feminist blogs

NY Governor Eliot Spitzer seems to have been a patron of the world’s oldest profession:

ALBANY - Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, an administration official said this morning….

Just last week, federal prosecutors arrested four people in connection with an expensive prostitution operation. Administration officials would not say that this was the ring with which the governor had become involved.

But a person with knowledge of the governor’s role said that the person believes the governor is one of the men identified as clients in court papers.

The governor’s travel records show that he was in Washington in mid-February. One of the clients described in court papers arranged to meet with a prostitute who was part of the ring, the Emperors Club VIP on the night of Feb. 13.

Mr. Spitzer appeared on a CNBC television show at 7 a.m. the next morning. Later in the morning, he testified before a Congressional committee.

An affidavit filed in federal court in Manhattan in connection with that case lists six conversations between the man, identified as Client 9, and a booking agent for the Emperors Club.

He was so good as an activist Attorney General, but as governor, he ran on a promise of reform, but then ran smack into the entrenched interests in Albany, which have effectively stymied him. And now this.

I just hope it doesn’t come out that he got caught because he used his own credit card or a number traceable to him. Every time one of these things goes down, I shake my head in wonder at how many people do the utterly stupid thing and leave evidence like that lying around.

Release all your pent-up blogflogging here.

I’ll be 40 this year (yipe!). And 40 is a Big Birthday. And when one is staring down the business end of a Big Birthday, one starts to ponder. One of the things I’m pondering is what it means to be a middle-aged (eep!) woman in this culture.

One thing that it means is that I’m no longer the target for handwringing articles urging me to get married and have children before it’s too late. It’s already assumed to be too late! Pressure’s off on that score.

Another thing it means is that I face somewhat of a dilemma: do I opt out of trying to look young, even if that means a certain amount of invisibility in a culture which prizes feminine youthfulness? Do I try instead to cultivate a look of authoritativeness?

The question before me now is: do I stop coloring my hair and let the gray come in?

I’ve been coloring my hair since college, which is coincidentally when I started getting my first gray hairs. Those weren’t the reason for the dye jobs, though; I was just experimenting. Indeed, one of my first experiments went very awry (I envisioned some kind of blonde highlights in my chestnut-brown hair; I wound up with brassy orange), and when the roots came in, I just picked a darker color and re-did the whole thing. Suddenly, I had auburn hair, and people started noticing it. I got stopped on the street and told how beautiful my hair was (oddly enough, people assumed the haircolor was real, but asked me if I wore colored contact lenses). I enjoyed the attention.

But after a while, more and more gray started coming in, and covering it up became more of a hassle. But still, there wasn’t enough gray yet for me to even consider laying off the dye — I’d always told myself that I’d love to have gray hair, I just didn’t want graying hair. “Gray hair” made me think of my middle-school friend Ellen’s mom — Mrs. W was prematurely gray, and in her mid-30s had lovely, striking silver hair which set off her green eyes.

So I kept dyeing my hair, and trying to keep the root growth to a minimum; as a result, I never really got a sense of just how gray my hair really was, because I couldn’t get a good look at it.

Now, though — I have not been able to color my hair for about two months because I just refinished my bathtub and put my apartment up for sale. I don’t want to do anything that might stain the finish before I have the contract signed. And I noticed the other day, what with there being two months’ worth of roots, that I might just be gray enough, finally.

Unfortunately, I’m not really sure how to proceed here. I don’t want to walk around with a giant skunk stripe of undyed gray hair in the middle of my head. If I switch to henna for the new growth, will that eventually fade out? Do I have to cut it all off and start fresh?

Help!

And feel free to share your thoughts re: gray hair, aging and the way that middle-aged (urk!) women are viewed.

No time to do a real post about this right now, but be sure to check out this chat at the WaPo with Charlotte Allen in which she defends her “bitchez is dumb” op-ed piece.

