenly discover if only we were trained to look.

We have no problem acknowledging that trained photographers are more likely to be able to find the beauty in a moment or vista than those of us who have not been taught to look at the world that way. Yet when it comes to our preferences in human appearances, we believe our sense of what is and is not beautiful, of where to find beauty, is innate, objective, and universal.

And that’s without even getting into the ways in which the things that are most valued in female beauty are themselves often a construction—clear skin and big eyes aped with makeup, slim waists honed through dieting and exercise and faked by “support garments” and tailored clothing, long legs an illusion created by stilettos, and boobs! Forget padding and implants, even all-natural, unembellished boobs, as we most often think of them, are a construction. Breasts don’t stay high and round and small-nippled well into middle age if they are left to their own devices. They sag and flatten and stretch. And I bet neither the Jezebel commenters nor Isaac Mizrahi, whom Sadie quotes as saying, “I mean, breasts! They’re beautiful! All breasts!” were thinking of “National Geographic boobs” when they sang the praises of those luscious curves.

I’m meandering, so in case it’s not clear, let me state outright: I’m not criticizing Sadie, who wrote a short piece on a topic tangentially related to this post, for not shoehorning in some analysis on why so many of us seem to feel that women are more aesthetically pleasing than men. She doesn’t even make the mistake of saying women are objectively or obviously more beautiful than men. But her post touches on an argument I’ve had more than once, where someone says, “Women are just more fun to look at!” and I’m forced to say, “I kind of agree, but I think we need to look at what makes us say that.” And then it gets awkward and shouty.

But it’s an argument worth making over and over, because letting the presumption that women are inherently better-looking than men stand feeds into and provides an excuse for treating women as decorative objects, for expecting them to be on display all the time, for equating them with sex.

In happier news

Yesterday a girl drove in the winning runs in a Little League World Series game for possibly the first time ever.

Katie Reyes hit a two-run single in the top of the sixth to help Vancouver, British Columbia, rally for a wild 14-13 victory Tuesday over Ramstein Air Force Base, Germany, in the Little League World Series. [...]

“I was excited. I was shaking,” Reyes, 13, said about going to the plate for her big hit. She finished with three hits and three runs batted in.

Playing first, Reyes also caught the last out. She joined her happy teammates jumping on the mound after Canada won its last game of the series.

Canada has already been eliminated, so Ms. Reyes won’t be going on to further glory in the tournament this year, but I think she’s already earned plenty. You go, girl.

Fucking despicable

Ben Roethlisberger: He must be innocent, because otherwise how could he have gotten away with it for so long?

Super-famous quarterback Ben Roethlisberger is the subject of a civil lawsuit that alleges he raped a woman employed at a hotel where he stayed last summer. (Anyone clicking that link, be warned: The story includes a detailed description of the alleged rape.) If he did what he’s accused of, that’s pretty fucking despicable, if soul-crushingly predictable, all by itself.

But the plague-rat topping on this shit-and-thumbtacks pie is Roethlisberger’s lawyer’s statement defending his client:

“Ben has never sexually assaulted anyone. The timing of the lawsuit and the absence of a criminal complaint and a criminal investigation are the most compelling evidence of the absence of any criminal conduct,” David Cornwell said in a statement. “If an investigation is commenced, Ben will cooperate fully and Ben will be fully exonerated.” [Emphasis mine]

OK, Ben’s lawyer, let’s clear something up here. Around 60% percent of rapes are never reported at all, and even those people who do work up the strength to go to the police don’t always do so immediately. You, a fucking lawyer, who practices law for a living, and who felt qualified to give a detailed opinion on another high-profile athlete rape case, you have surely at least heard a rumor that rape is hugely underreported, even if you were not aware of the exact numbers. Look, you even said this relatively decent thing a while back, when it wasn’t your client who was making headlines:

“Most of those times, it’s mixed signals, or someone changes their mind before they complete the act,” Cornwell says. “And that means you have to stop — no means no, anytime.”

OK, that “mixed signal” bit is gross, but that thing at the end! Where no means no even if you’re already in the middle of things! That’s fucking great! That’s perfect! Way to go!

