feminist blogs

I’m not so sure that casting the female candidate for president as a beaver is a really good strategy, Erica.

Casting the black candidate as a stallion probably not a good idea, either.

Just sayin’.

Quite possibly the most perfect bit of irony ever.

Stay classy, Brian Ross and the ABC News Investigative Team.

Screencap image swiped with permission from Liss.

I really don’t know what to say at this point. Unbeknownst to me, yesterday was not actually the fifth anniversary of our invasion of Iraq, but Wank Day, as our mainstream media pored through the 11,000 pages of records from Hillary Clinton’s eight years as First Lady and grabbed the Lubriderm.

Oh, yes, boys and girls, it must have felt so good to be able to trot out the Blue Dress and add new, fresh wankstains to it. Thing’s more stain than dress at this point, what with being used as a receptacle for the splooge of a media desperate for ways to revive the Lewinsky scandal and remind everyone that Hillary Clinton’s husband cheated on her! Right under her nose!

(The WSJ, OTOH, would like to remind you that she’s a murderer, even if she wasn’t in the area when Vince Foster was killed.)

Message to the media: if you really want to relive the Clinton era, you might want to reach a little further back and this little mantra in mind: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

What a very odd piece from the NYT on food bloggers and restaurateurs who suddenly find themselves, after years of overindulging in rich, fatty foods, to be, well, rich and fat:

Back before everyone with a fork and a laptop started nursing a food blog, Mr. Perlow was a founder of eGullet, a pioneering online discussion forum that helped obsessed food enthusiasts find one another.

It put him at the center of a community where no food was too fatty and no field trip too extreme. Ferreting out the best place for an empanada or the perfect way to braise pork belly meant tasting countless versions, often in the same day. Being the first in the group to find it was golden.

In October, Mr. Perlow was in Denver on business for his day job as a systems integration expert. He fell ill, and what seemed like a case of altitude sickness turned into a three-day hospital visit. There he heard the grim truth: He was diabetic. He weighed more than 400 pounds, his blood pressure was dangerously high and his blood was thick with glucose and cholesterol.

A doctor told him he would be dead in five years.

“I wasn’t shocked but I thought maybe it’s time the party’s over,” he said.

Yeeeeees, what a surprise, indeed, that mainlining chicken fat might lead to ill health.

The only thing that’s terribly surprising about this article is that the specific eating habits of those profiled, and not just their weight, is brought up for examination.

Indeed, other than the scorn (for, undoubtedly, the ickily public weight gain and tacky reminders that certain dietary habits can lead to mortality), I could see the descriptions of what’s being eaten among this crowd as the ultimate in indulgence in a non-belt-tightening era:

To which many members of the Fat Pack say: Shut up and pass the pork butt. Among a certain slice of the food-possessed, to suggest that indulgence might put one’s health in peril is to invite ridicule.

“I think enjoyment of food has never proven to be harmful to anyone’s health,” said Mr. Shaw, who turned from practicing law to writing about food in the late 1990s with an article for salon.com defending fat guys. He still cultivates a persona in print and online as The Fat Guy, and at 5-foot-10 weighs about 270 pounds.

Mr. Shaw said he believes the genetic component of weight and health matter more than moderation and exercise. Although his father died from heart disease, he thinks that the state of medical knowledge on the relationship of diet to health changes so frequently that it can’t be trusted.

Some of his views about diet and health border on the extreme. “I think the whole diabetes thing is a major hoax,” he said. “They are overdiagnosing it.”

Josh Ozersky, the online food editor for New York magazine, once told Mr. Perlow that they were the type of people who had their cholesterol tested for blood. Mr. Ozersky used the pen name Mr. Cutlets when he wrote the eating guide “Meat Me in Manhattan” (Gamble Guides, 2003), but uses his real name on his new book, “The Hamburger: A History,” due out next month from Yale University Press.

“Obviously, my philosophy on gastronomy can be summed up by saying the fat is the meat and the meat is the vegetable,” he said.

And here is where I part company with Mr. Cutlets and those who think like he does (why, yes, Anthony Bourdain, I’m looking at you): Meat is meat, but vegetable is vegetable, and if you can’t enjoy a vegetable without reference to meat, then what kind of foodie are you, really?

Because, honestly, why do you have to agree that meat and lard are the best thing EVAH in order to have an opinion that asparagus dredged in olive oil and grilled with salt and pepper is just about the perfect way to serve that vegetable?

Moreover, why should anyone be ashamed of liking tofu for what tofu is?

Just before Thanksgiving, Mr. Perlow told readers of his blog, Off the Broiler (offthebroiler.wordpress.com), the truth about his health. Reviews of chili dogs and videos of home tostone-frying projects gave way to meditations on lentil soup and The Big Salad.