A taste:

Knoxville, Tenn.: So, um, after skimming your previous responses, apparently you were somewhat serious in the overall point you were making about women’s dumbness. Then my question is this — how can you think this would be funny, when you’re basically regurgitating all the old arguments for women’s inferiority, with very little humorous spin at all? If someone were to write a piece like this about Afridan Americans, do you think they should consider it funny? Even something like this about men — arguably the least repressed group of human beings throughout history — would be in poor taste at best. So what made you think people would take the disparagement of women’s intelligence lightly?

Charlotte Allen: People are always writing pieces just like mine about men. It’s called feminist humor. As for African-Americans, for heaven’s sake! Women aren’t a historically oppressed minority; they’re half the population or more! What–are we women always supposed to portray ourselves as victims of patriarchy? That’s absurd in 2008 when we have every conceivable opportunity.

A grand jury in Johnson County, Kansas, has refused to indict a Planned Parenthood clinic in Overland Park on charges that it violated restrictions on the procedure.

Abortion opponents, through a petition, had forced the court to convene the panel and investigate the clinic in Overland Park, Kan., to determine whether it violated laws on parental notice and informed consent.

They also wanted to see whether the clinic was illegally trafficking in fetal tissue.

”We are once again vindicated, as we have been any time there is an objective review of these allegations,” said Peter Brownlie, president and chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri. ”The jury investigated all of the allegations that were in the petition that resulted in the grand jury being formed, and they found no evidence of any wrongdoing.”

Said Planned Parenthood attorney Pedro Irigonegaray: ”It gives me great faith in the justice system and the people of Kansas.”

That’s the good news. The bad news is, this isn’t over, not by a longshot. The District Attorney in Johnson County is none other than Phill Kline, infamous for his pantysniffing fishing expedition into the sex lives of Kansas’ women. While he served as Attorney General for the state, he reinterpreted state law to require a wide variety of medical and school personnel to report all instances of “intimate contact” between consenting teens (even though he had a hard time defining just what comprised such contact, and got soundly smacked down by the federal court for his trouble); filed a lawsuit against the governor trying to ban the use of Medicaid funds to pay for abortions; attempted (unsuccessfully) to get the private medical records of thousands of women who had had late-term abortions in Dr. George Tiller’s clinic in Wichita, one of the few that is authorized to conduct the procedure — with the justification that he was looking for instances where the clinic failed to report statutory rape. Happily, Kansas voters had enough of Kline and bounced him in the last election — though he wound up as Johnson County’s district attorney, from which position he promptly launched an investigation of Planned Parenthood in Overland Park.

And defeat? Defeat means nothing to Kline and his ilk. When they lose, they simply persist; if persistence doesn’t pay off, they change tactics. And of course, if the law won’t help them out, they’re perfectly happy to engage in terrorism.

Do these sound like people who have accepted defeat?

”Planned Parenthood cannot claim they are free of any indictment, because the full evidence never reached the grand jury,” said Tim Golba, spokesman for the LIFE Coalition, the anti-abortion collaborative that petitioned for the grand jury.

The jurors issued a subpoena in January seeking the records of 16 clinic patients, but Planned Parenthood feared information in the records would identify the patients.

Johnson County District Attorney Phill Kline, who has started his own investigation into Planned Parenthood, asked District Judge Kevin Moriarty to make the agency and its clinic abide by the subpoena…

Cheryl Sullenger, spokeswoman for Operation Rescue, one of the groups in the LIFE Coalition, said she wasn’t surprised by the grand jury’s decision. Jurors didn’t appear to seriously investigate all of the allegations, she said.

”We’ve been considering a second grand jury effort,” Sullenger said. ”That’s something that’s on the table right now.”

Not that the people at Planned Parenthood are surprised:

Brownlie said he expected abortion opponents to claim the grand jury’s work was tainted.

”Any time a decision is different from the one they want, they will claim it’s because of some nefarious doings,” he said. ”The only people who continue to insist that there’s criminal wrongdoing are people who have a political agenda.”

Gah. In an otherwise fairly non-objectionable article about couples who never really talked about sex or made it a real priority experiencing periods of sexlessness, CNN quotes this bit of advice from sex therapist Laura Berman:

Berman offers at least one reason to resolve unsatisfying love lives: “Often, when you’re not having sex, your empathy and ability to connect is lower, and it’s easier to have conflict,” she says. “It amplifies (marital) problems.”

