feminist blogs in english

by Amanda Marcotte

So there’s been a dust-up between a guest blogger named Monica at Feministe and fat activists (mostly on Twitter that I’ve seen), with Maia actually posting on it.  I’m not interested in getting in the middle of it.  I think both sides make good points.  FAs are right that Monica is out of line suggesting their negative experiences with health care providers are figments of their imaginations, but Monica is right that the “but some highly muscular people are technically obese!” is a disingenuous argument.  I think people were too hard on Monica, but also that she was incredibly unfair in some ways.  I want to talk about the most glaring unfair assertion she made, one that was pulled out by Kate Harding on Twitter in particular.

Weight can signal a lack of activity or too many donuts, and that shouldn’t irk anyone. Yet, it does.

This was unfair, for the very simple reason that fat activists are 100% right that 95% of fat people are going to stay fat.  Drastic weight loss that stays off is incredibly rare, and is usually the result of weight loss surgery or a complete 180 in personal habits that is the sort of thing that is really not in human nature.  And when I say “180”, I mean 180---the only fat people I’ve ever known to get un-fat without WLS went from being people who didn’t get much exercise to people who turned into jocks.  Moderate exercise---which I still have no idea what that supposedly means anyway---just isn’t going to cut it.  Losing weight is really, really hard.  I put myself on a gym regime when we moved to New York, on top of all the extra walking you do here, and I’ve lost weight, sure, but it wasn’t the kind of weight loss rate that would turn a fat person thin.  I can’t imagine what it would take to lose 10 times as much weight as I’ve lost, much less the 20 times that some people would have to lose to go from being fat people to not-fat people.  I hear people make cracks about soda and donuts all the time, as if merely giving up overindulgence would magically turn a fat person thin.  If you sit down and calculate the calorie shortages someone would have to endure to lose a whole lot of weight, you should see the mathematical issues in play. 

But it wasn’t just the “drop the donuts, lose 100 pounds” simplicity that was off here.  It was also the invocation of the concept of personal responsibility that makes me more than a little queasy.  Not to say that I think that people don’t have personal responsibilities to look after their own diets or exercise regimes, but to write it off to that and not look at the big picture is to miss the point.  Americans have been getting fatter in recent decades, and there have been rising rates of diabetes and heart disease to go with it.  To imply that the cause is simple lack of self-control is to suggest that Americans have magically become lazier or more impulsive.  I would argue that the culture has changed dramatically and puts immense amount of pressure on people to have habits that are simply counter-productive to their diet and exercise goals. 

I was really reminded of how bad it is out there when I went to El Paso this last weekend.  In general, my forays into middle America for family occasions tend to shock me with how much the world outside of my little urban bubble* makes it hard to maintain just basic healthful habits that would probably keep you from gaining weight in the first place.  The food I can’t comment on too much, because we were there for an engagement party-birthday party-baby shower trifecta (all for different people, though I see no problem with having your engagement party with your baby shower), and so there was going to be overeating, because that’s just what you do at parties.  My main exposure to non-party food was the continental breakfast in the hotel, but that was a decent reminder of how the food culture of America is sort of sadistic towards the eaters of America.  I found an item at the bar made by Smuckers that was a waffle with the maple syrup baked into it, to spare you the burning of precious calories pouring your own syrup before consuming it, I guess.  Despite the fact that the waffles came pre-syruped, however, there was a big bottle of syrup available.  One day, the brilliant minds at junk food central will figure out how to dispense with the waffle part of the waffle-and-syrup equation.

But what struck me about this whole inane product wasn’t just the calorie overload built into the breakfast experience.  It was that it was one of those kind of crazy labor-saving things that are so prevalent in America and are waging war on the prevalence of incident physical movement.  This was a small thing, but indicative of a larger culture that discourages moving your body at all costs, unless of course you’re inside a gym or engaged in some other formal kind of exercise.  Then you get to move your body.  But an hour of even intensive exercise a day isn’t really enough.  It’s the constant use of your body throughout the day that’s just as important, if not more so.  Not having to go through the motions to get a waffle into your body is a small drop in a sea of discouragement to exert even the slightest effort.  (Take, for instance, the electric turnstile we saw at a concert that completed the push forward motion for you after you started it.) What was really disconcerting to me during our visit was how much pressure there was not to walk.  No matter who gave us a ride to the hotel, for instance, they would automatically drive right up to our door, even though doing so struck me as more of a pain in the ass than dropping us off at the entrance and letting us walk.  I suppose I could have interrogated people about why the front door service, but I don’t think they wouldn’t understand the question because the idea of walking when you don’t have to in a non-exercise context just isn’t really something many people do.  I mean, I could bother to explain why I ask, and that would be an interesting discussion, I guess.  But I just didn’t want to go through the whole explanation.  In all honesty, I think the reason is that since everything is so far away and can only be gotten to by car, the car starts to feel like an extension of yourself.  At least, that’s how I felt until I started to live in places where walking was a lot more acceptable and certainly a lot more doable.

On top of that, a lot of people work too much to really make a lot of time for exercise.  So they get a double whammy.

