If you want closed case evidence on how conservatism is mostly about sadism and mean-spiritedness, look no further than how general wingnuttery views young people. Student debt and high unemployment are major problems for the Millennials. You would think that conservatives could muster sympathy in this case, because a) the people suffering could be their own kids and grandkids and b) these are people who are working hard, studying hard, and still getting screwed. But no. Instead you get folks like the evil monster Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, saying this about the student debt crisis:
"I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there's no reason for that," Foxx continued. "We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that. I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' You don't sit on your butt and have it dumped in your lap."
I decided to figure out how doable her "just work your way through school, and you won't have debt" solution is. If you're lucky enough to get in-state tuitiion at UT Austin, which is one of the better and more affordable options for a quality education, tuition and housing for two semesters will run you about $18,800. That's not counting books, food, or general cost-of-living expenses. You have to do school full-time to maximize the cost-effectiveness, since the amount of money you pay per credit hour if you don't goes up susbstantially in direct and indirect ways. If you can somehow manage to do that and are lucky enough to get a full-time minimum wage job in this economy, then you'll make about $15,000 a year. So even if you work 80 hours a week (remember, there's only 168 hours in a week, 49 of which must be spent sleeping), you won't make enough to pay for two semesters worth of school. And that doesn't even take into account cost of living expenses over the summer. It's literally impossible for someone to pull off the Virginia Foxx Plan For College, even if you're superhuman in your energy levels.
Needless to say, Foxx considers herself "pro-life". I point this out, because "pro-life" people want you to believe that they're in it not to punish women for being sexual, but that they just really are The Protectors of the Young. Well, that's clearly bullshit. Anyone who really cared a whit about the young would take this student debt and employment crisis seriously. I'd argue that instead of actually being protectors of the young, conservatives are haters of the young. Anti-choice is actually a piece of this, because the idealized victim of their policies is a young woman, being punished for her youth and sexuality. It really comes across in the comments of this article about the employment/debt crisis that Atrios linked:
They want to go to a boutique college, borrow money or receive grants to cover the $50K tuition, major in an arcane subject like gender studies or urban anthropology, and then have someone hand them a well paying job, so they can maintain a hipster lifestyle in a trendy neighborhood.
Here are the most popular majors, in order, according to the Princeton Review: business, psychology, nursing, biology, education, English, economics, communications, political science, and computer science. It seems that kids are mostly picking majors that will lead to the kind of professional careers that they're told they should want. This commenter betrays himself with his ignorance, sure, but also with the phrase "hipster lifestyle". This is all about hating the young for being young, wanting them to suffer because they still have hard bodies and high libidos while your aging body makes it increasingly hard to ignore that death is coming for all of us. It's basically asshole behavior, believing that you had a right to be young, but no one else does now that you aren't anymore. The next comment was more of the same:
Parents need to do a far better job in helping young adults understand that the money spent on education needs to be able to be recouped in the form of a real job on the other side. Parents would also do well to explain the importance of hard work, personal responsibility, vision, personal sacrifice and minimizing the sense of entitlement.
Please review that list of the most popular majors to understand what an asshole this guy is. One in every four degrees handed out is a business degree. The notion that kids aren't viewing their education as job training is a farce. On the contrary, the complaint now is that students are too focused on how to get from school to work, and find any class that doesn't have immediately obvious relevance for future employment to be a waste of time. Once again, the underlying sentiment here is that now that the commenter is no longer young, no one else has a right to be, and that young people should have grim, colorless lives so that he feels better about not being young anymore.
These people aren't the protectors of the young. Remember these attitudes every time a conservative waxes on about how they love babies. If they really did, they would want those babies to have meaningful lives with joy and color in them, not the grim existences of all work and no play that these wingnuts feel is the only acceptable youth now that theirs is gone.
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?
The Bible doesn't mention Rick Santorum's obsession, abortion (though not because ancient people didn't have it; the historical record suggests that as long as women have been getting pregnant, they've looked to abortion to control their fertility), but it does mention that it's really naughty to lie. In fact, lying about important issues, i.e. bearing false witness, is so bad that it's one of the commandments. It's one that Santorum breaks on a daily basis, but it's particularly ironic that Rick Panty Sniffer would lie so flagrantly when it comes to one of his fellow Catholics on the subject of Catholicism.
Santorum's hostility to Kennedy's admirable enthusiasm for First Amendment protections that keep us from sliding into a fundamentalist theocracy have been covered to death, but I particularly like how he lied about what Kennedy clearly meant by "separation of church and state". This is what Santorum claims that separation of church and state means:
To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?
Yep! That's exactly what Catholic President JFK meant, that only atheists should have a role in government. Which is why he ran for President! Perhaps Santorum believes that Kennedy didn't have religion? I realize that Santorum has an allergy to Google, but seriously, it took roughly two seconds to fact check the "Kennedy was an atheist" insinuation.
This is the Republican strategy for imposing theocracy: confusing the issue. They're claiming that "religious liberty" means giving fundamentalists the right to impose their religious views on everyone else, and now the claim is that unless we accede to theocracy, we're preventing religious people (I refuse to use that stupid term "people of faith") from participating in government. The only question now is how many people are stupid enough to buy this?
The Pentagon has released a report chronicling the 64% rise in sexual assaults since 2006 and their strategies for fixing the situation. If the proposed plan is properly implemented, we should expect it to work. Gendered violence is surprisingly suspectible to pressure from the outside. The VAWA lowered domestic violence rates dramatically and while most violent crime has gone down, rape rates have gone down even faster, suggesting feminist awareness campaigns about rape have worked. So this is a good thing that the Pentagon is doing, right?
Well, of course not, if you live in Wingnutland, where every bit of progress, especially for women, is the opportunity to have a four alarm meltdown. Liz Trotta responded to this news by framing rape, well, as a necessary part of life for female service members.
Her rant is a thing of evil beauty:
I think they have actually discovered there is a difference between men and women. And the sexual abuse report says that there has been, since 2006, a 64% increase in violent sexual assaults. Now, what did they expect? These people are in close contact, the whole airing of this issue has never been done by Congress, it's strictly been a question of pressure from the feminist.
Emphasis mine. Sometimes the word "misogyny" really fails to capture the full viciousness of right wing support for male domination. This worldview has just as ugly a view of men as women, casting men as beasts whose purpose in life is raping, beasts who can no more not rape than piranhas can stop themselves from swarming you if you fall into piranha-infested waters. Despite claims that feminists are "man-haters", I will point out that unlike a straight up man-hater like Liz Trotta, I think men are fully capable of not violently assaulting women the second they get a chance to. In fact, we know that most men take a pass, since there are technically lots and lots of opportunities to rape women, and as noted, rape rates are actually down.
