Feminism today

Moreover, women who engage in behavior that is perceived as “knowing” or “reckless” and who then suffer a miscarriage are potentially vulnerable to criminal investigation and prosecution under H.B. 12. For example, a woman who fails to wear a seatbelt and is in a car accident could be charged with reckless homicide, should she miscarry. Likewise, a preganant woman with a substance abuse problem is likely to forego necessary prenatal care out of fear that she could be prosecuted for “knowing” or “reckless” homicide by continuing to use illegal substances while pregnant.” ACLU Letter to Governor Gary R. Herbert, on House 12 Bill, “Criminal Homicide and Abortion Amendments”

Utah’s proposed “criminal miscarriage” law includes miscarriages in the definition of “illegal abortion” and opens the way to charging women deemed to have caused their own miscarriages by “knowing or reckless behavior.” It’s passed Utah’s House and Senate and is waiting for the governor’s signature.

We’ve already seen cases where women have been arrested for things like looking for a second opinion after a doctor recommended a caesarian, or falling down a flight of stairs while pregnant.

Think prosecutors in Utah, the state that recently proposed eliminating 12th Grade, will be any more rational and restrained?

No other comment necessary.

I will say yes when you want me to say yes. I will be quiet when you don’t want to hear me say no. I will take your call. I will listen to your opinion of my friends. I will listen to your friends opinions of my friends. I will be civil to your mother… Super Bowl car ad with the slogan “Charger. Man’s. Last. Stand."

That was the best Super Bowl game ever. Not only did both teams play hard and play well, but the Saints won. (And deserved to win, in spite of what dat canaille Troy Nelson wrote.)

Too bad about the ads, which I suspect, by halftime, had inspired a lot of perplexed reveries among women viewers.

I like a clever commercial. The Betty White/Abe Vigoda spot for Snickers was funny, and I enjoyed seeing Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo return as the Griswolds. I might even, in another context, have cracked a smile at the commercial in which a gorgeous wife is sacrificed to a bunch of futuristic uber-villians for a good set of tires, because I’m a sucker for parodies of bad science fiction.

But watching one commercial, and then another, and then another about how hapless men are being emasculated by women with our lavender scents and shopping and vampire shows and book clubs and requests not to leave the toilet seat up and by the way, here’s a website Tim Tebow and his mother want us to see… Let’s just say I detected a trend. Individually they might have been innocuous. Throw ‘em all together and it’s time for one of those talks - the kind a guy in a Super Bowl commercial abhors -- where the wife or girlfriend tells him to put away the football, sit down, and explain to her what the Hell is going on.

I only have a vague notion of how television ads are created and scheduled. Obviously, a cabal of advertising executives did not get together and say, “let’s write a bunch of commercials with castration as the subtext.” The idea just occurred to a bunch of them at roughly the same time. Combine that with the Tebow spot and CBS’ refusal to carry an ad for a gay dating site, and what comes through loud and clear is a state of widespread and sweaty anxiety among ad executives about masculinity, women and control.

Or the widespread perception among ad executives that sweaty anxiety about masculinity, women and control will be a good selling point this year.

Or the sweaty anxiety about masculinity, women and control of whatever CBS executive approved the ads.

Or all three. Who knows? Either way, something is afoot.

What guys often don’t realize is how counter-productive this exaggerated allegiance to masculinity can be. For an experienced woman, suspicion about a guy’s sexuality is likely to be aroused rather than allayed by an “icky-gurls” attitude combined with overt homophobia.

So, my dear, you prefer the company of men? Women make you uncomfortable? Uneasy? And references to men having sex with each other makes you break out in a nervous sweat?

Sorry to tear you away from your fascinated viewing of that game where broad-shouldered men with shiny tight butts hurl their magnificent physiques across a green field, often in slow motion. (I like watching that too.)

…but we need to talk.

Time is the most valuable commodity on a campaign and you just can't waste it thinking about how to choose your words carefully or get your job done more diplomatically. If someone isn't in tears every day, that day wasn't all it could be advancing the campaign. I once witnessed an experienced (big) man slap a professional female colleague across the face over an ad buy... and no one thought anything of it, starting with the woman. In fact, she would have been insulted if anyone told her she should have been insulted. Mary Matalin CNN 11/18/09

Yes, you read that correctly.

Mary Matalin believes a man physically chastising a female colleague is business as usual among the high-powered, tough-minded, hell-for-leather sophisticates running a national presidential campaign. And we’re quickly reassured by her that the woman in question would have been “insulted if anyone told her she should have been insulted.”