But now you’re screwed, because now I know you have at least a cursory grounding in rape law. You must, because anyone who tells athletes, “A one-night stand is a ticking time bomb,” but also knows that consent can be withdrawn at any time, no matter what must be getting it from places like this recent Maryland case, because you’re sure not getting it from our culture, and you’re clearly not getting it from feminists or people working with or for victims of sexual assault.

So! You know something about rape and the justice system! So you must also know that that thing you said? About how if someone doesn’t go to the cops soon enough he or she is clearly making it up? That’s a filthy fucking lie. And it’s a filthy fucking lie that damages not only the woman involved in this case, but every other person who does report being sexually assaulted—that would put them in the minority, remember—because every time that lie is repeated, especially by lawyers and cops and judges, it makes it harder for dozens, hundreds of other people to get a conviction. And since only about 6% of rapists ever see a day of prison, I’d say it’s hard enough as it is.

I know the “I swear it was consensual” defense isn’t particularly original, but you really ought to consider it. It has the enormous advantage of helping only one (accused) rapist walk free.

Thought for the day

Sorry to have gone silent for a bit there. I forgot to mention that I was venturing south of the Mason-Dixon for a relative’s wedding, and I was way too busy to post. But I’m back in good ol’ Massachusetts now, where people aren’t completely taken aback by self-deprecating humor, and I’ll probably start posting regularly again this weekend/next week.

For now, I give you a quick thought for the day: Why is that with so many Congresspeople using federally administered healthcare, a large number of whom are vehemently opposed to single-payer healthcare and all of whom have ready access to a national audience, we have not heard one horror story of the evils of government-run healthcare? To be sure, anyone in Congress is probably wealthy enough not to have to delay or forgo care—if the health insurance plans they get through their elected offices fail them, they can buy supplemental insurance or pay extra costs out of pocket. But if they had to resort to that, why haven’t they said anything? How far would a little anecdata go? Imagine a Representative on the Sunday morning talk shows saying, “I was told I’d have to wait three months to see a cardiac specialist, so I bought supplemental insurance so I could get taken care of sooner. What about all those Americans who aren’t as fortunate as I am? How long will they have to wait to see a specialist?” Or a Senator complaining, “My federal health insurance wouldn’t allow me to see the family doctor I’ve been going to for 20 years. Luckily for me, I can afford to pay her out of pocket, but what happens to working-class Americans? Do they have to give up their trusted medical practitioner?” Middle class people who don’t realize how much cheaper government-run healthcare would be would eat that shit up. (Of course, the 46 million Americans who have no health insurance probably won’t be much bothered by these complaints, since they people who can’t go to the doctor don’t have preferred practitioners and may have been delaying much-needed medical care for years, but the anti-single-payer folk don’t seem too concerned about them anyway.) The fact that not one Congresscritter has come out with such a woeful tale of how big government ruins everything makes me suspect they don’t exist. Which means, of course, that those opposing the government option are even more despicable, because they know themselves to be lying.

Sub-thought for the day: Why do anti-single-payer pro-lifers think it’s evil to “put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor” when they’re talking about providing healthcare to the poor but think it’s great, awesome, super-duper necessary when they’re talking about pregnant women? I’ve been chewing on that one for weeks and somehow the only answer I can come up with is “misogyny.” But that can’t be right…

Maxim: We are prevented from acting professionally by our proximity to BOOOOOOBS

My housemate Alexx, whose unexpected receipt of Maxim first alerted me to the whole all-gamers-must-love-tits crapfest, tried to opt out of Maxim and get his refund online so that things might process sometime this century. But when he submitted his form, all he got was this lousy ultra-charming error message:

OOPS?

You know, we could try and say this was part of the plan…

But guess what? We’re too busy trying to act like we’re working and not just looking at hot chicks to care.

<3 the Maxim Dev Team

Ha! Check out this hilarious and edgy error message, you guys! No one could be mad that we are preventing them from getting their money back when we are such lovably cheeky little scamps!

