Had some folks asking, and now I can finally say yes, I saw "The Avengers" on Friday night. And yes, I liked it. I like to tweak the noses of fanboys who brook not even the mildest criticism of their heroes, but I'm sure regular readers know I'm a big lover of Sir Whedon, and thought he managed the impossible: A coherent movie based on all these characters from other movies that still had enough action to make big overseas box office. It's a miracle, really, even if personally speaking, I thought "Cabin in the Woods" was a whole lot better.

My biggest complaint with the movie was casting. Not all of it, just I really thought Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo dragged the whole thing down with their wooden performances. Which is a shame, because the Hulk is fun* and Black Widow, upon reflection, was the best written part in the movie. I know Whedon fought hard to keep that character in the flick, and the reasons he gives for these things are admirably ideological---he hates the sexism of geek culture---but I also can't help but imagine he's thinking like a writer. Which is to say, he knows what he's good at, and in trying something new, he wants to bring his A game. And he's really good at writing female characters. That's not just ideology, but something that he just excels at. Talent is a bit of a mystery that way. 

Anyway, point being, the first thing my friends and I talked about as we left was recasting Black Widow with someone who has not just beauty, of which Johansson's is legendary, but charisma and can act. Because it was clear to me that if the right actress had been in that role, the fact that Black Widow is the hero of the movie would have been more obvious. She certainly has the most layers of any character, besides perhaps Tony Stark. I can see why some audience members didn't really grasp her importance as a character because of this. You go to action movies expecting to sit back and be taken for a ride, and calculations like, "This character is well-written but poorly acted" aren't something you get into. 

But there's no excuse for movie critics making the same mistake. Which is why I was really sad to see this round-up of male movie critics who downplayed, ignored, or otherwise minimized Black Widow's role in the movie. The character has, from what I recall, more separate individual actions that lead to victory than any other character, with Tony following right behind her, and yet, well, I can't state it better:

Writing in The Guardian, Henry Barnes noticed Black Widow but could not be bothered to isolate just what she did in the film. The New York Post’s Kyle Smith dreamed of a Black Widow who would perform one errand and and then be gone.

The New York Daily News’ Joe Neimaier admitted that Black Widow “kickstarts” things, but by deleting her from the rest of his coverage, implied that was that. Still, that was a lavishment compared with the treatment by A.O. Scott, who in his New York Times review found it beneath himself to even give Black Widow a job description, while The Globe and Mail went with “token sexy female,” clearly hoping only young boys and people who hadn’t seen the film were reading.

Meanwhile, in The Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern claimed Black Widow “spends lots of time looking puzzled or confused,” while Steven Rea's Philadelphia Inquirer review dispensed with Black Widow’s name, suggesting we “watch Scarlett Johansson clench her brow” while in “Ninja garb.” The Miami Herald’s Rene Rodriguez wasn’t as generous—his single sentence also accused Johansson of playing dress-up, but, perhaps mercifully, did not specify what in.

That last one hurts the most, because there's no more blatant sexism than sneering at a woman for playing "dress-up" in a movie where the men around her are dressed in tights and robot costumes. The belief that superhero movies are a No Girls Allowed zone couldn't be more obvious.

It seems to be part of a mini-trend of some men throwing a fit over the very idea that women might have a role in fiction besides decorative objects and damsels in distress. You had Lee Aronsohn treating a small uptick in female roles like it was the beginning of a horrific gynocracy. And of course, there's the over-the-top reaction to "Girls" and Lena Dunham. Outside of reasonable complaints about yet another show lacking in racial diversity when it would have been easy to make it diverse, most of the criticism of Dunham has a strong grasping-at-straws quality to it. Gawker especially has been humping the insinuation that the show only got on air---wait for it---because women's stories are like a freak show to attract lookee-lous. Anything but accept that it could be that the show is good. Apparently, we were supposed to just know that cringe comedy is a man's territory, and Gawker is terribly, terribly offended that women think they get to be in the club. I mean, look at the illustration they came up with:

The implication couldn't be more clear: Merely having to endure a woman's point of view is for men just as unsettling and oppressive as being adrift in a male-dominated world is for women.** Sure, women have to live in a world that values them less, and where that means they get an extra dose of humilation and bullshit just for being female. But man, that's nothing compared to the misery of a hip dude having to think about women's experiences from women's point of view. Ugh, I mean, really, could you stuff a cock in it already?

I think it's all about sex, which is why the reaction to "Girls" is the ugliest example of this. Cringe comedy is a "man's" genre because so much of it relies on laughing at bodies. Men laughing at their own bodies and at women's bodies, and especially at the sexual desires emanating from them and the awkward and often futile ways we try to satisfy those bodies. If women adopt this comedy form, then that puts women in a position where we're not only laughing at ourselves, but at men. Turning the tables in this way makes a lot of men deeply uncomfortable. I've often seen that this kind of sexism in pop culture gets its ugliest when a woman is in a position to say that men are only human, and let men know that we look at them in the same way they look at us. That is the great cultural taboo, and "Girls" is breaking it, and reaction is fierce. 

I think the same underlying urges are why there's such heavy guarding of the superhero genre from a female presence. It's just coming at it from another direction. If cringe comedy is about looking at human bodies as comically frail, superhero movies are about projecting fantasies of strength. But as long as the fantasy is male-only, fans can sort of convince themselves that it's something more than just a fantasy, because the strength of the male superheroes is seen as just an extrapolation of men's supposed physical superiority over women. If you put a female superhero in the mix and  have her body performing the same unreal feats, it's a lot more obvious that it's just a fantasy. In fact, neither men nor women are superbeings. The notion that men are closer and therefore more plausible as superheroes is just ridiculous. We are reminded by the presence of female superheroes that we're all actually just human. Which provokes a lot of men into discomfort, this realization that actually they're just deteriorating sacks of muscle and bone, just like women. 

Anyway, it's all very annoying and I wish people would cut it out. Let women have our comedy and our superhero fantasies without demanding that it become an existential crisis for men who have had these things all along. 

*In my ideal world, it would be Brad Pitt, who does somber-to-maniacal really well. I realize that's unattainable, but still, a million actors are better the Ruffalo.

**For those who don't know what I'm talking about, "Exile in Guyville" is a seminal album from Liz Phair where all the songs were held together loosely by the common theme of what it's like to be female in a world where men have more social power, which they wield in ways both overt and subtle, leaving women feeling a nervous and a confused, and often angry. 

Yesterday, I talked about how the problem of "choice" feminism---trying to assert that because a woman decided between available options, that means that no one should engage in critical analysis of that process---is giving cover to Republicans denying that the wage gap is a problem. Of course, that in no way means the wage gap is attributable mainly to women making choices that are considered off-limits for analysis, such as the entirely coincidental fact that women are something like ten times as likely to be a full-time homemaker than men. Direct discrimination is a real problem, as this incredibly important segment of Maddow's show demonstrates.

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Because of the silencing power of the word "choice", the discourse is limited to discussions of direct discrimination, which is employers paying women less simply because they can get away with it. As Heidi Hartmann asserts, this is 20-50% of the wage gap, and possibly more. Then there's systemic discrimination in job opportunities, with women being channeled into developing job skills that put them in jobs that pay less money. That's a bit harder to measure, but addressing it with policy is easy to imagine.

But like Hartmann said, this kind of slicing and dicing assumes that some kinds of sexist discrimination don't count, because CHOICES. She notes that Canada's bean counters don't see it that way, and include interpersonal sexism as part of the discriminatory patterns that cause women to earn less, both pressure to be less competitive because it's icky for ladies and home pressure to take on more than their fair share of the domestic work. Women are subtly told in many different ways that our economic independence and our ambitions simply aren't as valuable as that of men's. It's in everything: The way that women are expected to name themselves after their spouses, symbolically embracing their secondary role in marriage. The way female sexuality is policed in a way male sexuality isn't, sending the signal that women's very bodies are the property of eventual spouses, which has all sorts of implications for who is more important in the marriage. It's in the fact that child care is considered a "women's" issue, but in terms of policy but also at home, since many couples only compare the costs of child care to her salary, instead of both of them. Needless to say, the way single mothers are treated also feeds into this.

It's a self-perpetuating thing. Because women know they make less and are valued less for their paid labor, and because women are under a deluge of wedding propaganda that suggests our real value in this world is determined by someone wanting to marry us, of course we're going to make all-holy CHOICES that reflect our circumstances but don't get us any closer to equality. Which would be all well and good, I suppose, except women pay the price every day for our lack of equality. We're more likely to live in poverty and more likely to struggle to get by. We're more dependent on men, which is something that's often used against us in interpersonal relationships. If men and women were truly valued equally in this society, women would be better off, emotionally and materially. So I'm not just trying to be a meanie-bear making people uncomfortable with these observations. There's real stakes here. 

I'm guessing most of you have seen the video of Alex Castellanos trying to win an argument on "Meet the Press" with Rachel Maddow by all but saying, "It's so cute when you ladies have opinions like you were people. Now go make me a sandwich." No, seriously, he said, "I love how passionate you are. I wish you were as right about what you're saying as you are passionate about it. I really do." But that hardly captures the "women are so cute when theyr'e mad!" tones he took in a bid to put her in her place before she did that thing she does, that unfortunate thing where she reminds you that you're entitled to your opinions but not to your facts. 