At the Berman Center in Chicago, she counsels couples on repairing their sex lives. Some advice:

• Try traditional gender roles: Men may become more sexually assertive if they feel more in control, and women may feel more desire for a mate with newfound machismo. “You don’t have to get his slippers,” explains Berman. “You just have to give him some control.” She suggests a date where the man chooses everything — her clothes, the restaurant, the food — as a starting point.

Being equals is soooooo unsexy. Remember, ladies, it’s your fault the marriage is sexless, because not letting your man control you, down to choosing what you wear, makes the baby Jesus cry. Or at least makes his wee-wee soft. And if you don’t let him control what you wear, what you eat and what you do in bed, then it’s your fault that he and his wee-wee take up with some other woman who will.

Or, you know, maybe you could learn to talk about sex and learn to ask for what you want:

• Talk about it: Couples also would benefit from simply communicating with their partners about what they want in bed. “There is no secret to hot sex,” says Klein. “Sexy lingerie and dinners out are no substitute for an honest conversation about sex.”

Is it just me, or does it seem that these two pieces of advice contradict each other? I would guess that the kind of people who are heavily invested with traditional gender roles aren’t going to be comfortable talking about sex.

So says John Pomfret of the WaPo, who’s receiving a spanking over the latest dribblings from Charlotte Allen. Even Ed Morrissey, writing at Hot Air — neither of which are known for their pro-feminist stance — didn’t miss the abject woman-hating in the piece:

Bobby Riggs during his intentionally provocative promotion of his tennis match with Billy Jean King couldn’t have written this with a straight face. Allen blithely consigns the entire gender into second-class status and advises women to give up their dreams of wealth and power, and instead stick to chick flicks, chick lit, and classic chick roles as mothers and homemakers. That, she promises, will make everyone happier.

What a load of absolute nonsense. Women succeed every day in every arena. If Allen feels a little dim, that may have more to do with her own talents that those of her fellow females. It almost sounds like an excuse. I couldn’t help failing, kind sir; I’m only a woman!

Pomfret is now furiously backpedaling. It was a joke, ladies! Can’t you take a joke?

“If it insulted people, that was not the intent,” Outlook editor John Pomfret told me this morning, calling the piece “tongue-in-cheek.”

Pomfret said that Allen pitched the idea to him as a riff on women fainting at Obama rallies, and similarities with the Beatles…

“She wanted to make fun of this issue,” Pomfret said. “A lot of people have taken it very seriously.”

Hey, remember what I said earlier about this kind of acceptance of blatant misogyny in our nation’s mainstream media having nothing at all to do with the dearth of women on the op-ed pages, except as instruments with which to tear down women as a whole? That goes double for the failure of the WaPo to attract and retain female readers, I’m sure. Wholly unconnected!

In the meantime, keep checking in with Eschaton, where Atrios is dropping gems like this today:

Next Week In John Pomfret’s Washington Post Outlook Section

When she says no, she really means yes.

ETA: Some of Allen’s greatest hits here.

How else to explain a weekend in which the Washington Post gives space on its op-ed page to Charlotte Allen to complain about how stupid women are; the LA Times does the same for “humorist” Joel Stein (with a soupcon of anxiety about his dick falling off because women can vote, to be added to his anxiety about his dick falling off due to women’s Halloween costumes); Bill Maher sat around on HBO with Christopher Hitchens and Harry Shearer (oh, you disappoint me, Harry) complaining about what need buckets women are; and the New York Times still employs Maureen Dowd.

And I’m sure the fact that these opinions are aired in mainstream outlets has nothing at all to do with the dearth of women on op-ed pages. Well, except for those engaged in the ignoble pursuit of tearing down other women.

Have at.

John Edwards has apparently asked his pledged delegates to stay with him until the convention.

That means he intends to make sure that his progressive policy ideas are included in the party platform. Go John!