And the feminists have also directed them, really, to spend a lot of money. They have sexual counselors all over the place, victims' advocates, sexual response coordinators. Let me just read something to you from McClatchy Newspapers about how much this position on extreme feminism is costing us. "The budget for the Defense Department's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office leapt from $5 million in fiscal 2005 to more than $23 million in fiscal 2010. Total Defense Department spending on sexual assault prevention and related efforts now exceeds $113 million annually." That's from McClatchy Newspapers.So, you have this whole bureaucracy upon bureaucracy being built up with all kinds of levels of people to support women in the military who are now being raped too much.
Which of course, is the money quote. It makes sense; Trotta's casting of men as violent beasts who can't control themselves necessarily means some rape is just part of women's lot in life, and that can't be changed. But in the military, you're with dudes all the time, so it's a non-stop rape-fest. Trotta can cast around in her cold heart and find a teeny bit of feeling enough to decide that at a certain point, it's too much. But it's still your fault, rape victim! You should have known that men are just all raping machines, and limited your exposure. If it's raining outside, you grab an umbrella and expect to get your shoes wet, but you're an idiot if you go outside without an umbrella and complain because you got too much wet. Rape is just like bad weather, in this estimation---nothing you can do to stop it. That would require assuming men who rape are responsible for their actions, and we can't have that, can we?
I often like to point out that the sexist framing around rape implies that rape is a useful tool to punish and control women. Rapists are often portrayed on the right as an unfortunate but necessary (though this is euphemistically framed as unchangeable) vigilante police force, attacking women for getting out of line. That's why there's all these questions about what she was wearing, who she was with, blah blah. The idea is she broke the rules, she got her punishment, end of story. Trotta's just extending this to the military. She clearly doesn't think women should be in the military, and sees rape as the punishment that they've got coming to them for breaking her rules.
As you know, House Republicans are flipping out and screaming about Obama and the HHS wanting to mandate contraception coverage for those dirty, dirty sluts that use contraception, the ones that constitute over 99% of women. This isn't about "religious freedom", no matter how much that's being used as a distraction. As Mother Jones reports, the USCCB has made it clear that they want a repeal of the entire mandate, because they think women having sex for pleasure is wrong, full stop. Before they were screeching about "religious freedom", the USCCB was clear that they just really want to punish women for fucking. Dana Goldstein reported on this in 2010, and got this delicious quote:
"I don't want to overstate or understate our level of concern," said McQuade, the Catholic bishops' spokesperson. "We consider [birth control] an elective drug. Married women can practice periodic abstinence. Other women can abstain altogether. Not having sex doesn't make you sick."
This is a full-blown war on women's sexuality. Always has been. Republicans are rallying around the idea that women who have sex are sinful and dirty and that therefore their basic health care needs aren't "real" health care. That's what's behind this battle, and was behind the attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, and the pushing of abstinence-only education before that.
“‘I was thinking about how sexy it would be to kiss you,’” world renowned pickup artist Wayne Elise told a group of young Rick Santorum fans. “You can say that [to a girl], it’s a cool.”
Elise, better known by his handle “Juggler” from Neil Strauss’ notorious pickup memoir The Game, was offering advice to attendees at conservative mega-conference CPAC on how to improve their dating game. Remember that old VH1 reality show The Pickup Artist with that lanky host with a Slash hat and goggles teaching people how to insult girls then hit on them when their self esteem is shattered? This is one of his top rivals, charging upwards of $5,000 for a one-day private session.....
But on Thursday, young socially conservative activists got it for free. One tip, he noted, was to introduce sensuality into early conversations with girls — like the above quote — to keep from falling into the platonic zone with your target.
“Most guys fall into the category of not being sexual enough, so that girls will easily see them as friend material and the guys have a hard time getting out of that,” he said. “I think one of my ideas that connects to conservatives is that it’s OK to wait but you definitely want to show the person you’re sexual and sensual.”
Emphasis mine. This goes on for awhile, but the short version of it is that while simultaneously screeching about the evils of feminism and how terrible it is that women want to have their contraception covered like common slatterns, conservative activists are also encouraging young men to be more sexual, more sexually aggressive, and to even seek casual sex with women. Women who then can be condemned by the Catholic bishops, House Republicans, anti-choice activists, and whoever else wants a potshot for offending their delicate sensibilities with their desire not to get pregnant. The double standard always lurks in these discussions about sex, but man, it's just getting blatant. Being a perverted liberal, I've been to lots of conferences where groups like Planned Parenthood and the like handed out condoms, precisely because they know people hook up at these things. But I'm guessing they're not welcome at CPAC. Because while men apparently need to be more sexual, women being sexual at all is a national tragedy that moaning and wailing about it has to dominate the cable news and the halls of Congress.
Update: I also want to point out that "pick-up artistry" is sexist, in that it promotes a "men are hunters/women are prey" approach to sex, as opposed to the enthusiastic consent model of femihism. But it's also just bullshit. If anything, some of their pointers, such as being rude and insulting to women, probably make it less likely you'll get laid. You're better off honing your overall social skills, because women are people, and being people, they act like people.
Mark Oppenheimer has a long but well worth reading profile of Maggie Gallagher, the avid opponent of same-sex marriage, up at Salon. His read on her personality coincides with the observations of a lot of us who've had to deal with her, which is that her self-absorption in her own pain makes her weirdly oblivious to the idea that other people also have feelings and lives that matter. Oppenheimer really spells out something that's well-known in activist circles around gay marriage, both pro and con, which is that Gallagher's hostility to gay marriage is rooted, bizarrely, in her endless bitterness that her pregnancy in her sophomore year resulted not in a proposal of marriage, but in being dumped. This wound is the one her entire life is about tending (not healing, because she really scratches at it and keeps it nice and raw). Really, she's about the closest thing that modern life has to one version of the movie villain, the person whose profound evil is rooted in a single trauma, and who without that might have been a really good person. Darth Vader, all vampires, you know the kind of villains I'm talking about. What that has to do with gay marriage might not seem immediately obvious, but Oppenheimer manages to convey the way I've heard it explained to me by various people in the know about this:
“I’m a revert,” Gallagher says. “I was raised Catholic. When I was 8, my mother left the church, and she ended up doing a lot of spiritual seeking … I was an atheist from the youngest age. When I was 16, I became a Randian. Becoming a Catholic began as an intellectual thing. In college, I reasoned my way into the pro-life stance. I could not come up with any good reason why the person inside a woman was not a person. Also, I had completely separated sex from procreation, and after I got pregnant, I realized that was a mistake. All the smartest people in the world, draped in all their Ph.D.s, were saying that sex and procreation were separate things, and of course that was just completely not true. The Catholic Church was the only institution that was saying that was not true. On the big issues, I began to realize that on all the issues I thought most deeply about, the church was right.”