To be fair, I can believe the woman in question would have been insulted by someone telling her she should be insulted after being struck by a co-worker. If in the course of a national political campaign, a male colleague slapped me, and someone who witnessed it hastened to instruct me to be insulted, yes, I would consider that advice an insult to my intelligence. “No Shit, Sherlock,” might be my first response as I rubbed my cheek and mentally toted up the attorneys I could call.

Somehow, the excuse that the guy just didn’t have time not to slap me wouldn’t go over very well. Nor would I be impressed by hearing someone talking about it as though it were merely a breach of diplomacy or tact, akin to choosing the wrong words.

It would have nothing to do with hurting my feelings. It would have nothing to do with whether or not being struck made me cry. It wouldn’t even be entirely a matter of what that slap said about the stability or common sense of the male colleague, and whether or not this kind of behavior would escalate in the future.

It would have everything to do with the need to set firm limits when you’re a woman working in what was previously an all male preserve. I’m reminded of an anecdote I once heard about a black man back in the ‘70s who, as the one African American in a previously all white office, objected to being called “boy” by his white boss. “You don’t see me constantly reminding the people around me that I’m a grown man,” said the boss.

“You don’t have to,” retorted his black employee.

A woman who puts up with being physically attacked in the workplace, even if it’s just a slap in the face, is not being a “good sport.” She’s not being wunnathaboys or tough, or savvy, or stoic.

She’s being a fool.

One of the tidbits recently reported on Media Matters about Acorn-baiting videographer James O’Keefe is his 2005 taping of an attempt to distribute “The Good Wife’s Guide” to a women’s studies class at Rutgers. This guide – allegedly first published in 1955 for Housekeeping Monthly -- includes advice like “don’t ask him questions or question his integrity” and concluded with “a good wife always knows her place.”



It’s interesting to note the provenance of that “guide” O’Keefe passed out. According to Snopes.com, it’s a faked mock-up of an apparently fake list of “Good Wife” rules said to be from a 1950s textbook. In short, it’s a spoof -- one that reflects an ugly reality of that era, but still, as Snopes puts it, "a condensation of the worst of this 'joy through subservience' era …call it an exaggeration with a point if you will."

So O’Keefe either took this exaggeration seriously enough to denounce as “hypocrisy” its rejection as a class handout, or, he knew it was faked, in which case his outrage over the supposed “hypocrisy” of the teacher objections is also phony.

If there is yet another ever-so-puckish film clip, in which O’Keefe distributes excerpts from Dixon’s The Klansmen to a black studies class, it hasn’t come to light yet.

Last week, the day after Dr. George Tiller was murdered by an anti-abortion activist in the vestibule of a church, Tucker Carlson was asked the following question by a Washington Post reader:

Over the past few years, Bill O'Reilly has made the following comments about Dr. Tiller:
- He "destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for $5,000."
- He's guilty of "Nazi stuff,"
- a moral equivalent to NAMBLA and al-Qaida
- "This is the kind of stuff that happened in Mao's China, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union"
- "operating a death mill"
- "has blood on his hands"
- "executing babies about to be born
Tucker, I'm not saying Billo wanted some kook to kill him, but isn't this playing with fire?

To which Carlson replied:

Every one of those descriptions of Tiller is objectively true. I sincerely think it's appalling that he was murdered. But Tiller was a monster, no doubt.

This week, Carlson got asked another question on the subject of abortion:

if Roe v. Wade is overturned and abortion could once more be made illegal in various states, what is the appropriate punishment for providing or obtaining an abortion? Who should be charged? The abortion provider? The woman? Those pressuring the woman to obtain an abortion? Is it pre-meditated murder? Manslaughter? Generally, those questions never seem to get addressed, but is it worthwhile to ban abortions when we shrink from imposing any penalties? What is the use of such a law? Thanks.

Carlson’s response:

Good question. Let me dodge it: Laws exist not simply so we can punish those who break them, but to inform those who are considering doing so. They're moral statements, in other words. Let's start by agreeing that abortion is wrong, because it so clearly is, and then decide what we think the penalties ought to be. You can hardly do one without doing the other first.

If we wind up deciding to treat abortion like suicide -- illegal but rarely prosecuted -- that'll be a huge improvement over where we are today, when many politicians (Obama included) can't even work up the strength to condemn abortion for purposes of sex selection.

I guess it would be too much to ask that Carlson do a little soul-searching about why his first instinct is to dodge the question.

