Samhita at Feministing links to this Salon article criticizing pop star Gwen Stefani for hiring four Asian women to follow her around. The article’s subtitle neatly sums up its point: “Gwen Stefani neuters Japanese street fashion to create spring’s must-have accessory: Giggling geisha!” From the article:

Real harajuku girls are just the funky dressers who hang out in the Japanese shopping district of Harajuku. To the uninitiated, harajuku style can look like what might happen if a 5-year-old girl jacked up on liquor and goofballs decided to become a stylist. Layering is important, as is the mix of seemingly disparate styles and colors. Vintage couture can be mixed with traditional Japanese costumes, thrift-store classics, Lolita-esque flourishes and cyber-punk accessories. In a culture where the dreaded “salary man/woman” office worker is a fate to be avoided for this never-wanna-grow-up generation, harajuku style can look as radical as punk rockers first looked on London’s King Road or how pale-faced Goths silently sweating in their widows weeds look in cheerful sunny suburbs. […]

Stefani fawns over harajuku style in her lyrics, but her appropriation of this subculture makes about as much sense as the Gap selling Anarchy T-shirts; she’s swallowed a subversive youth culture in Japan and barfed up another image of submissive giggling Asian women. While aping a style that’s suppose to be about individuality and personal expression, Stefani ends up being the only one who stands out.

The writer’s critique of Stefani seems pretty on-target. The description of harajuku fashion made me curious, so I googled and found some photo galleries: here, here, here, here, and here. The girls seem to be very creative and having a lot of gothy fun. Even the “sexy” outfits seem more like satire or appropriation than like dressing up to attract boys, and there’s a lot of wit going into the outfits. (There’s also some stuff that’s disturbing - a couple of photos I saw showed girls who had made themselves up to look as if they’d been beat up, or dressed like Nazis, etc..)

This post was removed by request of the author.

Here’s a neat announcement: Pseudo-Adrienne, of Pseudo-Adrienne’s Liberal Feminist Bias, is going to be joining “Alas” as the younger, cooler co-blogger. If all goes well, she’ll be blogging here permanently. I’m really excited about this.

Also, we’re planning to rename “Alas, a Blog” to something else, but we haven’t determined what yet. Suggestions are welcome.

An interesting Forward article discusses “what feminism can teach jewish organizations.” I particularly liked this bit:

A nationwide study released recently by Ma’yan: the Jewish Women’s Project, “Listen to Her Voice,” reveals that feminism has had a transformative effect on the Jewish community over the last 30 years. Respondents to the survey were not only thrilled with the many changes that have occurred … the ordination of women as cantors and rabbis, unprecedented access to learning and sacred texts, women’s leadership on the bimah and in the boardroom … but they also believe that there would have been little to hold their interest in the Jewish community without these changes.

Many of the women reported leading their families to synagogues in which they could be counted as full participants. Others note the sweeping effects that feminism has had on Jewish theology, liturgy and ritual over the last three decades. One would hardly know it from the rhetoric of most of the organized Jewish community, but without feminism, Jewish continuity today would be much more seriously jeopardized than it is. Feminism has given many women and men a reason to again be involved Jewishly.

So that all sounds good. But, on the other hand:

Is that good enough? Can a community that purports to value families and the rearing of children above all else offer no paid parental leave to most of its employees? Is it feasible that Jewish women … who are the most highly educated women in America and who, according to numerous studies, are also singularly dedicated to the Jewish community … are unqualified for positions of leadership in the Jewish community? If feminism has transformed Jewish religious life in just 30 years, might it not have an equally powerful contribution to make to the communal world?

How might we transform this reality? We can begin by simply listening to what Jewish women are saying. Nearly half the women surveyed by Ma’yan reported being discriminated against in the Jewish community on the basis of gender. Forty-two percent have experienced pay inequity. Roughly two-thirds believe that women are underrepresented as communal leaders. Only three in 10 feel that they “often” have a way to make their voices heard about issues of local concern to them.

Read the whole thing.