The great trauma of Gallagher’s youth, her unplanned pregnancy and subsequent alienation from the father of her child, was rooted in failing to understand that sex and procreation are connected. It is understandable that, having grasped the truth, she is intent on emphasizing its importance. So it follows that gay marriage and, above all, gay parenthood, more than gay people themselves, presents a real challenge to her belief system. Same-sex marriage advocates offend her hard-won wisdom in two ways. First, they imply that sex and love can in fact be separate from procreation, and no less valid for it. Second, and perhaps more troubling for Gallagher, the increasingly visible column of attentive, loving gay parents — gay male parents in particular — mocks her own romantic choices. It mocks her own son’s good-for-nothing father. There must be something wrong with these gay dads, something contrary to the natural order, such that even when they appear to be splendid dads themselves, their agenda is the cause of poor parenting in others.
What's fascinating about Gallagher is that she has always maintained that it was liberalism and feminism that failed her. But as she admits here, she was no liberal feminist when she got pregnant. Far from it. She was a prominent campus conservative, a member of Yale's Party of the Right. The guy who got her pregnant was also in the Party of the Right. She wasn't soaking in feminist values when she got pregnant and was, by her measure, abandoned. They were self-professed right wingers that believed in conservative values. Thus, it seems the only logical set of values to blame is the conservative ones.
I'm happy to make that case. Gallagher is a big time anti-choice nut, and soaked completely in anti-choice narratives and myths. One of the most important, prominent myths the anti-choice movement pushes is that babies turn reticient men into loving husbands and fathers. The shotgun marriage is probably the central fantasy of the anti-choice movement, I'd argue. Anti-choice groups like Feminists for Life put most of their energies into pushing the myth that a mercurial lover will, when you tell him you're pregnant, glow with love and immediately fall to his knees and ask for your hand. They have a lecture series where women who got pregnant in college tell glowing stories of boyfriends who joyfully embraced the pregnancy and married them immediately, even though they were still college students. Abortion is often fingered as the reason that women marry later or not at all, again because of this rock solid belief that unintended pregnancies turn carefree bachelors into worshipful grooms.
Hey, I'm not in Gallagher's head, but it seems likely that the reason she's so bitter is she bought the myth that patriarchy is about providing and protecting women, and that as long as you're a good girl who refuses to separate sex from procreation, you'll be rewarded with a handsome husband and a beautiful wedding gown. But what she got instead was a swift lesson in how patriarchy is actually just about men dominating women. (Well, and it is also about creating a pecking order amongst men, often by using women's bodies for status.) You can lead a man to engagement water, but you can't make him drink.
No, the problem wasn't feminism, but not enough feminism. One of the nice things about feminism is that it teaches that women are full human beings and that we have value outside of being wives and mothers. And that you should get married because you want to, not because you "have" to. To be blunt, you're not going to meet many feminists who have whoopsie pregnancies and then flip around expecting the ring to be produced, and then are angry if it's not. Giving women rights means also imbuing women with responsibilities. If indeed one of the trade-off of having reproductive rights is that we forsake the right to pressure a man into marriage with pregnancy, then that's fine with me. Those marriages tend not to be too happy, anyway, and as Gallagher learned, an oopsie is no guarantee that a man is going to cough up the ring. We're better of being empowered to care for ourselves instead of depending on men to do it.
In round one bazillion of the "man, atheists really need to deal with the misogynists" problem, we have Penn Jillette. I know, surprising that he's got a wide misogynist streak, right? I mean, I try not to judge a book by its cover, but if there were cash prizes for correctly guessing which celebrities are still bitter about not getting laid in high school, he would definitely be on my ballot. Now there's a kerfuffle because Jillette is a big fan of everyone's favorite C-word.
As you can imagine, his defenders are trotting out the "just because you call someone a cunt doesn't mean you're sexist!" argument. This is why I get a little frustrated with trying to prove sexism or racism on a single word. It has this tendency to narrow the playing field, make it all about "proving" whether this word or that word is an Official Utterance of -Ists, which distracts from the larger issues and encourages -Ists to use coded language for better ass-coverage in the future. ("Food stamp President" is a good example.) In this case, "cunt" was just the icing on the cake of an explosive bit of inexplicable misogynist diarrhea. You see, this is the piece that caused Jillette such profound anger. As you'll see, it's a harmless bit of goofing on Super Bowl ads, clearly written for an audience looking to pass some time while they're eating a sandwich at their desks, i.e. the bread and butter of freelance humor writing online. I would rate it as funnier than most of these pieces, because it has a clever conceit (marketers are worried about the apocalypse) and because it's breezily written and made me smile. In offensiveness terms, I would rank it somewhere between that video of otters holding hands and Kitten Covers.
In addition, the complaints the Jillette are trotting out are very much of the "those in glass houses" variety. I don't know that someone whose career started because he thought card tricks were first rate entertainment is really in the position to be judging whether or not something is quality sandwich-eating-time-passing material. As for the accusation of strained, repetitive comedy, well, when I think of that, well certainly I'd never think of "Bullshit". I mean, coming up with thin excuses to have naked ladies walking around and being able to say curse words on a TV show is a fresh joke every time, amiritefellas? Most importantly, my eyebrow raised at the accusation that someone is trying to "be superior". This from a man who, you know, has a show called "Bullshit". Within the tweet, he makes a pointless bid at superiority, bragging about how he didn't see any Super Bowl ads. Between the outsized reaction and the incredible double standard for himself and some female writer on the internet, we're already talking about 90+% chance that he's got issues with women. If men allow having sex, being arrogant, or making silly jokes for themselves but flip out on women for doing the same, it's almost surely sexism, and Jillette hit two out of three. (There's far more, of course: being slovenly, drinking, you could go all day with the list of things sexists allow for themselves but not for women.) The fact that he used the word "cunt" just makes it a near-certainty, hovering around the 99.9% region.
With that in mind, I made a list of things people can say, and potential totally non-sexist Penn Jillette reactions. All of them guaranteed to get a "nuh-uh, that's not sexism!" response from his fanboys.
The forecast for today shows clear skies and highs around 55 degrees.
Who does this bitch think she is with her weather predictions? Just because you have a map and a meterology report doesn't make you the queen of the fucking weather, sweetheart.
I'll have a skim latte and a blueberry muffin, please.
*snort* Jesus Christ, what a fucking diva. An ordinary muffin isn't good enough for you? You have to have blueberries? What, is your pretty princess tongue unable to choke down your breakfast unless it's all blue and fruity?
I was happy that the Giants won, but it would have been cool to see the Patriots pull it off at the last minute.
Useless fucking cunt. Hey, lady, instead of offering your pointless opinion on football, why not do something useful with your mouth and stuff a cock in it?
I like to sit around scratching my balls while writing blog posts insisting that unregulated markets, which have been shown to repeatedly fail when tried in the real world, are the one true path to peace and prosperity.
Carry on, good sir. Perhaps you would like to come on my show to pass off your anti-government crankery as if it were scientific fact?