Because guys are incapable of not staring at tits. It’s in their DNA! Because “I was too busy sexually harassing that model” is an awesome excuse for not doing your job. Because only straight dudes would be doing anything at all on the Maxim website, and all straight dudes would be totally sympathetic to this “problem” that Maxim employees have of being unable to tear their eyes away from some hot chick’s cleavage. And because Maxim employees are all straight dudes, so this serious and totally real medical condition afflicts everyone in the office.

It might not seem worth spending any time or energy on breaking down the logic of such a minor and poorly executed joke, but you know what? Encouraging the objectification of women in order to excuse your shitty customer service is doubly offensive, and I’m not going to let it pass without comment.

Do you like video games? Then you must LOVE tits!

Video games and treating women as mindless objects to be used solely for straight male entertainment: They go together like chocolate and cat piss.

I’ve been thinking a lot about assumptions lately, so I couldn’t ignore this little news item: Anyone who has an ongoing subscription to the recently defunct Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine will have all remaining issues substituted with Maxim. Boobies, everybody! Hooray!

Or, you know, not. Not if you’re a straight woman or a gay man or a feminist/ally who isn’t turned on by the unapologetic objectification of women or anyone who dislikes hideously overdone airbrushing.

Subscribers do have the option of writing the publishing company a letter asking for a pro-rated refund of the remaining time on their subscriptions, but they learned about this option through a note attached to the issue of Maxim that was mailed to them in lieu of the copy of EGM they would otherwise have received this month. Thaaat’s right, the ownership just sent people a lad mag without first giving them a chance to opt out, and made opting out as much of a pain in the ass as possible. Clearly it’s cheaper for them to send out a few more copies of a magazine they were already printing than it would be to issue refunds, so they’re trying to keep as many people as possible satisfied with what they’re getting, thereby discouraging as many people as possible from asking for their money back. And the magazine that the publishers assumed would appeal to the great possible number of gamers? Tits R Us.

Because all gamers are dudes, don’tcha know! Straight dudes! Straight dudes who can’t see—let alone touch—an actual set of boobs in real life! Which is why they will positively fucking salivate over soft-core porn! This plan is genius!

And just in case any of you are thinking, “Well, maybe the only other magazines the company publishes are Maxim and Equestrians & Miniature Model-Making Enthusiasts Monthly. Maybe Maxim really was the best option,” let me disabuse you of that notion. For do you know what company now owns and has ceased publishing EGM? It is motherfucking HEARST. Which, I don’t know if you’re aware, is only like the biggest publishing house in the entire goddamn world. According to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, Hearst owns about 200 magazines. They couldn’t have found one in there that people other than straight teenage boys might enjoy? Popular Mechanics? SmartMoney? ESPN The Magazine? For fuck’s sake, even Esquire would be better if you’re convinced that everyone who reads gaming magazine must love titties, because there are at least a few articles and some respectable new fiction in there. But no, it was Maxim that Hearst felt sure would keep the refund requests at bay.

And yet! Even most dudes (who appear to be straight, judging by their near-universal rush to note that they’re totally into boobs! Never fear! No queers here!) who are so into video games that they write about them for a living and would therefore seem to be precisely the group that Hearst was targeting with the Maxim replacement seem to think the idea is pretty fucking stupid. Crazy, right? Even these dudes—who are totally excited about tits! they are eager to remind you!—can conceive of other gamers who might not be. So why couldn’t Hearst?

Roundup: Reasons my mood matches the weather

For those not in Boston, the description that suits both is “foul.”

• This tidbit on the front page of the Boston Globe‘s website:

Cuts reached, Times does not foresee closing Globe
With the 23 percent pay cut imposed on members of the Boston Newspaper Guild, the paper’s owner, the New York Times Co., said today it has achieved the savings it needs and doesn’t foresee shutting down the paper.

Now, of course I’m happy that the Globe won’t be closing. But I was never really afraid that it would be closing, because this same little melodrama plays out every year or two. Each time, the Times Co. tell the unions that if they don’t make big sacrifices, the paper will shut down and everyone will lose their jobs. And yet even though the company almost never gets the full amount of concessions it was asking for, the paper miraculously continues to publish! Why, it’s almost as if the parent company were exaggerating the paper’s financial distress in order to cheat employees and weaken the unions! But that can’t be, because corporations are fundamentally ethical and have come to recognize the important role unions play in today’s business world.