• AbstinenceOnly.com is amazing. Give it a look. Via Feministe.
• A good article in Bitch magazine talks about the politics, pro and con, of those “I Had an Abortion” t-shirts.
• Culture Kitchen discusses the “crisis of masculinity” in our culture right now, and compares it to the culture of pre-Nazi Germany. Via Blackfeminism.org.
• Saudi Arabia: Men “Behaving Like Women” Face Flogging. I’m so glad I don’t live there.
• Vanessa at Feministing has a good post, with a couple of links worth following, about the intersection between racism about Asians, violent misogyny, and pornography.
• Friday Turtle Blogging! I love turtles. And this particular one is a cute baby turtle.
• An interesting article on Frontline’s website discusses why it is Texas is so far in the lead when it comes to executions. Via The Daily Blatt.
• Confined Space describes how a “see a doctor in 30 minutes or we give you a $15 gift certificate” policy at a hospital led to bad medicine and the serious injury of a nurse.
• A bizarre and disturbing “vegitative state” case in Austrailia: A man assaults his wife and leaves her in a PVS. Now he’s demanding that she be kept alive so that he doesn’t have to face murder charges. (Visit bugmenot.com if you need a pass to read this site).
• Riba Rambles has an excellent post arguing that our cultural mythology of the 1950s has led us to misunderstand what women in the 1950s actually did. Riba discusses jobs - women were much more in the waged work market than we often hear described - and cake mixes.
• The New York Times editorializes against a sneaky middle-of-the-night attack on Title IX by the Bush administration.
• Interesting-sounding academic paper about the history of music copyright.

From the New York Times (via Michele):

A high school principal in Columbus, Ohio, has been fired and three assistant principals suspended without pay because they failed to notify the police last month about accusations that a 16-year-old special-education student had been sexually assaulted in the school auditorium by a group of boys, one of whom videotaped the incident, school officials said yesterday.

The principal and her assistants not only failed to report the incident but also urged the girl’s father to avoid calling the police out of concerns that reporters would become aware of the assault, according to statements given to school investigators.

The police are investigating four teenagers in connection with the incident, a spokeswoman for the Columbus police, Sherry Mercurio, said yesterday, but no charges have been filed. […]

One of the three assistant principals, Richard Watson, said he had found the videotape and then viewed it with other administrators. Their conclusion, they told investigators, was that there had been no coercion.

From what the NBC story says, it appears that the boys may have been caught because they were showing off by playing the video for friends in math class. While the school administration may not have found any signs of coercion, the police investigators found quite a lot. From the Times:

One witness’s statement said a boy pulled the girl onto the auditorium stage, ordered her to be quiet, pushed her to her knees and forced her to perform oral sex on him.

“If you scream, I’ll have all my boys punch you,” the boy told her and then hit her in the face, causing her mouth to bleed, a student told the investigators.

The girl told a special-education teacher minutes after the incident that she had been forced to have oral sex with two boys behind a curtain on the stage while at least two others watched. She said the boys stopped only after someone arrived in the auditorium and scared them off.

The girl, who has a speech defect, “just kept saying she was scared,” the special-education teacher told the investigators.

Maybe there’s less to this story than it seems; maybe the witnesses are lying, for example. But if the witness statements are accurate, then the boys should be arrested and tried as rapists.

MaxedOutMama , aka MOM, has an interesting post regarding this story. She doesn’t think the boys will ever be punished:

I’m outraged too, but not at all surprised. For one thing, multiple boy on one girl blowjob orgies aren’t that rare any more, even in school. There is a fine line between manipulation, intimidation and outright force. Stories such as these aren’t that rare - developmentally disabled girls are often manipulated and abused in this way in school. So are emotionally vulnerable girls. Once you have kids blowing each other in the school johns in junior high, things get pretty much out of control.

I’ll give you my guess. This boys will not be convicted of any criminal charges. There will not be enough evidence; the testimony (said quietly behind closed doors) will be that the word was that this girl was known for giving blowjobs to boys. Those involved will say they thought she was consenting. Those witnessing it will agree. Not one of all the boys involved said anything to school authorities. Not one. They don’t know the difference between right and wrong, consenting and enforced acts. If they haven’t participated themselves they have all heard about such acts before.

(Link to MOM via My Whim is Law).

MOM is already mistaken about what at least one of the witnesses is saying (if the New York Times‘ account is accurate). I’m also more than a little skeptical about how common “multiple boy on one girl blowjob orgies” are - as far as I can tell, adults have always vastly exaggerated how much sex kids are having. But I worry that she’ll be proved right about the odds of any of these boys being convicted of rape.

