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.

MOTHER. FUCK.

All the local stations are calling it. Coakley conceded. Somehow Massachusetts elected a forced-birth advocating, birth-certificate denying, Kennedy-hating teabagger.

I am deeply ashamed of my state right now. Congratulations, fellow voters. If you’re a wealthy, straight, white, able-bodied, Christian man between 35 and 60 who has a recession-proof job, high-quality, low-cost health insurance, and a small enough heart to only care about people just like you, Scott Brown might not be that bad for you.

Anyone know of any expatriate newspapers looking for a good editor?

The Senate race is giving me heart palpitations

Wish I had a moment to say something more in-depth, but since I’m using my lunch break to both eat and post this, I’ll have to settle for a few thoughts.

1. The weather here is shitty—wet, sloppy snow—and that probably helps Brown. Low turnouts are generally good for challengers because their voters tend to be more motivated. They’ll turn out in muck to change the system, whereas supporters of incumbents (or members of entrenched incumbent parties, in this case) feel their candidate is safe without their votes and are more easily convinced to stay home.

2. However, turnout has been surprisingly strong so far, which I think is a good sign for Coakley. It could be that every last member of Brown’s base is at the polls and they alone are enough to make turnout look high for an off-year special election, but I doubt it. What I think is happening is that all the national coverage of Brown’s surge has led a lot of complacent Massachusetts liberals to realize that, for once, the primaries were not the only vote that matters. The same goes for people who were going to stay home because because, you know, Coakley sucks, who’re now realizing that it’s important to hold their noses and vote the ticket if they don’t want zombie Ted Kennedy on their doorsteps tomorrow.

3. It’s important to note that the Globe article is referring to strong turnout in Boston, which is usually very strongly Democratic and always the source of the lion’s share of the state’s votes. In Boston, most people can walk to their polling places. This may make a difference, because the largest Republican enclaves are on the Cape and along the I-495 loop that skirts the city, where all those people who have office jobs in Boston but don’t want to see a person of color in their neighborhood live. If it snows hard enough, especially if the roads get bad, those people might decide to go straight home after work. A girl can dream.

4. If Scott Motherfucking Brown wins this election, I’m moving to France, where I can vote Socialist, spend a month on the Riviera every summer, and drink red wine by the gallon. À bientôt, mes amis.

Goodbye, Teddy

I hope to have coherent thoughts on the death of Senator Kennedy in a few days, but I’m having trouble pulling them together right now.

I will miss him. And although our standard-bearer may have fallen, the best way to heal ourselves and pay tribute to him is to keep fighting. Not in his name, but for his causes. As my boyfriend said, Teddy would probably rather the health care bill be called the “Ted Kennedy Was A Drunken Schmuck Health Care Act” and include a robust public option than have it lionize him but be toothless itself.

Those interested in paying tribute to the late senior Senator from Massachusetts should head to the memorial website his family has set up, TedKennedy.org, and those in the area who are thinking of attending one of the public mourning events in his honor can find information about the arrangements here.

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…

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!

It’s that time of the election cycle again…

Yes, Obama’s first 100 days ended about five minutes ago, but the 2012 campaign has already begun. This unwelcome news was forced upon my consciousness, which had been dutifully trying to ignore it for weeks now, during an afternoon perusal of the Boston Globe‘s homepage. There I saw, under some much less interesting news about former Mass House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi’s indictment for being more than usually corrupt, the following two headlines in close proximity to one another: “Romney takes Obama bashing to CNN, ‘Today Show’” and “Minn. Governor Pawlenty won’t seek third term.”

Two inescapable conclusions must be drawn from each of these. From the first, I conclude that Mitt Romney will never, ever stop annoying the shit out of me, and that that annoying fucker is running for president. Still. Again. Some more. From the second, I conclude that Tim Pawlenty is also running for president, and that Al Franken is screwed. Y’see, now that he’s set his sights on the White House, Pawlenty no longer has to pretend he gives a shit what Minnesota voters think, and he has every motivation to do things that empower or curry favor with Republicans, and refusing to certify Franken’s election does both. So unless the Minnesota Supreme Court rules not only that Coleman has no grounds to continue contesting the election, but also that Pawlenty must certify Franken immediately, the junior Senator from Minnesota probably won’t be seated before Congress breaks for the summer. And with a judicial nominee to filibuster, you can bet the party leadership would be extremely grateful to anyone who could hold the Dems to 59 seats.

