Jill has a great post up about the double standard for showing off your body if you're a politician, in response to this cover of Men's Health. Yes, that's Aaron Schock, a Republican congressman from Illinois, and those are his abs. Jill points out that this would be the scandal of the fucking year if that was a female congresswoman. Not to defend Sarah Palin, but think of all the crap she got when she posed for Runner's World fully dressed.
Of course, the irony is that both Palin and Schock are being sexually provocative, but he's just outdoing her by a mile, because he's a conservative man and he can. And she got away with it as far as she did because she's also Republican. Jill says: "Now try to picture Erin Schock, newly elected to Congress, single and a conservative Baptist with some sick abs, on the cover of Women’s Health. Just sayin’." And to that I say, that could be a problem. A national scandal, however, would be Erin Schock, pro-choice Democratic congresswoman from Illinois. The double standard is a male/female one, but that gets projected onto the Republican/Democratic divide.
I've always been mildly fascinated by how Republicans are permitted far more space to be fitness dorks than Democrats in our culture. Bush and Clinton had similar workout routines, in terms of going jogging in public, but Clinton was mocked ruthlessly for it and Bush was mostly ignored. (Turned out that Clinton probably needed it more, what with his heart problems.) Obama's dedication to playing sports is less of an issue in the mainstream media than Clinton's jogging, but right wingers still make hay of it in a way that liberals wouldn't if the shoe was on the other foot. Maybe part of it is that health and fitness are turning into culture war issues, and liberals are generally going to fall on the pro-health side. We feel the sting of hypocrisy in a way conservatives don't, and so seeing someone on the Other Side do something we approve of isn't going to cause us to waste energy trying to make an issue out of it.
But the elephant in the room on this issue is gender and sexuality, and that's why I think Republicans have a lot more space not only to be fit but to make a fuss over it, as Palin, Schock, and Paul Ryan all do. Trying to untangle working out as a health practice and as a hobby from the perceived sexual benefits is impossible in our cultural landscape (though obviously individuals do fine, so I don't necessarily see the value of commenters saying because some individuals do it, my cultural observations are invalidated). So what you have when someone is a workout fanatic and a cultural conservative is the conservative trope of the Sexy Virgin. By "Sexy Virgin", I don't mean a literal virgin, but someone who is assumed to be sexually conservative and properly judgmental of others, but who plays up their own sexual appeal. The right loves them some Sexy Virgins. Sexy Virgins exist to reassure people on the right that just because they're anti-sex means they aren't sexy people. (Much in the same way that black conservatives work to reassure the racists in the Republican party that they're not racist even if they really don't think the President was born here.) One of the most amusing things about anti-choicers is that they're always trying to claim the pro-choice side is a bunch of sexless hags, and on the occasion they can get a pretty young woman to be a spokesperson (see: Lila Rose, who knows she's a Sexy Virgin and who uses the poses of ingenue starlets in her publicity photos), they're all over it. The sexless part of being anti-sex is their Achilles' heel, and Sexy Virgins work to counteract that problem. Leaving me in a constant state of amusement, since the two attacks I frequently get in tandem from antis are: a) you're a slutty slut slut and b) you're a dried-out hag.
Here's an amusing story of the Sexy Virgin vs. people who perhaps are less interested in the internal politics of right wingers reassuring themselves. Needless to say, if you haven't encountered the Sexy Virgin much, perhaps it's a little harder to realize that her sexiness is supposed to denote chastity within the circles of Bible-thumpers. You might just think that sexy is supposed to be about sex and not about not-sex.
Anyway. There's a strong strain in our culture of allowing people to be sexy if there's heavy reassurance that their actual sexuality is controlled. Democrats, who are mostly pro-choice, perversely don't get to be sexy because that provokes anxieties that their support for sexual rights means, gasp, lurking affection for bona fide sexual freedom and we can't have that. So that's where we're at when it comes to the national image-making process around the partisan divide. Anti-sex views being sold with sexiness while pro-sex folks are, believe me, often deeply worried about making sure their collars are high enough when they go on TV to talk about abortion rights.
Of course, that's on the national level. On the local and in-group media level, things are way different. Lila Rose is put forth as the national face of anti-choicers as much as possible on their side, so she can pout and flutter her eyelashes and try to sell you not-sex with sex. Paul Ryan and Aaron Schock are feeding the press stories and now photos of their sex-ay bodies. Let's not talk about Sarah Palin. But on the local and in-group level, right wing media still mostly features a bunch of angry old dudes and church lady sorts hollering about girls these days with their birth control pills and low moral standards. Meanwhile, the pro-choice movement tries to be attractive-but-not-sexy when putting ourselves in front of the national media, but on the local and in-group level, you're much more likely to see sex-positive feminism being promoted by women who are happy to wear whatever the fuck they like.
I have more thoughts on gender, working out, and modesty, but that's another post since this one is long enough. Maybe tonight.
I know I've been hitting the feminist themes a little harder than usual lately, but I really just have to blog about this. Even though it's link bait. Nutbar lifestyle writer Liz Jones, writing for the far-right British newspaper The Daily Mail, did what is usually impossible to do and make me feel really bad for a philandering liar. But reading her essay, how can you not? She admits she only had sex with him to get him to marry her, and then immediately cut him off as soon as she could, and then was surprised---surprised!---when he fell for another woman. The way she's comforted herself, however, is really strange. She claims that her attitude towards sex---that it's a tool used to trap men and not desireable in and of itself---is typical of women. Because her friends are also anti-sex and believe that it's their husbands' duty to hang it up when they do.
The truth is: we don’t really enjoy sex that much. And we definitely don’t want sex as often as men do. That is a cold, hard fact. And women most definitely, incontrovertibly, do not want sex once they have children — or so my friends who have children confess to me. Particularly once their stomachs develop a texture akin to cold porridge.
The only reason we do have sex is to get a man, keep a man, steal his sperm and flatter ourselves that we are attractive.
Once we have a man, his children, his name on a piece of paper, his youth and his house, we no longer want to indulge in that ridiculous, time-consuming, horizontal dance.
The decades of feminism, the millions of dishonest features in magazines like Cosmopolitan, have misled us. We are not equal to men when it comes to libido. We grow up. We have other priorities. Sex slips onto a backburner, sliding to the bottom of an almost endless list of things to do that day.