Republican appeals to the white working class have always been fraught, and not just because Republicans are trying to hoodwink this group with talk of abortion and gays in order to get them to vote against their own economic interests. It's also because it's always been illogical. On top of race-baiting and sexism, one of the big rhetorical strategies has been to pit the white working class against well-paid professionals (who are in fact becoming more liberal, though that's a recent shift) they deem the "liberal elite", with the hopes of distracting the white working class from the independently wealthy. It's illogical, since the argument is that rich fat cats who make a lot of money off other people's work are somehow a less appropriate target for class resentments than doctors, college professors and laywers who make a lot of money, but do so clocking in to a productive job every day like their working class brethern. But it's been somewhat effective, in no small part because your average working class white person probably knows someone of the working upper middle class, and they probably don't know any of the obscenely wealthy. Most of us are more likely, in other words, to know someone like the Obamas than the Romneys. So they're an easier target to describe meaningfully while dredging up resentments against them.
But another reason a lot of conservative thought leaders are so good at painting a picture of a snooty professional elite who wouldn't deign to rub shoulders with ordinary working Americans is that they are those people. In fact, far more so than the liberal versions of themselves much of the time. And really, while they're good at setting up people of their own class as hate-objects, they can barely conceal their disdain for working class whites. They just project it on liberals, and hope that their target audience doesn't notice what's going on.
Well, Charles Murray has blown their cover. That's all I can say about his latest book where he simulataneously plays the same cards that conservatives have for a long time, accusing the professional elite of being out of touch with "real" Americans, i.e. the white working class, and then proceeding to tell professional elites that their duty is to appoint themselves the moral guardians of the white working class and scold them to keep it in their pants. As part of the marketing for his book, he's released a quiz where you can rate how "in touch" you are with the working man by counting your visits to Applebee's, which is a typical exercise in claiming that a certain kind of American is the ony real one, a standard issue strategy for conservatives. But most of the book is about how people who would presumably rate high on his Quiz de Vicious White Trash Stereotypes are intellectually and morally inferior to the professional class, and thus need a good talking-to.
Frankly, I think Murray needs to be forced to choose. Are white working class Americans the only Real Americans, and anyone who is less than keen on drinking a Miller Lite in a Chili's is an evil snob? Or are the evil snobs the superior people here, and Real Americans are an unwashed mass of perverts who need to straighten up and fly right?
See, what's nice about being an evil liberal is that I don't have to deal with these problems. I don't think that conservative working class white culture is either the One True Culture, nor do I think that it's the business of upper class or upper middle class folks to appoint themselves the moral guardians of the rest of the country, bleating about how everything is going to hell because someone somewhere is fucking without a marriage license. The beauty of the "We Are the 99%" slogan is that it gets to the heart of this: the real elite in this country has, by treating our markets like a big casino, laid waste to our economy and screwed over everyone else. What's interesting to me is that idiots like Murray can never get past unbelievably superficial anger about sex and getting conservative haircuts (which is presumably what he means by "work ethic", because it's ludicruous to think any actual working Americans have been slacking off when it comes to actual working, which we do too much of) to ever stop and think that perhaps different people make different choices about marriage and haircuts for good reasons. Of course, deeper analysis would reveal that in fact, it's not that Americans collectively got immoral and stupid so much as that the very elite who control this country economically have been gobbling up a larger and larger slice of the pie, leaving the rest of us fighting over scraps. And Murray can't have that.
By the way, I did start to take the quiz and got really bored, but unsurprisingly, considering my family background, I was scoring a lot of points on it. But I have to point out that the fishing question is a little geographical-ist, since people who live in the desert really have to travel far to go fishing much of the time. Also, my long-standing defense of the deliciousness of many American piss beers is, in my experience, has proven to be generally useless in getting the liberal elite to care or conservative America to be less wary of me. But perhaps my dedication to not doing something so bourgeois as get married is good for giving Murray the vapors.
Most mornings, except weekends, at Casa del Marcotte, we get up in the morning. The first thing on our minds is work. I make coffee and get right to it on my computer, since I work at home. My dude gets dressed, walks to the subway, and takes the train to his office. Often we both work late---really often. Like most Americans, our lives are basically consumed by work. Unlike a lot of Americans, we're lucky because we have fulfilling jobs, for sure, but they are still work. Like most Americans, 100% of our income is from work, except maybe like the occasional birthday or Christmas card from relatives with a check instead of a present in it. Americans work more hours than our counterparts in Western Europe and have fewer vacations. (Being a freelancer, I haven't really taken a vacation-vacation where I completely unplug, I think, ever, actually. But being unable to unplug is increasingly a part of even salaried and hourly employees' lives.) Because most non-retired Americans are dependent on work for 100% of their income, losing a job is devastating, often worse that a divorce. Because most of us derive 100% of our income from working, taxes are a legitimate burden, though one most of us---except a few extremist wingnuts---believe is part of the responsibilities of being an American.
Contrast that with what we've learned about Mitt Romney from his tax returns: 1) He pays a low rate in taxes, lower than many of us who derive our income from working 2) His work income is pocket change compared to the money he makes sitting on his ass paying other people to make money for him and 3) He makes more in a day doing nothing than your average American makes in a year of life being consumed by work.
The critical words here are DOING NOTHING. Romney jokes that he's "unemployed", when in fact the proper term is the "idle rich". He was employed at one point, sure, but it's laughable to say that his wealth is the result of "hard work", as every wingnut apologist mindlessly says. Most Americans don't have the option of making more money sitting on their ass than working. Retirement is usually associated with terms like "fixed income", not "exploding amounts of wealth". But the claim from Republicans is that by taxing money you make by not working, you're somehow discouraging productivity, so we need to lower taxes on money made from not working, and shift the burden to those who actually work for their money. I hope it's clear what a giant pile of bullshit that is. If we actually want to adjust taxes to encourage productivity and discourage idleness, we need to jack the rates up on people like Mitt Romney and possibly even lower them on those of us whose lives are occupied by work from the time we get up in the morning to, if we're lucky, sometime after dinner. (And many of us work harder than that.) You know, those of us who contribute something.
Romney has said he was unemployed. He's right. He actually does nothing to earn most of his income. He's just in possession of a giant pile of cash. He pays some people to do stuff with that giant pile of cash so it earns a rate of return. And because we are ruled by horrible people who think the lives of the 1% are more important than everyone else, the tax rate on any money that pile of cash earns is much lower than it is on the money earned by people who actually work.
He snipes that those of us who work and want those---like him---who don't because they can just live like kings off investments to pay more taxes.....well, we're consumed with "envy". Perhaps. Or perhaps it's just that we actually believe, unlike Republicans who just pay lip service, to the concept of work, and we want the people who actually do it to get their fair share of the pie, instead of feeding it all to those who just feed off the money others actually make.
