Wil Wheaton has a post on his blog entitled “Hillary Clinton: the psycho ex-girlfriend of the democratic party,” and there’s really nothing more you need than the title to understand what the post is about.

I’ve seen altogether too much of this from Obama supporters; not just sexism, but also bitter derision and gloating.¹

My message to Obama supporters such as Wheaton: Stop it. If you’re so sure Obama has won, then it’s time to start acting like smart winners. We can’t win in November without the nearly 50% of Democrats who prefer Clinton to Obama, and every unnecessary word you write that dismisses, alienates or otherwise pisses off Clinton’s supporters is a word that helps John McCain win in November.

I’m not saying to keep silent regarding substantive disagreements, but if all you’ve got is sexist jokes and sneering mockery, then do Barack Obama a favor and shut the hell up.

Wheaton ends his post with this:

And allow me to just head something off right now that’s already come up on Twitter: I’m not sexist. This isn’t sexist. That’s a stupid straw man, and if you try to make that claim, I will point and laugh at you.

This so annoyed me I was going to leave a comment — but then I read the comments, and this response from Backpacking Dad had already said it perfectly:

Is it not sexist because it’s mysogynistic instead?

Is it not sexist because it’s funny?

Is it not sexist because it’s a metaphor that speaks to you?

So. Those were all questions. Here is a statement:

“Dude. You don’t get to decide what’s sexist.”

Here’s a reason to think that it MIGHT be sexist. You can g’an and point and laugh, but I’ll take this seriously for a second just to see where it goes:

The metaphor evokes a trope in sexual politics, that of the irrational girl who cannot accept that a relationship is over. Labeling, categorizing, pigeon-holing someone in this way “he’s a geek, she’s a slut, he’s a pig, she’s cow” is at once appealing to a fragment of truth, and also making the target controllable.

If they are controllable, they are marginalizable. And they can be dismissed. The problem with controlling and dismissing Hillary using a trope from sexual politics is that it moves her from the realm of discourse and debate into the realm of sex (as in “getting it on”). And labeling her as batshit crazy in an ex-girlfriend sense means that she is not only sexualized, but her sexuality can be controlled.

And that’s the heart and soul of sexism.

But I can understand if you didn’t really want to engage anyone on this. It is a funny piece, and sometimes maybe we want to hang on to the things we like even though someone else might think they’re inappropriate.

UPDATE:

According to U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Memphis, she may be starting to more closely resemble another famous movie character: The psycho lady played by Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction.”

When asked about whether Clinton should drop out of the race on Fox 13’s “Good Morning Memphis” program today, Cohen said: “Glenn Close should have stayed in that tub.”

Rep. Cohen, would you please GET THE FUCK OFF MY SIDE!!!

(Curtsy: Talk Left.)

1. And yes, I’ve seen plenty of bitter derision from Clinton’s supporters for us “Obamabots,” as they charmingly call us, but that’s not the subject of this post. (back)

Posting on the Feminist SF Blog, the Angry Black Woman quotes people from both sides¹ of a debate going on about Podcastle, the new fantasy fiction podcast edited by our own Mandolin (in her secret identity as mild-manner fantasy/sf writer Rachel Swirsky).²

Essentially, some posters feel that Mandolin has infected Podcastle with (as ABW says) girl cooties, or maybe it’s feminist cooties. It’s hard to tell what the complaint is, because the goal posts shift.

Is it too many female-centric stories? No, wait, it’s not — because if that was objectionable, surely the critics would also be objecting to the fact that on Escape Pod, 14 of the last 16 stories had male narrators.

But we’re told it’s not too many stories about women, it’s too many female-empowerment stories in Podcastle. Except that “Come Lady Death” is hardly a female-empowerment story, unless “female empowerment story” is defined as any stories with strong female characters. Nor is four stories really enough of a sample size to say anything.

Well, it’s not just four stories — this complain is about the stories appearing on Podcastle, Pseudopod (the horror podcast), and Escape Pod, which in a single month did contain several different stories that really did have female empowerment or anti-sexist themes (oh nooooo)! But choosing just a single month, when it’s obvious that choosing any other time period would lead to different results (see “14 out of 16″ statistic, above), is just cherry-picking.

No, wait, it’s that too many stories are too political, and too heavy. But stories like Goosegirl and Come Lady Death aren’t political at all. So the only way this complaint makes sense is if including any stories with sociopolitical themes at all, is defined as too many.

At this point, the football field is scratched up like a tic-tac-toe board by all the shifting goalposts. I can’t help but wonder if ABW isn’t right — if this isn’t really about the girl cooties.

Earlier on, I left this comment on Podcastle:

It’s commonplace for podcasts to be organized by male editors, with stories by male writers, about male protagonists, and read by male readers. It’s not uncommon for there to be several such episodes in a row.

There’s nothing wrong with male writers, editors, readers, or protagonists, of course.