I'm not going to debunk this or get into a snit over how Jones is using all of womankind to cover up for her inadequacies. (Not being asexual, but demanding that someone else turn of his entire sexual self for her after luring him in with false premises.) Jill at Feministe and Sadie at Jezebel have already done this. What I don't get is why this sort of bullshit gets published in the first place. It's not just Jones; Jill also caught the NY Times running with a "women hate sex" story. Clearly, these stories exist only as traffic bait. But that means that there are whole lot of people who want to hear this lie. Merely getting outraged links alone does not good traffic bait make. Ideal traffic bait is saying some thing that assholes really want to believe and validating them, so you get the asshole traffic and the outraged traffic. So who are the people that want to hear this? Considering that the Daily Mail published Jones' ridiculous nonsense, we have a clue as to who---sexist dudes. Half of their content is viciously sexist claptrap that the misogynist dudes who run the Daily Mail want to hear, as well as the misogynist dudes yelling, "Right on!" along with it. But I don't completely get it.
I get the appeal of most sexist lies. There are a lot of men out there who will sacrifice many good things in life in exchange for getting a leg up on women, and there's many women who will sell out other women by telling these lies in order to get rewarded by said men. Keeping women out of power is why lies are told about income equality and reproductive rights, and while men do better in a pragmatic sense when women are equal (more in the household, better and more frequent sex), what they lose in return is direct power over women in their lives. Many men would rather have less material wealth and less sex if that means that they can keep a woman dependent, and that's the audience for those lies.
But what's the point of believing women don't like sex? I would think it would increase men's power to believe that women desire them. Even Nice Guys® don't really want to believe women are asexual, preferring instead to believe women just have "wrong" sexualities that make them want other dudes. I don't really see what men get in exchange for having to believe that every woman they touch hates every second of it and is simply suffering through it to get access to something else. I guess as I reason it out, it makes a little more sense. Maybe believing that sex is a good purchased from women and not an exchange is comforting, and makes men who need to believe this feel in control. I suppose if women are allowed to have a "yes", then when they say "no", it means something real. It doesn't just mean, "Counter with a better financial offer." It actually means no. In order to have the chance to feel wanted, you also have to run the risk of rejection. Not that I'm feeling sorry for any dude who makes this calculation. The whole thing is just another example of how certain kinds of privilege can make the people who hold it really rotten because they never have to try. See: R.S. McCain, who apparently still gets invited to parties even though he brags about harassing the other guests.
It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire.
It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired.
His theory is---and I agree---that the reason this has cropped up is because being desired is cast as "feminine" in our culture, and men are taught to run from anything feminine. But being desired is such a fundamental human feeling that I've often wondered how you really trick men into it. (And you really don't with many men, who are going to keep grooming and wearing clothes that look good no matter how often you fling homophobic slurs at them for doing so.) And I think it may be this. If women are free from desire, straight men are free to see women as consumable goods for purchase. What name you call them---wife, prostitute---depends mainly on the price. Such a system means you're never really rejected. That peanut butter at the store doesn't look at you and say, "Nah." You either can afford it or you can't. Reducing women to that is comforting, I suppose.
But it's also emotionally anemic, as Liz Jones found out. Hearts do long for love, and even people who are determined to be strictly mercenary in their sexual relationships often get bitten. I think that's what happened to Mark Sanford, too. He made a solid, patriachal marriage that was more a business arrangement than a love affair. His church buddies approved, since this is the patriarchal system. His arrangement was fruitful, both in terms of offspring and in his career. And then he felt real desire and everything went to hell.
Some days I wonder why sex threatens authoritarians so much. Often I threw my hands in the air during the Planned Parenthood debacle and said, "Seriously, what's it to you?" And other days, like today, I see fairly clearly how liberated sexual desire---the right not just to pleasure but to real desire and god forbid even love---really can be such a threat.
Ruh-roh, the douchebag wingnut community is very unhappy with the suggestion that their attempts to strip people of their personal freedoms might be an act of sadism. John Hawkins at Right Wing News, responding to Matt and my mockery of Kay Hymowitz for wanting everyone to get married right after they graduate high school, kicks his legs and says, “Nuh-uh!” Sadly, his claim to be motivated by something other than sadism is undercut by his actual post.
This is intriguing on more than one level because studies consistently show that married people are happier than single people, religious people are happier than non-religious people, and conservatives are happier than liberals.
I’m sure much of the research he’s referencing is deeply flawed (having grown up in Bible-thumping land, I can assure you that many people who are stone cold miserable would tell a pollster they’re full of joy, because otherwise, everything they’ve lived for is a lie), but let’s take the marriage argument on its own, since that’s what he’s kicking his feet about. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that married people are happier. That’s because they got to choose who they’re married to, and because they married later in life than people used to do. Here’s some interesting research:
Not surprisingly, researchers in the ‘50s found that less than one in three married couples reported being happy or very happy with their relationship. Compare that to today, when 61 percent of married Americans report themselves to be “very happy” in their marriage. Part of the sour spouse problem of the ‘50s was that many couples didn’t really want to be married to each other. Often, they were trapped into marriage by unintended pregnancy. With no sex-ed, no birth control, no legal abortion—the exact legislative agenda of today’s pro-life movement!—teen birth rates soared, reaching highs that have not been equaled since: there were twice as many teen mothers in the ‘50s than today.
So, John looks at research that shows that married people are happy. And so he wishes to “fix” this situation by dramatically lowering the happiness rates of married people by shoving all the single people into dysfunctional relationships as soon as possible. I forget why we’re supposed to think this is an argument against the hypothesis that conservatives are sadistic.
By the way, if you’re trying to sound like someone who isn’t jealous of other people because they don’t fearfully deprive themselves of freedom like you do, don’t say things like this:
Additionally, Marcotte’s tired jabs about conservatives hating sex aren’t surprising coming from someone whose philosophy could be fairly summed up as screw everything that moves, follow that with an abortion, and accuse anyone who raises an eyebrow about it of “slut shaming.”
It’s really difficult to buy the argument that you’re not anti-sex when the first reaction you have to a woman who doesn’t hate herself for being sexual is to call her a slut. In fact, that’s kind of definitional. Which is, of course, what’s going on, since he’s conflating “monogamy with a boyfriend of 5 years that’s conducted without shame or self-hatred” with “screwing everything that moves”. Once you have an orgasm without crying, you’ve crossed the line into Irredeemable Slut territory, I suppose.* Tell me again how this attitude is so conducive to human happiness!