“I can’t believe I just blogged about tofu,” he said just after the change began. But what a blog entry it was. Mr. Perlow prepared and photographed, in smart, annotated detail, ma-po tofu and tofu skin noodles with spicy peanut sauce.

And though he is still in mourning for his old loves, especially pizza and burgers, he says his pleasure receptors are better tuned to the joys of vegetables and legumes.

While the former eGullet partners don’t speak anymore, Mr. Shaw said he admired Mr. Perlow’s latest venture.

“I’ve got to hand it to Jason,” he said. “He’s not part of the culture of deprivation. He is really enjoying what he eats.”

It’s not like you should jump off a bridge if you can’t get the perfect slice of bacon; there’s a whole world of tastes out there to discover.

Let’s have it.

The story:

LOS ANGELES — UCLA Medical Center will fire some employees and discipline others for snooping at the confidential medical records of Britney Spears, who was hospitalized in its psychiatric ward, a hospital official told The Associated Press.

Jeri Simpson, the hospital’s director of human resources who was involved in the investigations of the confidentiality breach, confirmed the action but could not say how many employees were affected. The hospital did not say when the snooping took place or which of Spears records were looked at.

The Los Angeles Times reported on its Web site Friday that the breaches occurred during Spears most recent hospital stay. While the disciplined employees were unable to access her psychiatric records, they did look at non-psychiatric records from her previous visits to the medical center, the Times reported.

The headline?

Britney Spears Gets Hospital Workers Fired

Now, is it just me, or does that headline seem to imply that Spears was the one demanding that the employees lose their jobs? Because she’s an overentitled celebrity who crushes the little people wherever she goes. She’s an unreasonable diva, squashing those poor people who did nothing at all wrong! Clearly, it was a hissyfit!

Well, except for the part where Spears is* hospitalized, and these people were breaking medical privacy laws (HIPAA, anyone?) by snooping in her medical records, even if — as far as anyone knows — the information in them hasn’t been leaked to the press. Luckily, they couldn’t access her psychiatric records, but they did look at confidential information from her prior stays at the hospital, such as when she gave birth to her sons.

I don’t know if the headline was written by the AP or by HuffPo, but HuffPo has a neat little feature that allows you to compare different versions of a story. The earlier version had this headline:

Hospital to Fire Workers in Spears Case

Guess it wasn’t quite as sexy as the one that positioned Spears as responsible for the firings.

Both versions, however, have the following paragraph:

Leading up to the hospitalizations, Spears had been behaving bizarrely. She shaved her head, was seen in public without underwear, ran over a celebrity photographer’s foot and attacked a vehicle with an umbrella.

Of the items on this list, one kind of stands out as being not particularly indicative of mental problems; and, indeed, indicative more of the level of privacy invasion that this woman has to put up with every time she steps out of her door. Really, no one would ever know that Britney Spears “was seen in public without underwear” had the pack of paparazzi who hound her relentlessly not had their lenses trained up her skirt. Someone will undoubtedly raise her celebrity status in comments, and argue that she sought fame, so why should she have any expectation that they’re *not* going to be shooting photos up her skirt? IOW, she asked for it by being a celebrity.

Well, there are two answers for that. Number one, she became a celebrity not as an adult, but as a child, pushed by her family. And number two, that argument is, frankly, probably what those 13 hospital employees told themselves when they snooped into her medical records.

* Actually, is she? I confess I haven’t been keeping close tabs on her whereabouts lately.

Thanks to Going Gray in the comments to this post, I found her blog as well as the site Going Gray, Looking Great, a site for Diana Jewell’s book of the same name. Lots of great information about transitioning there, as well as colors to wear with gray and photos of great gray hair.

I haven’t yet done anything with the color, though I got a haircut yesterday. I was willing to chop it short, but I left the cut in the hands of the stylist with some instructions (i.e., GET THIS FUCKING HAIR OUT OF MY EYES OR I’M GOING AFTER IT WITH NAIL SCISSORS!!!!), and wound up with something much more textured but still more or less a chin-length bob. Which looks great. And given that there’s a good deal of texturizing, there’s a lot of shorter pieces which won’t take long to grow out.

I hadn’t been planning on getting a haircut yet, but I had a job interview yesterday afternoon, and since my hair was both showing roots and overgrown, I had to fix one or the other in order to look polished. And since I both still couldn’t stain my bathtub AND I suspect I’ve developed an allergy to a chemical in hair dye, I went with the cut.