What was clear to me was that if I was living in that kind of environment, the amount of personal responsibility I’d have to take to avoid gaining weight would be way more.  Way, way more, like 50% more.  And I don’t know that I have the time or energy to put towards that.  So, I really think that suggesting that the reason Americans are getting fatter is strictly because they’re spoiled or lazy is missing the point by a mile.  Our culture has gone to great lengths to make it very hard to achieve a baseline of physical activity, or to eat in a way that makes you feel satisfied and happy without consuming an excess of sugar and fat.  If we want to change things, we have to change the culture. 

*And this was true of Austin, at least the part where I lived.  It was really walkable.  Plus, the city of Austin is health-conscious, foodie-oriented, and veggie-friendly, which means the calorie to other nutrient ratio on a restaurant plate is way better in Austin than in the rest of Texas.

by Amanda Marcotte

Is it just me, or are conservatives feeling more emboldened than ever to lie their asses off?  For years, many of us pro-science types have been raising the alarm about the Republican war on science---denying global warming, lying about the medical realities of women’s health care, denying evolution, and now even attacking the theory of relativity.  And of course, there was the usual political lies, especially the brazen way that the Bush administration lied about WMDs in Iraq.  But lately, it seems like they’re not even interested in hat-tipping the truth when they assault basic reality.  And part of this new, brazen, “fuck the truth” strategy is an assault on basic historical facts.

Glenn Beck is the king motherfucker in this department, with his “university” nonsense.  I’ve watched some of it, and basically it’s just a matter of rewriting history.  The wingnut obsession with history is nearly as fascinating to me as their obsession with claiming that they’re just speaking for god or the upswing in interest in combining a sort of self-help speak with hyper-right-wing politics.  I asked Will Bunch about it in an interview that’s going to be released on Tuesday on the podcast---he’s got an awesome new book out called The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama---and he pointed out that it relates to the notion that they want their country “back”.  In order to establish their claim that the country belongs to angry white conservatives and not to everyone, they need to make appeals to history. Thus the powdered wigs and nostalgia for a time when slavery was legal but women voting wasn’t.  But the fact of the matter is that most of American history isn’t really conducive to the incoherent arguments they want to make about how they’re both totally not racist and yet they want to claim that controlling all the reins of power is the birthright of a group of people who just so happens to be super-white.  So, they rewrite it. 

The latest example is claiming there was no Southern Strategy.  Even though it’s literally undeniable that racism was a major factor in creating the modern Republican party, and not just because Southern Democrats decamped to the Republicans in open revolt over the Civil Rights Act.  The fact is that Republicans at the time were pretty open about this:

In 1981, during the first year of Mr. Reagan’s presidency, the late Lee Atwater gave an interview to a political science professor at Case Western Reserve University, explaining the evolution of the Southern strategy:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ ” said Atwater. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

The reason to rewrite history is that the Southern Strategy is still in play.  The Tea Party is the Southern Strategy, exactly as outlined by Lee Atwater.  But the new wrinkle is denying this at the top of their lungs, in hopes that a few morons will be swayed into buying their bad faith arguments.  Sadly, I think it’s working---I’ve seen a few ostensible “liberals” get all upset when some of us suggest that the use of the Southern Strategy is as racist as it ever was, and the intensity of it now might have something to do with our black President.  Which makes me wonder what their grasp on history must be.  After all, mowing down civil rights protesters with hoses happened within the lifetime of the majority of Americans.  Granted, as the years go by the people who openly supported segregation are becoming fewer in number.  But still.  Do people really think that Dr. King made a speech and suddenly all those mean racists just evaporated into thin air? 

In reality, those mean racists stayed right where they were.  They got quieter about it.  They only started saying what they really thought in private to white-only audiences.  Their ugliest opinions may have softened up some.  Some may even start to convince themselves they were never really that racist to begin with.  But they didn’t go anywhere.  And the Southern Strategy still works its magic on them. 

The good news in all this is that the Tea Crackers aren’t a particularly young crowd. The average Tea Cracker is a Baby Boomer. The average Fox viewer is even older than that. One thing I do get from this is that the civil rights movement did more to racists than make them more circumspect about their racism.  It also made it that much harder for them to pass their values down to their children.  The folks who were born during a time when segregation was still legal were apparently still ripe to absorb the values of a previous generation, but then there’s a break.  I’ve seen a lot of this with my own eyes---white Generation Xers and millennials who are openly at war with their older relatives about these issues.  I honestly do think time will fix a lot of these problems.  But let’s be clear about one thing.  Just because the civil rights movement made it more taboo to be openly racist doesn’t mean the people who opposed the civil rights movement just up and went away. 

by Amanda Marcotte

I haven’t written about MRAs (men’s rights activists) in awhile, because what is there to say about a group of men organized around the principle that women shouldn’t have the right to say no?  Because that’s basically what pisses them off: women who think they get to say no to sex, to staying in abusive marriages, to having their time occupied by any man who demands it, to having a baby when they don’t want.  And they hide behind patriarchal sentimentality to justify their strong desire to control women.  Not much else to say, because going at it with them is a lesson in hearing undeserved self-pity from those who were dumped for reasons obvious to everyone but them, and who have endless amounts of time and energy to dedicate to throwing their own pity parade. 