I was thinking more about the Douthat piece I wrote about here, because I really think it’s kind of interesting what a maddening shithead that guy is. It’s not just his smug misogyny, or the way that he radiates disgust with human sexuality (especially female sexuality) that is really unnerving in anyone, but especially a still-young man. It’s not even that he’s demonstrably disingenuous, because he presents arguments that right wing watchers can prove easily he obtained because he engages with fringe conservatives who agitate to ban contraception, but he acts like he’s being reasonable and downplays the radical nature of the arguments he’s presenting.
No, I think what really sets people off about his is that he’s a genius at packing in more false assumptions per paragraph than almost anyone writing, especially when he’s talking about sex. Take this, for example:
But they also see Planned Parenthood’s larger worldview — in which teen sexual activity is taken for granted1, and the most important judgment to be made about a sexual encounter is whether it’s clinically “safe”2 — as the enemy of the kind of sexual idealism3 they’re trying to restore4.
Liberals argue, not unreasonably, that Planned Parenthood’s approach is tailored to the gritty realities5 of teenage6 sexuality. But realism can blur into cynicism7, and a jaded attitude8 can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Social conservatives look at the contemporary sexual landscape and remember that it wasn’t always thus9, and they look at current trends and hope10 that it doesn’t have to be this way forever.
Reading some of the otherresponsesto him, I realized exactly how fucked up his argument truly is. So I’ve taken the time to footnote these sentences, so as to detail out exactly how many false assumptions he smuggles in.
1) There’s a couple of false assumptions, but the first one is that it’s a negative thing—-“taken for granted” is never really a positive thing, is it?—-to believe that teenagers are going to experiment and explore sexuality. In fact, Douthat assumes this earlier on and concedes the argument that this always was and always will be the behavior of post-pubescent individuals. But he takes for granted that this is tragic. I don’t actually think that most people that aren’t sex-phobes or misogynists think it’s a great tragedy that young people start dating and eventually fucking. When I was in high school, we even had dances where you were encouraged to bring dates! I’m sure a couple of church ladies believed this could happen without said dates ever considering the possibility of “sexual activity”—-a range of behavior that spans from holding hands to anal intercourse—-but by and large, most people, even conservative-leaning, believe that coming into your sexuality is a major part of growing up. The timetable is usually more of the point of contention, but not the fact that sexual activity is natural and even desirable.
Also, Douthat draws on research done on college kids for a bulk of this article, so he’s also suggesting that the widespread assumption that it’s natural and even good for college kids to be having sex is fucked up. This phrase also assumes, falsely, that Planned Parenthood only serves teenage clients. It actually serves a wide range of ages.
I had my suspicions about Benjamin Dueholm in this article about how Dan Savage has become the nation’s preeminent sexual ethicist. There was a whiff of prudery from the get-go, but I squelched my concerns because it could very well be that said prudery was just a rhetorical device used to highlight how much the culture had to change for Dan Savage to take the place of Ann Landers. After all, I felt like Dueholm has a fairly accurate read about the principles that guide Savage’s advice: honesty, respecting the individual’s right to bodily autonomy, reciprocity, and generosity. You would think a Lutheran minister like Dueholm would fully endorse such a slate of seemingly non-controversial values, but as we all know, the truth is that a theory of radical (and feminist/queer-friendly) sexual liberation threatens the power of authority, especially religious authority, and that will always trump other concerns.
By the way, because this always comes up, I want to be clear that by defending Dan Savage against a minister beating some strawman, I’m not—-I repeat not—-saying I agree with every fucking thing Savage has ever said ever. I don’t engage in the concept that anyone is received wisdom, not the Bible and not a sex advice columnist. Savage is wrong a lot. But these principles are generally sound, and I appreciate Savage for popularizing them, particularly with regards to autonomy, which you shall see is easily the most threatening one to authority.
I knew Dueholm was definitely going to fly off the rails when, after he describes these sound ethical principles, drops this bullshit:
Underlying all of Savage’s principles, abbreviations, and maxims is a pragmatism that strives for stable, livable, and reasonably happy relationships in a world where the old constraints that were meant to facilitate these ends are gone.
This is a blatantly false characterization of the old constraints. Time to get feminist, y’all, but I would say that the old constraints were not meant to create livability or happiness so much as to reinstate patriarchal power structures. You can criticize Savage for being wrong or being sexist at times, but generally speaking, he’s trying to create an ethical system that’s anti-patriarchal not to fill a void, but because he believes that the old patriarchy was evil and unethical. He’s openly agreed with the feminist contention that the “old constraints” were more about oppressing gay people and straight women than anything else. In fact, this should be pretty obvious. A system that forces gay people to live in shadows and deliberately pushes women to be a servant class for men is not a system that’s about happiness, at least not for the majority of people. And that’s especially true if you grasp, as Savage often does, that straight men who are more interested in personal fulfillment than dominance are also screwed by a patriarchy. He may not use the word “patriarchy” often, but that’s the basic gist of it. And while I’m skeptical of a lot of the evo psych stuff he’s been indulging lately, it’s undeniable that he does so because he’s arguing that our basic human nature is thwarted by patriarchy, and he supports the claim that the “old restraints” were there more to keep men controlling women than to promote happiness or even stability.
But this is a liberal magazine, so you have to do more than glide past the realities that old sexual ethics were more patriarchal than humanist, and try to use loaded language to get a buy-in from the liberal audience.
As it happens, this vision fits rather well in a society built around consumption. If Savage’s ethical guidelines—disclosure, autonomy, mutual exchange, and minimum standards of performance—seem familiar or intuitive, it’s probably because they also govern expectations in the markets for goods and services. No false advertising, no lemons, nothing omitted from the fine print: in the deregulated marketplace of modern intimacy, Dan Savage has become a kind of Better Business Bureau, laying out the rules by which individuals, as rationally optimizing firms, negotiate their wildly diverse transactions.
And then blah blah blah the market is crass blah blah blah. We’re liberals, right? We don’t like “the market”, right? Treating sex like “the market” is bad, right?
Via Hugo, I found this blog post that really is the epitome of Nice Guys®, and what makes them such megadouchebags. It starts off like this:
It’s difficult to write about the sexual isolation of sensitive men without falling back on clichés.