Caitlin Flanagan gets a lot of attention because she's able to write in these elliptical, obtuse ways that seem really profound, which is why it's useful to listen to her on the radio, where she's forced to be more concise, revealing that she's just the same old culture warrior whose veneer of sophistication falls off at a sneeze, revealing the cranky (prematurely) old church lady underneath. That's why I recommend skipping her strange-sounding new book and listening instead to this interview on WBUR, which has the added bonus of Irin Carmon's presence as a sanity check. Listening to it, you realize that for all the puffery about girlhood fascinations and diaries, Flanagan is really only making one argument, one we know really well, that goes like this:
*Boys and men only care about sex, and mainly see girls and women as these tedious obstacles between them and pussy.
*Girls and women only care about romance---the more princessy, the better---and see sex as this filthy ritual they have to perform in order to get it.
*Therefore, women should use sex as a bartering chip to get men to pretend to like us. Actual affection from men is clearly impossible to get, but in Flanagan's view, women can get a semblance of self-respect by refusing to have sex with men until they play-act affection by taking us on some dates and letting us call them our boyfriends. According to Flanagan, not having a man hanging around pretending to like you in order to get his dick wet is a major tragedy, probably the worst thing that could happen to a woman.
And that's about it. A lot of attention is paid to Flanagan's strange descriptions of what she calls "girlhood", which the rest of us tend to think of more as "adolescence", but Flanagan does really collapse the two in significant ways, imagining the typical teenage girl as horrified at her burgeoning sexuality and desperate to return to the comfortable world of childhood. (You can read Irin's review here.) Pretty much all of her descriptions of the life of teenage girls is in support of the above argument. For instance, she's bizarrely insistent that nostalgia for childhood toys is both universal to young women and not something young men care for at all. This has confused quite a few people who live in reality, because, if anything, it's men who are more likely to keep their childhood toys. How many guys not only have a collection of action figures and comic books from their youth, but continue to buy new things that have a connection to childhood playthings? Nor is this a new phenomenon; think of older generations of men with toy train collections or baseball cards. Not that Flanagan is wrong that a number of college girls still have their dollies or teddy bears. That's the point: her continued insistence that men and women are basically opposite in every way is just wrong.
But it's clear to me why she paints a picture of young men forging into adulthood while young women lean back, clutching teddy bears. It's about S-E-X; everything Flanagan says is in service of her belief that women want Disney princess romances, and sex is this filthy price that men extract from us in exchange for the Prince Charming act. (Seriously, few things are more grim than conservatives' view of heterosexuality.) Thus, she has to insist that girls are innocent and boys are not.
Flanagan's call to action is for parents to be excessively "protective" of their daughters' innocence. Listening to this program, you get the creeping feeling that Flanagan feels that you're not a successful parent of a daughter unless your child is a social reject because she acts childish throughout her high school years. She gets positively giddy when some overbearing parent calls and brags that her kids aren't allowed to use Facebook. She proposes sheltering girls (and only girls, apparently) in two very important ways: by disallowing them to have their own internet in their rooms and by insisting that cross-gender socializing only occur in traditional date-like situations, probably involving the boy picking the girl up (which conveniently shuts off any dating before 16, soon 18 in places with graduated driving licenses). The excuse she gives for the internet lockdown is that girls shouldn't see pornography, though I suspect that, due to Flanagan's over-excited response to the Facebook ban, the real reason is that she fears girls having a social life outside of the view of adults. (As the mother of only boys, Flanagan conveniently doesn't have to live by her own rules.) As for the porn thing, well, I don't disagree that it's not awesome for young kids to see so much hardcore porn before they even start to think of being sexual themselves, but I also think the results of Flanagan's actions aren't so great, either. I mean, how would you prefer a girl to first see porn: in her bedroom by herself, or because a boyfriend in college shows it to her?
And that is the fundamental problem with Flanagan's wingnutty attitude towards adolescent girls; she has no interest in helping girls make the transition from girlhood to adulthood. She just wants girlhood to last as long as possible. She's deliberately vague on what happens after the sheltered girl is released into the "wild", as it were. She did slip at one point in the show and say that we shouldn't "let" college women "hook up", which suggests that Flanagan is far more radical than she lets on, and personally fantasizes about young women staying virginal and generally unaware of sex well into adulthood and probably until marriage, by force if necessary. But she won't be up front about it, because she knows showing her cards will end her career as "provocative" writer and expose her as the same old boring wingnut as every other abstinence hysteric. (Seriously, how do we avoid "letting" grown ass adult women---even if they look like young kids to us---not make their own sexual choices?) The problem is that even though Flanagan is right and sheltering a high school girl is possible, there's not much you can do when they move out of the house. So the question is, then what? Is the college freshman better off having learned a little about men and sex in her adolescence before she's dumped into the waters and asked to swim, or does knowledge give you power? Interestingly, Flanagan really wants high school girls to have boyfriends (she's wrong that they don't; what research I've read suggests that high schoolers drift into committed relationships and college kids are more like to hook up), but her proposal of sheltering them is exactly how to keep girls from having that. What normal boy wants to date the religious weirdo whose parents forbid her from having internet access? I'm guessing that a lot high school relationships are conducted online, in fact, so keeping a girl offline probably removes her flirting and getting-to-know-you opportunities.
But realizing that requires thinking, and Flanagan, for all that she's a talented prose stylist, isn't a thinking person. She's just a reactionary, and one with a particular obsession with young women.
All the blather about "fiscal conservatism" that comes off conservatives is, I generally believe, just that: blather. The notion that they want to slash social spending because it's the "responsible" thing to do has always and forever been belied by Republican willingness to spend like madmen when it came to private contractors feeding off the military, corporate giveaways, and of course, tax breaks for the rich. No, the entire conservative view of social spending is rooted in a authoritarian, hierarchical view of the world that believes that it's somehow for the best if the lower classes suffer privation. After all, how will you know how comfortable you are if you don't have people going hungry to compare yourself to?
If you doubt this, spend five minutes listening to any wingnut rant about the economy. Their imagination is captured by the fear that some poor person somewhere might have occasional moments of not suffering. Any suggestion that a poor person might have a moment of joy, a bit of relief, a pillow to lay their head on at night? All this is considered offensive to the wingnut, evidence that the poor are simply not suffering enough. Which is why you continually see "outrages" on the right, such as learning that most poor people have a refrigerator in their homes, a factoid that reasonable people should find unremarkable because refrigerators usually come standard with apartments. (Seriously, I find this outrage completely baffling. Are they suggesting that a smart move for a person living in poverty would be to pawn a refrigerator that is almost surely owned by their landlord? Talk about fiscal irresponsibility!) And needless to say, images of poor people owning phones are sure to set off any wingnut worth his salt. How dare they have a way for potential employers to reach them?! They're poor! They have to bootstrap it by communicating with others through smoke signals. Anything less than that is being coddled by the system.