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The whole thing is kind of mind-boggling. If Romney's people want to kill this "war on women" narrative, they should probably stop acting like outrageous sexists every chance they get. You know, it might help. In addition, Castellanos tries to argue that if you could pay women 25% less, employers would only hire women and make huge profits, an argument that suggests he believes the only real cost of business is labor. (Considering how much effort conservatives put into fighting labor, you can see why this myth might arise, but in reality, the war on labor is less about actual cost-saving and more about an ideological commitment to keeping the little guy down.) But mainly I want to point out that this entire exchange, and the entire approach of Republicans to the wage gap issue, shows why there's so much danger is women using I CHOOSE MY CHOICE to shut down any uncomfortable analysis regarding things like women's exponentially higher rates of quitting work to stay home with children. Or even when they make seemingly just symbolic gestures towards the idea that a woman is more subservient to family demands than a man, such as changing your name upon marriage. 

The problem with presenting "choice" as some abstract concept unmoored to social pressures and therefore as beyond critical analysis as the preference of the color of red over blue is that conservatives are happy to exploit that to continue supporting a system where women are systemically underpaid. As this exchange shows, it gives them cover even to push their favorite argument for continuing inequality, which is that the people who aren't doing as well simply aren't as worthy. Rachel calls it the "math is  hard" argument, and Castellanos basically says, "Yep, that's my argument." To unpack that, what's going on here is the argument from conservatives is that since women are mentally inferior, work outside the home is just harder for their wee female brains, and so they "choose" supposedly easier work that taxes their tender lady nervous systems less. Because of the "I choose my choice" rhetoric, they can bury this essentialist argument about inferior women in the language of "choice", and it sounds nearly feminist-ish. Mostly, they want it to be clear there's nothing to be done about it. They may even pretend to be stating this more in sorrow than joy, but at the end of the day, the strategy is clear: Bandy around the word "choice" to advance the argument that women are the natural inferiors of men, and that's why they get paid less, something policy cannot address. 

There's actually a lot of reasons for the wage gap, and it's actually not strictly due to things that get defensively fenced in as "choice", such as women feeling more pressure to scale back on career ambitions in order to care for family. But the problem is, with feminist help, we've somehow managed to get to a point where sexist pressures on women to take on more unpaid domestic labor than men are considered off-limits and certainly not available for analysis, lest you make anyone feel you're questioning their "choice". A lot of it is rooted in not-my-Nigelism, i.e. women's concern that noticing their partner's often-unintentional sexism will cause rifts in the relationship that will end it, and so they do things like make completely silly excuses for why it's not sexist that he thinks marriage means changing your name or he didn't offer enough help around the house after the kids were born to make your continued employment possible. It's an understandable defensive manuever, but the problem here is that by not having to deal with minor discomfort at home, we're perpetuating a dialogue that allows overt sexist discrimination and systemic abuses of women's rights to continue. 

Well, I think we're on the next and final phase of conservatives trying to find a narrative that allows them to conduct all-out war on women while denying that's what they're doing: I'm rubber and you're glue. I'm a bit surprised they didn't latch on to this strategy sooner, honestly, since the ways of the petulant 5-year-old have always had tremendous appeal for those who classify themselves as "real Americans". That the strategy requires heavy use of the non sequitur is considered no bar to using it.

Example #1:

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh on Monday pushed back against claims that Republicans were attacking women's rights and insisted that the "real war on women" was being directed by President Barack Obama.

"The real war on women is being conducted by the regime, by the Obama administration," he explained. "Since Barack Obama took office, the unemployment rate for women has gone up from 7 to 8.1 percent. ... The poverty rate among women rose to 14.5 percent last year, up from 13.9 percent when Obama was immaculated."

Since this attack is being directed by someone who appears to believe that Obama was "immaculated" instead of what really happened---he won a national election with a stunningly high percentage of the vote for these polarizing times---I suppose it will have traction with those who are as delusional as he. But even then, this is all a garbled mess. Let's not even deal with the factual error, which of course is blaming the economic problems of the Bush administration on Obama. Let's deal with the fact that in order to rationalize a war on women that's being conducted in large part to keep women from competing economically with men, conservatives have resorted to pretending they give a shit about women's economic wellbeing. The two major planks of the war on women are ultimately about keeping women economically dependent on men, which in turn conservatives hope will keep the power balance at home in favor of men. First, there's the attempts to take away a woman's right to control when she gives birth, which is ultimately about economics. Women who lose that control fare poorly in the job market, unable to structure their career in a way that allows them to move up like a man can, which in turn can allow women to exercise more power in the home, with men losing the "but I make  more money, so I'm owed more service and decision-making power" excuse. Additionally, women hobbled by unwanted child-bearing can't compete economically with men, which means people who are uncomfortable with female power in the workplace are going to support forced child-bearing. 

The second plank of the war on women is to directly attack women's right to equal pay for equal work. That's why the Supreme Court ruled against Lilly Ledbetter, and that's why Gov. Scott Walker just repealed equal pay protections in his state. In order of the high unemployment gambit to work, two things have to happen: 1) The facts have to be shoved aside. (The fact is that the unemployment crisis is on President Bush, and Obama's efforts blunted it.) 2) The listener has to simulataneously get angry that women are unemployed while eagerly supporting policies that hurt women economically on purpose, because they don't want women to do well. Now, wingnuts are perfectly capable of that level of cognitive dissonance, but I don't see how that attack crosses the barrier into the mainstream. Functionally, Limbaugh is saying, "Don't look at those of us trying to destroy women economically because women aren't doing well economically, though better than they would if we were in charge, so if you support women, support those of us who are actively out to destroy them." 

In contrast, the claim that the "real racists" are people who oppose racism because they notice racism seems like it nearly makes sense. 

Because of the tortured logic of the "I'm rubber, you're glue" strategy, Fox decided just to skip even trying to make an argument. This the headline of example #2:

But if you read the actual article---which is about as hysterical and pointless as the headline would suggest---there is literally not a single word about the supposed war on women that Obama is suddenly conducting. No mention of wage equality, reproductive rights, women's wellbeing at all. In fact, there's no mention in the text of the article of women. The word "women" doesn't appear in the text. Nor "woman", nor "female". Not even "girl". The comments suggest that super wingnuts are making connections---they believe Muslims hate women, and they believe Obama is a secret Muslim, and that therefore that's all you need to know---but again, not enough there to jump the mainstream media line. 

Ironically, there is something the Obama administration has done that conservatives could howl about if they wanted to score some "both sides" points that would be embraced by a mainstream media eager to embrace that narrative regardless of the facts. Conservatives could point to the preposterous Plan B decision. Of course, doing so would be a tacit embrace of the notion that women have reproductive rights, even after a man has "claimed" their body by ejaculating in it. However, that women lose their human rights once they have sex with a man is the fundamental belief they're pushing here, so I'm guessing they're going to sidestep that easy hit.

A million people have sent me this off-putting article by David Wong at Cracked trying to explain misogyny. The women have found it unnerving, and the men have loved it, for reasons they should be ashamed of that I will explain in just a moment. I didn't want to write about it, because having done this for many years, I'm less inclined to be critical of someone who means well, even if they're doing it all wrong, but this seems to be the only way to get people to stop sending me this article. Apparently, it struck a chord. 

The piece starts off on a good foot, explaining that men are taught from the cradle that they're entitled to women's affection, and he even touches on how women who aren't considered beautiful are often not considered at all. He's 100% right on this. This is the underpinning of the Nice Guy® complaint. They say that "women" overlook the "nice" guys because they're not as attractive or whatever, but if you scratch them, you'll find that they exclude a huge percentage of women from the category "women" for not fitting their beauty standards. Thus, the whine only makes sense if you assume that men are entitled to beauty, but women should settle for "nice", and give up on physical attraction.

The rest of the piece is based on the iffy theory that only men really know what it's like to feel horny. This is why liberal dudes were licking it up, since it was a purportedly anti-sexist piece, but it still had a soothing message that men still somehow are more than women, because they are more alive, you know. They have more desire. They really like sex, in a way that you women can never understand. 

Do you guys know how offensive this is? Imagine if you said that men naturally understood music better, or had a better ability to taste food, or just really enjoyed the sun on their skin more than women could ever understand. This article, while well-meaning, couldn't get past the notion that women are dull, because we don't have those all-important sex drives to create sharpness and ambition. Some quotes:

It's because, in males more so than females, the sex drive is completely detached from the rest of the personality.

By the way, he later says the sex drive actually creates the male personality, so he contradicts himself.

When that happens, when we get that boner at the funeral, we get mad at the girl showing the cleavage. Because we, ourselves, our own rational personality that knows right from wrong and appropriate from inappropriate, knows this is a bad place to get a boner. So it comes off like cleavage girl is conspiring with our penis to screw us over.

I appreciate that he agrees men shouldn't hold women responsible for this, but still embedded in this is the idea that men and only men have these remarkable will to live, to screw, to really enjoy life that comes out even in in the face of death. Women certainly aren't interesting enough to have inappropriate urges, you know. 

We're starving, and all women are various types of food. Only instead of food, it's sex. And we're trying to conduct our everyday business around the fact that we're trying to renew our driver's license with a talking pair of boobs. So, from about age 13 on, around 90 percent of our energy and discipline is devoted to overcoming this, to behave like civilized human beings and not like stray dogs in a meat market. One where instead of eating the meat, they want to hump it.......

Do you see what I'm getting at? Go look outside. See those cars driving by? Every car being driven by a man was designed and built and bought and sold with you in mind. The only reason why small, fuel-efficient or electric cars don't dominate the roads is because we want to look cool in our cars, to impress you.

Go look at a city skyline. All those skyscrapers? We built those to impress you, too. All those sports you see on TV? All of those guys learned to play purely because in school, playing sports gets you laid. All the music you hear on the radio? All of those guys learned to sing and play guitar because as a teenager, they figured out that absolutely nothing gets women out of their pants faster. It's the same reason all of the actors got into acting.

