feminist blogs

This is where we admit up front that the tradition of gift giving is really an awkward and oft-times awful one. Slate has a couple of advice articles up on gifts not to give, and I think the advice is pretty sound, especially Jon Katz's important reminder that dogs are not good gifts. Amanda Fortini addresses the ongoing problem of people who think that there's exactly no problem with buying clothes they themselves would like for people that have different tastes than them. I'm not as strongly against the practice of giving clothes as gifts as she is, since I think I know a lot of people who are pretty good at doing it, but in general, she's right--about 95% of gift horror stories you will hear involve clothing purchases of one sort or another. Fortini has a pretty funny horror story like this:

During one recent Christmas, I opened a gift from my mother to find a nightshirt printed with an image of dancing books and the sentence "A Booklover Never Sleeps Alone." (It had been a chaotic year; she had clearly done her shopping at Hallmark, likely 12 hours earlier.) I wanted to respond, "If she wears this nightgown she certainly does," but I refrained, smiled, and announced, "I LOVE it!" while my sisters gazed on in sympathetic horror.

She accurately points out that the real danger of the clothing gift is that unless you know exactly their size and taste, you are really treading on insulting someone with your gift. I had a similiar situation to this story once when an aunt of mine gave all the women in our family a gift of a sexy silk nightgown....well, all the women but me and my sister. We got boxer shorts. Three guesses as to whether or not we found this refreshingly charming or were suddenly concerned that she was trying to send us the message that we somehow failed in the sexy and feminine department.

And all that's not to mention trying to find a way to look enthusiastic and grateful when you open a box only to find a sweatshirt decorated with a Christmas tree or a bunch of kittens with sparkles or something. I suppose you could strike the middle ground between saying, "What the fuck?" and saying, "I've never seen anything so beautiful in all my life" through deadpan sarcasm that hides your irritation. "It's wonderful, I'll wear it on my next date with some stirrup pants and a big bow in my hair." I would try this, if not for being a cowardly sort who instead runs off to my blog and makes fun of glitter kitten sweatshirts instead.

Luckily, my mother is the sort who bypasses the whole charade that giving gifts is about surprising people and admits openly it's a materialistic frenzy and just asks her assorted no-longer-minor children just to provide lists of things we want. This is the sort of sensible, no-bullshit approach to Christmas that my romantic self just can't quite bring herself to take yet. I want people to be surprised, which I suppose to be honest just means that I want them to swoon with amazement at my good taste. Which is probably the same motivation that leads people to buy me sparkle kitty sweatshirts, I guess.

Gift-giving: An exercise in egotism, 90% of the time. But to be fair, it's the good, generous kind of egotism, not the bad kind that makes you turn saying "Merry Christmas" into an anti-liberal-call-to-arms.

So, gotta a funny bad gift story? Please tell me I'm not the only one who had gender anxieties provoked against my will on Christmas Day.

Well, at least seriously, that is.

It looks like Dennis Prager, hot on the heels of his series "Why Jews Shouldn't Mind Having Their Religion Co-oped by the Christian Right for Political Purposes" has decided to do another series on what to look for in someone to marry. He's on Part II now. Hopefully, this one will be 25 parts as well. He's got all sorts of insightful advice that's pretty hard for the Average Joe Townhall Fan to think of on his own, apparently. Like:

9. Do you miss the person when you are not together?

Apparently, even men are supposed to like the woman they are to marry well enough to miss her when she's around, though Prager doesn't make it clear if men have to go so far as to actually miss her hideous feminine visage or if they are permitted only to miss having dinner made and their dick sucked when she goes out of town to visit her family. Maybe he'll address that next week.

Anyway, Prager appears to be getting hung up on the sexual stuff and giving advice that boils down to, "Don't marry someone just because they give good head," though why he thinks the virtous Christmas-protecting Townhall readers would ever even consider anything but chaste hand-holding before marriage, I do not know. That said, I thought I'd help him along in his task of crafted a manifesto of advice on who to marry.

