feminist blogs

Just read it.

Jeralyn Merritt and Kevin Drum are asking why Obama isn’t giving the press full-time access to his life. I suspect it’s because he realizes that they’re gearing up to take him down.

And why would he think that the press would turn on their golden boy? Oh, I don’t know… maybe because the guy can’t so much as eat breakfast without it becoming “waffle-gate“?

Obama’s a pimp and Hillary is a bitch. Lovely.

And this comes from the pro-Obama camp. Can we please knock if off now, guys? I know we can do better than this.

Video from TRex.

Personally, I’d like to hear the Presidential candidates discuss how best to prepare and eat this.

There are a lot of things I hate about election season, but the competition of which potential First Lady has the best recipes is perhaps my least favorite. So I’m actually kind of glad that “Farfalle-gate” has broken, and it turns out that Cindy McCain’s favorite family recipes were pulled directly from the Food Network — and that she didn’t even offer them up herself, some unpaid intern found them and claimed they were McCain family traditions. The whole thing is BS, and it makes me happy that Cindy didn’t waste ten minutes of her life transcribing her recipe for rosemary chicken (although, of course, she should have just said the whole thing was crap and given Rachel Ray the proper credit).

I like food as much as the next person — actually, I probably like food a whole lot more than the next person — but I don’t really understand why Americans care which First Lady has the best cookie recipe. And I really don’t understand this:

In the meantime, The Huffington Post reported that the passion fruit recipe had appeared under Mrs. McCain’s name in the Jan. 16 issue of The New York Sun, in an article that also included a recipe from Michelle Obama (apple cobbler) but not one from the spouse of the other Democratic presidential candidate. The article did include Hillary Rodham Clinton’s recipe for oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

Cindy McCain, Michelle Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Which one of these is not like the others?

Which isn’t to say that Hillary Clinton is above recipe-swapping because she’s a real competitor and the other ladies are just wives. It’s to point out that the whole thing is stupid and sexist, and that it’s not about presidential spouses. It’s a country-wide reminder of a woman’s place, and a nice little national smack-down of feminism and gender equality.

Plus, people cook with recipes that are not their own. The only thing I use my own “recipe” for is gemelli pasta with sauteed garlic, crushed red pepper, black pepper, cilantro and asiago cheese (plus whatever else I have in the fridge that sounds good — chickpeas, avocado, parmesan etc). And I’m pretty sure I picked that up from my old room mate. Now, if I were in the race, I would totally submit the Barefoot Contessa’s recipe for steak au poivre, since that’s the only non-pasta, non-quesadilla thing I can cook — but I wouldn’t even try to convince the American people that it’s an old family secret. I would just send them directly to Ina Garten, and everyone would be the better for it.

What would be your presidential recipe?

It seems that Barack Obama’s performance during a recent campaign stop at a bowling alley wasn’t manly enough for Joe Scarborough:

During the March 31 edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Willie Geist repeatedly mocked Sen. Barack Obama’s bowling performance — which Scarborough called “dainty” — at a March 29 campaign stop at Pleasant Valley Lanes in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Deriding Obama’s score, he said: “You know Willie, the thing is, Americans want their president, if it’s a man, to be a real man.” Scarborough added, “You get 150, you’re a man, or a good woman,” to which Geist replied, “Out of my president, I want a 150, at least.”

Later in the show, after NBC political analyst Harold Ford Jr. said that Obama’s bowling showed a “humble” and “human” side to him, Scarborough replied, “A very human side? A prissy side.” Ford asserted that Obama, who reportedly plays pick-up basketball, is a “heck of an athlete.” Later, Scarborough acknowledged: “I’ll challenge him to a bowl-off. But basketball — he looks like he’s in pretty good shape. I would just have to post low.” Switching to football, Ford also said to Scarborough: “I’d throw him a pass on you, too. I’ve seen you. I think he could probably take you down the sideline on a post route.”

I was not aware that one’s manhood was dependent on one’s ability to hit the requisite number of pins with a big ball while wearing rented shoes. (more…)

This is going to be fun.

I do love being quoted in the New York Times as saying that “I see a scary animalistic black man, a primal scream, and a beautiful white woman.” Ah, context!

I have very little to say about this article, other than:

1. Talking about condoms and safer sex is not the same thing as demonizing abstinence, and if you’re under that impression, I sure hope that you were a legacy admission to Harvard, because otherwise that’s just embarrassing.

2. You look dumb when you complain that “there is just one lifestyle that doesn’t get recognition” and that’s abstinence. Abstinence gets recognition to the tune of more than $140 million in federal funding every year. Abstinence is discussed constantly. It is brought up in every single sex ed program. It is the subject of Congressional investigations and debates. It is studied by researchers. It is discussed in the classroom, in churches, in homes, in the news, and on blogs. Abstinence-until-marriage is discussed perhaps more than any other lifestyle choice made my less than five percent of the population.

3. You look even dumber when you complain about how mean and alienating the comprehensive sex ed folks are, and then you say stuff like pre-marital sex “deeply compromises human dignity” and leads to “personal unhappiness and social harm.” I can recognize that it is hard to remain abstinent, especially in the face of a very sexualized culture. I appreciate and applaud the personal strength of individuals who decide abstinence in the best choice for them. But what I can’t support is the constant attacks on sexually active people. People who have sex do not feel a constant need to tell abstinent people that their human dignity has been compromised, or that they’re dirty, or that they are secretly unhappy, or that they’re headed for total life ruin. I can understand how abstinent people may feel like society regards them as freaks because it seems like everyone else is having sex, but, statistically, most adults do have sex before marriage. It doesn’t mean you’re a freak if you don’t, but it does mean you’re making a different choice than 95 percent of the population. You can’t really expect that the choices made by the overwhelming majority won’t be normalized; you can, however, expect that your choices be recognized and respected. Unfortunately, the most vocal abstinence crusaders don’t do that. They instead choose to tell the rest of us that we’re making bad decisions and that we’re compromising our dignity as human beings. That’s far more fucked up and judgmental than anything I’ve ever heard a sexually active person say about abstinent folks.

