feminist blogs

Meet Big Dog (no, not him), the quadruped robot from Boston Dynamics:

You will be assimilated.

Fashion, as my regular readers may have guessed, is not my thing. They may have guessed this because I’ve never posted on it. I don’t follow it, I don’t think about it.

But today — today, all that has changed.

I’m in shock and I don’t know where else to go with this. I need therapy; I need comfort and soothing explanations. I need a drink.

I’m a recluse, you see (allow me to direct your attention to the name of the blog), which means that I pretty much haven’t left in the house in five years. It’s been five years since I was in a business office or even thought about what female humans in 21st century America wear to such places.

But today for some reason I happened to open up the JC Penney sale circular that was crammed into the middle of my Sunday newspaper. And this is what I saw advertised in the “spring looks” for the office:

(full size)

Sweet jesus, what the fuck is this? Half of a pink babydoll nightgown paired with the grey trousers from a business suit (freakishly truncated at the knee, though god knows why) and finished off with a pair of metallic silver…stripper shoes? What?

The combination of fabrics and styles here is so bizarre I can’t even make sense of it. Is it supposed to be some kind of edgy post-modern commentary on the fragmented nature of modern womanhood? I’m a business woman! No, I’m a disco queen! No, I’m a slumber party for 10-year-olds!

Next to Nightgown Lady is this unfortunate model:

(full size)

I realize that fashions change, but there has never been a century or decade in which this getup could possibly be flattering to anyone. The proportions, the lines — they’re all wrong for the human body. It’s like a cross between Japanese deconstruction and a dryer problem.

But what’s really upsetting about this outfit is the strings. I don’t want to be an alarmist, but the model appears to be wearing one of those blouson things with strings from 1978. Remember those? Remember when every goddamn blouse, shirt, and jacket had a fucking string in it? And remember how the nation prayed for healing once the reprieve finally came and all the blouson things were packed off to a landfill in North Carolina?

All I can think is that somehow the blouson things have escaped. They’ve escaped the landfill and they’re back, ready to wreak unholy vengeance. Because there is no fucking way anybody would actually re-create those garments. It’s beyond human imagination.

And then there’s this:

(full size)

Sure, it looked good on Lamont in the first season of Sanford and Son, but is that really the career statement you want to be making?

So tell me, people: if I were to go out into the world — into, say, an office — would I actually see this stuff? Is this actually what women are wearing now?

The first part is the debate parody (which I actually think is unfair to Hillary because she’s not annoying and unlikable, damnit), and then Hillary herself comes on! She’s just wonderful — funny, warm, smart, gorgeous. Allow me to indulge a little feminist love here, ’cause whenever I see Hillary like this my heart swells up like a balloon. I feel so proud.

Juan Cole has a post up about the fact that Queen Elizabeth is descended from the Prophet Mohammed. He says:

I was surprised that the writers of comments over at Salon.com did not know the below. It is common knowledge to anyone interested in genealogy.

True.

But what’s also true is that pretty much everyone of European ancestry is descended from Mohammed. And from Charlemagne, and probably from William the Conqueror.

And everyone in the world is probably descended from Nefertiti and Ramesses the Great and all the other individuals who were around that far back and who have living descendants today.

It’s the magic of Most Recent Common Ancestor, and if you’re interested here are some articles about it:

The Royal We (Atlantic Monthly)

Most Recent Common Ancestors (Interesting Thing of the Day)

Common Ancestors of All Humans (web page)

Common Ancestors of All Humans Using Mathematical Models (with links to published papers)

Hat tip to Appletree, where I saw the Juan Cole link.

Erin at Queen of Spain — apparently a popular mommy blogger, though I’ve never heard of her — thinks Hillary should step down. Why? Because she makes people uncomfortable, especially men. And this, according to Erin, has nothing to do with the fact that Hillary is a woman.

When I told myself it was gender that got people going, I refrained from asking and wanting you to step aside. Simply on principle, I wanted to see you run and win because they said it couldn’t be done. Because it was my belief, this was all about being a girl.

It’s not, and I was wrong.

I firmly believe while the gender issue has given you a handicap I hope we all one day overcome, it is NOT the reason people have a gut reaction to you or your campaign or your legacy.

It’s not? Gee, what is the reason, then?

Erin doesn’t know. No fucking clue. She says:

For some reason you still get people very riled up, and not in the good way.

And that’s it. That’s the extent of the analysis. Hillary may be the best-qualified candidate, but for some mysterious, unfathomable reason that Erin can’t quite put her finger on, people don’t like her. Especially men.

So Hillary should quit. It’s awful, men feeling threatened and stuff. We can’t have that! Much better to just wait quietly and patiently for some nice lady to come along who the men will accept. Then maybe, if our husbands agree, we can have a lady president.