1. Determine if he/she is alive. This may not seem important now, but if there comes a time in the future when you have to determine what to do with your spouse's estate, it will be helpful if you know if they died before or after you married them. If you have medical training, you can often determine if your beloved is alive by checking for a pulse and/or putting a mirror in front of their face to see if they fog it up. If this seems to be too much trouble, you can probably ask around amongst your beloved's relatives. If all else fails, you can probably find out if there's a death certificate on file for your intended--ask him/her about it. If they can muster the strength to tell you, odds are they are not dead.

2. Determine if that person is of the sex that you have a preference for. Don't ask your intended about this, especially if you suspect she is one of those wily female-types. Sometimes they are desperate enough for a ring that they'll lie about this, you know. If you are having sex with that person, as Prager assumes you are, then that's a pretty good opportunity to find out this information. Take a medical textbook to bed, or if you are a victim of abstinence-only education, you might want to start with something a little easier to manage, like this book. If they complain about what you are doing, you can fake 'em out by saying that you're studying up for a biology exam. If they are dumb enough to consider marrying you, that should probably work on them.

3. Determine if you have a legal right to marry this person. The main thing here is that your genitals are a lot different looking than theirs. I know--it doesn't make sense, but nor do a lot of things that get crammed into the category "Judeo-Christian values" that we're supposed to base our laws on even though the Constitution forbids it. But it's the law and you'd better follow it. If you are having trouble determining if your genitals look different enough from your intended's, I'd suggest snapping a photograph of each other naked and taking it to the courthouse when you go to obtain your license. They probably won't like it, but just explain that you're doing your best to follow the law and you'd appreciate their help.

4. Determine if this person will consent to marry you. Consent, as we all know, is possibly one of the hardest things to detect and understand known to man, so it might be a little too much to ask of a Townhall reader to find out if their beloved will consent to marry them. Nonetheless, this is a critical element, and really, if a marriage isn't worth working for, is it worth having at all? If you want to follow tradition, and naturally you are scared not to, or the Judeo-Christian theocrat Mafia will have your head, then you will want to obtain consent by having the man of the couple get on one knee and pretend to be subservient while asking the woman to consent to a lifetime of subservience to him. If you are having trouble determining which one does the asking and which one does the being asked part, ask the kind people at the courthouse who've examined your naked photographs. They should be happy to help you.*

5. Determine if getting married is really what you want to do. Just kidding! Of course it is. Everyone should get married. Hopefully in the future once that pesky Constitution gets out of the way of the proper, value-laden theocracy of the future, we won't even have to bother with meandering and silly advice columns like this, because marriage will simply be mandatory. That'll be a great day, of course. To paraphrase a famous band that has no chance of surviving the impending ban on irony, freedom from choice is what you want.

*Note to libertarians: See? The government is good for something besides blowing foreign nations to bits.

Jesse's gone and I'm stealing his idea.

To be fair, it turned into a community project of sorts.

But Chris Muir needs our help, folks. He's still not getting the concept of "funny".

More beneath the fold.

Chris Clarke is here to help:

And here's my suggestion:

Play along, kids. If you don't have a place to host your new, improved "Day by Day" comic, don't forget the comic strip generator that one can use in a pinch.

Update: Norbizness did one, too. I had to blow it up to make it readable. I think the habit of doing Red Meat cartoons is making you a tad wordy there, Norbiz. You're damn lucky I found this so funny.

Funny parody from Mad Kane. Check it out, y'all.

After publishing a stupid and offensive article about the 10 things every single woman should own, MSN has decided to be an equal opportunity offender and publish a corresponding article that reinforces stifling gender roles for men. My boyfriend emailed this to me and noted something that might have passed me by--unlike the list for women, every item on this list is an expensive material good. Very interesting. Are they simply saying men make more? Or is it that men are defined by what they can buy and women are supposed to present ourselves as essentially purchasable? Many theories come to mind, but the list itself deserves attention.