I bring it up, because while most people who play this game are men, some women do it, too.  And by “it”, I mean specifically the game MRAs play and teach each other through their organized movement, which is to cling to control over your ex-wife as long as possible by exploiting the court system.  Just because she has a right to leave you doesn’t mean you’re going to let her go without punishing her over and over again!  And Lindsay linked to an article from one of them.  Beverly Willett is protesting New York adopting no-fault divorce because if there had been no-fault when her husband broke it off with her, she would have had fewer options to punish him for rejecting her, and dragging out the pain for years. 

It’s interesting to consider how Willett makes exactly the same arguments about marriage that MRAs make, without the whining about imaginary “reverse sexism”, but the audience for it sees through her a lot more quickly than audiences tend to see through MRAs.  When a woman hides behind patriarchal nonsense about the sacredness of marriage, she doesn’t bring any male authority to bear to the situation and just sounds like an abusive control freak.  I humbly submit that anyone who uses the courts to punish a spouse for years after leaving them is an abusive control freak, regardless of gender.  Indeed, I’d say that’s a tautology to say so.  What I think is interesting is how these abusive control freaks make appeals to “family values” to justify their own damage.

Willett’s husband left her.  He was with someone else.  It was abundantly clear that he wasn’t coming back.  For all intents and purposes, they weren’t married, except in name.  But Willett carries on in her justifications of what she did as if she had a chance to change the facts on the ground.  Example:

One night when I was up reluctantly working on the divorce papers, my eldest daughter appeared by my side. “I don’t want you to get a divorce,” she said. I didn’t either. Yet until this moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that I had the power to stop this from happening. I realized perhaps the break-up of my marriage wasn’t inevitable and that by standing up, maybe I could also help others.

The invoking of the children is a classic MRA ploy, and despicable. It’s using your own children as cover for your own inability to act like an adult when a relationship cracks up.  But the next part about how the break-up wasn’t inevitable?  This is a note she plays over and over in the piece, and it never once makes sense.  What did she think would happen if she found a way to keep her husband from actually divorcing her?  That he would break up with his girlfriend, move back home, get into bed and make sweet love to his legal wife?  Does she think that if the state just forced people to stay legally married, especially in this day and age, that would mean love would flourish?  Or is she being disingenuous about the real reason she dragged this fight out for five years and thousands of dollars---to punish her husband for leaving her and to throw a multi-year pity party for herself?  My guess is the last one.  She lets the truth slip out a little in all the self-martyring language about “saving” a marriage where one person unilaterally would not participate in spirit even if forced to have this single legal binding.

“Divorce is about money,” Saul said. No one cared about right and wrong.

Right and wrong.  Her husband cheated and left; she felt this was wrong.  But there are no legal punishments for breaking a person’s heart. So, she decided that if the criminal system wouldn’t punish her husband, she’d punish him.  Through 5 years of divorce hell and many judges trying to tell her to grow the fuck up.  Her stated desire to “save” her marriage failed, of course.  Her mostly unspoken but far more real desire to exact punishment worked like a charm.  Except, of course, she did it to herself as much as to her husband. 

All of this is why I rolled my eyes when I read this part:

When I refused a quickie divorce on his terms, he served me with divorce papers filled with baseless complaints.

“The whole thing is a pack of lies,” I said to my attorney, sobbing. “He’s the one committing adultery.”

“Then deny it, and sue him for divorce,” Saul said.

“But I don’t want a divorce,” I cried. “I love my husband.”

She loved him so much she was willing to spend the next five years of her life trying to exact punishment.  That’s not love.  That’s hate. 

Twenty years wasn’t something I wanted to chuck overnight. Made of strong Southern female stock, I grew up believing the words “until death do us part” were non-negotiable. Family was paramount, and divorce virtually unheard of. “I don’t think there’s anything in life that can’t be forgiven,” my aunt said when I asked for her advice. To me, that pretty much covered the whole territory.

There’s nothing strong about being a clingy, vindictive control freak.  That is cowardly and weak.  I want to drive this home, because like this woman thinks of her weak, childish behavior as evidence of some strength, so do MRAs tend to pride themselves on being Big Men, even as they act like toddlers throwing tantrums because other human beings don’t submit completely to them.  All of these people are 100% wrong in their self-assessment. Strong people don’t need to exert control over others to feel strong.  Strong people don’t waste their lives on revenge.  Strong people have the strength to get up and move on.  Strong people don’t throw good money after bad. 

by Amanda Marcotte

Michelle Goldberg has an interesting piece up at The Daily Beast about how Glenn Beck is using his haterade to create unity between Mormons and the traditional Christian right, which is mostly populated by evangelical Christians.  If you really step back and look at what he’s done, it’s pretty amazing.  Beck is Mormon, but you honestly wouldn’t know it from the general way he carries on, which is to imitate the tropes of right wing evangelical Christianity, with the weeping and the ranting and confessions.  I don’t know a lot about Mormons, but I think they’re generally a little more buttoned-up than that.  I’m sure much of his audience would agree. They probably think Beck is like them for weeks or even months of watching him before they find out that he’s a Mormon, and by then, they’ve decided he’s in the tribe.  So they’re probably warmed up to Mormons by default. 