Jay Smooth breaks it down again

I got back from the inauguration last night and immediately fell into bed. I’m too tired to write today, but tomorrow I promise my story of the day, plus pictures. For now, watch Jay Smooth get to the heart of things in typically awesome fashion.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

That guy

So. You’ve been dating this guy—pretend you’re into guys—for a couple months and the two of you are spending all your time in your apartment because the chemistry’s so great—you rarely even bother to go on dates, in fact—but things outside the bedroom are progressing slowly and he’s a little aloof because he just got out of a bad relationship. And you’re a little smitten, sure, but not, like, head-over-heels, and anyway it’s OK, you can be patient. And he’s met a few of your friends but you haven’t met any of his, and you’ve dropped a couple hints about it but you’re trying not to be pushy because, you know, bad relationship. And one day he says, “Sorry, babe,”—he’s the kind of guy who says “babe”—”I have to cancel our plans for tonight. One of my buddies is moving to another state and a bunch of us are having this going-away thing and I’ll be out ’til the bars close.” And you go, “Well, we were just going to grab a beer anyway, and I’d really love to meet your friends, so why don’t I just come along? At least for an hour, just so I can say hello and learn some names.” And he says, “Oh, babe, I don’t know if that’s such a great idea. I’ll tell you what, though: You can come over my apartment tomorrow, maybe meet my roommate if he’s around.” And in that moment you realize not only that he isn’t dating you at all, he’s just using you, but also that he thinks you’re so dumb you won’t realize it and so shallow that you can be bought off with such a pathetic and obvious sop. You, of course, are insulted and infuriated because this condescending bullshit is so much worse than if he’d just frankly told you, “Babe, I only bring people I’m serious about to meet my friends.” So maybe you yell at him some, maybe you just tell him to get the hell out of your house, but you sure as shit never call his sorry ass again.

You hate that guy, right? Everybody hates that guy. Even his friends hate him a little for what he does to people who care about him, who think he cares back.

So, Barack Obama, why do you want to be that guy?

We’ll have a gay old time

I will never apologize for my open homer-ism about life in New England, especially when it seems like every week my home region gives me another reason to cheerlead.

AUGUSTA, Maine—State Sen. Dennis Damon is introducing a bill to end the prohibition on gay marriage in Maine. House Republican Josh Tardy, meanwhile, is proposing to bolster the state law restricting marriage to one man and one woman by making it a constitutional amendment.

The dueling proposals ensure that gay marriage will be hotly debated this legislative session.

As it stands, Maine has a domestic partnership registry that’s open to gay couples. But that’s not enough for gay marriage supporters. Damon says it’s time to “fully end discrimination in Maine.”

Gay marriage is being debated elsewhere in the region.

In New Hampshire, a bill’s been submitted to replace the term “civil union” with “marriage” in the state’s 1-year-old civil union law. Vermont, the first state to recognize same-sex couples with its civil unions law, is now likely to consider a gay marriage bill.

Tardy’s competing bill is admittedly depressing, but I think Damon’s has a fighting chance. Maine is more Republican than the rest of New England, but that’s mostly due to fiscal conservativism. If you want to help things along, you can email Senator Damon to tell him you support his measure or (politely!*) ask Representative Tardy not to enshrine bigotry in the state constitution. Obviously this is especially important for constituents, but even if you’re not a Mainer it’s still valuable to let those on the side of equality know they’re not alone, and let those trying to legislate hate know that their bigotry won’t be condoned.

If things go well, marriage equality could be the status quo in five out of six New England states by the end of the year. What’s up with you laggers in Rhode Island? Get with the program!

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*I say “politely” because although I know outrage over this issue is absolutely warranted, feeding someone’s fantasy that they’re a persecuted crusader for an unpopular moral right just encourages them to never accept defeat.

Great news!

Update: Paycheck Fairness Act and Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act pass House!

Blago impeached!

New “Target Women”!

Vodpod videos no longer available.

And I think my writer’s block may finally be breaking up!

Hey, remember me?

I’m sorry for my long silence. Life is stressful for me right now, so I’ve been doing what I always do when I’m stressed: alternately baking and hiding under the bed. All this baking and consuming of ginger snaps (Pictured at right. Tip: Use them as biscotti!), lemon squares, lacy oatmeal sandwich cookies, snickerdoodles, and tiny soufflés, among other things, has left very little time for writing.