MOM goes on to suggest that “instinct” may be responsible for this disgusting act: “Instinct in a young, roving band of teenage boys dictates imposing sexually upon a vulnerable girl…” In MOM’s view, young boys have an instinct towards gang-rape, which they need to be guided away from. I don’t think there’s much evidence to support MOM’s view, however. Have any anthropologists found that hunter-gatherer societies have a high incidence of gang rape, or if they don’t, that they spend a lot of time teaching their boys that gang-rape is wrong?

I don’t think boys have a natural instinct for gang-rape. However, I do think boys have a natural instinct to rely their peer group for validation and for their self-identity (that’s something I think MOM and I agree on). In a culture which teaches boys that masculinity is measured by “getting some,” that if they’re not a man they’re nothing, that having sex is not only normal but an entitlement, and that women don’t have much worth, it’s unsurprising that gang rapes happen. It’s even less surprising that the victim is (it seems) disabled, since the disabled are also not seen as being worth much by our society.

I doubt these boys were acting out of a desire for sexual release. I think they were acting out of a desire to show each other that they’re not scared, that they’re brave, that they’re men. From the point of view of the boys, their victim was just an object, which they used for demonstrating their masculinity to each other.

MOM then makes what seems to me to be a surprising, and out-of-place, digression:

Here’s reality. Girls can be imposed upon sexually, but once they learn the sexual game they can often whipsaw adolescent boys with it. Boys often find one-on-one sex really frightening until they’ve proved to themselves that they can do it, but no such inhibitions exist in a group. Adolescent boys are often just as emotionally vulnerable as girls. Girls have an instinct to use their own powers of sexual attraction. Nature made it so. An attractive, intelligent girl can become a superstar by her junior year in high school if she plays her cards well, especially if she is carefully and selectively sexually active. In the process she may cut an old boyfriend into emotional pieces.

No doubt some girls act just as MOM describes. But what does any of this have to do with a “developmentally disabled” girl who is dragged onto an auditorium stage, hit, and told “if you scream, I’ll have all my boys punch you”? The girl in this case wasn’t using her “powers of sexual attraction” to make herself a “superstar”; she was raped by a bunch of assholes using the power of threats and fists. To use a discussion of a girl being gang-raped as a springboard for discussing how girls are victimizers, too, is bizarre and disturbing.

There’s a lot more to MOM’s post, some of which I agree with, some of which I don’t; take a look.

UPDATE: Due to having nearly 500 responses, this thread is now closed. If you want to continue the discussion, please do so on this new thread.

On Thursday, April 14, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that the nearly 3,000 marriage licenses issued last year to same-sex couples in Multnomah County are void. This isn’t a surprising ruling, since Oregon voters passed Measure 36 last November, which amended the Oregon Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Still, it’s disappointing.

(There is a slim chance that Measure 36 will end up being overturned on the basis of technicalities.)

There is almost nothing positive in this ruling for same-sex marriage advocates. The only silver lining is that the Court didn’t rule on whether or not the Oregon Constitution requires that lesbians and gays be offered civil unions, leaving the matter open for another civil rights lawsuit.

Meanwhile, as The Oregonian reports, “Gov. Ted Kulongoski and a bipartisan coalition of state senators introduced legislation Wednesday allowing civil unions for same-sex couples and outlawing discrimination against gays and lesbians.” From the Oregonian’s article, it sounds like SB1000 will pass the Senate but be allowed to die in the House.

SB1000 has strong opposition from the Portland-based Defense of Marriage Coalition. “In our mind, it’s bad public policy and it’s unnecessary,” Tim Nashif, a coalition spokesman, said Wednesday.

Nashif argues that little — if any — discrimination occurs against gays and lesbians in Oregon. And he said the anti-discrimination language could put employers and landlords at risk of frivolous lawsuits. […]

The Senate Rules Committee will hold a hearing on SB1000 within a few weeks, Brown said. She and others predicted the proposal would be endorsed by the Senate.

But nobody would handicap the bill’s chances in the House.

Chuck Deister, spokesman for House Speaker Karen Minnis, R-Wood Village, couldn’t say whether SB1000 would get a committee hearing .

I love the way the “Defense of Marriage Coalition” opposes even anti-discrimination laws; what does keeping anti-queer discrimination legal have to do with defending marriage? Sometimes it seems that the marriage-movement types want to have the phrase “defense of marriage” come to be synonymous with hatred of lesbians and gays.

Portland’s One True b!X has more on the Oregon Supreme Court’s ruling.