Once you piece together the various outrages against poor people for having refrigerators and phones, it becomes clear that for all the talk of bootstraps, conservatives really don't want poor people to find a way out of poverty. That's why they really get angry if someone has any tool to help them save money or earn money. The refrigerator is offensive, because it allows a person to buy food at the grocery store and cook, which stretches the food dollar. Apparently, you're supposed to be living on Doritos. The phone connects you to the world, which is the bare minimum for job seekers, and we can't have people looking for work actually, god forbid, find it. And so on.
And so it goes with the latest assault on people living on the edge of the knife. Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania is cutting people off of food stamps if they have more than $2,000 in savings. This will help expediate the process of getting people in unemployed or under-employed situations out of their homes and into the streets. If you have to burn through the money you were counting on to pay rent on food instead, that will subtract months of you sitting around in an apartment, acting like you deserve shelter like some uppity shelter-haver. You can eat or you can have a daily shower, but Corbett and his supporters think you're just asking too much if you want both.
Of course, having savings to lean on while unemployed is critical if you, lower income person, are trying to get a job in order to not be dependent on food stamps anymore. Under the new Corbett system, where you have to choose between shelter or food, you can kiss that job goodbye. Employers aren't generally known for looking fondly on people who show up to interviews in unwashed clothes without having had a good night's rest or a shower. If the goal is to make sure people living in poverty have all avenues of escape cut off, good job, Pennsylvania! If your goal is anything else, well....I reject that it could be. No one could be that stone cold stupid. Occam's Razor: the intention here is to make escaping poverty impossible.
Before we leave the weekend's debates behind, and in keeping with the blog's first rule of economics — Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money. — I would be remiss not to mention the performance on Sunday of Dancin' Dave Gregory, chronic Vineyard vacationer and Beltway King of Pain. He reached an entirely new level of smarm when he asked Jon Huntsman the following question:
Let's talk substance. So Governor Huntsman, name three areas where Americans will feel real pain in order to balance the budget?
See, you stupid proles. The only "substance" worth talking about is exactly how miserable your lives will have to be made in order to keep The Deficit from eating our children in their beds, and how wretched your existence will have to become so that David Gregory and the people with whom he goes to dinner can think themselves people of serious purpose. And then, even after Huntsman had once again pledged fealty to the economic sadism that is the plan offered by zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan, which is why Huntsman's position as The Only Sane One is not entirely accurate, Gregory still wasn't satisfied.
Three programs that will make Americans feel pain, sir?
Not that Atrios and Charles are wrong to blanch at Gregory's slobbering desire to see throngs of people begging in the streets, of course, but I also hesitate to draw too much attention to our disgust, for fear that these kinds of questions are going to get toned down. As I was noting gleefully on Twitter when a couple of anti-choicers started bleating at me, I want them to explain, in lavish detail, how sex is only for procreation and that women who have sex for pleasure deserve to be punished as the dirty whores they are. They know, as I know, that it's probably not best for them to show their hand like this, which is why they're constantly on about "babies", but if you push hard enough, the "sex is evil and should be punished" belief always comes out. That's where we need them: showing their true face. The more honest they are, the better.
Ideally, we'd have a situation where the Republican candidates started competing with each other to see who could come up with the most lavish trials they wish the 99% to endure. If we could get Mitt Romney trying to outdo Newt Gingrich by explaining how he won't be satisfied until good Christian women are selling blow jobs in the church parking lot to make rent, I think that would probably work out pretty well. Sure, the Republicans will eat it up, but it won't do much to help the Republicans pick up votes from those oh--so-important swing voters and independents.
Video chosen, because like Ron Paul, I hope we can all day be Austrians.
Even though he took back his endorsement of Ron Paul, I think it's safe to say that Andrew Sullivan is still deeply in love with George Wallance-cum-Dale Gribble. After all, the general tone of his retraction was, "Wah, I'm right that the man is like Mr. Totally Not A Racist, just like my 'Bell Curve'-loving self, but pouty pout the readers are making me." Seriously, he said things like, "It seems to me that even though I don't believe these old screeds reflect Paul's own beliefs....", despite the heavy of the first person in those screeds. It's clear Sullivan would be denying that Paul wrote them himself if someone dug up a picture of Paul writing them. But he continues to blog about the awesomeness that is the resident black helicopter crank in the race, and so I thought it would be a fun time to grab one of the more fun "NUH-UH RON PAUL IS TOTALLY NOT A RACIST" quotes, by way of this link from LGM.
Chuck Todd notes that Ron Paul voted for the MLK national holiday. Gingrich voted against. I find the notion that Ron Paul is a racist to be preposterous.
Ta-Nehisi Coates pushes back, pointing out that Paul explained his reasons for disliking the King holiday in his newsletter, and guess what! It's not because he's Mr. Peace, Love and Understanding. Here is Paul, in his own words, on the MLK holiday:
Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.
Cue the chorus of people claiming that we can't actually believe that someone using the first person and signing his name to a document could have possibly written it. Next you'll be saying Duncan Black is Atrios. Can we be sure that it's Andrew Sullivan writing the preposterous claim that it's preposterous to believe Ron Paul wrote some stuff that he said he wrote? Why not suggest no one ever be treated like the author of that which they authored, since fundamentally, we can never know for sure.
It's worth pointing out at this point that supporting Ron Paul, even just a little, appears to infect the supporter with Crank's Disease, where they're making conspiratorial claims that we can't assume that someone writing, "I, _____, am totally writing this," actually wrote it. The longer you chew on that belief, the more likely you are to find yourself, a year from now, wearing camo and shooting up beer cans while complaining about a one world currency, which is of course, a totally different thing than your desire that the entire world trade in gold.
I digress, however. (See, it's infecting me!) My point in writing this blog post is to point out that Sullivan, in his desperation, appears to have used Newt Gingrich as his standard-bearer for not-racism. He did this two days ago, in fact, which puts this comment after the blogosphere erupted with this comment made by Newt Gingrich:
And so I’m prepared if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.
Rick Santorum has been having fun implying both that all black people are on food stamps, and that all food stamp recipients are black, as well. In fact, the single largest racial group in the SNAP program is.....wait for it......white people.
According to 2010 census numbers, about 26 percent of food stamp recipients are African-American, while 49 percent are white and 20 percent are Hispanic.
I also want to digress a moment and denounce the very notion that there's something shameful about using SNAP. There's something shameful in the fact that our society has so many people living in poverty that we need to offer so much food assistance, but there's no shame in taking it. In fact, food stamps are the best form of economic stimulus our government is currently engaging in, generating $1.73 worth of stimulus for every dollar spent. The worst problem with food stamps is that the shame and hassle of applying discourages many eligible people---imagine the boost the economy would get if everyone eligible was using food stamps. Just sayin'.