Is it my imagination, or are they implying that the presence of an expresso maker in your home will spare you the odious task of treating someone you had a one night stand with like she is another human being instead of hurrying her out the door in a frenzy of self-hatred projected on someone you were only too happy to fuck like she was the last woman on Earth the night before? This is misleading. The quality of the coffee in her hand will not change her feelings about any mistreatment. And anyway, an expresso machine is no replacement for simply buying good coffee in the first place.

Then you are too young to be having sex and you should immediately ask your parents for a lamp.

Silly womens with their insecurities in the face of men cracking jokes about how they need forgiving light. The crack aside, I can't actually say for certain I've gone into a swoon over a man owning a lamp. I can't actually say I've known a man who didn't own a lamp. If I did, I probably wouldn't stay for fear that he may not own a toilet either.

Lame ad for Swiffer concealed as little nudge that implies that men would actually sleep in pig shit if it weren't for the overwhelming need to have sex with the sex that is so annoyingly anal retentive that they don't want to live in conditions that could cause leprosy. Indeed, this is a classic example of how you can be insulting to both sexes equally and still be sexist.

Other than the accompanying ad that implies that you have to spend a cool grand or more for this item or you will never again know what a woman's body feels like, I have to agree with this advice. My dating days are a few years past, but I doubt that the problem of men who decorate completely in a severe, 80s-style black yuppie evil style has been eradicated. Please, for the love of god, say no to all-black furniture.

Unless of course she wears men's underwear. Anyway, this is stupid advice because he skirts the major issue, which is wearing underwear that is stained or has big holes or has elastic missing in the waistband. Unfortunately, no human being alive has managed yet to invent underwear for men that doesn't sag in the ass for some reason, and until someone can do that small favor for humanity, it's pretty much pointless to worry about anything else, male-underwear-wise. Besides of course being in good shape and clean.

All I can say to this is that using the term "whipping out" when addressing what men should do on dates is really not recommended.

Because Levis don't automatically come with an eightball of cocaine in the back pocket. Hey, being popular at your local strip club counts as being popular with the ladies, so quit yer bitchin'.

The nerve of trying to pull this lie off is something to behold, much like watching the Shrub convince people that there was a noble purpose in invading Iraq--you know it's wrong, but you have grudging respect for the sheer huevos and total lack of conscience it takes. Anyone who knows anything about the malady known as shoe whore-dom, a malady I suffer from, knows that it is a single-minded obsession with women's shoes. The malady exists independently of men--their only relation to the disease is that some know from sexy shoes and know to compliment women with the proper amount of awe for her good taste and subdued and tasteful lust for her sexy, sexy feet.

I hate to promote that sexist stereotype, but my mother and I recently had a friendly 10 minute discussion about whether or not toe cleavage is sexy. (Toe cleavage is when you have closed toe shoes where a teeny bit of the break in your toes is visible above the shoe line.) We talk about this shit constantly. We have never once discussed men's shoes except to mock men who wear brown shoes with pin-striped suits.

At this point, I should be grateful they aren't begging men to wash their sheets as if hygeine were some great revelation, since most articles on how to impress women take just that stance.

Again, I have mixed feelings. There is nothing wrong with telling guys that learning to cook is a good idea, unless of course you are doing so with the idea that bachelor advice books of the 50s and 60s had of getting men by until they snagged a woman to do it for them. Of course, considering that the writer thinks his intended audience can't follow Rachel Ray, this advice is essentially the same.

Pictures for y'all of what was occupying mine and the Man of Mouse's time yesterday. I came to the inevitable conclusion that my potted caladiums were getting too damn big for their pots so they had to go into the ground. We've been putting off this inevitability because we knew that the ground was hard as a rock and we had the distinct pleasure of turning it over, mixing in some manure and something called Dillo Dirt into it, slapping a border down, putting the plants in the ground and here's the results.

I also bought some flowers to stick into metal buckets. The power drill was whipped out again to create drainage holes, an always thrilling event. Here's the results.

Anyway, it's race day so we're barbequing and stuff. Have fun!