What is problematic is the double-standard. That the large majority of published stories are by men, published by men, and about men is something we’re used to; it’s invisible, like water for seahorses. But even one or two podcasts that involve multiple female creators will be objected to.

I think that’s an accurate take on the situation.³ There is, or should be, nothing extraordinary about several stories in a row that involve female creators, female protagonists, or female protagonists whose story involves working to overcome a disadvantage of some sort (i.e., a “female empowerment” story). Even in a situation of total equality, random chance would frequently sort small numbers of such stories together.

In a reasonable world, there’d be nothing extraordinary about an election in which a white woman and an African American man happen to be major candidates. In a reasonable world, there’d be nothing notable about a podcast happening to have a few stories in a row involving women, or involving women overcoming obstacles, or whatever the complaint is. That these things are notable doesn’t say anything about black candidates, woman candidates, or about how Mandolin is editing Podcaste. They do, however, say something unfortunate about the less-than-reasonable world we live in.

1. Including quoting a comment I wrote. (back)
2. She wears glasses when she’s Rachel, and amazingly no one ever notices she’s also the famous superhero The Amazing Mandolin — not even Lois Lane, who is totally in love with Mandolin and never gives Rachel the time of day. (back)
3. Although I’d want to hedge “the large majority” to make it clear I’m talking about a particular submarket, not all stories ever written! (back)

I’ve not posted for quite a while for a variety of reasons . . . I’ve lost my job, decided to go to law school, and generally been immersed in being very busy. What fun!

Now, part of what this means is that I missed the big WoC appropriation blow up completely. This is probably good, since I just don’t feel like I have anything useful to say that hasn’t been said better already by someone else. In the midst of all that, though, I was forwarded several wonderful blog posts written by African women, and I’ve finally got the time to write about them.

The first, and the topic of this post, is How to Beat Girls And Women by Mama Wangari of A Life Less Perfect. Everyone should read it in its entirety, of course, but it’s an autobiographical post about being beaten by her father when she was 16, how she avoided it, and the larger expectations and culture surrounding beatings.

“Please don’t beat me. I’m having my period,” and he turned abruptly away from me, dropping the belt to his side, and marched away to the end of the path to stand staring at the fence for a few dangerous moments. Then he turned and marched back to me and handed me the belt. My heart leapt.

“What you just mentioned to me,” his voice had gone low. “Never mention it to me again. Never. That’s between you and your mother. Go!”

It’s a great story, but the part that really makes it shine is her mother’s reaction, later:

A few days later I was walking home with my mum, down a steep rutted path, when out of a silence she suddenly asked, “Why did you ask Daddy not to beat you because of your period?”

“Pardon?”

“The other day, when you asked Daddy not to beat you because of your period. Did you think it would make you bleed more heavily or something? Why did you - ? What did you think would happen?”

I was puzzled. I decided to stick with pure fact.

“I wasn’t having my period,” I said.

“What? You weren’t?”

“No. I wasn’t,” I waited for her to burst out laughing and congratulate me.

“You mean you lied?” she was shocked.

“Of course!” so was I.

“But why?” she asked.

That really sort of sums it all up, doesn’t it? It’s not just that women and girls are expected to take their beatings, it’s that they’re expected to take them, and not object. The concept that she would object to being beaten is shocking and incomprehensible to her mother, because violence against women is a part of the natural order of things, like the weather. It’s just how things are.

Lying to avoid a beating is like lying to avoid a thunderstorm. It’s just not done. There’s no point. Why bother?

This, then, in a lot of ways, is one of the victories of feminism . . . the concept that, beyond women having the right not to be beaten, they, as human beings, have the right to object at all, to say, “this is wrong,” and, “no, I won’t just take it.” Abuse, institutionalized abuse, the culture of abuse, relies on maintaining the expectation that women will not say no and maintaining the expectation that objection to your own abuse is taboo.

It’s really an amazing post, and I encourage everyone to go read it.

Heart would like the world to know that there really are no problems with the racist illustrations in It’s a Jungle Out There because those illustrations happen to have been called out on this blog:

On the day that Ampersand, of Alas a Blog, gets taken to task for — every single blessed day – benefitting from the sale of blatantly racist, misogynist pornography on his website, advertised not just by way of text but with pornographic imagery, photographs, maybe on that day I’ll take all of this outrage against Amanda, by people who suck up to Ampersand (and others who share Amp’s views) every single day, posting or commenting to his blog like they have some shred of sense, decency, or concern for female persons, seriously.

…On the day that Maia recognizes the seriousness of the presence of misogynist, racist pornographic images and text on Alas – where she regularly blogs – I’ll take her concerns about Seal Press and Amanda’s book seriously. When any of the crowd currently excoriating Amanda Marcotte begins to take racist, misogynist male pornographers and their apologists to task, I’ll view them as possibly having some shred of credibility, a leg to stand on, in criticizing Amanda Marcotte.