All those wars we fight? Sure, at the upper levels, in the halls of political power, they have some complicated reasons for wanting some piece of land or access to some resource. But on the ground? Well, let me ask you this -- historically, when an army takes over a city, what happens to the women there?

It's all about you. All of it. All of civilization.

I don't realize if Wong gets this, but he basically just argued that since women are just so asexual, we're also basically unartistic, unambitious, and even though he decried treating women like decorative objects, I don't really see how we fit into this. We don't have any desire to impress men and get sex, so we're never going to build and invent, right? 

I have a counter-theory. I don't believe that men build civilization to impress lazy women who keep saying no to sex, because we don't understand what it's really like to want it. I believe men built most things because women were shut out of political power, job opportunities, and education for most of history, and instead forced into servitude towards men in the home. I believe my theory has a lot of evidence for it, in the form of all of history. Plus, this theory doesn't do much to explain all the gay men who have been creators throughout history, of which there have been many. You know, it's not like Michelangelo was rumored to be doing the Sistine Chapel to catch a lady's eye. His theory doesn't really explain how it is that women, once given the opportunity to be creators, take it. 

Wong means well, but he's letting men off the hook. By making misogyny about men's supposedly overpowering sex drive, he makes it seem primal and nearly unavoidable. After all, if nature dictates that men want it and women don't, then there's not much you can do about it. 

But I think misogyny is rooted in something else, something Wong does hint at before scrambling away to make more jokes about how women can't know what it's like to really feel sexual desire. It's hard to talk about, because it cuts right to the bone in something humans don't like to talk about, but it's about the will to dominate. I think men become misogynists not because their intense horniness short circuits their brain. It's because they feel entitled to have women in a submissive position to them. They want to live in a world where women are considered automatically dumber, where women are expected to clean up after them, wipe their brows, and kiss their asses, all with a smile on our faces and without asking much more in return but an occasional bit of jewelry and a door-opening, which is just as much about the man feeling more powerful as it is about being nice to the woman. They want to control women sexually, not because they're more horny, but because sexual control is just one more form of control. Misogynists especially dislike women having reproductive control, because if a woman can't control her pregnancies, she's going to be more dependent on a man, and they believe that makes it easier for them. If women are dependent, you don't need to be nice to your wife to get her to stay. She doesn't have a choice, and that's how they like it. They believe in their hearts that women are inferior, and fear that if they're disproved in this contention, their entire sense of self will crumble, because that sense of self is all built on being a "man". They get angry and mock other men they believe are trying to hard to be pleasing to women---genuinely pleasing, not faux "build skyscrapers" pleasing---but men who take care of their looks to be sexually attractive (they get dismissed as "metrosexual") or men who treat women with respect. Those men are seen as undermining the united front to artificially lower women's standards. It's not an accident that the biggest misogynists are the first to flip their shit at the idea of swapping out big greasy burgers for some broccoli on occasion.

I see why the "men are hornier" gambit has appeal, even to men who should know better. For one thing, it allows you to feel superior to women and cling to that just a little bit, while wearing a false humility (gosh, we men are so hard to control!). Also, there's a rough sort of sense to it. Our sexual market is such that men are expected to do most of the pursuing and women are supposed to be more reticient, and this can feel for men who find it frustrating to be rejected like women just want it less. But it's actually just a result of the system. Men only hit on women they find attractive, so they get a skewed perception of how that works. Just because a man hits you up doesn't make him hot, you know. If women hit on men more, maybe men would notice that they don't actually want to fuck every woman they meet, because they mentally just exclude women they don't find attractive from the category "women". 

More importantly, men get to feel hornier because they're socially supported in this. The whole of society is geared toward titillating men and discouraging female sexual desire. It's inherent to the Nice Guy® complaint, where men are entitled to feel physical attraction, but a woman who wants more than "nice" is shallow. It's evident in the way men and women dress, with women always mindful to wear stuff that makes them sexually attractive, whereas men have the opposite problem, and have to avoid being too sexualized lest they seem feminine. Naked women are draped over every inch of public space, and the internet is full of visually interesting porn for men, but our society barely can imagine what it would be like to try to attract a female eye. (Though "True Blood" is really making up ground rapidly on this front.) Men seem hornier in no small part because their sexuality is celebrated and codified. It's easy for men to know right away how to be sexual, whereas women are still largely expected to figure it out for themselves---and even that's a recent invention, because pre-feminism, women were mostly just expected to do what men wanted. To a large extent, that's still true, but we're at least getting a few glimmers of liberty for women, but in many ways, the past few generations of women are real pioneers in trying to figure out what sex means when we're actually allowed to want it, even a little.

But even with the small amount of freedom we have, it's worth noting that a 30-year-old woman who admitted obliquely to having had non-procreative sex in Congress created a month long, nationwide scandal. Until that kind of pressure disappears completely, we can't even begin to measure what the "natural", unadulterated female sexuality would look like, and how it would compare to the celebrated and constantly titillated male sexuality. 

Either way, stop blaming sex for misogyny. If all men wanted was women to fuck them more, the English language wouldn't even have the word "slut" in it. 

I'm thrilled that women's rights are a front-and-center issue this campaign season, but it does come with an excrutiating price tag: Conservatives bloviating about how they looooooove "strong women". This is a standard talking point that Republicans trot out when they're called out for anti-feminism. At its core, it's a nonsensical claim and works more as a distraction than a real argument. The image of the steel magnolia---a woman who dispatches her responsibilities with ease, who has a lot of energy and occasionally is sassy to her husband, because she's far more competent than he---has a lot of emotional resonance, for conservatives, as well as feminists. Feminists admire the Joan Holloway type for her survival skills, because we know exactly how hard it is to survive in a system that is designed to make you fail no matter what you do. Conservatives love the "strong woman" image for an entirely different reason: Because the existence of these women means we don't need feminism, in their minds. The underlying argument of, "I don't hate women. I love strong women," is that we need patriarchy as a sort of litmus test for which women are deserving and which are not. If you can live under a system where you're a second class citizen, where you get paid less for equal work, where you don't have reproductive rights, and where men have a lot of personal power over you---and you can still get out of bed every day, put on your lipstick, and get shit done? Well, you've done proved you're a "strong woman". Here's a Mother's Day card as a reward, and remember, you don't need no stupid feminism. Just don't ask any hard questions about why men aren't tested this way.

Of course, there is a teeny bit of kinda feminism in the conservative wanking about "strong women". The celebrants of "strong women" are willing to go way out on a limb and allow that their favored form of female not be burned at the stake for her scary mouthiness. Conservatives love to pat themselves on the back for believing that the 19th amendment shouldn't be repealed or for allowing that some women may be allowed to draw a salary under some circumstances, and then get all faux-outraged when feminists say the vote is great, but it's really not enough. (We gave you the vote! How dare you actually use it for something, you stupid bitches, er, strong women?) I have a couple of examples from the campaign trail that have amused me.

Example #1: Rick Santorum is trying to suggest he doesn't hate women just because he believes their god-given role is to spend 30 years of their lives constantly pregnant. He's deploying his wife to defend him against charges of misogyny, since that's become women's work in Republican circles. 

Her argument is that Rick loves---you guessed it---strong women. Women with the strength to stand on two legs! Especially women who develop healthy pelvic muscles so that they don't have to wear pee pads all the time even after baby 8 or 10. By god, he's going to let her go back to work after all her kids are grown, which will be some time in her 70s, a well-known time in a woman's life when employers are scrambling over themselves to hire her for that resume with a 40-year gap in it. Did she mention that he supports her right to vote, because she votes for him? Who the fuck needs feminism?

But Rick Santorum is hardly the only man crowing about how his love of "strong women" means he doesn't have to answer for his votes against women's rights. Scott Brown has taken a hit for misogynist behavior and policy, and so he pulled the "strong woman" card out to argue against needing that stupid feminism stuff.

Brown was introduced at the press conference by his wife, former Boston television reporter Gail Huff.

Huff wasn't actively involved in the campaign that led to Brown's 2010 special election win to the seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy, but said she's able now to be more involved since she's no longer a reporter in Boston.

Brown said he's used to being surrounded by "strong willed women" and Huff said the family, including Brown and the couple's two daughters Ayla and Arianna, have open discussions around the kitchen table.

"The girls, now that they are 23 and 21, have very, very specific ideas about what they do and don't believe and they chime in with a lot of great ideas, and it's wonderful for both of us to be able to bounce things off of them because their generation sees things very differently," Huff said.

Brown declined to be more specific about the family discussions, but when a reporter asked Huff to name an issue that she and the couple's daughter have educated Brown on, Brown chimed in and said "how to cook."

"Yeah, how to cook, how to sew, how to clean," Huff added.

So let's see here. Brown deserves a cookie because he believes women are permitted to have political opinions, though he won't go so far as to suggest that anyone do something foolish like listen to those opinions. Women having opinions on politics is a lot like letting a kid repeat the plot of the movie he just saw to you: You let them rattle on because it's cute that they're trying, but they're not really ready to be Roger Ebert or anything. 

But that doesn't mean women don't get to know stuff! I mean, they know how to cook and how to clean and even how to sew! They are so strong. Even in a world where the men around them think of them as slightly dim children who can't be trusted with grown-up stuff like reproductive rights, they get up in the morning and get those stubborn eggs into that heavy frying pan. They are so strong! And feminism is trying to take that away, ladies. They want you to forsake the condescending head pats from men who think you're stupid, and replace those head pats with equality and respect. Which sounds good on paper, but you know what happens then, right? No more head pats. Are you sure you can give that up? 