From New Scientist:

Deaths from cervical cancer could jump fourfold to a million a year by 2050, mainly in developing countries. This could be prevented by soon-to-be-approved vaccines against the virus that causes most cases of cervical cancer - but there are signs that opposition to the vaccines might lead to many preventable deaths.

The trouble is that the human papilloma virus (HPV) is sexually transmitted. So to prevent infection, girls will have to be vaccinated before they become sexually active, which could be a problem in many countries.

In the US, for instance, religious groups are gearing up to oppose vaccination, despite a survey showing 80 per cent of parents favour vaccinating their daughters. “Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV,” says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group that has made much of the fact that, because it can spread by skin contact, condoms are not as effective against HPV as they are against other viruses such as HIV.

“Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex,” Maher claims, though it is arguable how many young women have even heard of the virus.

Unfortunately, these problems are not unique to the US - which is particularly infuriating outside the first world, where lack of good medical care makes dying of cervical cancer more likely.

India is planning to do its own clinical trials, but will not test the vaccine in young girls. “This is not possible until around the age of marriage in India,” Ganguly says.

Once licensed, the vaccine should be given to younger girls, he says. “But people will say ‘My girl is very virtuous, why vaccinate?’ It will be a real challenge, not like other vaccines.”

Via Tennessee Guerilla Women (which is a really excellent blog, by the way).

Thanks to Bob Hayes for the tip.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Sales clerks tend to discriminate against shoppers who are obese, according to new study findings.

Investigators found that when women wore a prosthetic suit designed to make them look obese, they were treated more rudely, and received fewer smiles and less eye contact from sales clerks at a Houston, Texas, shopping mall than when they shopped without the fat suit.

Sales clerks — almost three-quarters of whom were women — also tended to end interactions with obese shoppers more quickly, and use a negative tone with them.

Obese shoppers tended to experience more discrimination when they were casually dressed than when they were in professional attire.

However, when the apparently overweight shoppers sipped a diet soda and said they were trying to lose weight, they were treated just as nicely as when they shopped without their artificial bulk.

It seems to me that the last point suggests that’s what’s going on isn’t irresistable disgust, but instead moral disapproval. If the store clerks were simply too overwhelmed with emotion to treat fat women equally, then it wouldn’t make a difference what the fat person says. However, that’s not the case. If a fat woman implicitely agrees to the fat = immorality system by indicating that she is trying to reform her sinful ways (through dieting), then and only then will they be given equal treatment.

The full article has more, including the point that stores are actually losing money due to store employee discrimination.

UPDATE: Interesting discussion related to this study over at Big Fat Blog.

My favorite thing I’ve read about Dworkin today is this Guardian article by Katharine Viner. Here’s a sample:

Dworkin’s feminism often came into conflict with the more compromising theories of others, such as Naomi Wolf. “I do think liberal feminists bear responsibility for a lot of what’s gone wrong,” she told me in 1997. “To me, what’s so horrible is that they make alliances for the benefit of middle-class women. So it has to do with, say, having a woman in the supreme court. And that’s fine - I’d love a woman, eight women, in the supreme court - but poor women always lose out.” She did concede, however, that her radicalism was too much for some: “I’m not saying that everybody should be thinking about this in the same way. I have a really strong belief that any movement needs both radicals and liberals. You always need women who can walk into the room in the right way, talk in the right tone of voice, who have access to power. But you also need a bottom line.”

It was this bottom line that Dworkin provided. She was a bedrock, the place to start from: even when you disagreed with her, her arguments were infuriating, fascinating, hard to forget. Feminism needs those who won’t compromise, even in their appearance; perhaps I’m alone, but I find it pretty fabulous that, as a friend told me, Dworkin would “go to posh restaurants in Manhattan wearing those bloody dungarees”. She refused to compromise throughout her life, and was fearless in the face of great provocation.

Rad Geek has done a good job collecting links to posts about Dworkin - here and here.

Update: Heart posted a link in comments to the Andrea Dworkin Memorial site.

Update 2: Moderation Announcement from Amp, to everybody here:

Can the Dworkin-critics among us (me included) please save your criticisms of Andrea Dworkin for later or for elsewhere?

Okay, so the “gay party” consisted of Trey and Guy and a few other pairs of same-sex parents, gathered in a nice San Francisco apartment, watching all their 3-year-olds play and trying to hold my own in detailed discussions of potty-training. Followed by pizza and a game of Cranium. (The team I was on had lost the last four “game nights” in a row, but - due, no doubt, to my ability to draw the moon with my eyes closed, not to mention my astonishing Julie Andrews impression - finally chalked up a win).