I’ve always thought it was strange that right wing evangelicals and Mormons couldn’t set aside their differences when it came to whose made-up bullshit was the right made-up bullshit.  After all, their actual real world beliefs that the made-up bullshit was made up to rationalize are identical: that men are superior to women, that white people are superior to non-white people, that patriarchy is good, that gay people should cease existing, at least out in the open.  Also, they share a hostility to science and rationality that threatens the authority of their made-up bullshit, and a general suspicion of government policies that might undermine their core beliefs about the hierarchy of humans.  But I suppose people that subscribe to different flavors of made-up bullshit are wary of each other.  The existence of other religious beliefs is pretty much de facto proof that it’s all made-up bullshit.  After all, most religious people believe that other religions are a bunch of made-up bullshit.  If they ponder that too hard, they may be forced to conclude that their own made-up bullshit is also made-up bullshit.  I’ve long suspected American evangelicals dislike Mormons because Mormons hold a mirror up to their face and they don’t like what they see.  Evangelicals like to pretend their various theological beliefs are ancient and go back to Jesus, but in reality much of what they believe is recent and made up by Americans spinning bullshit.  For instance, the belief in the Rapture is quite American, as is the general assumption that it’s Americans that are so important in their theology that the end of the world must be related to our empire’s peak. 

Still, all along there’s been a strong potential for an alliance, because while the made-up bullshit part of the program causes animosity, the actual real world beliefs are there.  It takes someone like Glenn Beck, who is such a charlatan that even he probably doesn’t realize that he’s a charlatan, to conclude that there’s no reason for fairy tales to get in the way of a political alliance.

In a way, this all was inevitable.  It’s hard to say if the erroneous initial reports that the teabaggers were a secular movement were just mainstream media wishful thinking or a snow job being played by the teabaggers themselves.  I think it was a little of both, honestly.  Far from all teabaggers are religious, much less the religious right, and so the teabaggers were happy to play along with the “secular” narrative to reflect their bona fide secular members.  However, the religious right will always be the backbone of these kinds of movements, because without the organizing power of the churches, you mostly have a bunch of individuals sitting in their houses stewing.  Beck gets this, and I think he specifically set out to make the Jesus talk more explicit to pay tribute to the leaders of the religious right.  Now that they’re fattened up with flattery, they’re ready to do his bidding and start moving their people where he wants them to go. 

Coddling the religious right is really important, because I don’t think the workaday believers are necessarily a sure thing when it comes to political movements.  They need constant care and feeding to give a shit.  Evangelical churches recruit from two major populations, which are people who already have right wing beliefs they want to justify and organize around, and people who are emotionally needy and are attracted to the self-help and sob-heavy emphasis of the evangelical church.  The latter group are your loose cannons.  They’re reliable followers, which is good for the right, but they aren’t necessarily hateful and ready to respond to naked racist/sexist appeals, like you get with someone secular like Rush Limbaugh.  If tomorrow their pastors started to go old school with talk about how they don’t need to be involved in politics, because that’s of the world, these are the folks that would probably not only burn their voter registration cards but be a little relieved to be out of it, so they can dedicate 100% of their time to loving Jesus and chasing kids around.  So, these folks need constant flattery and feeding.  The Tea Crackers can’t keep the momentum going at the ballot box without them. 

by Amanda Marcotte

So, I was gone Friday-Monday, and away from the internet.  I was in the city of my birth, El Paso, TX.  I occasionally get to go back to my second favorite city in Texas (with Austin being an easy first), though I rarely get to stay long enough to do what I really love doing there, which is hitting downtown and thrift shopping.  Still, a little listening and looking, and I got a taste of what life’s been like these past few years there, and how much things have changed while everything continues to look the same.

See, geographically, El Paso is part of a bigger metroplex area---it’s all one big city with Ciudad Juarez, with a very thin Rio Grande and the mountain pass it cut (the Paso that gave El Paso del Norte its name) separating the Mexican side from the American side.  Juarez is the much bigger city, but both cities sit in the valley of their little spate of Rocky Mountains.  The entire area suffers from dryness, hot sun, and unreal amounts of smog that is trapped by the mountain range and hangs over the city, giving me a sore throat by day #3 there.  Most of my life, I felt like the fates of Juarez and El Paso were intertwined in such a way as to be functionally inseparable.  People traveled back and forth with ease, both commuting for work (as my Spanish professor for summer courses at UTEP did), and for fun and shopping.  That changed a little after 9/11, when the government revoked the right to cross the border without a passport.  But things didn’t really get weird until this functional civil war with the drug cartels broke out. 

Now it seems like El Paso and Juarez are worlds apart, even as they look even more like one city.  (In the past, at night, you could see a clean border between the cities because Mexico had a different standard light bulb than the U.S., which led the lights in El Paso to be a light yellow but the lights in Juarez to be a greenish white.  Now they all look the same, though the Mexican side of the border still twinkles because fewer people have their lights on.) El Paso is peaceful and quiet, and it’s consistently in the top 5 safest large cities in America. This, despite its outrageous poverty, the ability of criminals to border hop to escape detection, and of course, the fact that it’s in the same spot on the globe as what is becoming the most dangerous city in North America. 