So, Sandra Fluke---Georgetown law student---testified in front of Congress about using birth control and the expense. The response from the right is to act like she's the first woman on Earth to have confessed to having sex for reasons other than baby-making, and thus to call her the town dump. I wish I could say I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. Rush Limbaugh, who has been married four times and is a well-known fan of taking big bottles of Viagra to the Dominican Republic, said this about Fluke:

LIMBAUGH: What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic] who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex. What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.

On top of the baffling assertion that there's a direct correlation between the amount of sex you're having and the price of the birth control pill (believe me, they charge you the same whether you're getting laid or not), you of course have the notion that any woman who has sex is a "slut" and a "prostitute". And I mean any. Limbaugh tries to give himself cover by saying the "taxpayer" would be on the hook, but in fact, this is about whether or not insurance plans women pay into should cover their fucking health care. More importantly, the idea that contraception is health care and not just some per-fuck admittance fee for sex has long been established. Conservatives are pretending that Obama is requiring insurance companies to cover something they've never covered before, but in fact, they already cover it. The only thing that this is about is whether or not that coverage should be universal and treated like preventive care, which means offered without a co-pay. For instance, my insurance covers about 40% of the cost now and will, starting in 2013, cover 100%. Since 99% of American women have used contraception and since insurance companies already accept that contraception is a service that should be covered, Limbaugh basically characterized the 99% of American women as "sluts" and "prostitutes". I don't imagine you get a pass if you've only used condoms, either, because roughly 0% of women who use only condoms do so out of some noble unwillingness to accept insurance coverage for their contraception. Additionally, women who only use condoms still get other kinds of health care related to being sexual, such as Pap smears and gynecological consultations on their contraception choices, which, by Limbaugh's logic, puts them firmly in the "slut" and "prostitute" category, since insurance covers that sexuality-related care as well. So I suppose that puts the percentage of American women who are "sluts" at the level All in his world, except maybe a handful of lifelong celibates. And he probably has a few choice, judgmental words for those women, as well.

Which shouldn't be a surprise. Conservatives try to pretend like these blatant anti-woman attitudes are about something other than just seething hatred of women for being female, but this entire contraception debacle has demonstrated that nope, it's just misogyny. For instance, check out the Craig Bannister piece I blogged about at XX Factor today. After going on at length about how women on the pill must all be filthy sluts who spend all day sucking and fucking, Bannister ends his piece with the unapologetic double standard:

If these co-eds really are this guy crazy, I should've gone to law school.

Yep! He trotted out the "if a woman has sex with one man, she will have sex with anyone who asks" line. (Which is, may I remind you, often used to rationalize rape---the "will have sex" turns into "has to have sex, whether she likes it or not" very easily.) I thought I was beyond being surprised by the levels of ignorance, misogyny and prudery that emanate from the right, but nope! Here is a grown ass man who actually still believes that single women can be divided into virgins and "whores"*, and of course still believes that having sex is roughly the worst possible thing a woman can do, a man having sex is just being a man. 

To be clear, women are perfectly capable of dishing out the misogyny as well. Female misogynists are a special breed, morons who think they can escape being classified as women---and therefore as filthy whores who don't deserve any respect---if they hate on other women just as much as the male misogynists do. This is a uniquely stupid thing to believe, because not only do they not get a pass (remember, Limbaugh basically classified all women as "sluts" and "prostitutes"), but their male counterparts who are using them are probably laughing at them behind their backs for being such tools. With that in mind, I give you Tina Korbe of Hot Air:

At one point, Fluke mentions a friend who felt “embarrassed and powerless” when she learned her insurance didn’t cover contraception. Can you imagine how proud and empowered that same friend would be if she learned she has the ability to resist her own sexual urges? We can only assume she doesn’t know that because Fluke and she both labor under the illusion that contraception is a medical necessity.

Conservatives are their own worst enemy when trying to persuade the rest of us that women (and let's be clear, as the David Albo example proves, they are only referring to women---Albo felt so entitled to sex, he demanded an apology for not getting any) are "empowered" by not having sex for no good reason. After all, if pointless self-deprivation was so empowering, then folks like Korbe wouldn't be trying to push their lifestyle choices on the rest of us in a desperate bid to feel better about themselves by dragging everyone else down. Korbe just comes across as someone who is afraid of sexually satisfied people, because as long as we're walking around and being happy, we're making her look like a fool for depriving herself for no good reason. After all, she describes women who use contraception as "animals", even though in reality, using contraception is one of those things that sets us apart from other animals. In fact, I'd point out that most animals fuck according to the ideal Rick Santorum model: joylessly, infrequently, and only for procreation. Most even wait until the female is ovulating, to minimize the time they spend rutting! If your objective is to not be like other animals, the best strategy is to fuck all the time and take advantage of our unique ability to enjoy sex for its own sake. 

Beyond all the hatefulness, prudery, and misogyny is just the plain weirdness of all of this. Reading the right wing reaction to Sandra Fluke, you get the strong impression that they think that a single woman in her mid-20s who is sexually active is some kind of freakish outlier, as if Fluke admitted to being a mercenary with side business in running drugs to pay off law school. In reality, Fluke is as normal and American as apple pie. Being sexually active before marriage is just what people do; 93% of Americans have premarital sex before turning 30. We can safely guess there's no love here for women whose main pregnancy prevention strategy is to only have sex with women. Additionally, since no distinctions between women who use contraception in or out of marriage are being made here, women who use it to have monogamous sex with their husbands are being rolled into the "town dump" category as well, which means that basically, the utterly normal and nearly universal experience of being female is being characterized on the right as something disgusting and beyond the pale. Which is just a long, roundabout way to say they straight up hate women.

*Scare quotes because I want to be clear that I don't think that being a sex worker is shameful. I hope we're all adult enough here to understand that references to "whores" and "prostitutes" are being used to shame, and that's why they're offensive, not because being a sex worker is inherently shameful. 

As usual when women complain about sexual harassment and sexist wankery, there's a lot of bullshit excuse-making. Todays theme is, "It's only scary, uncomfortable and offensive to women to say sexist shit to them because women choose to feel bad!" It's the sexism apologist's version of "The Secret". Lots of it on this thread, with examples like:

The “C” word is another example of investing a word with much more power than any word deserves.  It has now become the taboo word for women (feminist or not), like the “N” word or the “F” word.  Only members of the group to which the words describe can use them. I don’t miss them but giving words such power to hurt gives too much power to people who would hurt you.

And the more illiterate and egregious:

But what I’m saying is that simply calling a woman you hate a ‘cunt’ is not necessarily sexist. It should really only be like calling a man a ‘bastard’ or a ‘twat’. But because our society (and sometimes feminism) infantilizes women it’s seen as worse.

And you see it all over this situation. TL;DR: A teenage girl who is an atheist activist posted a picture of herself with an open-mouthed "gleeful" face on Facebook. A bunch of men whose brains are addled from spending way too much time looking at porn saw an open female mouth on the internet, and confused about why there wasn't a cock in it already suggested to this 16-year-old that she would be doing everyone a favor contributing her image to a catalog of erotic images. When told, rightfully, that they are creepy motherfuckers, they whined and complained that people who believe that one should remember that women are more than sperm-draining machines are, to steal a phrase from Sady Doyle, trying to snatch away their boners. 

All of which is why I'm not going to bother to argue any of this crap down, but instead to post this video, the premiere episode of "Fridays at Galweather", a new web series about management consultants on the one day a week they spend at the office. Maybe coming from a bunch of male comedians, the point will go down easier than having to listen to some stupid bitches with their constant yakking about how unfair sexism is. 

It's 4 minutes and well worth your time. 

Komen for the Cure's decision to break with Planned Parenthood over a Congressional investigation based on doctored videos was, all things being told, a bad one. Bad for women, bad for Komen's credibility, and, as TBogg points out, bad for Komen's future viability. 

TBogg points out that Komen's new fellow travelers are about as concerned with women's health as I am with NASCAR standings, which is part of the problem. But Komen has a deeper issue here: the impetus for those anti-choice conservatives flocking to their side in the first place.

Komen brings in substantially north of $300 million in revenue. Its grants to Planned Parenthood totalled roughly $600,000. This means that Komen's new friends were withholding support over .2% of its funding going to an organization that performed abortions with entirely separate money. Now that they've made the political decision to side with people whose main source of political knowledge is the archive of false e-mails at Snopes, there's a larger and far more precarious issue: anti-choicers' invariable tendency toward rubedom.

Within a month, there will be an e-mail or a WorldNetDaily article or a Washington Examiner column. And the column will allege, through a vastly simplified chain of events, that Komen is once again engaged in the perfidy of tangential liberalism. People for the American Way once co-sponsored a 5K, Komen let halal companies use the pink ribbon, Hillary Clinton gets mammograms; something is going to set them off.

Eventually, Komen's not going to be able to placate them, probably because the actual controversy will make no sense whatsoever. After a few weeks of trying to understand why it can't partner with Campbell's Soup, the donations rewarding this week's decision will dry up. The Planned Parenthood investigation will go away. All Komen will be left with is a vastly reduced donor pool, and a large group of former donors that either remember Komen's actual betrayal, or will spend every minute looking to manufacture betrayals.

They should've just stuck to Awareness Doritos.

This story is definitely flying around feminist circles. Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, two investigative reporters for the Boston Globe, have published an excerpt from their new book about Mitt Romney in Vanity Fair. In it, they tell the story of a woman who was in Romney's church and when she was pregnant with her second child---while single---Romney, acting as a bishop, paid her a visit. He then pressured her to give up her baby for adoption, which she most adamantly didn't want to do.