This one's for the Garden Ho's. (I want this T-shirt so bad.) Pandagon Ho's who expect this blog to be a dual thing--Jesse, who actually plans what he's going to write about instead of coming up with entire posts while cleaning his ears with a Q-tip while sitting on the toilet, unlike some bloggers I could name (me), will be back tomorrow. So here's some pictures of plants.

There wasn't going to be any new garden stuff of interest this weekend, but I was given a Come to Jesus meeting by other organic gardeners about my woeful lack of mulch. Apparently, mulching is the new religion and my lack of tomatoes is directly attributable to my insufficient mulching. So I doubled up on the mulch and while I was at the store purchasing my locally made, recycled, non-chemical, all organic mulch, I spied the newest addition to the family. It was labeled as a plant from Vietnam that didn't need much sun, which is perfect for the mini-jungle I have growing under my enormous oak that allows very little sun to penetrate but still allows the area under it to be unbearably hot.

I was put in mind of a conversation I had with an elderly Vietnamese man who helped me jump my stalled car many years ago. He told me when he decided to move to the U.S. he picked Austin because the climate reminded him of of Vietnam. That's all the encouragement I needed to convince myself that a Vietnamese plant would love this weather--that and I knew that another one of my plants was getting too big for the Ween pot that a friend made for the Man of Mouse and this little plant looked to be the perfect size. So here it is.

Of course, the vacated plant needed a new pot, and I just so happened to have painted one the same color as my house.

The mulch on my vegetable garden is now twice as deep. And yes, I am that batshit crazy to be shoveling mulch on my vegetables when it's 100 degrees out. Seeing as how it hasn't rained in over a month here, this should hopefully start helping the plants cough up more than a half dozen fruits.

Garden talk away in the comments. Man of Mouse and I want to install a rain barrel soon, preferably next weekend, but we don't have any rain gutters. Is there any way I could install just like five feet of a gutter on the side of my house no one sees so that I could collect rain without breaking the bank? Has anyone put in a gutter just for a rain barrel?

Flea's shop is here for those who are curious. The usefulness of her products for men and women who are single and coupled is obvious enough, and yet nothing for sale there made it onto this MSN list of 10 things every single woman should have. Instead, as usual, they have a bunch of completely useless advice.

Assuming, of course, that you are dating someone who can't tell what a woman looks like unless she's presented to him in photographic form. If this is the case, it's probably best to dump him before you find out what his idea of "having sex" is.

I feel like Maria when I run around sporting an obviously fake Puerto Rican accent and have someone else do my singing.

I assure you that heels do not look good with cut-off shorts and a tank top. While some say that they look good with bathing suits, I don't recommend them if swimming is actually in your future.

And there's no reason to think anything but highly of men who want a woman who shows the proper disdain for other women.

He'll know you're not one of those crazy feminists who is uncomfortable with being called a bitch or listening to songs about murdering women.

Why don't you just tell him, "You know, I never did like Eminem?" and watch him run screaming off into the night with his balls clutched in his hands for protection, if in fact it's that important to "any" man?

Or just being a big time bitch and purchase good beer to drink for yourself. Go crazy! I won't tell.

He'll learn "10 different ways to make him moan in ecstasy", something he may have a use for, but probably not at your house.

It's not cool to write your number down impetously, but it is cool to hand him a card you had printed up specifically to give your suitors? Awesome. Why don't you hand off an application to date you while you're at it?

Damn, I've had the same boyfriend for four years and I never thought of this. This is good advice, actually. Though I imagine I'll probably stick to my primitive method of just rolling him around until he stops. Because I'm cheap.

Unless of course you don't treat your friends, gay or straight, like they are supporting roles in a sitcom all about You.

Dated men? Are you sure that's something your straight male friends have done? Nothing against straight men--for better or worse, most of my buds are just such creatures--but I can tell you from experience they are no better or worse than anyone else at giving advice.

Blah blah blah we give you nine pieces of worthless advice and we know it's worthless so we'll end this article with a piece of pious advice that you probably already knew. But I guess I can't complain if in fact it helps a single woman out there realize that she needs to have condoms on hand instead of scramble for them when it's late in the night, tempting her to take her chances.