• Dr. Tiller’s clinic is closing permanently. It’s hardly surprising, as there are few people trained to do the procedures Dr. Tiller performed, and, thanks to terrorists like Scott Roeder, fewer still willing to perform them, but part of me was hoping that something amazing would happen to allow the clinic to carry on its vital mission. But in real life, terrorists often win.

• This dude’s “My Brief Life as a Woman” article. He was prescribed Lupron, which suppresses sex hormones, as part of his treatment for prostate cancer and discovered that the drug induced in him a state similar to menopause. From this he “confirm[ed] my lifelong sense that the world of women is hormonal and mysterious,” including such difficulties as uncontrollable food cravings and weeping jags brought on by nothing in particular. It’s not worth going into any depth about this, but let me briefly enumerate the assumptions required to make this article possible:
  1. His problems were all caused by hormone fluctuations, none from the side effects of Lupron itself, even though I hear it’s a pretty powerful drug.
  2. The symptoms produced by testosterone withdrawal in men in no way vary from those produced by estrogen withdrawal (menopause) in women.
  3. Menopause, far from being a relatively brief transitional phase between two much longer, more stable phases in a woman’s life, is pretty much the state of all women, all the time.
  4. Despite being in a constant state of hormonal change (…is that even possible?) for decades on end, women have developed no strategies for coping with the effects of these fluctuations and are completely at their mercy.
  5. Men experience no hormone fluctuations similar to those of the menstrual cycle or menopause in women that would alter their moods or produce physical changes.

• I saw this cartoon on the front page of Slate the other day:
  

For those who can’t see the image, Osama bin Laden is in a cave reading a newspaper with the headline “Obama Reaches Out to Muslims” and declaring “And we’ll be reaching out to Christians.”

Ha ha ha! Get it? It’s funny! It’s totally funny! Don’t you get it? It’s funny because A) America is a Christian nation, and attacks on America—even those directed at international symbols of secular concepts and institutions like finance/capitalism and the U.S. government/democracy—are properly understood as attacks on Christianity and Christians, for it is our official national religion with which Muslim extremists take issue, B) the primary purpose of Obama’s Cairo speech was to combat terrorism, C) giving speeches is all the Obama administration is doing to combat terrorism, and D) making a public gesture of basic respect for the 1.5 billion members of the world’s second-largest religion would do nothing at all to prevent terrorism and might even encourage it! Now you get, it right? I shouldn’t even bother typing anymore, because surely you are now laughing too hard to read this through your tears of mirth!

Models: They’re bad people*

At least, that’s what Photoshop Disasters seems to think. Unless the guy who runs the site is secretly a doctor, and therefore he’s diagnosing, rather than uncreatively ridiculing, the discoloration on this woman’s arm as “junkie trackmarks.”

To me it looks like a scar or birthmark, and looks nothing at all like track marks (which look like this), but hey, I’m no secret doctor!

Fellow secret doctors in the comments section disagree with the diagnosis, but most seem to concur that it either has something to do with the fact that she’s thin, a status she must have gained through questionable means, or that she’s modeling for Hot Topic, which means she’s a whiny depressive and/or subculture freak. Some alternative diagnoses: A bruise caused by the anemia she has because she doesn’t eat! (Comes with bonus prescription for a sammich!) A scar caused by self-harm! A bruise from the kinky sex she was having last night! Scarification! Infection from a piercing gone wrong!

To be fair, more than half the commenters are saying that it’s not a Photoshop Disaster at all, that the mark is at worst not distracting, and at best the sign of a refreshing willingness to allow models to appear “imperfect” (otherwise known as “human”) for once. And although one person did attempt to sneer that one of the commenters defending leaving the mark alone is “gay,” someone else called them out on using “gay” as an insult! All this non-douchebaggery was a pleasant surprise on a site whose comment section usually seems to thrive on hackneyed mockery, played-out put-downs, and puerile antics.