You can hear from a distance how bad Juarez has gotten, or you can hear it up close.  The murder rampage is simply on people’s minds.  What used to be a regular part of visiting El Paso---going to Juarez for a drink and some shopping---is basically unthinkable now.  The people of El Paso are as content as the people of Juarez are fearful, and that feels dramatically off, almost impossible, really.  But what really blew my mind was when we were standing in the hotel lobby waiting for our cab to take us to the airport, and I saw they were giving away copies of the El Paso Times.  I casually picked one up and saw this story. 

Juárez cancels Sept. 16 celebration

For the first time since the Mexican Revolution, Juárez city government has canceled the festivities of one of Mexico’s most patriotic holidays.

“First comes the safety of the population,” said Juárez Mayor José Reyes Ferriz. “Because of threats, because of criminal activities that exist in Juárez, we don’t want to take any risks.”

On the eve of Sept. 16, mayors in Mexico lead crowds at city hall esplanades in the traditional ceremony of grito de independencia, or call to independence.

¡Viva México! were the words shouted the same day by Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla in 1810, when he launched the rebellion against the Spanish crown.

It’s basically like canceling the 4th of July.  But it’s understandable, of course.  Since 2008, there have been 6,200 murders in a city of about 1.3 million people.  I know intellectually about the murders, the curfews, the kidnappings, and the general climate of fear.  Still, seeing this simple story about the cancellation of the Sept. 16th celebrations really drove home to me how much Juarez has really fallen to pieces, and is basically a war zone.  We would stand on the hotel balcony and overlook Juarez and it was almost impossible to believe.  Obviously, it looks as quiet and normal as it ever did.  Only at night do you even get a hint of it, as the city looks darker than it should.

Of course, the way this tends to translate into American self-centered craziness is by reinforcing the hysterical racism in places like Arizona.  Passing laws to antagonize immigrants and people suspected of being immigrants---or beefing up border security to pander to racists despite the fact that there’s no real reason to believe the war is leaking over in anyway---is straight forward asshole behavior.  The worst part about all this is that the United States does play a role in all this, but it’s in a way that we, as a nation, don’t want to talk about.  The reason this kind of stuff concentrates on the border is because Americans exert such a powerful demand for illegal drugs that are either manufactured or at least routed through Mexico.  Conservatives are keeping us busy with their screeching about non-existent crime on the American side of the border and non-existent threats from illegal immigrants, but no one is talking about what we could do to relieve this horror show in Mexico that we played such a major role in creating.  Which isn’t to say that Mexico doesn’t have its own problems with waging a pointless War on Drugs as a bit of moral showboating and a form of control exerted on disenfranchised citizens.  But again---border town, American demand, and the criminal element has everything to do with the fact that Americans are so hellbent on keeping drugs illegal and dedicating outrageous amounts of resources towards attempting to stop the flow.

We should be ashamed of ourselves.  Deeply, deeply ashamed of ourselves.  It’s amazing to me that over this past weekend, the Glenn Beck rally was only the second biggest reason looming in my mind for why Americans should be ashamed of ourselves.  Of course, part of that is because Tea Crackers are such a clown show, but the War on Drugs is something even supposedly smart people mindlessly keep backing. 

by Amanda Marcotte

Spoilers!

Sorry that “Mad Men” blogging is late yet again.  We were traveling to El Paso, where it’s still 1996 in many ways (especially according to the music in the bowling alley), and internet access was spotty, if available at all.  I didn’t even get to see the show until last night!  So, it’s yet another Tuesday.  Hopefully, next week, things will be back on schedule.

As I’ve noted before, I’m wary of alcoholism as a plot device in the same way I don’t love inflicting any kind of horrible disease on a character to raise the stakes.  I don’t mind having characters that are alcoholics, just if that’s being used as a cheap plot device.  I feel, on “Mad Men”, that we had alcoholic characters all along, but it was played with a bit of subtlety.  Now, we’ve had another episode about how Don has gone way past “functional alcoholic” and deep into “blacking out and losing entire weekends” territory.  Alcoholism is an easy card for drama writers to play, but it rarely means much onscreen besides a stern message about the evils of excess and the horrors of addiction, both of which amount most often to as much as saying, “Cancer sux.” Are the writers of “Mad Men” going to give us more than that?

So far, I’m still feeling good about this storyline, for a couple of reasons.  One is the usual ability of the “Mad Men” writers to take a done-to-death topic (like, say, “The 60s were a time of tremendous social change!") and breathing new life into it, often by employing a heavy dose of bluntness that usually makes most writers fearful they’ll scare off the audience. And they usually do a good job of making the shocking stuff onscreen mean something, something more than, “Would you look at that?” And so far, we’re getting that with the alcoholism storyline. 

Don’s low points aren’t being rendered in quite the same cliched terms that you usually get.  He’s not screaming and throwing things, getting into fights, or getting in accidents.  His personality doesn’t change, but he just becomes less inhibited when he’s drunk.  At the end of the episode, you get the impression that the biggest losses are his ability to control his situation and his mental capacities.  We discover that, since he’s really been hitting the sauce, he’s basically not had a really good idea since they started SCDP.  On the contrary, his big Clio-winning coup was actually created by Peggy, who gets no credit for her work.  And worse, Don gets wasted and steals a crap idea from a crap applicant that he then has to hire. 