But even from under my bed, I cannot entirely escape blogging, as evidenced by the fact that I keep Taboo-ing blog fodder.

Like the story of this massive creepazoid, a serial groper of young girls on public transportation. One quick-thinking high schooler snapped a photo of him with her cell phone camera and, after learning from friends that she was far from his only victim, turned it over to the police. He was tracked down quickly and, even more amazingly, actually convicted. If only he’d been sentenced to more than 25 hours of community service and 2 years’ probation my joy would be complete.

And this story in Slate, wherein the openly Catholic author trumps up the danger of Catholic hospitals closing should President Obama do anything so radical as ratify the Freedom of Choice Act, thereby codifying Roe v. Wade and protecting it somewhat from the current sustained attacks by people who really don’t like it when women control their own internal organs. After noting that many Catholic hospitals are in low-income, under-served communities, she argues against the passage of FOCA as if it should be obvious to all readers that the group threatening to shut down hospitals for the needy—which, by the by, are staffed and run primarily by lay-people—so that no woman should receive complete medical care on their watch is indisputably in the right, and that the group attempting to protect the rights of half the population to decide upon their medical care without the help of the Nosy Nancy down the street are clearly the assholes.

And my deep ambivalence over Hillary Clinton’s acceptance of the Secretary of State position. I’m sure she’ll do a great job, but I was really looking forward to having her as Senate Majority Leader, and now I fear we may be stuck with several more years of Harry Reid’s asshattery.

Clearly there’s nothing for it but to attempt to post semi-regularly again, even if it’s only quick hits and food porn.

My new favorite phrase: President-elect Barack Obama

There are a few important races still too close to call, and some extremely disappointing results in some states, but today I don’t care about that. Tomorrow, I will care. Today I’m just going to revel in this amazing feeling and not think about the disappointments. There aren’t a lot of opportunities in life to be this happy, and I don’t intend to ruin one of them.

Every time I think about it I giggle like an insane person because I can’t smile wide enough to express my joy.

President-elect Barack Obama.

We did a good thing, America.

I voted!

They don’t give out stickers at my polling place, unfortunately, but I voted. It’s a glorious day in Boston, and I breezed in and out in under 15 minutes.

When I got there, there was only one person ahead of me in line, but all the booths were full. The poll-workers were great—quick, friendly, on the ball. The biggest hitch was that the scanner jammed briefly—so many ballots already!—but the cop checking off names joked around with the people in line and the machine was quickly fixed. On the way out, I got a free Marty Walsh pen (dunno why he was trying so hard; he was running unopposed) and I got exit-polled on my voting experience by some college kids working on a school project. I think I was home again half an hour after I left.

Of course, because I work from home, I had the freedom to go while most people were at work, which helped a lot. Last time there was an eloquent black man at the top of the ticket turnout was so strong that many polling places, including mine, ran out of ballots. (Your humble blogger is actually in the photo that accompanies that story.) That day it took me about two hours to vote. This year, Boston’s election chief promises, “I will have enough ballots for everyone to vote three times.” I hope so.

So what’s your voting story? Lines? Easy-breezy? How’s the weather where you are?

The first Tuesday after the first Monday

OK, this is it, people. This is not a dry run; this is not an exhibition game. This is democracy.

Today, we choose our history.

Go vote!

One day

I don’t even know what to say right now.

I’m sick of writing about, reading about, talking about, thinking about this election, and yet I cannot get enough of it. I’m so glad it’ll finally be over; I’m so scared it’ll finally be over.

I’m planning to spend the day in a baking frenzy, ostensibly to prepare for the results-watching party I’m having tomorrow, but really to calm my nerves and keep myself from obsessively reloading FiveThirtyEight, hoping for reassurance that the Republicans can’t possibly steal this one.

Tonight I’m going to try to do some last-minute phone banking against Prop 8. But there’s really not much left to say or do. Just this: Make sure you know where your polling place is, tell your boss you’ll be missing work, and get to the polls tomorrow.

Spreading the rage around

What the fuck, Wingnuts? Were you all asleep through 5th-grade civics?

I speak, of course, of this “Obama is a Communist” meme going around because he said his tax plan would “spread the wealth around.” Well, DUH! So would McCain’s. So would Ron Fucking Paul’s.