Digression over. The point is that I think it's perfectly sensible and evidence-based to say that Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich both rejected the MLK holiday out of racial prejudice, which both men have routinely displayed and which has helped both men in gathering large numbers of supporters. Any other conclusion is basically throwing red herrings and trying to confuse the situation. The racial resentment boat is a big one, and there's lots of room on board, especially for those catering favor with the Republican base.
It is possible that Sullivan was merely complaining that Gingrich isn't getting the same attention for his no vote on the MLK holiday. To which I say, well, he probably should, but the "he's guilty, too!" thing is no defense, especially if your man is polling much better than the equally guilty.
Well, my plans to blog some of the best of 2011 totally fell apart, and for that I apologize. I thought I would make it up to you by compiling a list of some of my favorite (or most disturbing) moments in sexual misinformation. These are some of the strangest, most dunderheaded, or most appalling falsehoods of the year, at least when it comes to doin' it. You'd think Americans in 2011 wouldn't be so dumb, but sadly, we have a long way to go before we start getting smarter about sex.
Most Jaw-Droppingly Audacious Lie
Yep, when Michele Bachmann tried to claim that a woman told her that her daughter got Gardasil and became mentally retarded. This lie was audacious on a number of levels. Obviously, the HPV vaccine has been demonstrated to be safe, and Bachmann's just trying to maximize the number of health problems and deaths that come to women who have sex, which she disapproves of. But what made this lie special was that she didn't even reference some of the prior, false accusations about the vaccine. It seems what she did here was half-remember claims about the MMR vaccine causing autism, translated "autism" into "retardation" in that special brain of hers, and coughed this one up. It's unlikely that there was a woman, and if there was, she probably didn't say what Bachmann is claiming. Even the most audacious anti-vaxxers know better than to insinuate a shot given at 12 years old causes some of the mental problems they falsely claim early childhood shots cause. Bachmann couldn't even get her bullshit straight.
There were many iterations of this claim, but to summarize: Many supposedly "skeptical" dudes repeatedly and apparently with a straight face claimed that there was no way for a fellow to get his dick wet if he couldn't cold-proposition women he had never met before at 4 in the morning in enclosed spaces with no means for her to escape. You would think that a skeptic, before making this bold claim, would gather some evidence first, by asking people how sex happens for them. Of course, they weren't going to do this, because they'd find that overall, straight people manage to hook it up without scaring the shit out of women most of the time, through processes like meeting someone, chatting, letting it develop into flirtation naturally, and developing a mutual attraction that eventually spills into fucking. Obviously, for sexist men, the problem with this process is it involves being nice to a woman for stretches of time, be it an hour or days or even months. So they falsely claimed it was cold propositions in scary circumstances or nothing, and women who expected men to behave in socially normal ways when they're physically attracted to women are out of their minds.
My favorite version of this lie was by James Onen:
Here is where the problem lies: a man generally cannot know until after attempting the proposition that it was unwanted. Not only that – it is, after all, also possible for a proposition to be unwanted at first but for the recipient of the proposition to change her mind after persuasion.
Setting aside the notion that it's acceptable to badger someone who has already turned you down for sex, let's consider the extraordinary nature of this claim, which is that a man literally cannot know if a woman is amendable to fucking him until he corners her in an enclosed space, and without any prior introduction, discourse, or flirting, asks her to his room for "coffee", a well-known euphemism for sex. For a skeptic, you'd think that such a claim could be tested, again, by asking people who have had successful sexual interactions, and asking what process got them from not knowing each other to touching naked bits. I bet you'd find that 0% of them said, "By getting perfect strangers into enclosed spaces and cold propositioning them." The notion that there's no way to know if someone likes you without asking them for sex without so much as a formal introduction? But James really believes this, and so he suggests that since sex can only happen under these dubious circumstances, we need to build an opt-out system for women who have peculiar ideas like, "A man should flirt with me a little to see if I'd be interested before he asks me to suck his cock".
The solution to such ambiguity is simple – as a way forward, women who attend atheist-skeptic conferences that are absolutely certain they don’t want to be hit on should wear a clearly visible “do not proposition me” sign on their backs. If not, maybe a colour-code can be designated for such women by the event organisers – let’s say, red – and then it could be announced that all women wearing red clothes should not be propositioned or approached by strangers.
Since the vast majority of women aren't amendable to being propositioned by perfect strangers in enclosed spaces, and the vast majority of men know better than to do that (and, I'll add, have no real interest in it, because a lot of men actually like women and enjoy the process of flirting and building up sexual tension so that the eventual sex is about more than crossing the daily ejaculation off the to-do list), this system seems unfair, because it puts the burden of monitoring the behavior of the slim minority of men who feel they're too good for flirting onto women. I offer a counter-solution that puts the burden on those who are too good for ordinary social interactions: men who feel they can't get laid without cold propositioning strangers. If you're one of those men, I suggest walking around with your cock out, to signal that you'd like a lady to do something about it without having to go through that tedious process of introducing yourself and having a conversation with her to gauge her interest. Since there are supposedly a lot of women down with cold propositions from strangers, I'm sure that these guys will find lots of takers!
My personal theory is that when Jon Kyle said that 90% of what Planned Parenthood does is abortion, he felt that was accurate, because the word "abortion" is slowly becoming a catch-all phrase on the right to describe any health care that allows women to have happier, healthier sex lives. So, you or I, when we say "abortion", mean "terminating a pregnancy". But Kyle probably includes Pap smears and condoms in his list of things that are "abortion". Anything that allows sexually active women to avoid conceiving against their will, contracting an STD, or dying? The end game for anti-choicers is to get all that defined as "abortion". Kyle was just being a little over eager.
Weirdest Theory About Anal Sex
This may eclipse the B.S. right wing claims that gay men all spend their old age shitting themselves from all the anal (why that doesn't happen to straight women who take it up the butt is never explained), and strangely, this claim comes from an actual gay man:
Paul Angelo MHA, MBA, the Miami Gay Matchmaker who incorporates health, relationship and lifestyle coaching has again "gone wild" with the intention to save the gay community from poor self-esteem, lack of confidence and relationship confusion.
Angelo explains that receptive anal sex decreases self esteem by forcing the person to assume a submissive position during an act of pleasure. This confuses the brain to believe that a feminine-like behavior is appropriate for a man and in turn reduces the man's assertiveness, confidence and will power.
Angelo is an enthusiast of "neurolinguistic programming", which is an obsession usually only found amongst straight men who, coincidentally, find the process of meeting and flirting with women to be a tedious waste of precious man-hours and so spend a bunch of time reading "pick-up artist" materials to find a way to fast track from seeing an attractive lady you don't know and having your penis inside her. Angelo's interest in the incredibly iffy NLP practices may not be geared towards trying to get vagina while minimizing your interactions with the woman surrounding the organ, but he nonetheless seems to be a rabid misogynist. This suggests a link between finding NLP intriguing and rabid misogyny, though further study is needed on this question.