Hayes was deeply insulted. She told him she would never surrender her child. Sure, her life wasn't exactly the picture of Rockwellian harmony, but she felt she was on a path to stability. In that moment, she also felt intimidated. Here was Romney, who held great power as her church leader and was the head of a wealthy, prominent Belmont family, sitting in her gritty apartment making grave demands. "And then he says, 'Well, this is what the church wants you to do, and if you don't, then you could be excommunicated for failing to follow the leadership of the church,'" Hayes recalled. It was a serious threat. At that point Hayes still valued her place within the Mormon Church. "This is not playing around," she said. "This is not like 'You don't get to take Communion.' This is like 'You will not be saved. You will never see the face of God.'" Romney would later deny that he had threatened Hayes with excommunication, but Hayes said his message was crystal clear: "Give up your son or give up your God."

It's a believable story, even though the church denies that they prescribe excommunication for the "sin" of single motherhood. After all, it sounds like he didn't phrase it to her that way, more more as a matter of disobedience. More to the point, I can see Romney, who is an imperious fuckhead, getting rapidly frustrated that this woman didn't immediately give in to his demands, so he could wrap up his church duties and return to his beloved business of cannibalizing other businesses and putting people out of work. Or whatever it was he had to do that day. Either way, I don't imagine he thought much of some woman low on the totem pole talking back to him instead of just doing what she was told. In frustration, bringing up the possibility of excommunication to get his way? Totally plausible.

(It's worth noting at this  point that Jezebel is right that his behavior, if true, is beyond the pale.  But from what I understand, Mormons don't believe in hell, per se, so perhaps this threat isn't quite as dire as when it's made by Catholics using the threat of god's punishment to control women's reproductive choices. It's like only 99.9% evil instead of 100% evil. But any Mormons or former Mormons are free to 'splain in comments.)

What's interesting to me is that the Romney campaign is denying the story. This is interesting to me, because it suggests that even out-of-touch Mitt Romney realizes that pressuring a woman to put a baby up for adoption has become politically toxic. This is an interesting and positive development, if that is in fact his concern. 

For as long as I remember, the anti-choice movement has heralded adoption as the "perfect" alternative to abortion, usually accompanies with platitudes like, "Abortion is never the answer." They implied that growing a baby for 9 months, giving birth, and then simply giving the baby to a "deserving" couple and walking away like it never happened was really not much harder than getting an abortion, and anyone who disputed that was just being selfish. The argument demonstrates the fundamental refusal of anti-choicers to see women---all women, even sexually active ones (aka, most women)---as full human beings. The value of women's labor, and the suffering that women reported was a common side effect of giving a baby away? Waved off, because they quite literally don't see it as mattering. Women are basically breeding animals in their view, and just like you don't ask your breeding dog if she wants pups when it's time to bring the stud around, you certainly do't worry if the women you see as stupid sluts get their hearts broken producing babies for "deserving" couples. You even take umbrage at the idea that women should be compensated for their labor with money.* 

For whatever reason, however, the coldness of this point of view has suddenly become apparent, and anti-choicers are scrambling to seem a little less heartless. I mean, they aren't becoming less heartless---their view is still that women who have sex outside of marriage deserve no better than to be forced to bear children and then to have those children taken away from them---but they are beginning to realize that they should probably at least pretend to support other options besides shotgun marriages and giving the baby up for adoption, if they want to present the false image of caring about women. That's why they occasionally make a big fuss over a single mother like Bristol Palin (while of course mindlessly condemning most single mothers who aren't white, wealthy, and Christian-identified). It's about creating the image that they will take single motherhood as a lesser of two evils, because they know their absolutist view of "get married or give it away" isn't flying with the public as much anymore. This feigned support for women who choose single motherhood over abortion is all smoke and mirrors, of course, since the Christian right by and large still doesn't support any social programs that would make raising a child by yourself easier, but that they feel the need to pretend to support single mothers is an interesting development.

Romney's denial suggests that he gets that. The aggressive attacks on single mothers makes it incredibly clear that the opposition to abortion is not about "life", but about patriarchal power and controlling women's reproductive capacities.That anti-choicers have to tone down the sexist aggression, at least for P.R. reasons, is a victory for feminists. While it's frustrating that they pretend to uphold our belief that women are valuable while pushing legislation to relegate women to second class status, it's interesting that our values are so ascendent that they have no other choice. Which, of course, is all the more reason to keep these older stories of women being coerced and threatened into giving babies up for adoption in the public eye. Antis shouldn't be allowed to hide their point of view on this so very easily.

*Yes, yes, I get that there are women who give babies up and walk away and it's not a big deal for them. But that's surprisingly rare. The evidence for this contention is that after maternity homes, which were basically places where pregnant women and girls were made to believe they had no choice but to give up their babies, were shut down, the number of healthy, adoptable babies on the market plummeted. Meanwhile, there was a concurrent rise in the rate of single motherhood, which indicates that it's not legal abortion that really did the adoption market in, but women keeping their babies. In fact, the difficulties white Christian couples have in finding white, healthy babies to adopt is one of the reasons the anti-choice movement is so extreme: They want to restore the supply side, by force, if necessary. Which it appears to be.

Few things provoke a man gripped by anxious masculinity like the idea of a woman reading, at least a woman reading anything beyond patriarchal assignments in man-pleasing. As any female bookworm can attest, almost no public behavior you can perform is more likely to get men to bother you and demand to know what you’re doing than simply reading a book. It makes sense. Few behaviors signal subjectivity more than reading. A person reading is existing in that moment only for themselves, enjoying the pleasure of being immersed in thought. Reading anything outside of instructive material (make-up guides, cookbooks) suggests a woman may have a reason to exist outside of being support staff for men. No, more than suggests. Puts it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Which is why, historically, the idea of a woman reading has causes so much strife. Female bookworms have been denounced from newsletters and pulpits, and subjected to claims that they were unmarriageable, corrupted, and somehow broken as women.

I wish that I could say that anxious men have abandoned the terror that a reading woman strikes in their hearts, but alas, as those of us frequently interrupted in public for the task of daring to pay attention to our books instead of looking around for a man to serve, it is not to be. And sadly, a 15-year-old atheist girl on Reddit learned the hard way this week what men who don’t believe women are people will do when confronted with hard evidence that woman like to do people-things like read: they will swarm, angrily insisting that you aren’t a person, but merely a hole to fuck. And they’ll do it while pretending to be “joking”.

Rebecca Watson has the blow-by-blow report here, but to summarize: In an atheist subreddit, a 15-year-old girl put up a sweet picture of herself holding Carl Sagan’s marvelous book The Demon-Haunted World, and noting that her religious mother gave it to her. The reaction was hundreds of comments of the “I’d like to stuff a cock in it, ha ha that’s illegal!” variety. Rebecca has the rundown, including how much that got upvoted. Turns out a lot of men are really, really afraid of women who have their own minds, even if those minds lead them to agree on stuff like atheism! After all, a woman with her own mind is likely to form judgments about you, and if you’re a prick, they run a strong chance of being negative judgments. Those women need to be smothered with sexual harassment until they learn a valuable lesson of never appearing to exist for any other reason than cock-sucking and sandwich-making.

But what struck me as emblematic of this entire clusterfuck was that someone posted this cartoon:

Rebecca touched on the most obvious reason this cartoon is wrong, which is that it argues, incorrectly, that posing in the picture with an object that you’re showing off is “female” behavior. Actually, both men and women do it, as Rebecca proves beyond a shadow of a doubt. The cartoonist probably thinks it’s “female” behavior because he only looks at pictures of women for very long, and forgets the dudes he saw do this. Confirmation bias at its worst.

But there’s so much more fail in this. Let us count the ways that this cartoon is epically wrong:

*The assumption that if a behavior is coded “female” instead of “male”, that automatically makes it inferior. This is a really common and unquestioned assumption that even feminists tend to make, especially if they’re newbies. But if you step back and think about it, even if only women posed with objects they want to show off, what’s wrong with that? It’s never articulated, beyond just “women do it, and men don’t”, which isn’t even true. People enjoy pictures with people in them, so why not put people in your pictures? After all, the point is community-building and having fun; there's no reason to take a picture of a fucking book and put it online outside of that. 

*Women can't win, believe me. Knowing that you're going to be accused of preening and vanity if you put pictures of yourself online, I've often avoided doing so. Invariably, what I'm rewarded with is accusations that I'm avoiding doing so because I'm ugly and don't want people to know. Putting the pictures up shuts up the "you're ugly" thing, and brings in the "you're vain" thing, no matter how non-sexualized the picture is. The point is that all choices a woman can make with a camera are wrong. This is basically a way of saying that women should simply have no agency or subjectivity; the problem isn't the choice in pictures, but that she thinks she has a right to  operate a camera and put stuff online at all.

*Blaming the victim. Part of the reason to put up this cartoon is to rationalize the "stuff a cock in it" reaction. The implicit argument here is that men can't help themselves, and seeing a picture of a woman on the internet causes such a rush of lust that they are forced---forced, I tell you---to sexually harass her and even cross the line into making rape threats disguised as jokes. The implication is that women have to do all the work to prevent this from happening, and if a woman puts up a picture that features her visage in it, then she was clearly asking to be abused. There's even an implication that she secretly likes it. 

*Reducing women to sex objects. This cartoon assumes that the only value that the image of a woman might have is sexual, thus the implicit argument that women are trying to be provocative by putting their pictures online. In reality, as demonstrated by the many men who put their pictures online, there's a social value in showing pictures of yourself beyond offering yourself up as spank material. In this girl's case, it's clear that the message being sent is, "I'm so happy today, look at me smile!" If this sets off alarm bells, I suggest it's time to do a little more interior work on your assumptions about women and what they are allowed to be in our society. Humans are social animals, and as our society moves more online, it's useful to replicate some of our social gestures---such as showing our face and smiling---to convey the same ideas we would in one-on-one interactions. Excluding half the human race from that process by saying that any picture of them in inherently porn and can have no other function is wrong.