He immediately then goes into a long quote from a work of fiction that portrays a woman in a violently abusive relationship who also doesn’t have sex with a man outside of her relationship. I submit to the jury this observation: If your reaction to hearing that a woman is in a relationship with a man who smacks her, kicks her, and calls her a “fat twat” is not to say, “Oh my god, that’s terrible! I hope she gets help!” but instead to say, “Damn, there’s one more woman whose pussy I’m not penetrating, woe is me,” you are not a sensitive man. On the contrary, you are a self-absorbed narcissist! The lack of dick-dipping in your life should be taken not as evidence that women love assholes, but that they avoid at least one asshole—-you—-like the plague. You should be commending women for their asshole-detection skills in not dating you. Not that it’s hard to detect your assholery, obviously—-it’s immediate from the second you viewed an abused woman not as a person who needs help and empathy, but some bitch who isn’t giving you the vagina-cookies you earned by heroically refraining from beating her.
I could have stopped reading there and gone on my merry way, but I kept perversely going, which I suppose is evidence I’m one of those masochistic females that love getting shit on by men that Nice Guys® are always talking about.
For many feminists, young women’s attraction to socially dominant men is either a fiction dreamt up by angry “men’s rights” types, or a fact of life that’s true, but somewhat trivial – important only insofar as it may lead to misogynistic attitudes on the part of men, as Hugo seems to imply. I would argue, to the contrary, that women’s attraction – some women’s attraction – to socially dominant men is both true and non-trivial.
Notice the slight-of-hand? The quote from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is about a violent abuser, but our blogger Miguel says that this is about “socially dominant” men. I submit to the jury that “socially dominant” is not the same thing as being abusive or even insensitive. After all, by his own measure, Miguel appears to be proof of this. He is on a pity trip because he’s not socially dominant, but he is quite clearly an insensitive prick.
I would argue that it is true that women—-and men—-are quite often attracted to socially dominant, i.e. confident people. “Socially dominant” is a deliberately ambiguous term, and Miguel is choosing it so as to conflate a bunch of disparate personality traits, such as self-confidence and popularity with being aggressive or cruel. Which Miguel then proceeds to do, equating social dominance with “hyper-masculinity”, and blaming women’s biology. Without this assumption that confidence is always coupled with aggression, that popularity is always coupled with abusiveness, that straightforwardness equals pushiness, his entire argument falls apart. Take the concluding paragraph:
Even among men who are more “successful” sexually, I think a lot of young men who are sympathetic toward feminism feel they have to behave hypocritically – be a little bit pushy, arrogant, and entitled – in order to get laid. Indeed, the life course of many male feminists seems to entail a period of acting out – usually corresponding to that point in life during which most people explore their sexuality – followed by a period of contrition. It’s almost as though there’s an unspoken deal between feminist women and their male counterparts: “We’ll forgive you for your youthful sexual arrogance and entitlement, so long as you don’t mention that a lot of us were turned on by men’s youthful sexual arrogance and entitlement.” This is a lousy deal, and it’s unnecessary. Not only does it freeze out and sexually isolate a lot of shy young men, but it causes men who are otherwise sympathetic to feminism to conclude that, in the sexual realm, feminism isn’t telling the whole story.
Shyness doesn’t make you nice. It just makes you Nice®. I have known many people who are shy assholes, who both hate other people and retreat from them, which actually makes a lot of sense.
I’m going to offer a counter-theory for Miguel. I believe what he has experienced is being rejected by women who prefer men who are self-confident, popular, and straightforward instead of men who lurk around giving you the stink eye because you haven’t offered to suck their cocks yet, even though they totally complimented on your shoes and pretended to care about your opinions. And he has decided that these men are pushy/arrogant/entitled because they do things such as ask a woman out on a date when they want to date that woman, instead of lingering around for years sending out resentment rays of passive aggression. And sometimes, yes, those men are abusive. But if he actually paid attention to the trajectory instead of gathered up evidence that he’s a victim of women not falling on his penis, he might notice that very few abusive relationships start off as abusive. In fact, abusers usually do a really good job of appearing sensitive and interested in women, and then they start to make their move after the relationship starts. In fact, I would point out that this is why Nice Guys® and abusers have more in common than Nice Guys® think! Both are groups of men who merely feign interest in women in order to get what they want. Nice Guys® just aren’t as good at it.
But there is actually no reason whatsoever to think “social dominance” or “alphaness” means that someone is an abuser or an asshole, any more than shyness is evidence that someone is nice or sensitive. A lot of gregarious, confident extroverts are actually kind, generous, and sensitive. Being nice is, to be fair, usually not enough to get you laid. You probably should have talents, a sense of humor, a sense of fun, or something else that makes others think spending time with you will benefit them in terms of being fun. But there’s no rule that says people who are funny, confident or talented can’t be kind. Nor, as Miguel’s complete indifference to the suffering of abuse victims demonstrates, is there any reason to think that lacking these qualities that draw people to you somehow means you’re a kind and generous soul.
My counter-theory is that Nice Guys® group together traits like confidence with aggression, so they can convince themselves that confident men are always assholes, and thus that they’re being unfairly deprived of pussy by women who are sick fucks that enjoy being abused. Are some confident men abusive assholes? Absolutely; look at Charlie Sheen. But are all confident men? Well, I can’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone like Matt Damon is a truly nice guy, but gosh, he seems like it. But what I can say is I’ve known many men who are great husbands/boyfriends and are also confident men that Miguel would probably denounce as pushy/entitled because they’re honest about what they want. Some shy men are also very nice people, just shy. But many shy men are inconsiderate fuckwits or even wife-beaters. I just don’t think there’s a strong correlation between “alpha”-ness and basic human decency.
But I do know this—-there’s no amount of shyness that turns a man who worries more about men not getting laid than women getting beaten into a nice person. None.
While most of the people involved in right wing attack on contraception are sticking to the talking points (claiming it’s “fiscal conservatism” and conflating contraception/cancer screening/STD testing at Planned Parenthood with abortion), the excitement of finally having a shot at parting some of the poorest and most vulnerable women in the country from reproductive health care is getting a few Republicans a little bit excited. And the cat is coming out of the bag.
Exhibit #1, Sean Hannity:
Sean Hannity, yelling at Juan Williams for suggesting it’s a good thing if women can choose when they give birth: “I’m pro-choice in this sense, Juan. If you choose to get in the back of the car with someone, if you choose to make out with them, if you choose to grab, grope and fondle, if you choose to take one article of clothing off after another, guess what? You made a series of choices, Juan.”