Apart from the fact that it’s obviously fallacious to assume that because someone disagrees with her — or is even provably wrong — on one subject, that will automatically taint their perspective on any other subject, I find this a pretty facile way of ignoring the problems that other feminists have raised outside Alas, many of them predating our postings.

It should be noted that I’m the only one calling Heart hypocritical and full of shit. Barry, for some reason unfathomable to me, actually has a great deal more respect for her than I do. So, if you’re offended, be offended at me, not him or Maia.

(Shocker: Feminists, anti-racist comments only. Probably best to assume any further posts I make to this site are such.)

1. I want to express my (very late) solidarity with Blackamazon, Adele and all the other women of colour who were ignored and dismissed by Seal Press. I want to express my support for the girlcott of Seal press. While there’s not a lot I can do personally, since I would neither buy books from Seal Press (can’t afford them) or write for Seal press anyway. But the whole point of solidarity is answering the question ‘which side are you on?’ I think women of colour activists are more important than a feminist publishing house. I know that my liberation is impossible while women of colour are enslaved, and that means that I have to make it clear that I stand with them against racism from feminist institutions.

2. I want to express my (equally late) solidarity with brownfemipower who will be missed. It is disgusting the way her names and intentions have been dragged and lied about across the blogsphere by people attempting to defend Amanda. Brownfemipower is amazing.

[There used to be bits of my opinion on appropriation in here, but I moved them to this thread. If you want good discussion on appropriation go there, or Holly , Daisy and Sylvia/M.

3. Finally, and less belatedly on my part, Amanda’s book itself. These images are racist.¹ They come from Amanda Marcotte’s book “It’s a jungle out there” that was published by Seal Press. I don’t just want to say ‘these pictures are racist and racism is bad’, but to talk about the harm that these sorts of images cause, because the racist ideas that they maintain are very specific. They are presenting indigenous people as a dangerous other. They are presented as things that must be conquered so that white people can live freely on their land. The idea represented in these images are one of the many ways colonialism is maintained and justified.

I live in a country where land has been stolen from indigenous people in the last five years. Amanda Marcotte lives, and Seal Press operates, in a country where the history of stealing land from indigenous people stretches back five centuries. We all live in a world where the distribution of wealth was established, and justified, by colonialism. The white woman, and man, in those pictures were stealing land and resources - everything Africa had that they could use (a century earlier, of course, they would have also been stealing people).

I’ve been writing this post for a week. Writing other posts about these issues for several weeks and not finishing them. I’m posting it now, rather than trying to make it better, because silent solidarity isn’t much good to anyone.

There have been a number of racist dynamics developing in various comment threads. Amanda, and her defenders, only talking to white people and ignoring people of colour. Re-centring the issue on Amanda by focusing on a very small section of comments and demanding that they be addressed first. These behaviours will not be welcome in this comment thread.

I am not interested in the pontifications of outsiders on this. So specifically Robert, RonF and Sailorman are not welcome, nor are anyone of their ilk.

1. note for Hugo Schwyzer the problem is not that they could be interpreted as racist. It is that they are racist (back)

I trust the anti-colonialist and anti-racist reasons to oppose most US uses of military force against other countries are clear to most “Alas” readers. I haven’t been discussing that connection because it’s too clear to be missed, not because it’s not important.

In contrast, I am worried, perhaps needlessly, that some readers will read this series of posts as me saying that I’m voting based on foreign policy concerns, not concerns about sexism, misogyny and LGBTQ issues.

I don’t believe the distinction exists. I’ll use this post to discuss why the distinction between a hawkish versus a moderate foreign policy should matter to feminists of all sorts.

And make no mistake — Clinton is a hawk, not just posturing as one for the election. Quoting Stephen Zunes:

…When her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination Senator Barack Obama expressed his willingness to meet with Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro or other foreign leaders with whom the United States has differences, she denounced him for being “irresponsible and frankly naive.”

Senator Clinton appears to have a history of advocating the blunt instrument of military force to deal with complex international problems. For example, she was one of the chief advocates in her husband’s inner circle for the 11-week bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 to attempt to resolve the Kosovo crisis.

Though she had not indicated any support for the Kosovar Albanians’ nonviolent campaign against Serbian oppression which had been ongoing since she had first moved into the White House six years earlier, she was quite eager for the United States to go to war on behalf of the militant Kosovo Liberation Army which had just recently come to prominence. Gail Sheehy’s book Hillary’s Choice reveals how, when President Bill Clinton and others correctly expressed concerns that bombing Serbia would likely lead to a dramatic worsening of the human rights situation by provoking the Serbs into engaging in full-scale ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, Hillary Clinton successfully pushed her husband to bomb that country anyway.

The most famous difference between Clinton and Obama is Clinton’s support of invading Iraq — an approach to foreign policy fully consistent with her history, and likely to continue in a future Clinton adminstration, judging from who she’s chosen to lead her foreign policy team so far. From a feminist perspective, it cannot be overemphasized that our decision to invade and occupy Iraq has been a nightmare. Here are just a few examples:

First, from an op-ed by Bonnie Erbe:

A new poll of leaders of Iraqi women’s-rights groups finds that women were treated better and their civil rights were more secure under deposed President Saddam Hussein than under the faltering and increasingly sectarian U.S.-installed government.