I expect the "it's just a cartoon!" reactions, so to cut that off at the pass: You do humor a disservice when you use the "just a joke" excuse. Humor that doesn't have a point isn't funny. Since good humor has a point to it, that point can and should be analyzed. Humor is like any other rhetorical device; the content the rhetoric is conveying matters. I accuse people of being humorless all the time, sure, but that's usually because they don't understand the nuances of a joke. This cartoon is a sledgehammer, however, and can be treated as such.

Which leads me to the second point: Rebecca and everyone who has linked her post has received this reaction, invariably from dudes: "Oh boy! People on the internet are mean! Big news!" Which is an attempt to deflect and silence the criticisms. This is why I'm not going to allow that attempt at shaming to work on me: In actuality, this stuff matters. When you step into a male-dominated space where men feel free to dogpile you in an effort to run you off---even if it's a virtual space---you learn really quickly that merely by being female, you are somehow controversial. That feeling sticks with you. As I noted in the comments at Skepchick, situations like this color a woman's entire world. Knowing that so many men find you threatening and have a desire to put you in your place makes a surprising number of otherwise simple interactions fraught. The example I used in comments as going into record stores, at least the more underground ones that sell a lot of vinyl. Often I'll go vinyl shopping, and I'll be the only woman in a record store. Even though I pretty much never run into problems with it, my frequent interactions with men who guard what they believe are "their" spaces elsewhere has made me wary, afraid that the guys in there are secretly looking for reasons to judge me or objectify me or somehow justify their hostility to me. In a sense, it's paranoia---like I said, that actually never does happen, at least in record stores---but it's an ingrained fear because that sort of thing happens all the time to me and to other women who are somehow seen as invading "male" spaces and acting like we have equal rights to enjoy X, Y, or Z. I feel that I'm often the only woman in these sorts of situations shows my fears are widely held, and that there's a vicious cycle created where even friendlier male-dominated spaces tend to stay male-dominated because women have, for good reason, so much fear of coming into male-dominated spaces. You can't tell the friendly ones from the ones where everyone is going to bum-rush you with the "stuff a cock in it" mentality just by looking, you know.  For what it's worth, I tend to go in and do my thing anyway, because a) screw 'em if they don't like it and b) you don't know for sure that they're easily provoked by independent women until they actually show their colors. But it's understandable that many women aren't going to bother.

The result is that women's freedom and options are subtly constrained in all sorts of ways. Want to be a music nerd while female? Since the literal first step of walking in the door is emotionally fraught, even starting out and seeing if you like it is often a step that women aren't going to take. Think you might be into reading comic books? Many women will never find out, because the obstacles of men gawking and acting like assholes outweigh the long-term rewards of finding some titles to get into. Want to get into an atheist forum online? Be prepared to told in many ways, over and over, that you're not wanted as anything but a sucking-and-fucking machine. A lot of men tell women in these situations to suck it up and just do it, but that seriously misunderstands human nature. We want to do these things---go record shopping, buy comics, join forums---for the same reason men do, to have fun. If it's not fun, we're not going to do it. The men who harass women understand this perfectly well, which is why they do it. They want theirs to be male-only spaces, and use harassment as a tool to get that. It's worth pointing out that women aren't the only victims of this, though that's reason enough to speak out. Men who want to have a more integrated experience also are. Since, like I said, women can't tell if a roomful of men is safe or not just by looking at it, they often just err on the side of caution. Therefore, male-dominated spaces that might actually be welcoming more intergration and diversity don't get what they want, and it's the fault of guys who harass in other male-dominated spaces. 

That's why it matters. It's not just about Reddit, but about women being told over and over again that they aren't welcome and that men have a right to drum you out and harass you, and it's your fault if you'd rather not bother. Speaking out and pushing back matters, because when you react to the harassment campaigns with silence, you're accepting the status quo how it is. And that's unacceptable. 

It's a real shame to see that a steady campaign of misogynist blather from so-called "men's rights activists" in the comments at Good Men Project has poisoned founder Tom Matlack's mind. Personally, I'm a big fan of just banning MRAs. They have nothing of value to add to a conversation, and exist online solely to disrupt any conversation they fear might lead others towards reaching the conclusion that women are people. The whole mission behind the Good Men Project is presumably to advocate for good men, and while they do publish writings by actual good men, they also publish writings by overt misogynists like Paul Elam, who by definition cannot be good men, any more than members of white supremacist groups can be called "good men". Differing viewpoints is one thing, but promoting the work of open bigots is just fucked up. 

Last week, Tom wrote a risible, sexist piece of garbage titled "Being A Dude Is A Good Thing". In it, he made a bunch of baseless assertions right out of the anti-feminist handbook, claiming that men are blamed for "everything", that men are oppressed by a sea of nagging wives who will never accept them for who they are, that men and women are "different" and women oppress men by not accepting men's differences. Seriously, he went so far as to claim that men don't speak up, basically because women won't let them, because we use our almighty bitch powers to silence any disagreement. For example:

One close friend jokes, “When speaking to my wife I always make sure to look at the ground in deference. And I make sure not to make any sudden movements.” I’ve watched him. He loves his wife.

He’s a very competent human being. But with her he’s decided the only way to survive is to submit. The female view is the right view. The male view just gets you into trouble.

This, he treated as a universal example of the male condition. He also claimed that the pop culture media marginalizes male voices. 

I responded at GMP with a long piece that quoted Tom heavily to avoid accusations of bashing strawmen---Tom spent a lot of time on Twitter denying what he actually wrote, so I had to---but my argument was simple and easy to understand:

1) I wanted examples of these "differences" between men and women that Tom alluded to, but didn't describe.

2) I wanted evidence of how women are not accepting men, and what acceptance would look like. 

That's basically it. Tom made the outrageous and risible accusation that men are being oppressed as a group because women as a group don't accept our inherent differences with men, and instead just blame men for "everything". I wanted examples. Evidence. If you're going to make such a broad, hateful accusation, you really need to prove it, or even just provide a single piece of supporting evidence. Or even just define your fucking terms such as "difference" or "accept". Many feminists linked my response and said they agreed with it, so I think it's safe to say my objections were representative of the general objections of feminists.

So today, Tom responds with this:

What I don’t understand is the rage directed at me when I try to talk about one man’s perspective, albeit partial and deeply flawed for sure, of male emotion. Even the idea that women, or some women, would prefer men to be more like them than more manly sends the twitter-sphere into orbit. The idea that it’s not okay to treat all men as rapists, despite the preponderance of rape committed by individual men, is wrong. And, when I say that I believe treating every black man as a criminal just because there are one million of them behind bars is just as abhorrent as treating all men as rapists – it brings strangers to my door to call me not only a sexist but racist and deeply offensive.

This isn’t the feminism that I used to know. The feminism around our kitchen table was about equal rights. I agree whole-heartily with men and women having equal access to everything. I don’t agree that men and women are the same. Far from it. And maybe that is the sticking point here.

He goes on in this vein for awhile, making more risible and unsubstantiated accusations towards feminists, such as claiming that we treat every man like a rapist. (Something that the men in my life would find very surprising indeed!) What he doesn't do is address a single one of my criticisms. Not one. He just whines and whines and whines that he's such a nice guy and feminists are just meany-heads that claim (fill in X that we didn't ever actually claim). His obstinate refusal to either address my actual criticisms or even acknowledge them leads me to one, inescapable conclusion: He doesn't have an answer. He doesn't have evidence or specific examples of the oppression men supposedly suffer at the hands of this bitch-archy. He doesn't have examples of the "differences" between men and women, nor does he have evidence that women categorically refuse to accept men who are behaving like decent human beings. 

He's got nothing. 

When you make a bunch of baseless, unevidenced, generalizing arguments about a group of people---in this case, feminists and women as a group---and when challenged, cannot and will not provide evidence, you're not making argument. You're simply being prejudiced. Tom is whining that feminists don't feel empathy for "men", even though I quoted men extensively in my rebuttal to him and demonstrated ample empathy and understanding of men---starting with the understanding that "men" are not a monolith. He's got nothing. He's just spouting sexist blather and, when called on it, whining about meanie feminists instead of proving his arguments or hell, even giving a specific example of what the fuck he's talking about when he accuses women as a group of being so mean and unaccepting of men. 

It's a real shame to see this happen. I think that the idea of the Good Men Project is a great one, which is why I've been so supportive of the project. There are a lot of good men in this world, and they deserve a voice to talk about manhood and trying to be a good man in a society that so frequently defines masculinity as sexist and mean. But the bare minimum of being a good man is striving not to be sexist. Without that, the term "good man" is meaningless, really, because it defines "good man" so broadly as to be meaningless. As a general rule, I ignore anti-feminists who spew bile about women all day on the internet, but I responded to Tom because I thought he meant well and merely had a brain fart. Now that he's doubling down, however, I'm not so sure. It seems that we're still going to have to wait for a space truly dedicated to giving voice to "good men" and helping define what it means to be a good man in a world where believing women are truly equal is a bare minimum.

The good news is that Man Boobz is still going strong, and this ugly turn at GMP seems to be giving David some grist for his mill. 