Unfortunately, Hot Topic only listened to the minority opinion and has since airbrushed the whatever-it-is out. Because models have to adhere to inhuman standards of beauty so insane that even the most attractive people require the helping cursor of digital manipulation, and anything that detracts from the plastic “perfection” of their looks not only makes them ugly, but is also a sign of some kind of moral failing on their part. If a birthmark makes you a junkie, I dread to think what kind of mass-murdering sociopath you must be if your body is hideously deformed by a few moles or a spare tire.

—————————————–
*Not, of course, that I think engaging in any of the actions mentioned above makes you a bad person, but the commenters who are speculating about them sure seem to.

Weirdos in favor of infiltrating the ranks of typical, average straight gals

A couple days ago I became a fan of the Facebook cause “Typical, average straight gals in favor of gay rights,” which is approximately the 11 millionth group of its ilk I have joined. I don’t normally feel the need to broadcast my not-gayness, but I like flipping the bird to the idea that everyone who supports marriage equality and non-discrimination laws and so on must be either gay themselves or some kind of loopy, desperate fag hag or coconut-scented metrosexual or something equally strange and repellent. So I joined. And was immediately annoyed.

It’s not easy being a feminist, as I’m sure you know. You have to keep yourself in a state of high dudgeon at all times. It’s in the charter. And to maintain that special feminist brand of crankypants bitchfacery that makes you completely unlovable, you often have to go looking for ways to get offended. Sometimes you have to get creative and find ways to get offended by your allies. That’s what I was doing when I pored painstakingly over the first couple postings on the group’s page and, later, the item that was then at the top of my news feed.

“Straight families for gay marriage,” the first offending item said. “News flash…us typical, avaerage [sic], straight gals have kids,” proclaimed the second. “What the fuck?” said I.

Apparently many—OK, two, but for in order to be properly offended I will unfocus my eyes so that those two look like an army—typical, average straight gals think that their relationship and reproductive choices are shared by all typical, average straight gals. That there is, in fact, only one way to be a typical, average straight gal, and that is to get married and have kids. Single gals and gals without children can only be typical, average straight gals if they assume themselves to be only pre-wifehood and pre-motherhood, not if they are uncertain about whether they will ever enter either of those states or if they are (gasp!) deliberately unmarried and/or childless.

Which is why someone thought they would nobly counter the “segregation” of single-gender Facebook groups (even though they are, in fact, open to people of all genders and LGBTQI people, shockingly enough!) by inviting everyone to join instead a new group called “Straight families for gay marriage.” Yes indeedy, that leaves no one out! Thank you, Facebooker, for showing us the path to unity! To be fair, the group’s founder does tack on an afterthought note saying that singles are welcome to join too, but… no, we are not. One person is not a family. And counting yourself, as a single person, among families implies that you think you are a family-to-be, which it is my vague understanding, not everyone does! Sometimes even non-harpies think they may not be super into the idea of the nuclear family! I am sure you were knocked ass over teakettle by this revelation, just as I and Mrs. Bennet here were.

It’s also why another member felt the need to bring us BREAKING NEWS: NORMAL WOMEN REPRODUCE! in response to some other people saying that a post about an affordable day care advocacy group, while commendable, was somewhat off-topic. Typical, average straight gals have kids, and those currently without kids will have kids, eventually, so they won’t mind being included, surely. I mean, do you know anyone who’s childless by choice? There’s not even a term for that!

So here I am, 25, living with my boyfriend in post-collegiate poverty (and sin!), spending 82 hours a day on the internet, supporting the rights of my friends in quite possibly the least useful, most sarcastic way I can find, thinking I’m pretty fucking typical. A bit of Gen Y stereotype even. And here comes Facebook—Facebook! Supreme overlord of my entire time-wasting, virtual-reality-dependent, ephemera-obsessed, all-about-me-blogging, no-social-skills-having, hope-promoting, hippie-loving, responsibility-shirking, txt-spk-using, over-punctuating, emoticon-abusing, tl;dr generation!—telling me I’m some kind of weirdo! Reader, I was annoyed! First I asked myself, what would a typical, average straight gal do? (Which, actually, is probably write a long-winded blog post.) Then I realized I was asking the wrong question. What I should have asked myself is, what would a weirdo do? And I realized: Eat a rubber tire to the music of The Flight of the Bumblebee. Which is exactly what I’m going to do. That and, you know, keep not having kids, not getting married, and mulishly insisting that despite my self-evident weirdness, I’m just your typical, average straight gal. But mostly the tire thing.