Roz Kaveny writes:

Most weeks, three or four people are hacked, stoned, burned or shot to death for being lesbian, gay, bi or trans. The highest Shia religious dignitary Sistani has again promulgated a fatwa calling for the execution of all non-repentant LGBT people - people talk of him as a liberal and in this degree he is - he allows people to repent on pain of death when most of his rivals would just kill. Contacted by the UN about this campaign of murder, the Iraqi government has refused to acknowledge that it is even a problem.

This is a direct consequence of the war - the Saddam regime, vile as it was, was secular in this respect, just as the Ba’athists in Syria still are. No-one does well in a totalitarian state, but LGBT folk were left alone, mostly.

Riverbend:

Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it’s not really the latest- it’s just the one that’s being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last.

Houzan Mahmoud, of The Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, writes: (link via Bitch PhD):

More widely, professional women have been deliberately targeted and killed - notably in the city of Mosul - and, recently, anti-women fundamentalists in Baghdad have taken to throwing acid in women’s faces and on to their uncovered legs.

So-called “honour killings” are rife, as is the kidnapping and rape of women. Beheadings have occurred and women have been sold into sexual servitude. […] This is a recipe for future gender enslavement, second-class citizenship and ignorance. Thousands of female university students have now given up their studies to protect themselves against Islamist threats.

Islamist hostility is contagious and echoed daily in high-level political debate. Currently there is a drive over the “right” of men to have four wives, to make divorce a male preserve and for custody of children to be given to men only. Even women on Iraq’s National Assembly - the country’s parliament - have been calling for resolutions to allow for the beating of women by their guardians (males relatives, such as husbands or fathers).

This is all the outcome of the occupation of Iraq.

Melissa at Shakesville writes:

This is madness. In one fell swoop, they have turned back literally decades of women’s rights in Iraq.

When all other rationales for this war were proved devoid of substance, the Right yammered about a humanitarian intervention…and so did the hawkish Left. The last time I checked, women were humans, too, and they ought not to be left with less freedom than they had before we got there.

Iraqi women’s rights activist Yanar Mohammed:

Even apart from this the streets are not women-friendly. Many professional women who drive to and from work get insulted by men travelling around in pick-up trucks holding machine guns and wearing black from head to foot. Going out in the streets is scary. Many females have stopped going to school.[…]

If you travel from the north down through Iraq to the south, it is like being in a time machine. You travel from the 21st century in Sulamaniya, through Kirkuk to Baghdad, where you see a city which is in ruins. There is dust everywhere, and people are wearing very old clothes. Then in the south you are in the Dark Ages. In the areas dominated by the Sunni Islamists, in Fallujah or in Mosul, women’s situation is even worse than in Basra. You have something there which is new to us in Iraq. It comes from Wahhabism, from al Qaeda, from Saudi Arabia.

Riverbend again:

For me, June marked the first month I don’t dare leave the house without a hijab, or headscarf. I don’t wear a hijab usually, but it’s no longer possible to drive around Baghdad without one. It’s just not a good idea. (Take note that when I say ‘drive’ I actually mean ‘sit in the back seat of the car’- I haven’t driven for the longest time.) Going around bare-headed in a car or in the street also puts the family members with you in danger. You risk hearing something you don’t want to hear and then the father or the brother or cousin or uncle can’t just sit by and let it happen. I haven’t driven for the longest time. If you’re a female, you risk being attacked.

I look at my older clothes- the jeans and t-shirts and colorful skirts- and it’s like I’m studying a wardrobe from another country, another lifetime. There was a time, a couple of years ago, when you could more or less wear what you wanted if you weren’t going to a public place. If you were going to a friends or relatives house, you could wear trousers and a shirt, or jeans, something you wouldn’t ordinarily wear. We don’t do that anymore because there’s always that risk of getting stopped in the car and checked by one militia or another.

There are no laws that say we have to wear a hijab (yet), but there are the men in head-to-toe black and the turbans, the extremists and fanatics who were liberated by the occupation, and at some point, you tire of the defiance.

I could go on with quotes like this for another fifty screens, easily. The scope of the disaster is almost impossible to comprehend.

What’s important for this election isn’t how bad Iraq is, however. Iraq has happened, and neither Clinton nor Obama can change that. What’s important is how a Clinton or Obama presidency will change what happens in the future.

If Obama’s approach to foreign policy, and his team of policy advisers, comes into power, that will not mean that progressives occupy the White House, and it will not mean that horrible abuses of American power will cease to happen. Obama is not perfect. Obama is not even progressive. He’s just significantly better than the alternatives.