Which leads me to my biggest question about the comic parallels drawn in this episode.  We’re led to believe that Don basically used Roger’s alcoholism, albeit in a more crafty way, to get a job.  And Danny stumbles into this job because of Don’s alcoholism, though he doesn’t actually do anything to make that happen.  So, what are we to make of this?  We’re led to believe that Don deserved the job he got, that he was entitled to exploit Roger a little because the Rogers of the world don’t just let the working class Dons of the world in the door. Roger didn’t even look at his work!  But there’s no reason to think Danny actually deserves the job.  In most ways, he’s the opposite of Don---he’s a hack who is using his connections to get in the door, instead of a talented person who has to use cunning. They’re not the same at all, really.  So why the parallels?  To draw attention to how useless Don has become?  Is Danny a symbol of the mediocrity Don has invited into his life by getting wasted every night?

Entitled hacks were a real theme of the show, which I enjoyed.  The writers took a swipe at the very kind of writing I criticize at top, which is to be shocking for its own sake.  The new art director is pretty much idea-free, but he gets away with it by adopting the persona of a shocking, belligerent artist who is constrained by stupid middle class mores inflicted on him by a sex-withholding matriarchy.  He’s simply ahead of his time, of course---born a couple decades later and he could go on to found American Apparel and then run it into the ground.  As usual when something on the show is as over the top as this, there’s a conflict.  It seems to buck the norms of restraint that we expect on a critically acclaimed show like this, but on the flip side, to be less than over the top is to sacrifice accuracy.  Douchebags like that are, in the real world, like a million times worse.  Probably more so in the 60s. 

Which leads me to the most interesting aspect for me of this show, which is how it deals with feminist ideas with sympathy and intelligence they almost never get anywhere else.  The conflict between feminists and sexual liberationists who belligerently insist that any resistance to objectification equals prudery is one where the latter camp gets all the sympathy in the vast majority of Hollywood products.  People can’t conceive of a sexual model where women are really treated as full human beings, and therefore they assume that when feminists get bunchy at a bunch of “show us your tits” dudes, it’s because we’re uptight and hung up.  This dude noticed Peggy’s instinctive feminism---her quiet demands that the world take her seriously as a human being---and immediately determined it was anti-sex.  After all, what’s less sexy than treating women like human beings?  But the show sided with Peggy every step of the way, including the feminist critique of how female sexuality is portrayed in most pornography, as a commodity item---female receptacles who give you no grief for sale.  But I was genuinely thrilled at the way they showed Peggy laying waste to this “feminists are just prudes” argument that is still, to this day, flung around if a feminist dares clear her throat in the direction of suggesting that there’s some misogyny afoot when men insist on sexualized images of female humiliation, or use porn as a way to intimidate women they don’t want to deal with.  Getting naked and making it clear that her objections are to his misogyny and not to sex itself?  Brilliant.  If the art director was Dov Charney before his time, then Peggy is Donita Sparks throwing her tampon at the male audience at the Reading festival that objected to having to tolerate female musicians on stage.  Take what they’re so afraid of and shove in their face, ladies!  You’re my heroes. 

The other feminist theme was a bit more complicated, but once again, I love how the writers get to the heart of these problems instead of being distracted by shiny baubles like “prude” and “man hater” being waved by sexists.  Peggy and Don’s relationship is a classic example of the more subtle and frustrating ways that sexism works its magic on women.  The art director flashing KKK images was a nod to the problem---much of the public only accepts the reality of oppression when it’s overt and dressed in a white hood.  But at the time he’s making the ad, the images are already dated in significant ways.  The civil rights movement had passed a form of formal equality and were beginning to face the far more complex problems of oppression beyond overt laws demanding segregation.  The face of racism was quickly turning from burning crosses and hoods and into politicians demanding “law and order” and complaining about welfare fraud.  In 45 years, they’d be taking a piss on MLK’s grave while pretending to speak for him. 

Don both lifts Peggy up and keeps her in her place, and she knows it, but it’s complicated.  She doesn’t know what to do about it.  Sexism doesn’t always come in an ass-pinching, easily threatened package.  Don wouldn’t call Peggy “toots” or shove porn in her face as if to say, “I don’t care what job you have, you’re still just a vagina on legs to me.” Don believes Peggy is talented, and he respects her, in his way.  But Don still sees her as a woman, and still believes it’s her job to pick up the slack, show ladylike humility, and play the peace-maker, even when it’s a man that is causing all the problems.  In fact, I’d argue that sometimes Don is hard on Peggy precisely because he knows that she will be treated unfairly her whole life, and he believes that her best bet to succeed is to accept this as the way things are and play the game.  Peggy, however, is beginning to realize that smiling and taking it from dudes will get her a decent job writing ad campaigns that someone else will take credit for, but if she really wants to make it to the top, she’s going to have to break the rules made for women.  She and Don functionally have a disagreement on the best strategies for Peggy to succeed.  To her, Don isn’t an evil sexist.  He’s just wrong.  But what do you do with a man who means the best for you, but is so consistently wrong? 