Many thanks to Trey, Guy and Emma the Occasional Lion for letting me invade their (gorgeous! envy! envy!) house during my brief visit to San Francisco.

I also got to visit Tish, whose disloyal back had backstabbed her (as it were), but who still provided great conversation. (My previous post - about why there’s no female Homer Simpson - was utterly swiped from a conversation I had with Tish).

My favorite thing in Tish’s apartment, apart from Tish, was the photo collection on her fridge. Tish, like me, doesn’t drive. Tish, unlike me, has had the foresight to take a photo of everyone who has given her a ride - and taken by Tish from the passenger seat, while the person was driving. She’s put all the photos in magnetic picture frames; there are enough of them to cover the entire front of the fridge. It’s a really neat, striking display.

Both The Simpsons and Family Guy feature a very fat husband married to a wife with a model-perfect body. So did The Critic. Hank Hill isn’t very fat, but he’s got a spare tire, whereas Peggy Hill is pretty thin (their son Bobby is fat). Fred, Barney: fat. Wilma, Betty: thin.

This same pattern is found in non-animated family sit-coms, too, but I think the explanation for that is pretty obvious: most of those sit-coms are built around well-known male stand-up comedians or actors who are fat. This is just plain old sexism at work; it’s easier for fat men to become celebrities than it is for fat women. Very few fat women become famous enough to get their own family sit-com built around them, and even if they do, the network may order them to lose weight (which is what happened to Margaret Cho). Roseanne Barr got away with it, but then again - if the quality of her sit-com is anything to judge by - she also had ten times as much talent as nearly any other sit-com comedian.

But animated shows don’t face these problems. They can make any character buff, or any character fat. So why not a fat woman on these shows?

I think it’s one of two things. Or maybe both of two things.

First, there’s the cruelty factor. There are a lot of fat jokes made about the fat characters on The Simpsons and Family Guy. In our culture, being fat is considered a pretty bad thing for a man, but a mortal sin for a woman. Constantly making fun of fat women might just seem cruel, rather than funny.

Secondly, for both Homer and Peter, being fat is a physical manifestation of their main character trait: unrestrained Id. Neither character ever has a desire that he doesn’t immediately act on; they run entirely on impulse and want. All that unruly flesh is just a reflection of their unruly personalities.

So why couldn’t we have a female character who was a creature of pure Id, whose unruly mounds of fat, like Homer’s, is always threatening to crush the furnature, leak over the sides of all restraints, and just generally refuse to fit in?

Well, I think there could be such a character. If she was well-written, I’d find her funny. But to have a woman be that character… well, it somehow wouldn’t be very status quo, would it? I think a lot of America might find a female version of Homer Simpson or Peter Griffen - that is, an unashamed fat woman whose fat gets everywhere and who unabashedly goes after every passing want - more than a bit threatening. Not exactly the comforting material that successful sit-coms are made of.

I’m going to a comic-con this weekend, and have some things to get done before I go, so I probably won’t be writing any new posts until next week. Although, who knows? We’ll see how it goes.

This also means that comments moderation will be much reduced over the weekend, and if you have a comment put into the “needs approval” list it may take a while for me to see it and let it through. I’ll try to check at least once a day.

Meanwhile, I’ve been playing a bit with the images today. Hope you like ‘em. Extra-big-wet-thanks to Jenn and Kip, who each drew a between-comments illustration for me.

Fascinating article in The University of Chicago Magazine about the conflict between Hindu intellectuals and American academics. Here’s a selection from the article, but I recommend reading the whole thing.

Malhotra notes that “a peculiar brand of ’secularism’ has prevented academic religious studies from entering [India’s] education system in a serious manner.”? Therefore, unlike other religions, he writes in an e-mail interview, “there is a lack of Indic perspective that would…provide equivalent counter balance”? to Western scholars’ theories, creating an “asymmetric discourse.”? Further, he says, most of the Hinduism scholars are “either whites or Indians under the control of whites. One does not find Arabs, Chinese, blacks, Hispanics, etc., engaged in this kind of Hinduphobia racket.”? He’s begun to research “whiteness studies,”? which analyzes the “anthropology of white culture and uncovers their myths. … I am researching issues such as white culture’s Biblical based homophobia, deeply ingrained guilt of sex (Garden of Eden episode) and condemnation of the body. … I posit that many white scholars are driven into Hinduism studies by their own private voyeurism or fantasy, or an attempted escape from white culture’s restrictions….”