Kansas abortion doctor murdered

George Tiller, the Kansas doctor whose clinic is one of only a handful in the country willing to perform late-term abortions, was shot to death this morning walking into church.

In 1993, he was shot in both arms in an attempt to stop him from doing his job. Last month, vandals caused thousands of dollars in damage to his clinic.

And today, he was murdered. In front of his church. Presumably by “pro-life” activists acting in the name of God.

The fact that the perpetrators of these attacks are usually American, white, and Christian doesn’t make them any less terrorists.

(Hat tip to Cara.)

Amazon finally says something

Amazon finally, finally issued a press release about the de-listing debacle:

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

This makes more sense than either the theory of deliberate persecution by Amazon or the terrible “glitch” excuse the company issued earlier, so I’m willing to (tentatively) accept it. The common thread between all the topics listed above is the likelihood that they will involve frank discussions of sex. I’m not sure how exactly they would be de-listed while, you know, actual porn was left alone—or why books in those categories that did not involve frank discussions of sex, such as Heather Has Two Mommies, were de-listed—but it is conceivable that such a thing could happen. I’m also still puzzled as to why so many things got de-listed so suddenly, and why it occured over a weekend. I feel Amazon owes the public a fuller explanation of how this happened and what is being done to correct it and prevent its recurrence.

It also owes its customers, particularly the LGBTQI, feminist, rape survivor, and PWD communities, an apology for letting this happen, for not reacting more quickly, and for leaving everyone waiting so long for an explanation. It’s a mark of disrespect that Amazon did not feel that the anger and silencing of these communities deserved to be addressed immediately, even if only to say, “We’re not sure what’s going on, but we didn’t do it on purpose and we’re working to fix it.”

Is #Amazonfail a massive troll?

Note: Amazon has issued a statement about the situation since this post was published. You can read the statement and my take on it here.

In case you somehow missed it, yesterday while some of us were hanging out on our grandparents’ couches watching baseball and swapping Mario Kart tips, tons and tons of LGBTQI-friendly books listed on Amazon were stripped of their sales rankings, rendering them essentially invisible in many searches. The first replies from Amazon customer service said that this was due to a company policy intended to keep adult material off the front pages of the site. However, interwebbers noticed that sex toys still had their sales rankings, as did a Playboy anthology. A pattern quickly emerged: Heather Has Two Mommies? Adult. A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality? Fine. Ellen DeGeneres’s biography? Adult. Ron Jeremy’s biography? Fine. Full Frontal Feminism? Adult. The Professional Bachelor Dating Guide: How to Exploit Her Inner Psycho? Fine.

And then, Twitter exploded. The hashtag created to describe the mess, #Amazonfail, became the #1 trending item in the Twitterverse. The LGBTQI, rape survivor, and feminist communities and their allies are, understandably, outraged, and started a petition protesting the changes.

But before you run off to sign the petition, I urge you to strongly, strongly consider the possibility that we are being trolled.

Via Pandagon comes this possible explanation: LJ user (and admitted troll) tehdely posits that this could be a massive implementation of a tactic called Bantown:

Bantown is a tactic for inciting meta-lulz on multiple levels through the alignment of third-parties against each other. Bantown is like the plot of most James Bond movies, wherein some nefarious evildoer brings the US and the Soviets close to war. Bantown is a trolling technique of the highest order, which usually pits communities against each other, or communities against companies, or organizations against companies, or companies against organizations…

[...]

[T]his troll pits a marginalized and activist community against a big company, with the Internet and all its various discussion media (in this case, blogs and Twitter) as the facilitator.

The post makes excellent sense, so read the whole thing, and this theory also explains the many elements in this story that seem to run directly counter to logic.