So I published a couple of quick pieces, one for Forbes and one for XX Factor, about how Siri is sexist. I got a lot of great responses, including Jill's at Feministe,  but I also got a lot of people talking to me like I'm stupid. Lots and lots of people, especially men, condescendingly explaining that Siri can't be sexist, because it's just a dumb program that uses pre-existing databases for its searches. And apparently, since "sexism" can only  be used to describe intentional, hateful behavior, things like neglecting to remember that women have needs or employing subconscious stereotypes about women simply can't count as sexism. Gosh, the stuff you have to explain to ladies! They are so dim. Seriously, I got crap like this:

Besides the fairly hateful stereotyping on display, this tells a story of software development that simply doesn't make any sense. Siri is not really a "program" in the sense that it is not something a group of programmers sit and make. Rather, Siri is a collection of many different services presented under a unified interface. This unification (sort of Apple's specialty) might give you the mistaken impression that it is sort of all one piece, but it is less like a "car" and more like a "mixed urban transportation system". 

There's a good chance that the people who wrote the corny jokes don't even know the people who operate the database Siri uses to search for abortion clinics.

He blathered on like this for awhile, but really this is just hand-waving. I'm fully aware that Siri uses other databases to gather information. In fact, two minutes with the software will make that incredibly obvious, which means that this dude quite literally thinks women are so dumb they can't apply common sense understanding to a product distributed by Apple. The thing is, they also tested their own software to make sure that it was working properly, and while they made sure that it knew how to translate "blow job" into an escort service or "Viagra" into a drugstore, it didn't do the same for "birth control" to drug store. That's a huge oversight. 

To the mansplainers of the world, I have one thing I want to ask you very, very nicely to do before you start telling me I don't know what I'm talking about. Just do me this one favor, please: Read my piece before you respond defensively.  If you could, toss in a little reading comprehension, because really, you'll find that you can take your mansplaining efforts and put them elsewhere. Of course, pompously assuming a woman is obviously too stupid to grasp basic information about how computers work is more fun, so I don't imagine this will help, but at least give it a try. Because if you actually read my piece, you'd realize I never said that the staff behind Siri was out to get women. Never. Not once. On the contrary, I said the opposite:

The problem here is one of neglect and not malice. The programmers behind Siri seem to be a bunch of gleefully juvenile dudes who took the time to teach Siri corny jokes, marijuana know-how and sci-fi references, along with teaching it about serious problems that can affect both men and women, such as suicidal thoughts. And even though they really like the idea of sex with women, they seem to have not thought much about the work that women have to put into being sexually accessible. Just as with the mind-boggling name fail of the iPad, the problem seems to be that there simply aren't enough women working in innovative, customer-driven technology services, and the ones who do have to adopt a bro-like attitude that makes them nearly as forgetful of the concerns of ordinary women as the men are.

Oh yeah and: 

The problem isn’t that anyone involved with this hates women. The problem is that they just don’t think about women very much. Siri’s programmers clearly imagined a straight male user as their ideal and neglected to remember the nearly half of iPhone users who are female. 

The defensiveness on display is due in large part to the idea that saying something is "sexist" means that it's deliberately and malciously hateful to women. Or that there's some sort of anti-choice agenda here. (There's not. If you ask Siri directly for Planned Parenthood, it's really helpful.) The thing is, sexism doesn't work that way. I mean, in some cases, sure. But mostly it's stuff like this: casual assumptions about women's abilities and desires, assuming the default is always male, overlooking women's needs, failing to understand that women are subjective people instead of merely objects for you to fuck. A lot of men---and women!---who do these things don't realize what's going on. That was the entire point. This isn't even really about Siri, except insofar as new gadgets and softwares are an interesting hook to get people talking. Like I said at Forbes, it's about "a sexism that’s so interwoven into the fabric of our society that it’s nearly invisible." I'm actually quite confident that Apple will fix the problem in short order; they've basically said that they will. My hope is that they'll go a step beyond that and realize that the dominance of straight white men in Silicon Valley means that certain blinders will be built into their products that limit their reach into larger markets. No one here is out to get anyone else. This is about just getting better, and working better for everyone. No need to be so ruffled by it.

I almost don't want to respond to Katie Roiphe's evidence-free assertion that most sexual harassment is just a matter of over-sensitive feminists trying to destroy the male libido. It's hard for me to look at Roiphe in general, since at 43 years old, she still is playing that game where you try to establish yourself as a fun, free-spirited girl by bashing other women. It's "Curb Your Enthusiasm"-level embarrassing when performed by an 18-year-old who hasn't yet figured out that the men that attracts are no good; but it's epically worse if you're a grown woman with a divorce and a child to raise under your belt. It makes people wonder what kind of bubble you live in that maturity just passed you by. I'll never really be able to forgive Roiphe for characterizing acquaintance rape as nothing but bad sex---and therefore characterizing people like me, who did in fact need help to recover (from being assaulted; I can take bad sex in stride and there is a big fucking difference) completely as being nothing but oversensitive babies---but seeing her trot that same hair-twiriling "you can harass me any time, guys!" act out at her age just fills me with pity. Even as she cashes that NY Times paycheck while doing no real research that could actually upend her baseless assertions. 

Let's start at the top:

After all these years, we are again debating the definition of unwanted sexual advances and parsing the question of whether a dirty joke in the office is a crime. Conservatives have mocked the seriousness of sexual harassment; liberal and mainstream pundits have largely reverted to the pieties of the early ’90s, with the addition of some bloggy irony about irrelevant old men just not getting it.

Got it. Making jokes on blogs is Not Funny---oh my god, the feelings of old men, no matter how rude or bigoted, must be protected at all costs---but waggling your tongue at your coworker until she squirms and wonders if she can escape your attention without being groped is just fun times. If this strikes you as backwards, you forgot the golden rule, which is that having a penis automatically makes you better and more deserving of rights and protection.

The problem is, as it always was, the capaciousness of the concept, the umbrellalike nature of the charge: sexual harassment includes both demanding sex in exchange for a job or a comment about someone’s dress. 

Ah yes, the "just a compliment" excuse. I addressed this recently in a blog post:

You often hear, though far less than you used to, this notion that cat-calling was a compliment and only stupid women could therefore object to it. But it was, along with Hill's mendacity, an article of faith in my community that I was ugly and probably a lesbian and no one male could ever actually want to defile themselves by liking me. Thus, it was literally impossible for a lewd gesture to be a compliment. Most of the boys who did this stuff to me would have sooner endured someone putting a cigarette out on their arms than actually have anyone believe for a second they thought that someone like me was anything but scum for spitting on. I had no illusions, none, about what cat calls and groping meant. It was putting you in your place, a casual reminder that you had no value in their eyes and, more importantly, so little value to the community at large that no one would ever come to your defense. And no one ever did.

The nastiness aimed at those who are just coming out now and those who got settlements in the past also make this clear. Cain was not "complimenting" anyone. There are a couple flavors of sexual harassment, and his favorite seemed to be implying that women he came on to were loose women who had to take all comers. There's nothing wrong with having sex with multiple people, of course, but believing that automatically makes it a compliment when some sexist old fuck implies you're a slut is like saying that because there's nothing wrong with being gay, you should just roll over if someone spits the word "dyke" at you. 

The words used in workshops — “uncomfortable,” “inappropriate,” “hostile” — are vague, subjective, slippery. Feminists and liberal pundits say, with some indignation, that they are not talking about dirty jokes or misguided compliments when they talk about sexual harassment, but, in fact, they are: sexual harassment, as they’ve defined it, encompasses a wide and colorful spectrum of behaviors.

This, of course, is bullshit. She's gone full wingnut now, invoking the common wingnut assumption that the law never has language in it that might, say, need the interpretation of courts and lawyers. In the real world, that's what the law is. Most cases, especially civil cases, aren't about cut-and-dry things like murder. She's simply pretending there's no "reasonable person" standard, even though such a standard is used in many other situations besides sexual harassment. (Where's her broadside against loitering laws, by the way?) The problem with making a long list of words and gestures to refrain from is that it simply gives harassers plausible deniability. If you can't call someone a slut, you just sidle up to her in an enclosed space and start saying things like, "Were you up late last night? With your boyfriend? Is he good to you, if you know what I mean? Does he know what he's doing when he's taking out the trash?" Or whatever. As the Clarence Thomas situation showed, sexual harassers are endlessly inventive with their euphemisms or gestures. If anything, they deliberately act as weird as possible in an act that is so common that psychologists have a name for it: gaslighting, i.e. acting strange to disorient the victim so that she doubts herself or has others doubt her sanity. So you do things like put pubic hairs on Coke cans, because you know that accomplishes the twin goals of making the victim feel harassed while making it hard to explain to others what just happened to her. Thus, the language of "uncomfortable" and "hostlie" is good language, since a reasonable person can see that putting a pubic hair on a Coke can is a hostile gesture designed to make the victim uncomfortable. 

Of course, that's all even just assuming a straight up sexual harassment lawsuit. Most sexual harassment situations are handled by the management and never at all in a court of law. I don't know what kind of world Roiphe lives in, but in the real world, there's a lot of "ambiguous" words in employee rules and handbooks. If your employee handbook, for instance, bans "revealing" clothes, it rarely has a skin-to-cloth ratio spelled out in demonstrable numbers. 

A study recently released by the American Association of University Women shows that nearly half of students in grades 7 through 12 have experienced sexual harassment. Their definition is “unwelcome sexual behavior that takes place in person or electronically.” Which would seem to include anyone who has been called a “whore” or “so hot” on Facebook, or is jokingly or not jokingly propositioned.

Remember in "Carrie" how they pretended to elect her Homecoming Queen just to mock her? In Roiphe's world, Carrie should have been grateful to get the crown, and is merely paranoid for thinking there was any bullying going on there. In the real world, one cannot simply separate an occasional comment from its context, particularly with adolescents. Being called "so hot" by your actual boyfriend is not harassment. Being called "so hot" or a "whore" in the context of pervasive harassment can often be traumatizing. Leora Tanenbaum's book Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation is useful for understanding how serious this problem is.