More on the Spitzer mess. This time, we’re hearing from the sister-punishing Serena Joys who’ll happily tear down their own gender if it means they get to spend more time in the warm, warm glow of the television lights:

“Are you saying the women should feel guilty, like they somehow drove the man to cheat?” a visibly aghast Meredith Vieira of “Today” asked Dr. Laura Schlessinger,* a radio host.

Dr. Schlessinger replied, “Yes, I hold women accountable for tossing out perfectly good men by not treating them with the love and kindness and respect and attention they need.”

That’s right, Silda! It’s your fault your husband strayed! Why, if you’d just let him control you, you’d have satisfied his need to direct and dominate another human being, and he wouldn’t have had to move all that money around, attracting the attention of the banks and the IRS and the US Attorney’s Office! Dammit, woman, what is wrong with you?

Look, here’s another shameful political wife who couldn’t keep her husband in her bed! Bring her out for the ritual humiliation and penance.

Dina Matos McGreevey, the estranged wife of James E. McGreevey, who resigned as the governor of New Jersey in 2004 after admitting to an extramarital homosexual affair, has been much in demand these last two days.

On a different “Today” panel on Tuesday, called “Secret Lives: Does Power Equal Promiscuity?,” Ms. Matos McGreevey argued that blaming wives for their husbands’ infidelities was “like blaming a rape victim for being victimized.”

Heyyyyyy… she’s not following the script. What’s with this not being properly shamed? Get her out of there! Get a new panel to remind wives of their duty!

Daytime television does have a way of encouraging women to blame themselves or change themselves to hold on to their men. On yet another “Today” panel, this one labeled “Refresh Your Romance,” an expert advised viewers eager to rekindle their marriages to take erotic dance classes to “unleash the inner vixen.”

That’s better. Remember, ladies, it’s your fault, and yours alone, if your husband strays and gets caught and has to resign from office.

___________
* Yes, *that* Laura Schelessinger. Of the affairs and the divorce and the nude photos and the criminal son and the mother who was found in her apartment, having been dead for two months.

A government agency in Britain charged with investigating forced marriages has released a report estimating that the number of forced marriages may be as high as 4,000 per year, up from earlier estimates of about 300. These cases involve young women and girls being taken abroad and married against their will. And there are some differences of opinion on how to proceed with investigating these:

Sayeeda Warsi, a Muslim member of the House of Lords, said forced marriages should be treated as a criminal offence like domestic violence, to protect young women from ethnic minorities.

“As a society we draw a line in the sand,” she told GMTV. “This is not a culturally sensitive issue, this is an abhorrent act which we must stand together on.”

Khanum added: “Forced marriage has nothing to do with religion. It is a part of a patriarchal system where parents believe they know what is best for their children.”

But the government argues that criminalising forced marriage would only drive it underground.

Home Office Minister Alan West told the House of Lords Monday: “The difficulty is that these things happen in families. We have taken a lot of advice and talked to many people.

“There is a feeling that the crime would go even further underground because people generally do not want to put their families through this.”

There was also a separate study released which may tie into the forced marriages:

A separate study to be released Tuesday highlights how many children have suddenly stopped attending school, amid fears that some have been forced into marriages against their will.

The BBC said it had been told by one teenage Pakistani girl that she was withdrawn from school aged 13, taken to Pakistan and forced to marry a man who raped her.

She blamed the authorities for failing to launch a search for her. “I think they let me down,” she said. “I did still secretly think when I was in Pakistan, the school might search for me.

“Nobody looked for me. It was horrific.”

It was disclosed this month that 33 girls were missing from schools in Bradford despite efforts to locate them. It is feared they have been forced into marriages.

Thoughts?

I said in my post yesterday about Eliot Spitzer’s revelation that he was a patron of a prostitution ring that I hoped he hadn’t been so stupid as to pay with a credit card. Client 9, however, insisted on paying cash.

But Spitzer may have been too clever by half when it came to moving that much cash around.

There, in the Hauppauge offices of the Internal Revenue Service, investigators conducting a routine examination of suspicious financial transactions reported to them by banks found several unusual movements of cash involving the governor of New York, several officials said.

The investigators working out of the three-story office building, which faces Veterans Highway, typically review such reports, the officials said. But this was not typical: transactions by a governor who appeared to be trying to conceal the source, destination or purpose of the movement of thousands of dollars in cash, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The money ended up in the bank accounts of what appeared to be shell companies, corporations that essentially had no real business.

The transactions, officials said, suggested possible financial crimes — maybe bribery, political corruption, or something inappropriate involving campaign finance. Prostitution, they said, was the furthest thing from the minds of the investigators.

Soon, the I.R.S. agents, from the agency’s Criminal Investigation Division, were working with F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors from Manhattan who specialize in political corruption.

(more…)