What I enjoyed was the realization that Hannity thinks people stop fucking when they get old enough to have apartments of their own, and don’t have to make out in the back seats of cars. Is this a widespread assumption on the right? It would certainly explain a lot, especially in terms of the drooling voyeurism they exhibit when it comes to this subject, the kind that all too often resembles that of 12-year-olds who just learned really what sex is all about.
But even Hannity can’t top Rep. Steve King, who just created a slogan that will spawn a million T-shirts that you probably only want to wear to feminist meet-ups.
Quote: “Planned Parenthood is invested in promiscuity.”
Well, fuck me with a pogo stick! I wasn’t aware that promiscuity was an investment opportunity. While I have zero doubt that King would describe my 33-year-old unmarried-but-not-a-virgin ass as “promiscuous”, so far I have not made a single red cent off this amazing investment opportunity. And neither, I would add, have the stockholders of Planned Parenthood. Though in their case, that’s because they don’t have any, being a non-profit and all.
Still, I figure that this is a democracy, and if promiscuity is an investment, then it should be up to the people to decide if that’s where we want our tax dollars going. Hey, the advantage is that economic stimulus is especially stimulating, amirite? Obama keeps talking about boring shit like roads and trains and insulation for buildings and better math grades. Personally, I think our investment in promiscuity is way too fucking low, because of it. But I thought I’d create a poll and find out what you, the public, think about our investments in promiscuity.
Thanks to elena in comments for pointing me towards this wretchedly silly article from B.R. Myers in the Atlantic, where he denounces foodies through a mish-mash of casting aspersions on people who actually enjoy their bodies, engaging in the half-baked populism of portraying people you dislike as all too wealthy to understand the no doubt earthy simplicity of the author (who, in this case, lives the working class life of the contributing editor to a prominent magazine, when not taking on his other paid blue collar work as a professor of international studies), and weakening his already-weak argument by grouping genuinely different people together in order to make them all look bad. It’s hard to summarize his argument, but basically it goes like this: “Foodies are horrible people, because they’re all rich. Plus, some of them commit the greatest sin imaginable in modern America, which is trying to live liberal values, but they’re all lying hypocrites because others in the same vague category don’t have those liberal values. If this doesn’t make any sense, consider this: they really like eating, which is disgusting and sensual and therefore has to be wrong.”
Seriously, the problem with the article begins with the category “foodie”, which does encompass a fairly wide range of people, in my experience. Yes, it includes obscenely wealthy types and Anthony Bourdain types who will stuff their face with anything (no matter how unethical), but many to most foodies I know got there because they actually live their values, which made them think more about food and made them more appreciative of the pleasure it brings. Yes, some of us are rich, but some of us got into food because we were looking for ways to save money without eating a bunch of unhealthy junk, which requires learning more about food and avoiding packaging and processing. I’d say most foodies are probably in the middle class, not the upper classes. And lumping people who promote sustainable food projects with Anthony Bourdain because they all like to eat is like saying that Dr. Ruth and Jenna Jameson are basically the same person. I’m not trying to put anyone down here—-I like Bourdain, because he’s a rake and he doesn’t apologize for it, which makes him an infinitely more pleasant-sounding person than Myers—-just noting that vague categories really ought to resist these kind of highly specific criticisms that only apply to some members.
The only time Myers really sounds coherent is when he gets in a huff over the sin of gluttony, defined in this case apparently as enjoying too much.
In Medium Raw he congratulates Waters on having “made lust, greed, hunger, self-gratification and fetishism look good.” Not to everyone, perhaps, but okay.
The Roman historian Livy famously regarded the glorification of chefs as the sign of a culture in decline.
He’s quick to be clear that you don’t have to be an over-eater to be a glutton—-using the unfortunate language around fat and non-fat, but that’s his basic point—-just someone who really gets pleasure out of eating will do. Since he ends on a note of condemning “gluttony”, it’s safe to say that’s his main point, and the yuppie-bashing and snarking about people trying, imperfectly, to open up discussions about sustainability is just so much rationalization. Like I said, give me Bourdain trying to be provocative in his support for all meat all the time over this sort of fun-killing for the sake of it. And suspicion of physical pleasure, of course—-he routinely implies that feeding the body somehow means one is not feeding the mind.
This is going to be a fun news peg for the day—-researchers at Indiana University (where the Kinsey Institute is located), funded by Trojan condoms (a company I say actually does good work in tying its profit motive to the larger social good) have put out a new sexual behavior survey, the largest of its kind since 1994. They interviewed 5,865 Americans aged 14 to 94 about their sexual habits. A lot of what they found wasn’t surprising—-most people have a combination of things they do in bed, the older people are the less they use condoms (in part, because they’re more likely to be married), the percentage of women who had sex with a woman in the past year is twice as high in the 20-24 age group than in any other, and while 8% of men identify as gay or bisexual, nearly twice as many as that have had oral sex with another man.
Thought I’d pull some of the findings out for comment.
According to the study’s findings, 1 of 4 acts of vaginal intercourse are condom protected in the U.S. (1 in 3 among singles).
This is a hard statistic to read, because the non-condom-using group combines people who have chosen to go condom-free because they’re in low risk situations. Two out of three single people going without a condom, for instance, includes people who ditch the condom during a one night stand and the people who are in long-term, committed, disease-free relationships that simply haven’t resulted in marriage. The researchers are right to say this means that there needs to be more promotion of condom use, but we need more targeted information in terms of who is not using condoms when they really should be. There’s nothing wrong with a two-pronged education strategy that suggests some people need to use condoms and some don’t, and helping people honestly and accurately assess which group they belong to.
This result is getting a lot of coverage:
When it comes to responsible sexual behaviors, condom use is higher among black and Hispanic Americans than among white Americans and those from other racial groups.
The AP suggests targeted public health campaigns have a lot to do with this. I would also point out that the younger people are, the more likely they are to use condoms, and the percentage of the population that is black or Hispanic is much bigger in the younger groups than the older groups. Age is one of the most important factors in whether someone uses condoms or not. Men over 50 reported the lowest rates of condom use. Again, this may not be that big a deal, since part of the reason is that these men are likelier to be in monogamous, disease-free relationships. Still, many aren’t, and the low rate can also be explained in part by older men having grown up in a world where looking after sexual health was deemed strictly a woman’s responsibility.
Funnily enough, today there is one area of sex that when discussed, still makes people’s posteriors pucker with discomfort… abstinence.
