feminist blogs

Ever wonder who’s behind right-wing media? Here’s one example:

This guy owns the Washington Times, one of the most popular wingnut publications out there. He’s got a lot of fans in the GOP, and he loves them right back. And he’s the kind of guy who will get up in front of a room full of people, rail against “free sex,”* and end his speech with “NO ONE CAN OPPOSE ME!”

Bonus: The two-second shot of the guy with the awesome “professional” mullet.

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*I suppose the opposite of “free sex” is “paid-for sex.” Or, in wingnut terminology, “traditional marriage.”

Brilliant and self-conscious or racist and simplistic?

Probably a stupid one, but what the hell.

I’ve been earwormed with a bit of song that I know is from a movie, but I can’t place it. Here’s the line:

Moses supposes his toeses are roses.

Help me out, people: is this from Singin’ In the Rain? Some other movie? What was the scene?

I am so with Melissa on marshmallow peeps. Also on my list: Donuts. Capers. Chardonnay. Cocktail weenies. Aplets & Cotlets which, growing up in Washington State, I always got as Christmas presents. Lemon-flavored desserts (especially any sort of mousse, yuck). Jello, especially the way my grandma — God rest her soul — used to make it (with grapes inside).

Despite my long list of foods I despise, I’ll try pretty much anything once, and I tend to like strong and/or odd flavors. The only food that I have ever absolutely refused to eat was bull penis in Tunisia. It was (surprisingly) small and spongy and pink and in red sauce, and I just could not do it. You can kind of see it in this picture.

What do you hate to eat?

Kat emailed me with a request to poll the readership: What’s your favorite dish to bring to an office potluck?

Well, since Jill appears to be generating an entire week’s worth of feminist content in one day, I figured I’d follow Amanda’s and Lindsay’s lead and throw out a question to the Feministas: What’s your style of cooking?

I’m very much a seat-of-the-pants cook, throwing stuff together. I do use cookbooks, but I treat recipes as guidelines rather than formulas a lot of the time (unless it’s for something fussy, where proportions are very much important, like certain baked goods). I’ve done a good deal of food blogging on my other blog, and since my recipes are often made up, I write directions like “use enough garlic to make you happy.”

Lindsay, OTOH, is a food empiricist. And this sounds a bit ominous, given that we have been talking about getting together to make Thai food:

It drives me (irrationally) crazy when people neither follow, nor write down their own recipes. I applaud innovation. There’s no reason anyone should be bound to someone else’s recipe. But if you don’t write down your own procedure, how can you duplicate your results next time, or systematically improve on them?

Rut-roh.

UPDATE: GAH! Jill and her prolificness strike again!

Hi y’alls. Thanks to Jill for asking me to participate in the summer o’ guest blogging, especially since the only thing I write regularly these days is e-mail. I’m excited to be kicked in the pants to write more, and also to be part of the conversations here. A little bit about me: I used to work at Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, and now I procrastinate, mark time at my professional-hairsplitter day job, and “work” on “researching” a “book.”

This week I’m going to be writing about a random assortment of topics that have been rattling around in my brain lately.

The first is postfeminism. Or, rather, “postfeminism.”

Postfeminsm, both the term and the concept, has pissed me off since I became aware that there was such a thing. As I see it, the history of the term, most of its usages, and the communities that have sprung up around it suggest, its primary meaning is that feminism is an unattractive buzzkill and also so very over, so it’s past time to move on to more fun, carefree matters. Or, as a friend of mine recently put it, “Let’s forget liberation and go shopping; mmm, yay big cocks.”

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Way back when I was tagged to be a guest-blogger here, I said that I would write some race-relations 101 posts.

I have some ideas (and I’m hoping to flesh out at least one of them today), but I’d like to know what there’s an interest in too. I know there isn’t a race equivalent of tigtog’s brilliant Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog, and this series is probably not going to get anywhere near that involved… but I’d like to see what we come up with nonetheless.

Are there any questions you’re just burning to have answered? They don’t actually have to be 101, they just have to be questions.

(Of course, I’m not claiming to speak for all Brown people when I write this. But I’m wicked good with a Google search, and I like research better than I like my job.)

How do you balance criticism of something (or acknowledging its weaknesses) with your appreciation for it?

I liked the Transformers movie, on the whole… but I still left yelling “Why did the black robot have to die?” Thinking about the racist, sexist stuff in the movie didn’t diminish my enjoyment of it… but it did make me sad afterward.

I liked Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (and, indeed, the entire series)… but I still spent a fair amount of time wincing and making faces. Lily reads as the “Valentine” of the series… an object onto which all of the males projected virtues (intelligence, potions ability, goodness, empathy), but not a character in the same way all of her contemporaries (James, Sirius, Lupin) were. She has very few lines, and very little depth… in complete contrast to the layered, complex approach taken with other characters. (Even Winky has some depth to her. And lines.)

I like World of Warcraft, but I’m still (vastly) annoyed that the darkest human you can make is kind of a light coffee color, and none of the dark skin tones look right. (They don’t even shadow correctly.) It makes me roll my eyes that the same set of armor (ostensibly plate armor) magically shrinks from a full-sized and bulky looking armor set to a dainty metal bra and panties.