This is all coming to a head.  Peggy is the creative force holding the agency together, and Don is taking all the credit. There is much love and respect between them, but this cannot last.  I predict that eventually, Peggy will have to suck up all her love for Don and push him out of his job so she can take it. 

by Amanda Marcotte

Sorry for no posting last night.  Running around like mad, trying to get shit done before we head out to El Paso.  In fact, we’re on our way now.  There won’t be a CSA post tomorrow, and posting may be light until Tuesday.  The town of my birth is one that often pops up in rockabilly and in country western songs, often to represent the Wild West, the crazy middle of nowhere, or the border.  Think Marty Robbins’ “El Paso”.  With that in mind, this song is one of my favorite that name drops El Paso.  Aerosmith’s cover ruined it, but just ignore that.

Original song: “The Train Kept A-Rolling’” by the Johnny Burnette Trio

And here’s the list!  Leave yours in comments, or comments about whatever you like.

1) “My Boy Elvis” by Janis Martin
2) “Rockin’ Bones” by Ronnie Dawson
3) “Red Hot” by Billy Riley & His Little Green Men
4) “Crazy Legs” by Gene Vincent
5) “Let’s Have A Party” by Wanda Jackson
6) “Somethin’ Else” by Eddie Cochran
7) “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” by Buddy Holly (cover of a Chuck Berry song)
8) “Bad Reputation” by The Reverend Horton Heat
9) “That’ll Be The Day” by Buddy Hollly & The Crickets
10) “Justine” by The Righteous Brothers

Videos & cat pictures below the fold.

We heard at least two bands cover this song at SXSW.  True story.

Some days, Dusty just wants to cuddle with Marc.

Molly is a little more likely to hang out with me.

by Amanda Marcotte

So, the NY Times runs a piece about why female politicians love a specific pair of Kate Spade shoes. The author admits in the piece that it’s sexist to focus on the fashion choices of female politicians so obsessively, while male politicians can expect their footwear choices to largely go unmentioned.  Jill points out that this hedge should protect the Times from criticism for thinking this is such a great idea.  Irin at Jezebel collects the opinions of women in politics who do think this is a story, because ease of footwear is a legitimate advantage male politicians have over female politicians, because men’s shoes don’t actually put their health at risk when they’re on their feet all day. 

I think we can split the difference here.  The politicians are right that the fact that women have to sacrifice their health where men don’t to have a career in politics is a story.  But it’s not the story Susan Dominus wrote.  Dominus might as well have been writing copy for Kate Spade, implying that their $300 wedge heels do a sufficient job of battling the long list of health problems and chronic pain that women’s shoes---particularly high heeled shoes---given them.  A real story about this issue would question why female politicians feel they have no choice but to destroy their feet in order to win, and why our society turns a blind eye to the fact that huge percentages of women suffer entirely preventable health problems due to their shoes. 

It’s a question that I’m kind of surprised isn’t dwelt upon more by feminist writers, honestly.  I see more articles about the potential health effects of untested cosmetics than I do the actual, proven health effects of fashionable shoes on women.  That’s why I was glad Leora Tanenbaum wrote Bad Shoes and the Women Who Love Them, and why I had her on my podcast for an interview.  Neither she nor I am denying that high heels are sexy or fun to wear.  But the problem is that they’re not relegated to those rare occasions when you really want to go with sexy and fun to wear, occasions when you make other over the top sartorial choices like funky headwear, microminis, or your fancy jewelry.  High heels, even scarily tall high heels, are considered a regular part of everyday wear for women.  In fact, many women feel they have to wear them to look professional.  Even if they’re standing on their feet all day. 

Patriarchy loves to mutilate women’s bodies, that’s for sure.  Corsets, foot-binding, female genital mutilation---all sorts of traditions have arisen, and all of them have some relationship to the twin demands on women to be modest yet sexy.  The thing is, we like to pretend we’re not a society that puts such health-damaging demands on women.  And yet, if you look at the actual evidence of what women’s shoes do to women’s feet, we are exactly one of those societies.  (Because I will immediately be accused of creating equivalence between foot-binding or FGM and high heels, I’m not.  I’m talking about kind, not degree.) A lot of women experience chronic pain because of their shoes.  A lot of them have to get foot surgery to reverse some of the effects.  And for what?  A slightly better calf shape under a knee length pencil skirt?  Why is it so hard to relegate high heels to special occasions, and view flats as the only appropriate everyday wear? 

by Amanda Marcotte

Via Digby, I see Michael Tomasky has a theory as to why the Democrats let the Republicans set the media agenda, lie like motherfuckers, and basically act like they do without Democrats fighting back sufficiently. 

But the bottom line is this: the Democrats are afraid of the Republicans. They – all of them, from Obama on down – are afraid of Rush Limbaugh and Michele Bachmann and you name it. You hear Democratic operatives talk strategy, and there’s always a “logical” reason why this or that aggressive attack might not work. But it’s nothing to do with logic. They’re just afraid. Bachmann, the Minnesota congresswoman who wants the government out of everything, is a good case in point. It’s been revealed that her family farm has received $250,000 in federal subsidies. If she were a Democrat, the Republicans would make sure the entire country knew it.

It’s tempting to believe this, but it does make you ask, “Why?” Really, what is the basis of the fear?  Michael chalks up to irrationality, but I don’t think that’s sufficient.  After all, some Democrats are less afraid, and it’s usually because they’re in such safe seats that a media that panders to the right wing can’t touch them.  I think the fear is that they don’t have sufficient whatever it takes to get the media to treat them fairly whenever these right wing attacks come out.  I think, at the end of the day, they’re afraid they don’t have what it takes to fight back because of an inherent personality difference between typical liberals and typical conservatives.