The idea of abstinence has become somewhat of a punchline in this country. From the myth of unrealistic “abstinence only” education, to the media’s constant portrayal (and mockery) of young, nerdy, out of touch Christians riddled with chastity pendants, the message on abstinence being pumped through pop-culture is clear; If you’re abstinent it’s either because A) you’re ugly or B) you’re a loser. In my case, it was often both.
Actually, I’m perfectly fine accepting that attractive, successful people can be abstinent. However, if you push abstinence like sexlessness will make gold coins sprinkle from your crotch, chances are that you’re not pushing your cool lifestyle choice because it’s so self-evidently awesome. You’re probably pushing it because you’re desperately trying to convince other people that the variety of personal issues which lead to you believe that having sex will immediately ruin your relationship aren’t your own goddamn problem.
Maybe it’s just the lack of fun-factor, or maybe it started with harlotry being misused as a fulcrum for women’s liberation, but if you so much as suggest to someone that abstinence might be beneficial, you’ll often find yourself vilified as a judgmental jackass faster than Bill Maher can throw up his dainty hands.
Why would any limp-wristed, sex-having homosexual faggot-man ever think you were being judgmental about his having sex with women?
Listen, one doesn’t need to be religious (nor a rocket scientist) to see the value of abstinence. Let’s disregard the immediately eliminated risk of increasingly popular STD’ and STI’s. Heck, let’s even discount the statistical data showing that sexual exclusivity seems overwhelmingly conducive to a successful marriage. Abstinence also provides an incomparable bond of trust in a relationship.
Actually, I know a lot of relationships in which abstinence happens out a complete lack of trust, but then again, rationalization is super fun.
I can tell you beyond any doubt, that my lady is able to control herself and stick to her values regardless of circumstance. Just as surely, she can say the same about me (Ben&Jerry’s benders notwithstanding). It is that display of self-control, that tangible example of living your principles through your life’s walk that ensures her that I won’t be jumping on the first well-proportioned opportunity that comes my way.
Look, let’s talk about cheating for a second. People who are abstinent cheat. If you can’t trust your partner unless they purposely withhold something from themselves, then you need to be with a different partner. Plus, let’s be completely honest: if Crowder’s girlfriend said that she loved this article so much she was ready to stop being abstinent, he’d be back in 24 hours with an article about all the awesome sex Christians have.
By the same token, I can rest easy knowing that my dame won’t be trying to bed Jersey Shore’s “The Situation” anytime soon.—Though he does have great abs.
...Huh. That was just…weird.
Strong trust is the result. Constantly we hear cries of women aimed at their supposedly overly jealous boyfriends, “What’s the matter? Don’t you trust me?”
No, he doesn’t. You slept with him on the first date and there is no reason for him to think that you wouldn’t do the same when a better offer comes along.
Ahhh, I see now. You can’t trust that a woman isn’t a walking penis depository unless she refuses all penises equally! Of course, then you’d have to wonder if she’ll ever have sex with you, but it’s worth it. You never have to worry about the woman who’s in love with you and wants to go out for four hours with her friends, which is great. There’s no chance she’ll give in to her insane lust for four minutes of missionary in the bathroom at Red Robin - and really, isn’t that what love is?
While we’re on the subject, has the whole floozie shtick really empowered any women out there? I would imagine that immediate sexual gratification being assumed in modern relationships would do more damage to your gatekeeper status than good. I’d also have to imagine that sex with someone whom you share trust, loyalty and open communication would be far more liberating than the thrill of any one-night stand you could enjoy.
It’s too bad that there’s no middle ground between getting boozed up and having sex with someone whose name might be Tim or Tom or Todd or LeVontae…and complete abstinence.
I do appreciate, however, that Baseball Boy #1 has reduced all sexual activity outside of his chosen path to women being uncontrollable whores. It’s convinced me that I need to go find a lady who won’t touch me. On that note, I think I’m now dating all of the waitresses at my favorite bar. We trust each other so much!
Well, this strikes me as the most irritating non-story I’ve read in a long fucking time. I suppose I’m supposed to be shocked and mildly distressed at the release of a study (conducted by Nutrisystem) that shows that half of American women would “give up sex” rather than gain 10 pounds. But I find the whole thing too suspect to take seriously. And it’s not because, or at least just because, of what Tracy Clark-Flory pointed out, which is that 66% of survey respondents felt like they have to lose weight to feel sexy, which is a sad result of the widespread fat-shaming in our culture. (The survey suggested the average amount that had to be lost to reach that goal was 23 pounds, which is such an abstract number as to be meaningless. Is that a number that includes all the women that feel they’re 5 pounds away from getting into a size four averaged with people who want to lose 100 pounds, or is it just a lot of people who feel they need to lose 23 pounds? No idea.) But it’s because they poisoned the well to make sure they got the results they wanted.
See, they didn’t ask if people would give up sex rather than gain weight. They asked if you’d give up sex for the summer rather than gain weight. Considering that’s only 3 months, I’m surprised more people didn’t say yes. A lot of Americans go 3 month stretches without getting laid all the time, often even if they’re in relationships. I’m sure people who’ve had 3 month dry spells outnumber people who haven’t many times over. It’s not a super fun idea to go 3 months without sex, but most of us have plenty of assurance we’d survive. (Unless they’re rolling masturbation into their definition of “sex”, which I’m almost positive they aren’t.)
But what really pissed me off about this survey was that it’s indicative of the entire problem with the American diet industry, which is basically built to encourage yo-you dieting. You’ve heard the statistic that 95% of diets don’t work? That’s because they’re designed not to. The entire pitch of diet programs is, “Deprive yourself of pleasure for short periods of time, and then, when you reach a goal, go right back to your old habits. In a few years, when you’ve gained it all back, come back and we’ll do it all over again.” There’s no natural reason to connect sexual deprivation with weight control—-on the contrary, I’d guess frequent sex actually burns a fair number of calories—-but the diet industry’s logic is just this. The whole notion is that you “earn” pleasure by being skinny enough to deserve it, and the only way to earn it is to lose weight.
Silvana has a really long, interesting post on the way that getting married can provoke body anxiety in even the most stalwart opponents of that kind of crap, and she mentions something that has always bothered me, too.
As a fat chick, I am well aware of the MUSTLOSEWEIGHTBEFOREWEDDING cultural imperative. I was aware of this before I ever knew what Fat Acceptance was. And I knew before I ever got engaged that I would be doing no such thing. Frankly, I wasn’t even tempted. I know people who have gone on serious diets in the year or so before they get married, women who have attended “boot camp,” and companies who have made a lot of money off of fueling those anxieties. I wanted no part of it.