The Indian/white, or insider/outsider, issue has been debated in both academia and the Hindu community. […] For Sharma, author of Classical Hindu Thought: An Introduction (Oxford, 2000), the debate has shades of gray. “Both the insider and the outsider see the truth,”? he writes in an e-mail interview, “but genuine understanding may be said to arise at the point of their intersection. At this intersection one realizes that the Shivalinga [the icon of the god Shiva] is considered a phallic symbol by outsiders but rarely by Hindus themselves, or that the Eucharist looks like a cannibalistic ritual to outsiders but not to Christians.”? He continues, “If insiders and outsiders remain insulated they develop illusions of intellectual sovereignty. Each is required to call the other’s bluff.”?

There’s a fine line, some scholars say, between legitimate Hindu concerns and the right-wing political wave that has recently hit India. Although Malhotra, for example, condemns the violence and threats, he has acknowledged in a Washington Post article that the Hindu right has appropriated his arguments. Just as he points to certain Western academics, arguing they perpetuate what he calls the “caste, cows, curry, dowry” stereotypes, in India, says Vijay Prashad, AM’90, PhD’94, a Trinity College assistant professor of international studies, “the Hindu right has taken education as an important field of political battle,” trying, for instance, to install conservative textbooks in schools.

Malhotra’s goal is to “rebrand India,”? says Prashad, a self-described Marxist who studied history and anthropology, not religious studies, at Chicago, and who has debated Malhotra in online forums. But “scholars, to me, are not in the business of branding.” Malhotra and others “have created the idea that there is one Indic thought,”? Prashad says, but “there are so many schools of thought within Hinduism.” […]

For Doniger it’s a matter of considering multiple explanations. Both Courtright and Kripal, she says, “applied psychoanalysis in a limited way, and they found something that is worth thinking about. They said this could be one of the things that’s going on here, not the only thing.”? She understands that Indians are sensitive to postcolonial threats to their culture. “For many years Europeans wrote anything they wanted and took anything they wanted from India,”? she says. “Even now so much of Indian culture is influenced by American political and economic domination. And India is quite right to object to that.”? The protesters, however, have transferred that concern to an intellectual level, arguing “that Western scholars have pushed out Indian views the same way Coca-Cola has pushed out Indian products.”? But, she argues, “it’s a false model to juxtapose intellectual goods with economic ones. I don’t feel I diminish Indian texts by writing about or interpreting them. My books have a right to exist alongside other books.”?

I’d like to publicly apologize to Robert Johansen for this post, critiquing his National Review article about Terri Schiavo’s PVS diagnosis. I stand behind my critique of the facts and reasoning in Rev. Johansen’s National Review article. However, at times what I wrote isn’t critiquing Rev. Johansen’s article, and is instead making personal attacks on Rev. Johansen himself.

Not only was that wrong of me, but it’s the sort of thing I usually try hard to avoid. Again, I apologize to Robert Johansen, and I’ll try to do better in the future.

As the previous Terri Schiavo thread threatens to reach 500 posts, I thought I’d start a new thread. Please use this thread to continue any discussions started on the three previous extra-huge Schiavo discussion threads.

To start us off, a few links:

The Gimp Parade has a collection of links to articles by disabled activists about the Schiavo case and its related issues. From Harriet McBryde Johnson’s Slate article:

There is a genuine dispute as to what Ms. Schiavo believed and expressed about life with severe disability before she herself became incapacitated; certainly, she never stated her preferences in an advance directive like a living will. If we assume that Ms. Schiavo is aware and conscious, it is possible that, like most people who live with severe disability for as long as she has, she has abandoned her preconceived fears of the life she is now living. We have no idea whether she wishes to be bound by things she might have said when she was living a very different life. If we assume she is unaware and unconscious, we can’t justify her death as her preference. She has no preference.

I think Johnson has a good point regarding changing preferences. However, if we accept that point, then why does it make a difference whether or not someone leaves a living will? If someone who is not yet disabled lacks the information needed to make an informed choice about life while disabled - and it seems to me that is probably true - then they don’t magically become more informed if they leave their wishes in the form of a living will, rather than in the form of talking to their spouses and loved ones.