The Match.com/MSN dating advice started taunting me this morning. I'm not telling you how, but suffice it to say, it was relentless and cruel. And while the site has changed formats a little, it still is peddling the same putrid dating advice it always has. Today's steaming pile is an advice column to men on how to avoid being let down with a gentle, "Let's just be friends". I think I have a pretty good take on this burning question. There are two effective ways to avoid hearing those words.

1) Be such a massive asshole that no one wants to be in the same room with you, much less let you down gently. You won't be asked to be someone's friend if she's telling you to get the fuck out of her face.

2) Develop mind-reading skills so you can only ask out women who you know for a fact want to rip your clothes off right this minute.

Or of course you could realize occasional rejection is part of life--a strategy that will definitely result in more naked face time than the first one for sure and one that's more within reach than the second.

Of course, there's no way in hell the MSN article will admit this fact, because the endless hope of dating advice columns is that you can teach your readers to be manipulative enough to get their way no matter what. Well, that and mostly to fill up column space. So here is their advice.

This is good advice not to get on someone's nerves, because no one likes to be the person who does all the planning. But a better way to phrase it isn't "take control"--it's "don't be lazy and make someone else do all the planning". But rule #1 in writing advice columns aimed at men is assume that men are so fragile they have to have everything packaged as Conan the Barbarian materials or they will feel emasculated. That or they really do intend for men to take complete control with women, with the end result being that they have fallen in my first piece of advice, which I suppose does result in not hearing the "friends" word, if that's the only goal.

It's true. Women are slaves to our biological clocks and pick our lovers not according to who we like but whether or not the internal nightly alarm rings and then we are obliged to fuck whoever is nearest to us. In fact, the precise hour is 10:32 PM, so if that's your goal, forget the date and simply stand next to the woman you like at that hour.

So, when you meet a woman you like that you have a lot in common with, your options are to a) turn into an entirely different person or b) lie to her. Damn, I'd rather just take the friendship than be Cyrano-ing myself.

Or in short, pull the Jedi Mind Trick on her. What do you mean you aren't a Jedi? All single men are Jedis.

Whatever. Any woman who likes you and finds she likes you less because you listen to her and respond to what she says is not worth dating. Same with problem-solving--anyone who's response to someone who's good at solving problems is, "Well I sure as hell don't want you in my house where I could draw on your skills at a moment's notice," probably voted for Bush anyway on the theory that Kerry is too smart.

Why not just go the distance and say, "Frankly, I can't relate to women at all except as sex objects," right off the bat. And mention a lot of women that you know and be deliberately ambigious about your relationship. That or just say, "I got all the bitches on my dick." Again, you're back to Amanda's advice #1, but at least you won't hear "friend" from her. This really is the worst advice I've ever read--well, I suppose it could be worse. They could tell men to ditch their female friends altogether on the theory that there's no way that a female friend knows other women she could introduce you to.

Of course, what this entire article neglects to note is that "Let's be friends" may actually mean that the woman wants to be friends or it may be a bit of fudgery, but what it most definitely means is that she doesn't want to be your girlfriend. And no Jedi Mind Tricks are gonna make the incompatible compatible.

This is why home computer video editing software may in fact be the best thing ever.

And I've discovered two new favorite gardening tools.

And this:

The latter being something that was issued to me at birth, being born in the 70s in El Paso.

Anyway, I dug into the tool box because I decided that I am going to really be a huge hippie and try to incorporate recycling into the organic garden. We buy cat litter in giant plastic buckets and it occured to me that instead of throwing them out, I could convert them to planters. So the drill was to put drainage holes in them and the spray paint is so that I don't have a bunch of ugly planters that look like this. Here's the results, garden blogging lovers:

And I also made one out of a coffee can:

And I'm trying my hand at growing jasmine from clippings a friend gave me.

This is the only plant actually inside my dark little house, believe it or not. I don't do houseplants.