Damn you, Jessica Valenti. I was about to leave the woolly, weird world of Susan Walsh behind after yesterday’s post, but your email tip pointing out that Susan straight up lied (oh no! so surprised!) on Twitter has sucked me back in. The lie is simple—-Susan was squawking about sluts, so I asked her to tell me how many partners a woman could have before she was a slut, and she demurred, claiming to care not for this tawdry discussion of numbers. But on her blog, she straight up says you’re a lonely, used up slutbag if that number is too high, and maybe you should consider a little dishonesty to cover up the stink.
Your number is too high. OK, fine, you don’t want any guy who cares about how many people you’ve slept with. Problem is….that’s most guys. You don’t have to tell anyone your personal data. Just be aware that when you’re making the rounds within a certain community or group of friends, word gets out fast. I don’t think there has ever, ever been a guy who got laid and didn’t tell anyone about it afterwards. If your number is high and that fact is well known, you have every right to find a new pack of males and revirginate reinvent yourself.
I suppose the more generous interpretation is just that Susan’s a man-hater, and thinks all men are uptight yet sleazy at the same time. Again, I’m not sure why women are supposed to want so desperately the validation of a relationship from men, if men are so terrible, but I guess it’s because we’re accept on faith that they may suck but they are our superiors and we need them to validate us.
But I link this not just to call Susan a liar, because I did that on Twitter. I’m linking this because it’s great evidence of a pet theory I’m working on about how skeptical tools often used to debunk horoscopes and psychics can also be used to debunk reactionary dating advice. In particular, the confirmation bias. It’s why psychics or astrologers can just throw a bunch of shit out there, and you’ll attach yourself to the one that seems true about you and forget all the rest. “Do I sense a John that died of something in the heart/stomach region? No…. A name that starts with M….something in the head…. You say Mary died of brain cancer? Yes, I’m feeling a Mary.” Or a horoscope that says, “Today there will be some trials, but you will get through them.” If that’s true, then you remember the horoscope being accurate. If, in fact, you didn’t get through them, then well, you have other things on your mind, if you still have a mind. You see how it works.
This link provides a particularly blunt version of this tactic. Let’s start with the title: “20 Reasons You Don’t Have a Boyfriend”. Well, I have a boyfriend, so if I was an ordinary reader instead of a feminazi hellbeast bent on revenge, I’d probably skip this article and forget the whole thing. Things written therein that are true of me won’t be used to disprove the thesis, since I never bothered to do a rigorous experiment to find out if, as Susan suggests, sluts with some too high number that we won’t ever actually name don’t get boyfriends. (Evasion of specifics is another tactic of charlatans.) Unfortunately, I’m not an ordinary reader. Or fortunately, depending on your point of view.
But let’s dig in to the reasons that you without boyfriends don’t have them. And no, don’t be all smart with your thinking jokes are funny shit and saying things like, “Because I have a girlfriend who would disapprove” or perhaps, “Because I just threw his shit out the front door and changed the locks.” Because, if you’ll recall from earlier, jokes are only performed by people who think having fun is clever, and they really should know better. Also, women who crack jokes never have boyfriends, because jokes put your oxytocin levels at the level where no man can be snagged. It’s science, people. I peer-reviewed it, i.e. showed it to some misogynist blog commenters and they liked it.
1. You’re needy.
Right off the bat, we get that this is straight up bullshit. If being needy runs the guys off, then wouldn’t the first step be to put down the blog post examining why OMFGURSTILLSINGLEWHATSWRONGWITHU, go out on the town with your girls, pick some guy up, fuck him, and then push him out the front door as soon as he starts getting that I-kinda-like-you smile? Or at least start by not reading blog posts whose very existence says, “You, the reader, are kind of desperate and needy.” I suspect, however, Susan Walsh doesn’t want you to stop reading her bullshit.
2. You like players. You say you want a nice guy, but you fall for the same lines again and again. You can’t resist the bad boys, the ones who have dumped on other women.
I know this whole thing is probably disconcerting for her, but thanks to Jaclyn Friedman for pointing me to the most comically incoherent bout of slut-shaming I’ve read in a long ass time. See, Jaclyn wrote a moving story about how making the move to straight up slutting it up was liberating for her. Contrary to the incoherent claims of her critic Susan Walsh, Jaclyn did not suggest that trolling Craig’s List for casual sex is the right thing for everyone or the right response to every situation. And, unlike Susan, I can prove my claims! While Jaclyn’s essay is very much about how sluthood worked for her, when she says that she’s telling her story for others, she doesn’t say, “Because everyone should sleep around all the time and not want anything else.”
Sluthood isn’t a disease, or a wrong path, or a trend that’s ruining our youth. It isn’t just for detached, unemotional women who “fuck like men,” (as if that actually meant something), consequences be damned. It isn’t ever inevitable that sluthood should inspire violence or shame. Sluthood isn’t just a choice we should let women make because women should be free to make even “bad” choices. It’s a choice we should all have access to because it has the potential to be liberating. Healing. Soul-fulfilling. I’m telling you this because sluthood saved me, in a small but life-altering way, and I want it to be available to you if you ever think it could save you, too. Or if you want it for any other reason at all. And because even if you don’t ever want sluthood for yourself, you’re going to be called upon to support a slut. I’m telling you this because when that happens, I want you to say yes.
Access to =/ a mandate. At the end, she suggests your only real duty is to support your friends if they decide to have casual sex, but certainly no duty to do it yourself is implied. This is very, very important, because Susan Walsh has very strong ideas about how there’s only one path for everyone, and so she makes the mistake of thinking that’s what Jaclyn is saying. Even though Jaclyn already stated up front that she’d done her time in monogamous relationships, and figures she will again one day.
On to Walsh’s piece, because seriously, the incoherence may put Sarah Palin’s baffling use of the word “cojones” to shame.
Women who understand the power of sex, the incredible chemistry of it, women who know that sex is not casual physiologically speaking, women who do not embrace a life of sluthood, are indeed left alone by many men. That’s a good thing in some ways, but terribly disappointing in others. Very few women embrace the notion of receiving zero male attention once word gets out that they are not slutty. They cannot compete with determined sluts in the marketplace among these men.