An Obama White House mean that a group of people who are significantly less warlike, and more critical of the U.S.’s use of military power, will become much more important in Washington and in our national conversation than they have been (and will remain so for years after Obama leaves office). It means that questionable invasions and bombings, which Clinton has supported throughout her career, will probably happen less frequently.

If Clinton becomes President, that will be a big improvement over Bush, in that we’ll switch from having a Republican hawk to having a Democratic hawk. It will be a much saner and more intelligent hawkish administration; but it will still be a hawkish administration, and from a feminist perspective — especially a feminism perspective that recognizes that anti-racism, anti-colonialism and LGBTQ issues aren’t separate from feminism — that’s bad.

Clinton didn’t intend the enormous harms I discussed above, of course. (On the contrary, Clinton has a dedication to women’s rights internationally that goes back many years, and which I admire.) But the unintended consequences of hawkishness aren’t less dire because they’re unintentional. The unintended consequences of Clinton’s future hawkish policies could easily turn into thousands of deaths, thousands of rapes, thousands of women under virtual house arrest, thousands of LGBTQ people in prison or worse. For people on the margins, unintended consequences are deadly.

I am not saying that if you’re a feminist, you must vote against Clinton because she’s a hawk. Feminists can vote a variety of ways for a variety of legitimate reasons, and countless feminists I admire will be voting for Clinton, or already have.

But foreign policy isn’t separate from feminist issues. It makes no sense at all to say that you’re voting based on feminist concerns, not foreign policy concerns. Foreign policy is a feminist issue, and anyone voting as a feminist should take that into account as they weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each candidate.

This is amazing. Brownfemipower:

The thing is—I thought that those who were a part of a “feminist community” were held to the same sort of standards. That when a woman of color says that she will not be published thus the white women who are published need to spend more time than they feel comfortable talking about the needs of women of color—THEY WOULD DO IT. That they would say “It’s the least I can do” or “What else can I do” rather than JUST DO IT, JUST DO IT. Because we are all in a community together and we all are working to create something that challenges and dismantles gendered violence and inequality, right? And if it takes writing a book that does not assume all women are staying away from feminism because they are white and privileged and just don’t get it—well, ending gendered violence and inequality is worth it, right? Working together towards a common goal, right?

This?

It just took reading Hugo’s response for me to realize that I was fucked up wrong. That feminism’s goals and my goals are completly and totally opposite of each other. That in feminism’s eyes “dismantling” gendered violence= “shifting” gendered violence.

Well. To me, this looks like a really glaring fallacy. “Feminism” is not one thing, and I don’t accept the idea that one set of people (say, Hugo) has more right to the term than another (say, Sylvia), when both clearly are interested in ending patriarchy. Also, what Anxious Black Woman said:

I’m just reminding everyone that the “Feminist” label belongs to us, as women of color. We laid the foundations for feminist theory and practice. We are the bodies on which feminist theories are created. We are the “comparative” variable and the case study for why “life sucks for women.” It’s because of the combined effects of sexism, racism, imperialism, heterosexism, etc. why we’ve got it bad. And it’s because we “bleed at the intersections” why we, more than any other group of women, need feminist movement.

(By the way, that whole post is really amazing and informative and I recommend you read it.)

For me, it’s really problematic when BFP writes this:

“Feminists,” on the other hand, are not movement building, they are actively destroying women and blaming those women for the destruction. They are saying the point of feminism is “equality with men” without even thinking to acknowledge that “equality with women” is just as admirable of a goal and maybe even possibly the first step to achieving the goal of equality with men. They are saying, Just do it, just do it, JUST FUCKING DO IT.

BFP seems here to be defining feminists as people who subscribe to these behaviors. That ignores lots of women who don’t and who aren’t rejecting feminism. The fact that there *is* an argument in the feminist blogosphere indicates to me that there are feminists who believe as BFP is asking them to. Why write them off? Why are certain people more entitled to the label feminism?

I do fully understand that BFP is more educated than I am on these issues, and more articulate, and probably just plain smarter. But I find this part of her argument really frustrating.

When I stop to think “what am I missing here?”, I feel like what I’m missing is the real frustration and desperation and anger that accompanies these sentiments. I am truly missing them, and I do not wish to deny their legitimacy.

But at the same time when I think of my feminist influences — for instance Carolyn Martin Shaw, a black anthropology professor of mine who teaches on gender and sexuality and has organized women’s movements in Kenya — I… can’t really fathom ascribing to her the motives BFP professes belong to “feminists,” not can I fathom removing the label feminist from her because “feminism” — in BFP’s outline — means the (as far as I can tell) deliberate trampling of WOC. She’s a feminist.

I know, I know, if the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it.

Still. The only way I can reconcile these thoughts is to assume that there’s a difference between feminists and “feminists,” the same way there’s a difference between nice guys and NiceGuysTM — but if that’s the case, why not say so? I’m not reading this as an accusation toward individuals, but toward the moral quality of the entire movement (which thus requires its rejection, instead of merely the renouncements of “feminists”).

Feminist, anti-racist comments only.