First, why would this policy change be implemented on a weekend, and a holiday at that? Even internet companies run their offices on business hours. Trolls, however, would be happy to take advantage of the fact that, as tehdely points out, “Amazon’s customer service would be operating on a skeleton crew and most of those who would be able to fix the problem would be at home and possibly unavailable or on vacation.”

Why is what’s flagged as adult so sloppy and random? An algorithm aimed at flagging LGBTQI-friendly books would both be more thorough in catching those books and would also accidentally catch more of the homobigot books, so it definitely seems like humans running searches on keywords and flagging the top results. Only humans outside the Amazon organization would do this, as employees would have better tools available to them. There’s no evidence of a wingnut or fundie group urging its members to do this (and presumably they’d be busy on Easter Sunday), and it seems strange that such a group wouldn’t also flag sex toys or gay porn. Trolls, however, would focus on the stuff that would cause outrage to the targeted group, and since sex toys and porn are adult material, it’s unlikely that people would get up in arms about it being flagged as such.

And, most obviously, why would Amazon do this? There doesn’t seem to have been any outside pressure for them to hide these books, and even if there were, we’d have to believe that a national corporation with no known right-wing/fundie tendencies agreed to essentially cease to profit off hundreds of books—including some with very broad-based appeal, like Lady Chatterley’s Lover—in order to appease a group that we have to assume would be larger and more vocal than the LGBTQI community and its allies, but not so large or vocal that any of us have heard of it. Trolls, obviously, plan these things in secret.

A megatroll also explains the conflicting explanations for the clusterfucktastrophe that have come out of Amazon itself: first, that it’s policy, and later, that it’s a glitch. Imagine, for a moment, you work in Amazon customer service and you get an email from an author asking why his book has been stripped of its sales ranking. You investigate, see it’s been flagged by users as adult the requisite number of times, which happens to very few titles, and, having no reason to think anything but that all is on the up-and-up, shoot back a form email explaining that that’s what happens to adult titles. Case closed.

When this happens a few more times, over the course of a couple weeks, perhaps you notice a pattern, or perhaps you do not, because it’s not happening often enough for any one customer service rep to get many of these queries. When, all at once, you start getting hundreds of emails asking why certain books have been stripped of their sales rankings, you realize that something is up, but your supervisor has the day off, so you do the only thing you can: keep sending those form letters while leaving frantic messages on your bosses’ voicemails.

Finally, after several hours of this shitstorm, somebody with authority makes it back to the office. This person assesses the situation, knows that there’s no “new” policy, can’t find any reason the de-listings should be happening at all, and comes to the conclusion that something must be wrong with the software. The boss immediately issues a press release saying it’s a glitch in an effort to lessen the PR nightmare and buy some time to pinpoint the problem.

Nothing makes sense if you believe Amazon is doing this on purpose; everything makes sense if you believe the company has no idea what’s going on. I’m going to hold off on cancelling my Amazon Prime membership for a couple days and see what surfaces.

Update: Someone has claimed responsibility for this as a troll, though I have no way of judging whether it’s true or even plausible that this person did what they said they did. (Hat tip to Scott Madin, via the Shakesville comments section.)

Update 2: Someone else claims to have run the code in the post linked in the update above and found it doesn’t work, declaring that claim of responsibility a metatroll. Again, I have no way of judging whether this person’s analysis is accurate or not, although I freely admit that metatrolling is a real possibility.

Also of note: Amazon removed the “Flag as inappropriate” feature from its website sometime last night or this morning. This would seem to support the trolling theory, since it would be the quickest way to halt the process of stripping LGBTQI books of their sales rankings if, in fact, some group outside Amazon were acheiving that end by flagging such books without the company’s approval.

Update 3: Jessica Valenti’s editor apparently heard from an Amazon PR rep that this is the result of an attempt by the company to prevent people searching for Harry Potter from accidentally catching sight of anything that “might be offensive,” which is apparently limited almost exclusively to books for or about the scary gays. If this is true, it’s obviously fucking reprehensible. However, that same post says that Deanna Zandt remains unconvinced, and I tend to agree with her. This version of events doesn’t really explain the suddenness with which so many books were de-listed, why it happened over the weekend, or why it didn’t also cover porn, sex toys, or books that discussed but weren’t friendly to homosexuality. It sounds to me more like a case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, although I give a lot more weight to this report than to the form letters previously received by authors.