Maybe because answering it honestly and directly, especially given his loathsome response to the Tiller murder, would be just too revealing and too ugly.

No doubt if Roe V. Wade is overturned and women and physicians find themselves stuck in prison or even executed for performing, seeking, or undergoing abortions, he'll pronounce himself suitably "appalled."

An online friend has pointed out a piece by The Daily Mail’s Carol Sarler applauding the idea of employers discriminating against childless women.

Research conducted over six years shows that far from bosses and colleagues always being suspicious of a working mother, the opposite is becoming true: it is the childless woman who is regarded as cold and odd…

…three cheers for the employers who are catching on, the ones who don't want to people their workforces with the cold, the calculating, the sad and the mad. The only question is: what took you so long?

Keep in mind that Sarler is not offering those cheers to employers for simply recognizing that mothers can be very good employees. No, she has declared herself delighted that childless women are being punished, “are increasingly likely to be vilified, refused jobs and denied promotion” because they’re perceived as lacking “an essential humanity.”

Aside from the glaring sexism of this piece (Sarler seems to have no trouble with childless men), it’s an example of an especially obnoxious form of arrogance – inflating a personal preference into a moral imperative. Sarler is a mother. Sarler presumably wanted to be a mother and likes being a mother, but she’s not content unless she’s recognized as being morally superior to childless woman simply by virtue of being a mother.

Unfortunately, people afflicted with this form of smugness invariably feel compelled to either write essays about it or offer long, earnest explanations to anyone unfortunate enough to bring the subject up in conversation. Such people can’t merely say, “I’m a vegetarian.” They must add, with an air of faux apology “I prefer not to engage in the cold-blooded murder of innocent animals.” They can’t just say, “I don’t have a TV,” in response to someone asking, “Did you see Lost last night?” They must add, “I prefer to spend my time reading, or going for walks, and really, I just can’t understand how anyone can sit indoors staring at that boob tube…” They can’t even post an essay about their beloved dog without casting snide aspersions on the presumed masochism of cat lovers or about their beloved cat without imputing fascist tendencies to dog owners.

And when this personal preference is one widely embraced by certain sectors of society, such essayists can, like Carol Sarler, use it to make money.

It can be quite lucrative to write essays reassuring entire segments of the population that their own nasty prejudices are, in fact, evidence of keen moral insight.

A teenage gunman killed 15 people, most of them female, on Wednesday in a rampage that began at a school near Stuttgart in southern Germany and ended in a nearby town…

They said the attacker, clad in black, opened fire in three classrooms at the school, killing nine students — eight girls and a boy — and three teachers, all women….

No motive had emerged by Wednesday night….
article in The New York Times (3/12/09) on the German high-school student who recently went on a suicidal shooting rampage

…I don't want to speculate too much about this," Rech said at a news conference. "But it is noteworthy that primarily girls were killed -- eight girls and one boy . . . The teachers killed were women."
Article in The Washington Post, 3/11/09 under the headline "Motives Remain a Mystery after Slaughter in Germany"
Motive? What motive?

Come on, this mass murder was plainly not random and the motive is plainly not a complete mystery. I understand journalistic caution, but is it really a stretch to acknowledge that someone who deliberately shoots over a dozen people -- almost all of whom are female -- was at least partially driven by misogyny?

"I want some of these women to start telling me what it is I must do to close the gender gap — or, if not what it is I must do to close the gender gap, what it is I’ve done that has caused the gender gap" Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh wants to know why women don’t like him. To that end, he’s held a “summit” in which women (no transsexuals please) are invited to call him up and explain why we don’t like him.

So how did his “summit” go?

Pretty much the way any experienced woman of any political persuasion would expect it to. Most women of a certain age have in the course of their lives, encountered at least one guy who’s figured out women despise him and want us to “help him out.” Most of us learn pretty quickly that, in fact, guys like this know damned well why women dislike them, and are just looking for a forum from which to denounce women for disliking them.

For instance, there’s Rush’s reaction to learning about a conservative schoolteacher who thinks he’s “pompous.”

Here's a woman who's listened to me one time, she thinks I'm pompous. She's a schoolteacher, she's willing to profess her own ignorance by saying I'm pompous after having listened to one day, and she's out teaching kids? This woman is a menace to society.

Hey, that’ll win her over! And how many times should she have listened in order to make a reasoned judgement?

CALLER: She has listened to it once, and I was telling your screener that I think you made a great, great point when you said you have to listen for at least three weeks --

RUSH: Six.