It’s a tax plan! Tax plans, by definition, redistribute wealth. The only questions we’re actually debating here are whose wealth, how much of it, and where it goes. Not whether or not any wealth is taken from one person or group and given to another. Redistributing wealth is the primary function of the government. And not just in Jesus-y wasteful “feed the poor, heal the sick” way us namby-pamby liberals talk about, but in the “pay … Debts and provide for the common Defence” way the Constitution talks about. Redistributing wealth is in fact the first power the Constitution grants Congress. To question whether, rather than how, wealth should be redistributed is to question whether people should be ruled by governments at all.

So the real question, my friends, is not whether Democrats are Communists, but whether Republicans are Anarchists.

Quickie: Palin’s wardrobe*

This is gonna be fast because I have to leave, ironically enough, to go clothes shopping, but for the love of giant green Mutsu apples**, can we all stop talking about Sarah Palin’s wardrobe?

First of all, the $150,000 figure is really not that ridiculous. Clothes, particularly women’s clothes, are extremely expensive, and she has to look very good, for a number of reasons. She has to be the anti-Hillary, first of all, playing to a very narrow idea of femininity and taking care not to recall in any way that Scary Mommy figure who almost castrated every breathing male in the country by having power over them. She can’t afford to be seen as anything other than impeccably dressed because she certainly can’t overcome a poor first impression with her air of easy competence and her vast knowledge base. She owes her success in no small part to, yes, a cult of personality, and part of the attraction is that she looks good. (Same applies, obviously, to Obama and Bill Clinton.) And finally, let’s face it, part of the reason she energized the base, and was chosen to energize the base, is because she is Caribou Barbie to a certain brand of Republicans. She’s like the perfect plaything to them: Pretty and empty-headed, all accessories included. Just record some anti-woman talking points on her say-and-play voice box and you can get hours of entertainment dressing her up and creating fantasy lives for her to lead. Sarah Palin smacks down Joe Biden! Sarah Palin out-executives Barack Obama! Sarah Palin sells off the Senate’s chairs on Craigslist when it tries to override her veto! Sarah Palin shoots a moose, cooks it for your dinner, gives you a blowjob, and shuts the hell up!

And dressing her up is integral to this fantasy, fast as it is now fading. Dressing her up is part of why they can like her—because she doesn’t threaten them. She is a strong, ambitious woman just like Hillary Clinton, but she’s not scary because the dressing her up, along with all this “learning at McCain’s knee” grossness and her demonstrated willingness to bow to the almighty Penis Power by bearing a baby no woman could possibly want just to prove her husband’s continued virility***, makes them feel that they are still safely in charge, even if she’s the one in the Oval Office. They think that if her programming ever failed and she started voicing opinions different from theirs, that all it would take to get her back on track would be for a guy—any guy, even them—to sidle up to her and whisper, “Psst, honey, you don’t really want to do that, do you?” Dressing her up like that kind of dude’s fantasy of a working woman—woman first, worker second—is a huge part of creating that fantasy. Spike heels, tight skirts, jackets cut as much unlike a man’s as possible—it’s like her outfits are pulled straight out of their fantasy lives, giving them the illusion that they had a hand in dressing her. And a person you dress isn’t your superior, or even your equal. A person you dress is your child. Maintaining this illusion that Joe Asshole is the giant hand making Caribou Barbie act is worth any amount of money to the party, so getting it at $150,000 is a relative bargain.

Furthermore, I bet Hillary Clinton’s wardrobe is worth $150,000, or at least something on a similar scale. The only difference is that she, like the rest of us, built her wardrobe piece by piece over a number of years. But Sarah Palin got lifted from Outer Mooselick to the national stage overnight, and didn’t have time to build a wardrobe. The clothes she had weren’t suitable for the job she’s seeking, and neither she nor the campaign itself could afford to re-outfit her, so the RNC handed a few consultants an expense card and Palin’s measurements and sent them to Nieman and Saks with orders to make sure she would never be caught wearing repeats. Oh, what, you thought she went herself? Not a fucking chance, buck-o. Every minute of every day is booked for her from now until Nov. 5, and not with non-poll-affecting shit like checking out her own ass in a three-way mirror. No, if she’s not in front of a crowd, she’s traveling to the next crowd or sleeping. Possibly both of the latter two at once. So, yeah, a bunch of image consultants with someone else’s credit card and no budget constraints blew 150 grand on nice clothes. Wouldn’t you?