Conservatives basically have no compunction about the use of force, dishonesty, or lies.  This is incredibly hard to fight back against when your toolbox won’t allow you to access any of these.  And liberals can’t really just devolve into mean-spirited lying bullies, because it’s illiberal.  In fact, it’s so illiberal that it creates a double standard, where those who do cross the line are held accountable in a way that conservatives just aren’t.  No one gets upset when conservatives are villains---they’re supposed to be!  That’s their main appeal to their bully-loving base.  They like to think they’re showing those stupid liberals what for.  Like Sarah Palin likes to imagine, they want always to be reloading. 

Meanwhile, for liberals, even if you play by all the rules, you’re still in for a world of hurt if you dare speak the truth too forcefully or call an asshole an asshole.  Why so mean?  Shouldn’t you always be giving them a chance? Sure, Andrew Breitbart is a proven liar, but is that really a reason not to take his next shit storm seriously?  Isn’t it less than nice and liberal to believe that some people in this world are simply full of shit?

The problem is that liberals often conflate softness and endless forgiveness with justice.  The problem, of course, is in the endless attempts to be generous and giving to conservatives, we allow the truly vulnerable, the people who really need generosity, to go wanting.  For instance, to draw from the wellspring that is the abortion example, the harder we try to be accommodating towards conservatives’ “moral” qualms about abortions, the more women who actually need some real help go without it.  But those who need justice tend to be invisible, whereas loud-mouthed angry conservatives tend to be up in everyone’s face. 

I don’t know what to do about it.  The blogs have helped some, since bloggers often come to this because we’re sick of it all and want to fight back.  But we’re often the example of “bad” liberals who get all noisy and act like our agenda actually matters.  Until Democrats start learning to tell the difference between being soft and being good, we’re going to have this problem. 

by Amanda Marcotte

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

There are a lot of interesting points made in this video from Rachel Maddow’s show on Monday, mainly about how blatant racism has been the go-to tactic since Obama was elected for conservative political operatives trying to gin up excitement in their base.  The list of faux stories about evil minorities doing evil things that invariably turn out to be false or overblown is literally too long to be included in the segment.  Rachel hits some highlights, but doesn’t have time to include the Skip Gates controversy or the stories about Mexican drug bandits supposedly taking over Texas ranches, to name a couple of stories sold to the wingnut public as evidence that ending white supremacy is a bad idea.  It’s gotten so bad that even the usual suspects in the Village are having trouble denying that conservatives are being straight-up racist in an attempt to get enthusiasm behind Republican candidates and generally make life harder for Obama. 

But one thing that really was new information for me in this video was Suhail Khan’s* description of what Pam Gellar and Frank Gaffney have been up to in general, which is finding Muslims who work as bureaucrats and “outing” them, i.e. targeting them for attack from the flying monkeys.  I found the entire narrative behind this kind of action alarming, because the insinuation is that these people weren’t “out” as Muslim before.  Which is a way for Gellar to reinforce the narrative that Islam is a subversive force that hides itself, basically the same narrative that flying monkey wingnuts used about communism in the red-baiting days.  The notion that communists were hiding themselves and working undercover in the government made everyone suspect in the eyes of wingnuts, which is why John Birchers believed that Eisenhower was a communist agent.  The parallels between the beliefs about Eisenhower/communism and Obama/Islam should be immediately apparent. 

The thing is, I doubt that anyone that is “outed” as Muslim was hiding this fact about him or herself.  Or broadcasting it much, either.  Barring a handful of Christian fundies looking to create stories about how they’re martyrs at the hands of secularists because they get pushback for disruptive evangelizing and/or hating on people that aren’t them, most people tend to keep religious discussions out of the workplace.  Of course, aggressive Islamophobes deny that Islam is a religion, which is their justification for singling it out for attack despite our constitutional right to freedom of religion.  Instead, they view it as a cult and/or a subversive ideology.**

This is why the “we don’t want to ban mosques, we just want that specific one to move” thing isn’t as innocent as it’s supposed to sound.  Conflating all Muslims with the terrorists of 9/11 is a mandatory aspect of the argument, but it’s more than that.  It’s about making Muslims officially second class citizens.  Even if it’s just one place you’re not supposed to go in the public square, that’s already a form of segregation.  If the presence of Muslims around the WTC somehow contaminates the area, then I don’t imagine the demands will stop with this community center.  Do people who think there shouldn’t be a community center feel okay with all the Muslims who live and work in the area anyway?  How many of the opponents of the mosque would support a program where Muslims have to be “outed” and made to wear badges so that their access to certain areas can be monitored carefully?  It sounds crazy, but it’s the logical next step once you buy the logic of the people who are pushing this controversy, which is that Muslims are secretive and subversive, and the public at large needs to take steps to counteract that. 

*By the way, why did he have to diss the Island of the Misfit Toys?  They’re the good guys!
**Which I also think people have absolute freedom to believe.  Laws barring communists from certain activities strike me as the sort of thing that really should be unconstitutional, too.  But that’s a different discussion.  The cult/religion distinction is clearly bullshit that was concocted in order to deprive certain people of their religious rights.