I like the way it looks. It was actually one of my favorite armor sets for one of my characters.

I just wish I had a choice for it to look different.

(And it’d be really nice if people would stop insisting that this was normal and good.)
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I know there are at least a few regular readers who self-identify as “pro-life.” So here’s a question for you: How much time should she get?

One goal of the anti-choice movement is to outlaw abortion. But, as Anna Quindlen points out, anti-choice activists are almost never able to identify what the legal consequences should be for women who terminate their pregnancies. So, pro-lifers, tell me: What should the penalty be? How much time in jail should a woman face for abortion?

Anti-choicers emphasize that a fetus is a person, invested with all the same* natural rights as you or I. Life begins at conception. That fertilized egg has all of its DNA, making it just as human as all of us and endowing it with the right to live. Ok. But if a fetus is a person, and abortion indisputably kills a fetus, then abortion is murder — that certainly isn’t a concept that most anti-choicers disagree with. But we punish people for murder. We sentence them to long prison terms, often for life. Sometimes we execute them.

Do you support executing women who have abortions?

Do you support jailing them for life? For a few decades?

What if they have multiple abortions? What if they had access to all the literature and information that anti-choicers believe women considering abortion should be required to receive? What if they acknowledge that they know exactly what they are doing and they feel no guilt or shame for terminating their pregnancies?

Quindlen writes:

Lawmakers in a number of states have already passed or are considering statutes designed to outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned. But almost none hold the woman, the person who set the so-called crime in motion, accountable. Is the message that women are not to be held responsible for their actions? Or is it merely that those writing the laws understand that if women were going to jail, the vast majority of Americans would violently object? Watch the demonstrators in Libertyville try to worm their way out of the hypocrisy: It’s murder, but she’ll get her punishment from God. It’s murder, but it depends on her state of mind. It’s murder, but the penalty should be … counseling?

If women are so infantile that our bad acts toward fetuses must be punished with counseling or left to God, does that apply when our bad acts are directed at born people? If I kill my next-door neighbor, can I simply say that because of my tiny lady-brain and tinier lady-morals, I just didn’t know any better? Can I get counseling or some smiting instead of jail time?

If a fetus is a person with all the same rights as you or I, then killing that fetus — or paying someone to kill that fetus — is murder. Deliberate, pre-meditated murder. How can it possibly be legally (or even morally) consistent to attach full rights to a fetus and then treat its death as somehow less important, or different, than the death of a born person?

Could it be that when we actually examine the case of a pre-meditated, deliberate murder of a born, living person against the case of a woman who terminates a pregnancy, we see that the two situations feel… different? Could it be that we see that there is a difference between a fetus and a born person?

But that’s not the “pro-life” argument.

To complicate things a little more: If life starts at conception, and from the moment of fertilization an egg is a full-fledged human being with the same rights as you or I, what do we do about calculating the death rate? The miscarriage rate? What do we do about all those embryos in fertility clinics? Do we force women to implant them and carry them to term? If not, how do we justify forcing women to carry naturally-implanted pregnancies to term? If the answer is that no, we don’t force women to be implanted with embryos, but we don’t kill the embryos either — we just let them be — then would it be ok for pregnant women to simply remove their embryos/fetuses without purposely killing them and just hope for the best?

If a fertilized egg is a full-fledged person under the law, what other legal activities — other than abortion — would have to go? Fertility treatments? Birth control? Any medical treatment that could potentially harm a fetus, even if foregoing it meant that the woman would experience severe health complications or death?

What about pregnant women engaging in behaviors that are risky for the fetus? Can she be prosecuted for child abuse or negligence if she, say, drinks coffee while she’s pregnant? If she eats tuna? If she smokes? What about if she goes skiing? What if she didn’t know she was pregnant, but should have known, and she does something risky — like goes binge drinking every night and survives off of Cheetos? Willful blindness? Neglect? What if she miscarries, and perhaps you can attribute it to something she did — negligent homicide?

What do doctors do if they’re faced with a life-threatening pregnancy? Do they force the woman to continue it, knowing it will kill her? I mean, it’s not the fetus’s fault, and it can’t really be construed as self-defense to terminate the pregnancy. And their lives are equal, aren’t they? Do we just let nature take its course, then?

Finally, what about if we’re deciding between an embryo and a born child — who wins out? Lots of feminists have asked this question before and we’ve never gotten a straight answer, so let me try again. Take this hypothetical: There’s a fire in a fertility clinic. Inside the clinic there’s a three-year-old boy who you’ve never met and have absolutely no connection to. There are also 100 embryos in a box. You only have time to run into the clinic one time. You cannot carry the boy and the box at the same time. What do you do? Do you save 100, or do you save one?

These are a lot of questions, but they absolutely must be asked. And those who want to see abortion criminalized need to think long and hard about the consequences of their ideal policies. Because this post is long and I know all your time is valuable, I’ll even let “pro-life” readers off the hook with this one, and I’ll ask that you just answer the first question: How much time should she do?

*This point is highly disputable — after all, no born people have the right to physically attach themselves to someone else and use that person’s body for their own survival, against the will and at the physical expense of the attachee. But that’s another post. Or a Judith Jarvis Thomson article.