WAM, WAM, WAM, WAM, eggs, and WAM

Sorry, dear readers, to have abandoned you for a wicked long time. I was stricken with several Very Serious Illnesses. First, the flu. Then, Rock Band fever. Then, what my friend diagnosed as a terminal case of the Fuckits. I seem to be recovering now. Sunshine and the promise of baseball help.

However! If you are going to be at WAM! and you’re not too mad at me, I would love to meet you! Keep an eye out for me. I look like this:

Or, slightly more accurately, like this:

Have you had YOUR daily dose of Vitamin Crazy?

Don’t be afraid to say hello to the crazy lady. She will introduce you to the Miracle of Science.

Swagga like her

There are, like, eleventeen more important issues I’ve been meaning to blog about for weeks, but since it is not currently possible to draw a breath without hearing more about this story, I have to get this out quick.

Women are more than their wombs. Women do not stop being the people they are when they get their periods, when they stop getting their periods, when they get pregnant, or when they cease to be pregnant. And the massive controversy over M.I.A.’s 9-months-pregnant performance at the Grammys on Sunday highlights how incapable our culture is of understanding that simple fact.

M.I.A. is an enormously successful music star. Her career did not fall into her lap from thin air; she worked extremely hard at it for years and years, just like every other performer on that stage that night. She did not stop being ambitious, driven, or professional because a fetus took up residence in her uterus. Her pregnancy did not change the fundamental nature of her. She is still the woman she was 10 months ago, just rounder. So then why is it surprising that she would choose to perform if at all possible? And why do so many people find it unseemly?

We have this myth that women—at least some women—can be people as long as there’s nothing going on in their uteruses. But as soon as something changes in there, BLAMMO! Instant revocation of humanity. Women having, or about to have, their periods are shrill and hysterical, screaming for no reason one minute and crying for no reason the next. Women who no longer get their periods are shriveled and mean. Women who are pregnant put out a beatific glow, and do little other than mince around delicately while gently cradling their bellies. Women who have given birth suddenly find the domestic sphere more satisfying and more important than careers or social lives.

But did your mother stop making terrible puns when she hit menopause? Did your sister stop loving baseball when she got pregnant? Does the friendly barista at your regular coffee place start spitting in your latte once a month? Did the new mom at work forget how to manage the payroll when she came back from maternity leave?

Women are people, fully realized people, with widely differing personalities. Each will react differently to the various changes her body undergoes, but those changes are primarily physical. We don’t get brain replacements every time there’s a change in the status of our uteruses. Furthermore, these changes are all either regular (menstruation) or relatively long-lasting (pregnancy, menopause, parenthood). We adjust. Anything that’s a part of your life so often or for so long, you find a way to live with it, around it, through it, whatever. We make it work.

M.I.A. made it work. Yes, obviously, she could go into labor at any minute, but that was true two weeks ago, too, and every pregnant woman has to weigh for herself the costs and benefits of putting her life on hold while waiting to deliver. And the worst that could have happened would have been that her water broke onstage which, while embarrassing, isn’t particularly dangerous. So she went for it. And she was great. Not only did she take the stage with some of the biggest male stars of hip-hop and show that she belonged, she was confident enough to show off and play up the physical changes pregnancy has wrought.

She dared to be bold, be active, be the center of attention, be sexy, and be expecting. And in our society, that’s just not acceptable.

Obama signs Ledbetter Act!

Obama’s first bill signing is the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act! And I think Ledbetter herself was wearing an Elvis pin at the ceremony, which is badass. I just watched it live on CNN.com, so no links yet, but I will update when they come in.

Update: HuffPo has both the video and the transcript, so I guess I’ll just link you there. On closer inspection (or, more accurately, at higher resolution), it appears that Ledbetter’s pin isn’t Elvis striking a pose, but a woman in white walking. Easy mistake to make in streaming video.