I found this to be super awesome, because usually the faux concern aimed at loose women is about how no one will ever love them. But now they just suck up all the cock, leaving none behind for the ladies who like to wait it out a little. So you’re obligated to stop fucking so other women don’t feel they have to. This argument, taken to its logical conclusion, basically means that we can’t wear lipstick (or not), can’t have a sense of humor (or not), can’t be skinny (or not), can’t be curvy (or not), and absolutely can’t date. Because if a man finds out that he prefers this quality over that quality in a woman, then women who don’t have that quality will always be left out.
Fuck it. Let’s assign partners by lottery. Screw this notion that we should enjoy each other’s company.
Notice, by the way, that women’s preferences (for a man who moves fast vs. a man who moves slow, for instance) aren’t even considered? We just want someone with a pulse and a penis to validate our existence, I suppose.
We got into a Twitter battle over this, and I kept trying to get Susan to define a “slut” for me, based on the universally understood idea belief that you’re a slut once your Number gets over a certain point. Realizing she wasn’t going to win any friends settling on a number, Susan dodged the question, saying instead, “I reject theconcept of a #. Women should listen to their own instincts. If it makes you feel like crap, stop doing it.” But of course, she’s lying (or really, really fucking stupid), because she attacks Jaclyn for feeling good about her choices. If she doesn’t want women to feel like crap, she should be applauding Jaclyn’s piece, which had thrilling lines like:
“I’m telling you this because sluthood saved me. Sluthood gave me the time and space to nurse a shattered heart.”
And:
“I’ve remembered how much I like pleasure, and how much of it there is in the world. I’ve had to learn how to reject people nicely but clearly, and learn how to appreciate a generous rejection when it’s aimed at me.”
Is there such a thing as a negative IQ? The View’s Elisabeth Hasselbeck goes for the gold standard. Via The Advocate:
The View’s Elisabeth Hasselbeck says she knows why lesbians come out later in life: there are simply no available men.
Her theory is that older men tend to date younger women, “leaving older women with no one,” she said.
My question - someone willing to say something so asinine on the air cannot possibly have any close gay or lesbian friends. She needs to invest in rent-a-lez or some such before opening her piehole.
Niall Stanage has a piece up at Salon examining how David Vitter has managed to survive a rather comical sex scandal involving prostitutes and diaper-wearing. He makes a lot of good points about the situation in Louisiana and how Vitter is benefiting, but I think it’s useful to think about why the scandal itself doesn’t seem to hurt Vitter, when other Republicans—-even ones who have straight sex like Mark Sanford and John Ensign—-were so dramatically damaged by falling in the eyes of the “family values” crowd. Stanage addresses these specifics towards the end.
There is another element to Vitter’s resilient popularity worth mentioning: the nature of his offense. His encounter was (presumably) with a woman; the fact that he used an escort agency rather than picking up a prostitute from a street corner; that rumors of other similar episodes have not been substantiated; that he has stayed with his wife and family: All of this probably helps his case seem less egregious than, say, the male restroom arrest that ended Idaho Sen. Larry Craig’s career.
“Same-sex [scandal] would be a killer,” Maginiss says. “Or even if there was evidence that this is part of a pattern of continuing behavior—that would be hard to overcome.”
I’m going to take a moment to point out that I’m sure most people, especially evangelical Christians, are probably full well aware that it was not a one-time deal.
Jessi Fischer, a California-based writer on sexuality who blogs as “The Sexademic,” suggests that the contrast between the cases of Vitter and Craig “is significant because when you are talking about people having a kind of moral panic, often what we are talking about is the crossing of boundaries. That could be when the two people are of the same sex, but something like race and the crossing of racial boundaries affects these things as well.”
“You can’t cross too many boundaries at once,” she advises.
I think a lot of this is getting close but missing the point. The question at hand is why Vitter is able to sell himself to “family values” conservatives, and the assumption here is that going to prostitutes is transgressive in a way that it should be especially threatening to them. But I think the problem here is applying liberal values to the situation. But “family values” is really just a euphemism conservatives use for supporting the patriarchy. In this worldview, I’d argue that it’s less of a problem if a man goes to a prostitute than if he does something confusing and emasculating, such as expressing affection for a woman outside of the dutiful bounds of marriage. The fundie worldview, especially, has never been one that pretends that men don’t feel lust. On the contrary, they tend to argue that, when it comes to sex, men are basically uncaged animals who can’t control their own behavior very well, and so society has to do it for them. When you read a lot of evangelical grappling with pornography, this comes across loud and clear. Men who look at pornography are considered “addicted”, and the main concern is that it might weaken the sexual bonds in the marriage and lead to a divorce. I wouldn’t say I see a lack of understanding as to why men would look at porn. In fact, the fundie obsession with eliminating distribution makes it clear that they think men are mostly unable to control themselves. The internet has changed things somewhat; realizing that you can’t stop porn on the internet has made space in the evangelical world to talk about men actually taking self-control. But their preferred worldview is one where men are tempted by sex (not so much by love), and the women who tempt them bear the blame.
Jill has a great post up about the double standard for showing off your body if you're a politician, in response to this cover of Men's Health. Yes, that's Aaron Schock, a Republican congressman from Illinois, and those are his abs. Jill points out that this would be the scandal of the fucking year if that was a female congresswoman. Not to defend Sarah Palin, but think of all the crap she got when she posed for Runner's World fully dressed.
I know I've been hitting the feminist themes a little harder than usual lately, but I really just have to blog about this. Even though it's link bait. Nutbar lifestyle writer Liz Jones, writing for the far-right British newspaper The Daily Mail, did what is usually impossible to do and make me feel really bad for a philandering liar. 
Ruh-roh, the douchebag wingnut community is very unhappy with the suggestion that their attempts to strip people of their personal freedoms might be an act of sadism. John Hawkins at Right Wing News, responding to 
I was thinking more about 
I had my suspicions about Benjamin Dueholm in this article 
Thanks to elena in comments for pointing me towards this wretchedly 
This is going to be a fun news peg for the day—-researchers at Indiana University (where the Kinsey Institute is located), funded by Trojan condoms (a company I say actually does good work in tying its profit motive to the larger social good) have 
Well, this strikes me as the most irritating non-story I’ve read in a long fucking time. I suppose I’m supposed to be shocked and mildly distressed at the release of a study (conducted by Nutrisystem) that shows 
Damn you, Jessica Valenti. I was about to leave the woolly, weird world of Susan Walsh behind 
I know this whole thing is probably disconcerting for her, but thanks to Jaclyn Friedman for pointing me to 
Niall Stanage has a piece up at Salon