Right Wing "Always Be Breeding" Pressure Reaches A New Low
The discussion then moved on to how she has been able to use this healing power to cure all sorts of maladies, particularly barrenness, including one time when her prayers "completely replaced everything" for a woman who had had a full hysterectomy, resulting in her pregnancy.
In the past, religious wingnuts guilt-tripped women who had abortions, and then those who used contraception. Now they've added women who physically can't have children to the list of those they wish to shame. If you're not reproducing because your uterus has been removed from your body, well, I guess you're just not praying hard enough, you slattern.
I have a theory about the Spiderman musical, and its inexplicable popularity despite being the most hated piece of pop culture in 2011 (people's loathing for "Friday" is mixed with giddy affection, taking it off the list). It's a combination of two things. One, the amount of bad press it got raised its visibility, so when tourists come in and are looking for a show, they latch on to Spiderman because it's a known quantity. Of course, that's not enough to push it over the top. If you go to Times Square and take in the ads, you'll see Broadway is awash in known quantities to appeal to incurious tourists, revising all sorts of classic movies and TV shows to reel them in, plus Mamma Mia. No, I suspect what's helping Spiderman out is backlash. This is just a theory, but I suspect that this scenario plays out over and over again: A Fox News-loving family is planning their trip to the Big Apple, and they want to see a Broadway show. They look over the list of available shows and Spiderman sticks out. They heard a lot about it this year! Of course, it was all bad reviews. But hell, those reviews probably came from those elitist liberal snobs who want their Broadway shows to be nudist interpretative dances about the deaths of animals from oil spills, so fuck 'em. They bet Spiderman is great, because those reviewers hate it so much. And another batch of tickets is sold.
If this theory seems a little far-fetched, I invite you to read Media Matters' end-of-year round-up on the right wing war on health. Health is a thing those elitist liberals like, with their jogging and their fiber. The liberal associations with health grew stronger because of the health care reform battle. Now healthiness itself is suspect. Some of my favorite highlights:
Fox & Friends Attacked HPV Vaccine Law While Promoting Teenage Tanning. During the October 11 edition of Fox & Friends, the co-hosts attacked a California law that will allow adolescents as young as 12 to receive the HPV vaccine, which can protect against cervical cancer, without parental consent. They also juxtaposed this law with a California provision that restricts those younger than 18 from using tanning salons, but failed to note that tanning beds increase the risk of skin cancer by 75 percent.
I liked this one, because it not only touches on the hostility to health, but also encompasses the creepy right wing obsession with the sexy virgin. Jessica Valenti wrote about this in The Purity Myth, but to recap: the right doesn't just want young women to be virgins. They want them to be sex object virgins: slender, beautiful, preferably buxom, apparently super-tan, and compliant. The virgin's value is ratcheted up dramatically by how sexy (by the most conventional standards) she is. It's like objectification on steroids. Thus, the constant churning out of one blonde sex symbol after another who puts on a faux-modest look while bragging about her virginity. And, of course, the inevitable fall.....
Fox's Gutfeld: "Why Are Health Food Freaks Always So Sickly Looking?" On the August 23 broadcast of The Five, Gutfeld said, "Why are health food freaks always so sickly-looking?" Co-host Andrea Tantaros replied, "They're unhappy, because they're not eating any fat."
Projection is the favoritest of all right wing neuroses. This is the war on health equivalent of when a guy hits on you, and when you shoot him down, he calls you ugly and denies that he had any interest, due to the ugliness.
Right-Wing Media Freaked Out Over Red Lobster, Olive Garden Decision To Shrink Portion Sizes. In September, after Darden Restaurants Inc., the parent company of Red Lobster and Olive Garden, announced it would shrink portion sizes and reduce sodium in its meals, right-wing media responded by attacking the decision and claiming the company was "bending to the whims of Michelle Obama." In a blog post, Malkin claimed that Darden was "strong-armed" into "re-designing meals" by Michelle Obama, while the Drudge Report linked to the story with a picture of Michelle Obama and the words, "Adult Supervision for fries."
Fox Promotes Hypothetical Junk Food Tax, Responds With A "Cultur[al]" Defense Of Macaroni And Cheese. On the July 26 edition of Fox & Friends, Carlson discussed a hypothetical junk food tax, beginning the segment by saying, "Do we really need the government ... policing this?" Her guest, Robert Ferguson, then claimed that "[n]o one has ever really talked about" "what makes foods healthy." He also said that a person needs to "tak[e] into account different cultures" in order to calculate nutritional value, then concluded: "In my world, I like mac and cheese. ... I'm going to eat it."
Right wing media has quite literally cast its audience as belligerent, picky children and Michelle Obama as Mom standing over them telling they they can't have any dessert if they don't eat their vegetables. One could argue the facts on this until the end of time---do they seriously believe the First Lady has such all-encompassing powers that Olive Garden would rather cater to her than make money?----but I'm more interested in the psychology of this. Why are so many conservatives eager to imagine themselves not just as children, but as annoying, picky children? You'd think a bunch of authoritarians would at least prefer the image of well-behaved children who politely eat what's served, but their hatred of the Obamas runs so deep that they are willing to cast themselves in the role of the pointlessly petulant child.
Of course, it probably runs deeper than that. The truth may be that they don't realize that they are casting themselves in that role, but are just naturally drawn to it, because they are petulant and childish. That's probably the better explanation, since it also goes a long way towards explaining "Wah! I don't want to play nice with others!", the lavish worship of the bullies who steal other kids' lunch money, and seeing people in distress, such as the unemployed, and wanting to give them wedgies instead of help them out.
I have a theory about the Spiderman musical, and its inexplicable popularity despite being the most hated piece of pop culture in 2011 (people's loathing for "Friday" is mixed with giddy affection, taking it off the list). It's a combination of two things. One, the amount of bad press it got raised its visibility, so when tourists come in and are looking for a show, they latch on to Spiderman because it's a known quantity. Of course, that's not enough to push it over the top. If you go to Times Square and take in the ads, you'll see Broadway is awash in known quantities to appeal to incurious tourists, revising all sorts of classic movies and TV shows to reel them in, plus Mamma Mia. No, I suspect what's helping Spiderman out is backlash. This is just a theory, but I suspect that this scenario plays out over and over again: A Fox News-loving family is planning their trip to the Big Apple, and they want to see a Broadway show. They look over the list of available shows and Spiderman sticks out. They heard a lot about it this year! Of course, it was all bad reviews. But hell, those reviews probably came from those elitist liberal snobs who want their Broadway shows to be nudist interpretative dances about the deaths of animals from oil spills, so fuck 'em. They bet Spiderman is great, because those reviewers hate it so much. And another batch of tickets is sold.