By the way, I'm looking forward to Roiphe's denunciation of Dan Savage's It Gets Better project, where she scoffs at the idea that pantsing a kid and calling him "fag" on a daily basis should be a matter of concern, and not just a delightful expression of youthful boisterousness that shouldn't be troubled by the high suicide rate amongst gay teens.

The creativity and resourcefulness of the definitions, the broadness and rigor of the rules and codes, have always betrayed their more Orwellian purpose: when I was at Princeton in the ’90s, the guidelines distributed to students about sexual harassment stated, “sexual harassment may result from a conscious or unconscious action, and can be subtle or blatant.” It is, of course, notoriously hard to control one’s unconscious, and one can behave quite hideously in one’s dreams, but that did not deter the determined scolds.

Of course, she's assuming that the harasser is an upstanding citizen who, when confronted, will be completely honest about his intentions, which makes such language strange indeed. In the real world, harassers use Roiphe's excuse that they were just kidding around (and the guy who sexually assaulted me claimed he was just trying to tickle me, though he chose a strange place to tickle!). Creating a "kidding around" loophole for sexual harassers is like creating a "religious belief" loophole for bullies, which is to say it makes the rules meaningless. You'd be surprised what you could claim with a straight face was meant to be a joke or a well-intentioned gesture, including cornering people and groping them. Even stalkers claim they're just trying to be nice. That's why they can't have the loophole. 

If this language was curiously retrograde in the early ’90s, if it harkened back to the protection of delicate feminine sensibilities in an era when that protection was patently absurd, it is even more outdated now when women are yet more powerful and ascendant in the workplace. 

Back to Roiphe's typical schtick of hair-curling and inviting harassment. The problem isn't that many men casually dominate and harass women for shits and giggles, it's that women don't roll over and take it! That makes women "weak"! In reality, of course, standing up to a harasser is an act of courage, especially since you have to put up with shit from the likes of Roiphe. Pandering to sexist men for condescending head pats for being better than most of 'em (but certainly not equal to men) is the weak behavior. 

And, in fact, the majority of women in the workplace are not tender creatures and are largely adept at dealing with all varieties of uncomfortable or hostile situations.

For instance, instead of simply taking it as Roiphe expects you to do, you can stand up to the harasser. Then she'll label you as weak and fragile, but in reality, you're strong. 

Show me a smart, competent young professional woman who is utterly derailed by a verbal unwanted sexual advance or an inappropriate comment about her appearance, and I will show you a rare spotted owl.

You see this excuse trotted out a lot when it comes to sexual abuse and violence, that unless the victim is utterly destroyed, it doesn't count. If we end up learning more about Jerry Sandusky's victims, we may even see it if it's discovered that they did well in school or got a good job. This excuse turns what should be a point of pride for the victim, that they survived, into an excuse for the attacker. Notice, too, that Roiphe requires that the harassment utterly derail you. Perhaps the harassment you're enduring at work is merely causing you to lose sleep, pull into a coccoon, refuse to take assignments that could help out your career for fear of having to spend more time with the harasser, and killing your sex life because the harassment is making you anti-horny. You're not utterly derailed, though! You're still hanging in as you wonder how much of a pay cut you're willing to take to get another job away from the harasser. So by the magical properties of male privilege, his right to come into your office and "compliment" you by humping your desk shouldn't be curtailed, because hey, you're breathing, aren't you?

Worth pointing out again: Roiphe is, without a shred of evidence, claiming that sexual harassment complaints and lawsuits are generally about a single comment or quickly dispatched advance. In reality, for something to rise to the level of sexual harassment, it has to be a "hostile work environment", aka persistent abuse. No one is getting it for one day saying something a little off-color, and it's intellectually dishonest for her to suggest otherwise. In fact, I would call her implication a straight up falsehood. 

Codes of sexual harassment imagine an entirely symmetrical universe, where people are never outrageous, rude, awkward, excessive or confused, where sexual interest is always absent or reciprocated, in other words a universe that does not entirely resemble our own. 

False, it assumes that people can and often are rude and abusive, and that we should respond accordingly so as to minimize the damage to others. Plus, I reject this ongoing notion that there's no difference between politely asking for a date in a situation where you signal willingness to be refused without violence and cornering someone, calling them names, threatening their job, or pestering them until they start to wory that violence is coming. If Roiphe has a bunch of examples of men approaching women in public spaces with easy escape routes, asking politely, taking no for an answer, never bringing it up again, and still being hit with a sexual harassment suit and losing, I'd like to see those examples. 

We don’t legislate against meanness, or power struggles, or political maneuvering, or manipulation in offices, and how could we? 

False. There are all sorts of laws and rules restraining that behavior. If I tried to make a co-worker I don't like leave the job by taking a shit on their desk, I'd be fired. Using sexual abusiveness instead of fecal matter doesn't suddenly make that behavior okay.

Obviously there is a line, which if the allegations against Mr. Cain are true, he has crossed, but there are many behaviors loosely included under the creative, capacious rubric of sexual harassment that do not cross that line.

She doesn't have any examples, of course, but hey, we all know that all those other bitches are crazy, don't we? (Giggle, hair twirl.) No need to prove it!

In our effort to create a wholly unhostile work environment, have we simply created an environment that is hostile in a different way? 

I agree. The rules against shitting on desks are hostile to those who enjoy shitting on desks. In trying to create a shit-free work environment, we are discriminating against those who want to distribute their fecal matter willy-nilly, unrestrained by your puritanical American bullshit. You laugh, but hey, if we maybe made a rule where only men get to shit in public, and they only get to shit on women's stuff, maybe we could get Roiphe to support it. 

 Is it preferable or more productive, is it fostering a more creative or vivid office culture, for everyone to vanish into Facebook and otherwise dabble online?  Maybe it’s better to live and work with colorful or inappropriate comments, with irreverence, wildness, incorrectness, ease.

Is it preferable or more productive, is it fostering a more creative or vivid office culture, for everyone to vanish into the bathroom to dispose of their feces?  Maybe it’s better to live and work with colorful or inappropriate hygiene, with occasional turds distributed about the office.

Her entire argument about relaxing the professionalism around the office is a red herring, which is why I keep returning to the shit thing. Allowing people to harass each other isn't a charming bit of relaxed office politics like wearing jeans to work.  Most---pretty much all---of the stuff we call "sexual harassment" isn't welcome under any circumstances. Even if you're in a bar, a guy waiting until no one is looking and making lewd gestures is scary. If you're on a subway platform, having someone walk up and hump you isn't fun. Even at a party, no one likes creepy old dudes cornering you and implying that because you're young and single, you must be up for blowing anyone who asks at a moment's notice. The difference between those situation and work is that you don't have as many options when it comes to leaving your job. The harasser is holding your need to make money (or get an education) against you. 

But you know what? Even in non-work situations, we don't as a society think it's all that great to tolerate sexual harassment. Half the reason we have bouncers in bars is so they can toss out guys who grope unwilling women. All we evil feminists are asking for is that the workplace have similar protections. 

I try, and often fail, to end the week on a positive note. But this week, I can actually do that for you. Online, for obvious reasons, most of the fussing over NY Mag's look at feminist writing was over the piece on internet feminism. But I also want to recommend this piece on the history of Ms. Magazine, which may be a bit stale these days, but really had a lot to offer in the day.

And one thing really jumped out at me and made me glad. I think it can be a little depressing reading some feminist history because you really see how far we haven't come in so many ways. Back in the 60s and 70s, feminists were fighting the same forces that we're fighting on every front from sexual violence to men speaking to you like you're a child just because you have a vagina. In many ways, we've backslid; after all, we're still fighting the fucking abortion wars they really did have a reason to believe they'd won. Still, this article is a reminder that they won many important battles. The most obvious ones are things like giving women (some) access to male-only jobs---we have the legal right to them now, even if we still face discrimination. Gay rights have come a long way. Women are not only able to have their own money and property, but they're basically expected nowadays to pay as much attention to that as men. If you didn't have a credit card in your own name because you're married, people now would assume that you're a part of a religious cult, but that sort of thing was normal then. 

But one thing stood out to me that isn't discussed much but is really obvious reading this: they succeeded in improving the everyday interactions between men and women.  Well, maybe not for everyone, but absolutely they did on the left. This article leaves it very clear that in supposedly liberal, pro-feminist circles back then, men still felt fully empowered to treat women like meat, or openly support this woman over that woman, career-wise, because they thought she was hot. And worse. Like this story of how Warren Beatty treated Gloria Steinem, even though he was a politically liberal guy who supported the ERA and probably considered himself a feminist sympathizer. 

She said she’d had dinner with Beatty in London, and he got down on all fours and looked under the tablecloth to see her legs. She was wearing a high miniskirt, and you know, she had these perfect legs. She said to me, “Okay, look, let’s just see if Warren Beatty will do it first.”

So, that's changed a lot. There's still a lot of sexism in liberal circles, and even just sexualized idiocy like this, but it's much less and much less obnoxious. Jon Stewart isn't going to crawl under a table to leer at some woman's legs that is supposedly a colleague. On the contrary, when wingnut blogger Ann Althouse made a fuss over Jessica Valenti appearing in public with boobs still attached to her body, the male liberals of the blogosphere largely defended Jessica. In the more professional-left world that Steinem was running in, men who leer like this are the exception, and back then they were the rule. Obviously, there's flirting and hooking up, but that's not the issue here---no one is against that! But being treated like meat by the majority of your male allies, to the point where they expect to get away with shit like this? I'm sure it happens, but not that much. Not anything like it used to be. So big win on that front. Now for the world.