Via Kate at Shakesville (and pointed out to me by Bean):

The video is in two rough halves: the first half is a montage of anti-Clinton misogyny in the mainstream media (although you can find the same thing from some so-called progressives). The second half is a loving montage of Clinton pics (I love the black and white pic with striped pants) set to a really cool pop song.

The open misogyny displayed towards Clinton by media figures is, simply, disgusting. As Judith Hope said:

You know, no matter who your favorite candidate for president may be, can American women continue to look the other way while the national media spews such sexist contempt? If we learn nothing else from this long Democratic primary season, we now know this: It is still ‘open season’ on American women.

But there’s one element that keeps me from endorsing this video wholeheartedly; the videomaker includes Keith Olbermann bashing Clinton for not distancing herself from Geraldine Ferraro’s infamous comments. For all I know Olbermann is a sexist asshat (I don’t watch his show), but his Ferraro comments are anti-racist, not misogynist. Including anti-racism within a montage of vile misogynist crap, as if the two were interchangable or in any way comparable, is offensive.

P.S. Check out this recent Media Matters column reporting more misogyny on parade, this time from the delightfully fair and balanced, not at all biased people at Fox. curtsy: Chet at Shakesville.

Whoops — it’s a hoax. Barska denies having anything to do with these ads.

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I think every man should, too. The title of this post is a quote from an article by Connie Schultz:

I don’t think every woman should support Hillary Clinton just because she’s a woman. Smart women disagree all the time, and that has never been more obvious than in our heated discussions about Clinton.

I do, however, think every woman should support the notion of Hillary Clinton. That means judging her by her record and her plans for our future, not by her marital stamina, her choice in suits or her version of femininity. Even if we can’t support her as a candidate, we ought to acknowledge the history that she is making — for us and for our daughters and granddaughters. And we ought to point out to them that making history sure has a downside.

Recently, I learned that some airport shops are selling a “Hillary nutcracker.” She has a smile on her face and metal spikes between her thighs. I don’t worry about the candidate, who has learned how to handle such misogyny, but I do dwell on the young girls who might catch a horrifying glimpse of those steel jaws and decide that no woman should invite such vitriol. […]

Katie Roiphe writes that she has “yet to meet a woman who likes Hillary Clinton.” Lorrie Moore calls Clinton “a freak.” Amy Wilentz declares that Clinton’s recipe for chocolate-chip cookies “sounds awful” and that when Chelsea was a newborn, Hillary’s hair was “a wreck.”

On and on they go, bruising and battering the only woman to do what they — and the rest of us — could only dare to imagine.

All the while, 11-year-old girls watch.

And learn.

Curtsy: Kate Harding.

(By the way, Katie Roiphe is best known for an anti-feminist polemic she wrote years ago, declaring that there must not be a rape crisis because none of her female friends told her she had been raped. It’s curious that, all these years later, Roiphe’s still making a similar error in logic.)

The Nation has a detailed article. A woman working for KBR, a private contractor the US hires to operate in Iraq, claims to have been drugged and gang raped by her co-workers, possibly including her boss. The rape was then covered up.

This part enraged me (well, lots of it did, but this part too):

[Rape victims face] two major roadblocks in the fight for justice. The first is the battle to have the perpetrators prosecuted in criminal court — which, because of Order 17, may be nearly impossible. According to the order, imposed by Paul Bremer, U.S. defense contractors in Iraq cannot be prosecuted in the Iraqi criminal justice system. While they can technically be tried in U.S. federal court, the Justice Department has shown no interest in prosecuting her case. In fact, for more than two years now, the DOJ has brought no criminal charges in the matter. Rep. Ted Poe, a Texas Republican who has taken up Jones’ cause, reports that federal agencies refuse to discuss the status of the investigation; meanwhile, in December, the DOJ refused to send a representative to the related congressional hearing on the matter.

Even more appalling, the Justice Department, which can and should prosecute most of these cases, has declined to do so. “There is no rational explanation for this,” says Scott Horton, a lecturer at Columbia Law School who specializes in the law of armed conflict. Prosecutorial jurisdiction for crimes like Jones’ alleged rape is easily established under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act and the Patriot Act’s special maritime and territorial jurisdiction provisions. But somebody has to want to prosecute the cases.

Horton wonders what the 200 Justice Department employees and contractors stationed in Iraq do all day, noting that there has not been a single completed criminal conviction against a U.S. contractor implicated in a violent crime anywhere in Iraq since the invasion.

[…] “You have 180,000 people over there, you’re going to have a few crimes. […] And if you eliminate law enforcement, the crimes are going to get worse because people will quickly learn they can get away with it.”

This is an important point. Rapists exist no matter what the US government does, and that’s not the Republican Party’s fault. But it’s reasonable to expect the government to work to reduce rape and to punish rapists; instead, Republican leaders have chosen to be accessory to rape, by refusing to investigate or prosecute the crime.