CALLER: -- to really get the gist.

RUSH: Six weeks.

CALLER: -- of the show.

RUSH: Six weeks. Three weeks not enough.

CALLER: All right.

RUSH: Yeah, six weeks.

Ye Gods.

Then, of course, there’s the inevitable “lighten up” response. A conservative caller pointed out that calling a female blogger an “infobabe” annoyed most women whatever their political background.

RUSH: I would say they need to lighten up, for crying out loud! Why do I have to change who I am?

...because you were complaining that women don’t like who you are and you say the entire purpose of this “summit” is women telling you what it is you must do to close the gender gap?

Why can't they just lighten up? … I'm not going to change that. That is a signature. I mean, that's been picked up. Even if I stop using it, everybody else out there is using it. I guess next I should stop using the term "anchorette." (sigh)

But the true kicker, the one moment most likely to prompt the eyes of almost every mature woman on the right and left side of the political spectrum to meet over his head and lock for just one instant of mutual understanding and sympathy, is the moment when the guy who was asking us women to instruct him starts handing out assignments to us:

… Here's where I want to assign breakout groups. All such seminars and such as we're doing here, summits, have breakout groups. If you know a woman who doesn't listen or has listened very infrequently who despises me and this program, demand that you and her listen to the program together one day and then you report back to me on what happened. This is a great exercise here for the Female Summit, many breakout groups like this could occur all over America.

Just one day? I thought he said three weeks was “not enough. “ Maybe he meant three unsupervised weeks.

It’s an idea he really seems to like, because he repeats it to a caller who says the gals in her gender studies class truly dislike him:

This is a great opportunity here, playing off of the Female Summit; and that is just find one of the women in the class that buys everything in the textbook, and invite her to listen to the program with you for an hour or two or three, one day. Just one. Not because you want her to change her mind. You don't confront. It's nonconfrontational, it's nonargumentative, but you want her to understand you.

Interesting “assignment.” Are restraining straps included?

I like the idea too, actually, but that's because I’m an evil, evil old witch of a liberal. One of many. And I suspect an army of female dittoheads seeking out us female non-dittoheads so we can listen to Rush Limbaugh together and talk about it is likely to result in…well…carnage. That’s the only way to describe it. Dittoheads of any gender aren’t real good at argument. They tend to get flustered and, after tossing out a couple of Limbaughisms, close down the conversation with cogent observations like “Why do you hate America?” or “You’re a Femnazi!” or “Sez you!”

Which is why they make such yummy snacks. For sheer guilty pleasure, there’s nothing like spitting out the bones of some talk-radio fan who strode forth imagining that being armed with something Rush said makes his or her arguments unassailable.

Sometimes I use the Limbaugh quotes they came with to pick what’s left out from between my fangs.

Bring it on.

There are moments that transcend politics, moments when women on the left and the right look across the ideological divide, catch each other’s eye, and shake our heads bitterly in a brief instant of solidarity.

This excerpt from Morning Joe last week is one of them. On December 18th Mika Brezinski was mugged outside of a D. C. hotel before coming in to work. She wasn’t hurt, and she only lost about six dollars, and I’m sure it was a nasty experience. But I suspect what she’s truly going to remember about that day is not the mugging itself, but what she had to go through afterwards before the TV cameras.

Watch this clip and keep an eye on her face. It begins with Joe Scarborough announcing, “I’m a little bothered:”

M: Why are you bothered? (There’s a resigned note to the question that makes me suspect she has a sinking feeling about what’s coming.)

JS: By what happened to you before you came here.

M: “Oh, come on, that’s just not…You know what? No. (Joe is staring thoughtfully off into the distance as she says this, jaw firm with the expression of a man about to do what a man’s gotta do.)

JS: I think I gotta tell people… I won’t tell where it happened, but I’m a little upset. Willie Geist… (Note Mika Brezinski’s face as she hears this. Joe’s upset? She’s plainly mad as hell, and not about “what happened” to her before she came in to work.)

WG: What happened, I want to hear about it? (Geist has assumed his tough-guy expression. To hell with this woman fluttering on the periphery of this conversation, making it plain she doesn’t want to talk about this matter which involves her directly. Two men are talkin’ men’s business here.)

JS:, Mika…

M: This is totally inappropriate…

JS: Mika was waiting for the car….

M: Oh God, come on…

KS: I’m not going to say what hotel she was staying at… And she got mugged this morning!