So, no, I don’t think the $150,000 number is unreasonable at all. But the real reason we should stop fucking talking about it is that it’s not really a slam against an out-of-touch GOP. Let’s quit lying to ourselves: When people say, “OMG, the RNC spent more than I make in five years on Sarah Palin’s outfits!” what they’re really saying is, “OMG, that Sarah Palin chick is so vain and frivolous!” Because that’s how it is for women. Women who appear not to care whether men find them appealing are threatening bitches who just need a good dicking, except no one would touch them with Bea Arthur’s dick, amirite!? Women who men find appealing but accidentally let slip that they don’t just roll out of bed looking like a dude’s pornified wet dream are high maintenance and shallow and, by extension, dumb. That’s all there is. Only ugly women can be smart, and they’re all bitches. Pretty women can only be stupid.

That’s why most of the columns on this topic start off “God, the GOP’s stepped in it this time,” and end with “What did Palin even spend it all on?” Because it’s really about Palin. It’s about Palin. It’s about Palin. It’s. about. Palin. Get it? It’s the party’s credit card, but the real story’s about Palin. About how she’s totally frivolous because, like every other candidate, she’s working with her party to build an image, and about how frivolous women are dumb. Can’t trust those bitches, spending all your hard-earned money on shoes! Don’t they know how hard you work? Don’t they know how much things cost these days? Why do they need another cardigan or pair of pumps anyway? They already have like a million! Dagnabbit, you have three pairs of shoes and that’s plenty! What does she even do with all that stuff?

You see it now, right? The reason this story is sooooo appealing, that no news outlet or blog or stranger on the bus can resist it, is that it feeds that narrative. That women really are too shallow to do serious shit like run the country or work outside the home. That women are bad with money. That women are stupid. That women can be safely shut out and dismissed. That men should really be in charge. In a campaign season where, for the first time, several women are unapologetically demanding a desk in the White House, these narratives about stereotypes confirmed and order restored are just too tempting to ignore.

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*OK, it turned out kinda long, but it’s still quick for me because I just ranted and posted without bothering to edit for clarity or flow or anything. Sorry!

**Fucking delicious, BTW.

***In case it wasn’t completely, brain-numbingly obvious, that was sarcasm. Many parents choose to have children they know will have Down Syndrome, and many of them do so for reasons that have nothing to do with their stance on abortion. I wouldn’t pretend to know what factors led to Sarah and Todd Palin choosing to carry Trig to term, but I think it’s telling that the base jumped to the conclusion that it’s because the governor is pro-life. Regardless of what led to their decision, as a pro-choice liberal I support it and advocate for more and better assistance for caregivers of special-needs children.

Issues! Get yer fresh, hot issues!

As I’ve mentioned before, the only time I ever see political ads* here in Boston is when my rabbit ears pick up a station that reaches into southern New Hampshire, but even I am not safe from the scourge of the new “issues ads.” Last year, SCOTUS re-legalized “issue ads” that mention candidates by name, paving the way for big companies to throw shitloads of money at campaigns with essentially no regulation or oversight. So for months I’ve been seeing the US Chamber of Commerce’s attempts to influence the New Hampshire Senate race. No prizes for guessing which candidate is the pro-life, anti-gun control incumbent and which is the former-governor-who-raised-taxes-to-fund-schools challenger.

And there’s plenty more where these came from!

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*You’re probably thinking, “She must mean national political ads. Of course she sees television ads for local candidates.” Not so! Kennedy’s been in the Senate since my parents were in diapers, and Kerry joined him when I was in swaddling clothes, so even on the rare occasion someone decides to challenge them, they don’t bother running TV ads. No one below Senate level seems to have the war chest for air time except on the public access cable channel, which, of course, doesn’t come in on my rabbit ears.

Woohoo!

From the Greenwich Time:

Connecticut’s Supreme Court ruled Friday that same-sex couples have the right to marry, making the state the third behind Massachusetts and California to legalize such unions.

The divided court ruled 4-3 that gay and lesbian couples cannot be denied the freedom to marry under the state constitution, and Connecticut’s civil unions law does not provide those couples with the same rights as heterosexual couples.

OK, Connecticut, we’re convinced. You can stay in New England despite all your Yankees fans.