Do I really think that Bush and his managers want Americans raped and the rapists to get off scott-free? No. But they consider that better than the alternative. In Bush’s eyes, for American contractors to be arrested and tried for rape would be unbearable; letting them get away with rape is, in the administration’s view, the lesser evil.

I can’t wait until these cancers in suits are out of office.

That said, even if we had a competent administration staffed by people instead of soulless monsters, there would still be too many rapes committed by Americans in Iraq. ¹ There would be fewer such crimes, but they’d still happen, because the vastly uneven power relations and dehumanization brought about by war and occupation make rape of soldiers and of civilians inevitable.

This is one reason the Bush doctrine, which makes wars of choice inevitable, is evil. The cost of war is always hideous, and the rapes are just a small part of that. War should always be a last resort. It wasn’t in Iraq. The shame of it is that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens, and thousands of Americans, have paid the price for the fecklessness and warlust of US leaders. It would have been far better — both objectively and morally — if Bush, and Cheney, and McCain, and the rest of the pro-war leadership class had died instead.

1. I’m ignoring for a moment the obvious point that if the current administration was staffed by competent, decent people, there never would have been an invasion of Iraq at all. (back)

From Dr. King’s anti-war speech “Beyond Vietnam,” April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. … A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.

Kai Wright has written a good article about the whitewashing of Dr. King’s politics. The radicalism of his vision, against racism but also against poverty and against war, is too often forgotten.

From an LA Times op-ed:

Prison rape occupies a fairly odd space in our culture. It is, all at once, a cherished source of humor, a tacitly accepted form of punishment and a broadly understood human rights abuse. We pass legislation called the Prison Rape Elimination Act at the same time that we produce films meant to explore the funny side of inmate sexual brutality.

Occasionally, we even admit that prison rape is a quietly honored part of the punishment structure for criminals. When Enron’s Ken Lay was sentenced to jail, for instance, Bill Lockyer, then the attorney general of California, spoke dreamily of his desire “to personally escort Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, ‘Hi, my name is Spike, honey.’ ”

The culture is rife with similar comments. Although it would be unthinkable for the government today to institute corporal punishment in prisons, there is little or no outrage when the government interns prisoners in institutions where their fellow inmates will brutally violate them. We won’t touch you, but we can’t be held accountable for the behavior of Spike, now can we?

To quote myself: The prison rape epidemic is probably going to get worse. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ projections, if our current rate of sending men to prison is maintained, then at some point in the future 15% of American men will have spent time in prison. (6% of white men, 17% of Latinos, and 32% of Black men. For comparison’s sake, the projections for women are 1%, 2% and 6%.)

If those projections are true (or even partly true), and if the prison rape epidemic continues unabated, the overall number of American rape victims will vastly increase over the coming decades. This is true even if rape prevalence outside of prison doesn’t change at all. This is one reason why it’s essential to support strong measures to combat prison rape; unfortunately, all that’s gotten through congress so far are weak half-measures.

From Tapped, Dana advises pregnant workers to give written notice… of pregnancy:

That’s one of the lessons in Sue Shellenbarger’s latest Wall Street Journal column, which reports that pregnancy bias complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rose 14 percent last year to 5,587, a 40 percent increase from a decade ago. One woman in the publishing industry was fired while she was pregnant, supposedly for poor performance, yet those issues had never come up prior to her pregnancy. She wanted legal redress, but couldn’t prove in writing that her bosses actually knew she was expecting. So consider sharing your big news over email.

Shallenbarger also writes that many American women, until they get pregnant, have no idea that they are entitled to no paid leave under current law. Indeed, a study from Harvard University last year found that of 168 nations worldwide, the United States is one of only four whose government doesn’t require employers to provide paid maternity leave. The others are Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.

Curtsy Feministing.

Brett Favre, who I infer is a football player of some accomplishment, cried when announcing his retirement. And anti-feminist radio host Laura Ingraham commented:

“All these years, and I didn’t know there was a woman quarterback in the NFL,” said Ingraham to start her Friday show that aired on replay on Monday at 2:00 a.m. on Newsradio 620 WTMJ.

“Brett Favre…we’re watching this in the studio, obviously retiring from the NFL, great quarterback, handsome 38-year-old man, he gets up there and he does this press conference that was frankly one of the most embarrassing things I have ever seen.

“That’s a great message for young boys. ‘Get up there and act like a girl and start blubbering like a baby.”

When I first heard about this, I thought it was a disgusting example of anti-male sexism. But on reading her actual words, what’s striking about it is how perfectly Ingraham merges anti-male and anti-female sexism; note how she uses the terms “woman” and “girl” as insults.

As Jill says, what an asshole.

From my inbox:

Whoo Hoo!  We did it!!  BIG VICTORY in the Senate yesterday.  Last night, just before 9 pm, the Senate voted UNANIMOUSLY to approve restoring $100 million for the Violence Against Women Act into the Senate’s budget
proposal.   Thanks to everyone for your HUGE response to yesterday’s action alert.  We’ll have to keep on top of this as the appropriations process gets underway - but we’re
off to a great start!