See also this Washington Post article, which respectfully quotes disabled activists on both sides of the Schiavo issue (is that fair because it doesn’t pretend that all disabled activists agree, or unfair because it gives undue prominence to marginal dissenters from a genuine consensus?), and this critique of the disabled rights argument by Cathy Young. (Like Young, I just can’t get over my belief that there is a substantial difference between being disabled and having no cerebral cortex to speak of). Both links via Disability Law.

An “Alas” reader George F pointed out this article, “Before the Circus,” by a journalist who visited Terri Schiavo several years ago.

Back then, both sides were civil to one another. No one disputed that Terri was in a persistent vegetative state and had been for a decade. Or that an eating disorder probably had led to Terri’s cardiac arrest and collapse, not physical abuse by Michael as some now contend.

Nobody was a murderer, an abuser, an adulterer, a fanatic, a liar. They were just family, trying their best to do right by their daughter, wife, sister. […]

After all these years, what haunts me is something Terri’s brother once said: “If Terri knew what this had done to this family, she would go ballistic.”

And he told me that before things spun out of control.

And, finally, a Schiavo-inspired post from the blog Transterrestrial Musings, which is noodling about with the question of self and soul. If we replaced someone’s brain with a mechanical brain, but the person still “feels” like herself, then does she still have a soul?

To the degree that I understand the concept of the soul, I can’t believe that it is associated simply with a body, living or breathing. To the degree that I believe in souls, I think of it as a different word for “mind.”

Great post at Raging Feminist about fatophobic sex scenes in The L Word, and in MSM in general:

It should have been an interesting scene, then, as she fell into bed with her new romantic interest. Sure, he was a man, but he’s an interesting fat man. Boy was I disappointed, but not shocked, when they cut to a completely different scene as soon as Kit and her man hit their hotel bed. Now I’m not one to look for the sex scenes, and, in fact, the soft core porn atmosphere of the show is often very upsetting to my feminist politics, but damn, if I’m going to see a bunch of people having sex, if I’m going to be subjected to tons of explicit heterosexual screwing, and if I’m going to hear women talking about fucking one another every week, completely internalizing patriarchal ideas about sex, then damn it, I want to see some fat! I want to see Kit’s big body with its soft rolls of fat and big thighs just like we see Katherine Moennig’s spine and boney sternum on every single episode.

Why can’t we see Kit having sex? Why is she hidden behind everyone else in the orgiastic promo pics for the show? If it’s because she doesn’t want to do nudity then fine, but go out and find other fat women to include on the show as well, and don’t hide them.

The fat haters, and you all know who you are, need to get over this shit, because I’m tired of being told that fat women aren’t sexy. I’m sick of watching perfectly gorgeous women covered up and ignored in favor of an aesthetic that promotes eating disorders, depression, and low self-esteem. Show me the fat, and pass me the donuts while you’re at it.

Raging Feminist via Brutal Women. (I love that I just typed that sentence.)

The New York Times reports that “major leaders of the three faiths - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - are making a rare show of unity to try to stop” a gay pride festival scheduled to take place this August in Jerusalem.

“They are creating a deep and terrible sorrow that is unbearable,” Shlomo Amar, Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi, said yesterday at a news conference in Jerusalem attended by Israel’s two chief rabbis, the patriarchs of the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian churches, and three senior Muslim prayer leaders. “It hurts all of the religions. We are all against it.”

Abdel Aziz Bukhari, a Sufi sheik, added: “We can’t permit anybody to come and make the Holy City dirty. This is very ugly and very nasty to have these people come to Jerusalem.”

Warms my heart. Or maybe my temper. Something’s warmed up, anyway.

Link via Finnigans Wake.

• Via Brutal Women, this is way fun: Make your own South Park character. In two languages!
  
• Also, Brutal Women linked to this NYTimes article, explaining that it describes NYU’s newest suicide-prevention measure. Does it say something terrible about me that reading the headline, after that setup, cracked me up?
• It would have been more timeless, and hence funnier, without the Terri Schiavo reference, but this post nonetheless is pretty brilliant. Via Balloon Juice, who calls it “The Greatest Blog Post of All Time.”

From News 14 Carolina:

The National Retail Association reports in 2003 single women bought one in five homes. That’s close to two million homes.

The share of homes bought by single women has increased about 33 percent over the past decade, making single women the fastest growing segment of the home buying population.