4. You are not Ghandi or Nelson Mandela for choosing not to have sex.

5. I’m glad you’ve given this a feminist analysis, and I think there are feminist reasons for making your own sexual choices, including abstinence. But thinking that dudes are going to talk about you in the locker room and believing that oral sex is “disgusting” are not great justifications for the no-sex stance. First, if you think all men are dogs who are going to do the locker-room play-by-play, what makes you want to marry one? And why do you think that your guy will change from scum into a prince the day he puts a ring on your finger? Second, what makes you think that the constant “Don’t think about sex!” message will actually make people not think about sex? It’s the old “pink elephant” game, isn’t it? Third, if your abstinence is based in feminist theory about controlling your own body and not giving it over to men, why are you against masturbation? Fourth, could you please just stop pretending that your abstinence is based in feminism and secularism? It’s pretty clear that it’s not, and your anti-masturbation stance isn’t the only clue. If your choices are religiously motivated, that’s fine — but you really don’t need to co-opt other movements to try to trick other people out of a condom-lovin’ fuck.

6. When you’re a dude who authors an article like this and you end it with a competition between the virgin and the whore and then conclude with a quote saying “most guys out there would rather end up with a girl like Janie [the virgin],” you do all involved a disservice.

I’ll support Hillary Clinton shutting up and dropping out of the race as soon as you decide that as another loud-mouthed and unapologetic woman who pisses people off, you should drop off the editorial pages of the Times.

And I will start to love your mouthiness again as soon as you stop referring to Barack Obama as “exotic” with “braided ancestry.”

Perhaps we should be focusing on the fear-mongering and outright lying on behalf of anti-choicers. Amanda tackles the hypocrisy of Wright’s critics — the same people who attack him for repeating inaccurate messages about HIV/AIDS were the primary architects of Bush’s anti-science, deadly HIV/AIDS policies abroad.

And while Wright’s conspiracy theories about where HIV came from are a little whacked out, when you know the history of medical experimentation on people of color, you can understand his paranoia a little better. Heck, even today, people of color tend to receive medical care from lower-skilled professionals, and are more likely to be “teaching subjects” than white people.

None of that is to say that his statements about HIV are correct. But Wright is only Obama’s pastor, and he has never been invited to influence policy — unlike, say, Jerry Thacker, a man who called AIDS a “gay plague” and homosexuality a “death style” and was rewarded with a nomination from President Bush to serve on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS.

And the mainstream anti-choice movement spreads all kinds of lies about HIV/AIDS and other diseases — except they don’t keep it in the pulpit, they bring it into the classroom. A large anti-choice website — prolife.com — “warns” people about condoms, implying that HIV can penetrate microscopic holes in latex and flat-out stating that condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission 31% of the time. The site also says that “one out of every three teenage couples using condoms will become pregnant each year.” They further falsely claim that all STDs can be spread without exchanging body fluids:

STDs are frequently passed through “skin to skin” contact even when condoms are used. This can happen because the bacterial or viral germs that cause many serious STDs (such as human papillomavirus, chlamydia, herpes, and syphilis) do not infect just one place on your body. They may infect anywhere in the male or female genital areas.

So, even if the virus or bacteria isn’t passed through tears or holes in the condom itself, you can still get diseases because condoms don’t cover or protect all areas of the genital region. That means condoms don’t prevent many of the STD infections that take place during sexual contact.

This is what young people are learning from “pro-life” groups. And anti-choice groups are being well-funded by federal abstinence-only dollars to teach this kind of BS in the public school classroom.

But, yes, let’s be upset that Rev. Wright made a ridiculous statement about the origins of HIV to his church. After all, that will have absolutely no effect at all on what people do when it comes to HIV/AIDS prevention, but it’s a tasty news tidbit to bandy about in an effort to make Obama look like a run-of-the-mill crazy/paranoid/racially-divisive black man. Why would the mainstream media take a step back from the headline du jour and instead worry about the millions of people here and abroad who are being told that condoms don’t work to prevent HIV? After all, that won’t have any negative public health consequences, right?

This article makes me want to stab something. Registration is required, so I’ll excerpt most of it here. It’s one attorney’s take on what “woman lawyers” (am I the only one that hates when the word “woman” is used instead of “female” in these situations?) can learn from Hillary, and the moral of the story seems to be that Clinton should teach us to take our sexist knocks. The “lessons” Clinton has taught us:

Stereotypes are tough to shake, and they can help and hurt women lawyers. The rap on Clinton, almost from the beginning, was that she was too tough and played hardball — a not altogether undesirable attribute in a president. But then she had her misty moment in New Hampshire, and all of a sudden she’s back in the hunt.

In that case, being warm helped Clinton, but had warmth and likeability been the gist of her campaign, she would have been sunk. Obama has been able to be likeable from the get-go because, as a man, he doesn’t have to prove his toughness.

Women lawyers should follow suit. They don’t have to be likeable or warm or nurturing to get the job done. In fact, for most of them, that would work against them — and their clients’ — interests. But, when the timing’s right, a bit of femininity doesn’t hurt. In fact, it can work greatly to women lawyers’ advantage.

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