M: (Every woman will recognize her body language here. She puts something aside, bends over, hides her face for second. When she uncovers it’s plain she’s passed into the “I can’t believe their doing this” stage and is now trying to laugh it off.) It’s okay!

JS: A guy, a guy walked up to her, seriously, right outside the hotel door and I am furious about this.(Geist is listening to this openmouthed with rage.) I’m furious, and we’re going to give them a call…

Mika, Okay, no, no, no, no, no, no, no…

JS: I’m not saying what hotel. But she is sitting outside of a hotel…(Mika has given up smiling and is now staring at her lap, no doubt fantasizing about a trap door opening and swallowing her up – or better yet, a trap door opening up under Joe Scarborough….)

WG: Whaaaat! (This is in a sibilant whisper.)

JS: …and a guy comes up to her ad says “give me your money and nothing will happen to you…”

She gave him six dollars. He went on his way. She’s not happy about it, but in the long run, fine. Mika’s an adult, and does not appear to have been deeply traumatized by the incident.

Gentlemen, watch her face in this clip. Watch and learn. Is she charmed? Is she impressed? Does she look as though she feels all warm and safe and cuddly because Joe Scarborough, Willie Geist and, about midway through it, Patrick Buchanan are puffing out their many chests and emoting about the awful thing that happened to Mika?

No. She is not. Because she knows damned well it’s not about her. If it were, they would have shut up the minute she made it plain she was unhappy about this on-camera discussion.

No, It’s about three guys putting on their Roy Rogers cowboy hats and posturing around a grown woman who’s been cast in the profoundly unwilling role of maiden in distress.

And she also knows that if she were a guy, none of them would have even considered embarrassing her in this manner.

Slobbering Yahoo Michael Savage, on a recent case in New York where a New York City attorney is alleged to have been shot to death over a woman who “moonlights as a dominatrix.

"Where did this all come from, a dominatrix? When did that -- when did that come up in America, dominatrix? I mean, I could say a few words about it. When I was a kid, we didn't need to go to a dominatrix; all we had to do is argue with our mothers." The Savage Nation 12/4/08, quoted in Media Matters

Oh…My…God.

And it gets worse.

"… Then we got into the dominatrix issue. I don't understand that part of it. I truly don't understand it because any heterosexual woman today over the age of 25 who grew up in America is basically a dominatrix. You ask any heterosexual guy…."

Is this guy trying to confirm our suspicions that right wing talk radio is disproportionately infested with hirsute, pear-shaped women haters who have seriously twisted mommy issues?

Yes. Yes he is…

"It's any wonder I'm in talk radio. The safest place for a man to be today is in talk radio and listening to it."

Sexual assault is heavily stigmatized in the Middle East, and victims are often afraid to talk about it to anyone, fearing that their families will abandon them. And their shaky status in Jordan leaves them afraid to seek help and vulnerable to new assaults and abuse. Anna Badkhen, Christian Science Monitor, November 24, 2008

Today’s Christian Science Monitor piece on Iraqi rape victims who have fled to Jordan illustrates just how false is one myth about patriarchal societies where women are relegated to strictly “traditional” roles. It’s frequently claimed that such communities cherish women. Women in such societies are in fact “cherished” only as possessions, so rape is perceived not so much as a crime against a human being as destruction of someone’s property.

This is true whether the patriarchal society in question exists in the Middle East or in the United States. One of the often overlooked bits of nastiness in Thomas Dixon Jr’s early 20th century bestseller, The Clansman, along with its violent racism and its promotion of the myth of black men as insatiable sexual predators, was its premise that the only honorable option for a victim of rape was suicide.

“The thought of life is torture. Only those who hate me would wish that I live. The grave will be soft and cool, the light of day a burning shame...Death is the only way,” a rape victim says in the novel before hurling herself from a cliff. One wonders, after reading this, how rape victims in white southern society at that time were treated if they didn’t do the “honorable thing” and kill themselves.

Of course, we no longer go that far when it comes to rape. We just treat the rights of women as if they were a separate issue from human rights in general. After all our chest beating and outrage of the Taliban’s ill-treatment of women in Afghanistan, we invaded a Muslim country where women were, in fact, better treated than in most places in the Middle East. The result was a rise in the power of Islamic fundamentalists that has caused half of Iraq’s population to lose rather than gain rights. And while we don’t urge them to commit suicide anymore, we treat as a peripheral issue the rape of American women in our armed forces and female Halliburton employees.

For all the progress we’ve made in recent years, women are still not quite perceived as part of the human equation in human rights.