In the meantime, we can have President Jesus Obama. Because once he’s the Democratic nominee, the Republicans will just roll over. McCain will withdraw his candidacy and there won’t even be a Republican on the ticket. There won’t even have to be a campaign! No fighting, no mudslinging, no character assassination, nothing. In fact, the Republican party will probably just fold right up! No more red state-blue state culture war, no more wingnuts, no more fundies, no more neo-cons, nothing. Everybody in the country will grow their hair long and we’ll join hands and sing kumbaya. I can’t wait.

Today the media is dancing on Hillary’s grave, thrilled to the very tips of their dicks (prosthetic or otherwise) that The Bitch Is Going Down. It’s pre-New Hampshire all over again, though this time it may be for real.

The sexist old guard is not about to let a woman become President. Some stupid twat in the White House? Are you fucking kidding? Much better to have the Tasteful Black Man. The old guard is racist, too, but there’s no question that at this point in our nation’s life, the media and most of the establishment are more amenable to voting for a black man than for any woman.

And they are joined in this by the sexist new guard, the post-backlash generation that is every bit as misogynistic — if not more so — than their predecessors.

Melissa at Shakespeare’s Sister has done a round-up of all the Hillary Sexism Watch posts at her place; there are sixty-two. Sixty-two posts, and that’s just since September. I was reading through the comments there and this one jumped out at me:

How this got so polarized is beyond me, then I remember that it’s the twenty-somethings who are coming out in droves for Barack, the ones who trash people (particularly women) with glee at the slightest hint of disagreement, the ones who urge young women to commit suicide, the ones who think rape is funny, the ones who dress provocatively and point video cameras up their (nearly nonexistent) skirts because their boyfriends want them to…. yeah, those kids. Do I sound old? I am. And it’s depressing to see that this is the generation that’s supposed to bring “change” to the world. What, exactly will change, or has changed? You think it’s great that you have the freedom to be dismissive, obnoxious, self-absorbed, nasty a**holes?

Exactly. The glorious youth of today. O joy.

See, if you’re a decrepit old person like me and you came of age in the 70s, it is painfully obvious that my generation, the feminist generation that grew up with the Second Wave, is an aberrant hiccup. Before us there was the Rat Pack world of Frank Sinatra and Hugh Hefner, where all the women were broads and dames; after us is the hip-hop world of Snoop Dogg and Joe Francis, where all the women are hos and bitches. It’s the post-backlash, kill-the-feminazis, all-porn-all-the-time culture of exuberant misogyny. My generation certainly included plenty of sexists, but we also created a brief moment in time when it was actually cool to be a feminist. When respect for women as fully realized human beings was the “in” thing. Those days are long gone. Even while the political demands of liberal feminism have become mainstream — equal pay, etc. — social attitudes towards women are more dismissive and degrading than I’ve ever seen in my life.

Go to some lowest-common-denominator site like YouTube or a gamer forum or something and read the threads. These are the moronic youth of America, people who can barely even spell, much less string a sentence together. Notice how they think. They’ll lecture each other self-importantly about how evil racism is (to the extent that they possess sufficient human language to “lecture” anybody about anything), but when it comes to women, holy christ. It’s all skanks and hos and fuk u bitch and I’d hit that and lol she nasty cum ho and suk it u bitch — and those are just the nice comments.

All you have to do is listen to a few rap songs or watch a couple of hip-hop videos or check out the porn landscape — the mind-boggling miasma of misogyny with which today’s generation is saturated — and you realize that there is no way in hell most young people would ever get behind a woman for President. Bitches be for fucking! Clothes off, face down, ass up!

P.S. Almost forgot Camille. Poor old Camille, still on her lifelong quest to never miss an opportunity to ridicule women and feminism. Her piece in Salon today: “Old-guard feminists caterwaul for Hillary.”

Sorry. These things happen. I’ve been AWOL on a sex vacation with Anthony Kiedis. I’d planned to be back a few days ago but then John Frusciante begged me to leave Anthony for him and so it was a real situation.

I gotta check my email and stuff.

I have absolutely no reason to post this picture. It’s just that occasionally (though not often) I grow tired of blowing smoke up my own ass, and the urge overcomes me to decorate the blog instead. Put up pretty pictures, new curtains, that sort of thing. And since I was thinking about the Chili Peppers last night, here’s the pretty:

Is Anthony wearing lash extenders there? Yeah. Totally.

To the editors in Reno:

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. They felt like with all the excesses of the 60s and the 70s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think he tapped into what people were already feeling. Which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”

To Hillary in tonight’s debate:

“I didn’t say they were good ideas!”

Here’s the early fireworky part of the debate:

I suspect that reaction to Obama’s Reagan-love is going to break along age lines. If you were a child or just a gleam in somebody’s eye during the 80s, then it probably won’t bother you at all. Just some dead guy, yadeyadeyade, Obama was just talking about change agents, ancient history, no big whoop.

But if you were an adult, and you remember that Reagan was the precursor to Bush — a racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, imperialistic, corrupt, 100% nasty piece of work who did untold damage to this country and to the world and cost the lives of god knows how many — then you might have a little more trouble.

(Reno quote and debate video both via Talking Points Memo.)