NOW- we’ve got an important deadline in the House of Representatives!  Today is the last day for your representatives to sign on to the “Dear Colleague” letter urging full funding for  VAWA.  Let’s keep our momentum going!!

ACT NOW!

Use our easy to use tools to CALL your Representative  and ask them to sign on!! 
It’s easy!  We provide their name, phone number, a script and a feedback form.  You  provide the commitment to making a difference :)

and/or  SEND an email today!!

Your CALL is especially important since today’s the deadline. Please CALL if you can!!

Vivian Stringer is the head coach of the Rutger’s women’s basketball team, so many of you may have heard her name in the wake of Don Imus’s racist and sexist comments.  However, her story and her influence as a pioneering woman extends well beyond the Imus controversy.  She has an amazing biography, and she is undoubtably a pioneering African American woman.  Her influence as a role model extends well beyond her coaching background, as revealed in the press surrounding the book:

 A gifted athlete, she had to fight for a place on an all-white cheerleading squad in the sixties. In 1981, just as her coaching career was taking off, her fourteen-month-old daughter, Nina, was stricken with spinal meningitis. Nina would never walk or talk again. Still grieving, Stringer brought a small, poor, historically black college to the national championships—a triumph hailed as “Hoosiers with an all-female cast.” In 1991, her husband, Bill—her staunchest supporter, the father of her children, and the love of her life—fell dead of a sudden heartattack, but that same year, she led yet another young team to the Final Four. Through these dark times and others—including her bout with cancer, shared here for the first time—Stringer has carried her burdens with grace. Given her history, it was no surprise that she led her team to respond to Don Imus’s slurs with dignity and courage.

Standing Tall is a story of quiet strength in the face of punishing odds. Above all, it is an extraordinary love story—love for the game, for the players she has coached, for her close-knit family, and for the husband she lost far too soon. It will resonate long after the last page.

Stringer releases her autobiography today and I encourage everyone to check it out.  It’s often that I put up stories about the mistreatment of black women in the US, so it is nice to have an occasion to celebrate some one who helps challenge those images of black women.

Update: Here is an interview I heard with her today.

Remember the movie “Teachers,” with Judd Hirsch as the principle and Nick Nolte as a noble teacher? In the movie, one sign of the principal’s corruption was when he allowed a teacher who had sex with a student to quietly resign.

From The Oregonian:

It would take months for the agency that licenses Oregon teachers to discipline a Salem-area teacher for inappropriately touching at least eight girls.

To get Kenneth John Cushing, then 44, away from Claggett Creek Middle School students immediately, administrators cut him a deal: If Cushing resigned, they would conceal his alleged conduct — clutching students’ waists, touching their buttocks and massaging their shoulders — from the public.

Cushing signed the pact — obtained by The Oregonian through public records requests — with Salem-Keizer Public Schools in 2004, and officials promised not to reveal the teacher’s behavior if potential employers called looking for a reference. They would attribute his departure to “personal reasons,” the document reads, and make “no reference to this agreement.”

Salem’s deal is just one of 47 similar confidential settlement agreements obtained or confirmed by the newspaper.

During the past five years, nearly half of Oregon teachers disciplined for sexual misconduct with a child left their school districts with confidential agreements. Most, like Cushing’s, promised to keep alleged abuse quiet. Some promised cash settlements, health insurance and letters of recommendation as incentives for a resignation.

The practice is so widespread, school officials across the country call it “passing the trash.”

Via Portland Women’s Crisis Line blog.

Being a very lazy blogger (with a bunch of drawing deadlines), I’m going to just quote other bloggers (but I agree with their opinions). First, from Political Punch:

Earlier this month, speaking at Tulane University, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, said this about the attacks coming his way from Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY:

“You challenge the status quo and suddenly the claws come out,” Obama said.

The CLAWS come out? Really?

Then yesterday Obama told reporters who had asked about Clinton’s latest attack ad, “I understand that Senator Clinton, periodically when she’s feeling down, launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal.” […]

“Claws”…”feeling down”…I find it hard to envision Obama using the same language if he were facing, say, former Sen. John Edwards, D-NC.

From Faux Real:

…It’s about dismissing HRC with careless sexism. If you’ve never been told you are “ruled by your emotions” in a professional capacity, you probably wouldn’t get it either.

And in conclusion, from Too Sense:

…It’s hard for me not to read the subtext of this statement as “if you elect this woman, she’s going to act crazy every time she’s on the rag. You know how chicks are.” What does “feeling down” have to do with it? The two of them are competing for votes, so she’s launching attack ads. Why the fucking psychotherapy? […]

…Neither candidate can afford to avoid appealing to white women. Obama needs their votes, and so it strikes me as completely stupid for him to deliberately piss them off, so I can’t imagine that he would do so deliberately. Because that would be, you know, really stupid.

That said, cut the shit Barack.