Julie Sunday, writing for RH Reality Check, reports on a piece of legislation that passed the Texas House and will probably become law because Republicans have a super-majority.  The law would require any university that has a “gender and sexuality center” to also have a “traditional values center” as a form of counter-programming. 

What I like about this is how nakedly obvious it is.  Gender and sexuality centers at universities are there to promote what really should be non-controversial ideas: that women/gay/transgender people are full human beings, that human sexuality is a natural part of life, that rape and domestic violence are bad things, and that people have a right to be healthy regardless of gender or sexual status.  Counter-programming then, I have to assume, is pro-rape, pro-domestic violence and bullyin, anti-health, and anti-woman.  Not a big surprise to those of us who’ve been paying attention and know that the conservative movement does in fact oppose anti-rape efforts, sex education, gay rights, anti-domestic violence efforts, and health care for anyone who has dared experience sexual pleasure, especially outside of their strict rules (which include not just being married, but being the right race and wealthy enough to pay out of pocket for all expenses related to sexual health care).

On that last link, I want to point out that the implication behind the misleading obsession with mammograms on the right carries with it the implication that anyone who dies of cervical cancer—-which Planned Parenthood does screen for in office—-had it coming and deserves to die. Because she touched a penis.  In theory, virgins can get breast cancer, so they’re hard-pressed to oppose screening for it, though I suppose if you released statistics showing that 99.9% of breast cancer patients have had sex at some point, they’d probably go ahead and round that one up to a had-it-coming disease. 

What is fascinating about this particular story is how blatant this is.  Usually there’s an attempt to pretend that anti-woman efforts are somehow pro-woman—-Susan B. Anthony would want women to die of cervical cancer, we swear!—-though of course, no such effort is expended in the game of pretending they care if queer people live or die.  In this case, though, it’s just straightforward.  Gender and sexuality centers offer health and anti-violence information, and that needs counter-programming.  I’m curious what kind of “traditional values” programming we can expect to see. For instance, if gender and sexuality centers organize a Take Back the Night Rally, will the anti-feminist centers organize a Bitches Stay In Or You Deserve To Be Raped Rally?  If a gender and sexuality center has a seminar on avoiding or escaping violent relationships, will the “traditional values” center have a seminar explaining that men only hit because they love too much?  If you think about it, it seems that this move might be a tad counterproductive, except that it creates more jobs for professional anti-feminists.

I’ve been reluctant to blog about this, because anything that attracts MRA attention is really bad, bad, bad—-like letting the boyfriend who beats you and you’re trying to break up with come over “just” to “have a talk”.  But it’s an important issue, and god knows that bunch of anti-feminist clowns don’t actually give a flying fuck about making inroads against truly oppressive laws that hurt men, so I’m forced to say something.  As a general rule, I think deadbeat dads should be forced to pay child support.  Women aren’t allowed to just abandon their children willy-nilly, and any man who thinks that his support for his children should be dependent on whether their mother is draining his balls regularly is an asshole and shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.*

But throwing men in jail for not paying child support is just stupid.  Charging men who are in prison and literally cannot make the money to pay child support for child support is just stupid. These are policies that not only hurt men that might very well intend to pay child support but can’t, but it doesn’t actually do anything to get the child support paid.  Men who can’t make money can’t pay child support, and being behind bars pretty much means you can’t hold a job.

I realize MRA fuckwads blame feminists for this, but it’s worth pointing out these backwards, punitive laws tend to be in place in anti-feminist, conservative states.  The reason behind them isn’t “feminazis out to get paid”.  It’s actually because conservatives believe that mothers are on public assistance not because they’re poor, but because they’re not married.  They still subscribe to this ridiculous notion that Mom + Dad + Baby = No Problems Ever Again, and figure that if people are struggling financially, it’s because they’re sexual deviants.  And so their child support laws are geared not towards making sure men pay for their children so much as punishing people for not being married, and punishing people for being poor.  It’s no good for the mothers, either, because they’re often expected to go to great lengths to try to get the money from the fathers before they’re permitted to get public assistance to feed their children. This is all rooted in a highly punitive view of gender roles and responsibilities, and no one benefits from it.

Not that I’m against the state getting child support out of those who can pay it.  They should do that!  But we already have a method that works just fine: wage garnishment.  The only drawback to wage garnishment is that you can’t do it to men who aren’t drawing wages.  And that’s fine by me.  People who can’t afford to pay their child support aren’t going to magically be able to if you throw them in jail.  Inability to cover expenses is why we have public assistance.  Men who are in dire financial circumstances aren’t going to get out of them by having the state force them into ever more desperate situations.  The children will be much better off in the long run if men have a road out of poverty.  Once they actually start drawing wages, then it’s fine by me to garnish them, though I’m a little wary of charging them back child support on money they weren’t even making.  Again, the state should be helping people out instead of just piling more and more penalties on people who can’t afford to pay in the first place.

*And don’t try to distract the issue with hypothetical situations of women steal sperm to get on that, um, gravy train of child support that often doesn’t cover even a quarter of expenses.  Most child support dodgers were eager to have children, and are only reneging now that the relationship is over. 

In my surfing around the internet this weekend, I came across this old piece by Katie Roiphe about women who use their babies as their Facebook profile pictures, and surprisingly, I found myself agreeing with her, a rare enough instance.

The mystery here is that the woman with the baby on her Facebook page has surely read The Feminine Mystique in college, and The Second Sex, and The Beauty Myth. She is no stranger to the smart talk of whatever wave of feminism we are on, and yet this style of effacement, this voluntary loss of self, comes naturally to her. Here is my pretty family, she seems to be saying, I don’t matter anymore…...

This generation leaches itself of sexuality by putting the innocent face of a child in the place of an attractive mother. It telegraphs a discomfort with even a minimal level of vanity. Like wearing sneakers every day or forgetting to cut your hair, it is a way of being dowdy and invisible, and it mirrors a certain mommy culture in which its almost a point of pride how little remains of the healthy, worldly, engaged, and preening self.

Just as in the past and to an extent today, women are expected to show their love for their male partners by erasing their own identities and replacing them with his—-going from Ms. My Name to Mrs. His Name—-now there seems to be increasing pressure for women to “prove” they love their children through self-abasement.  I suspect the backlash against feminism is taking this form because replacing men with children in the equation makes it harder for feminists to criticize without opening ourselves up to complaints that we’re anti-motherhood, just as in the past suggesting women should keep their own names was equated with being anti-man.  But the kid thing is basically a cover for the same ol’, same ol’, and boy howdy did Natalie Portman’s comments drives that home last night!

She was as lovely and slightly awkward as she has been every time she’s hauled home another prize for her devastatingly creepy turn in “Black Swan,” thanking her fellow nominees, her parents, the directors who’ve guided her career, and then at last “my beautiful love,” dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied, for giving her “the most important role of my life.” That’d be when he impregnated her, I’d wager.

“Sure, I may have just won a prestigious award in a cutthroat business and be famous and wealthy, but hey, look at my partner and his Sperm Magic!”  Awesome.  Some days I look at what we’re up against and feel like giving up. 

I honestly don’t understand the widespread cultural hostility to women being ambitious, accomplished, and self-assured.  Needless to say, we don’t expect men to suddenly and unceremoniously denounce their life’s work as inconsequential compared to their job as boyfriends, husbands, and fathers.  But there does seem to be immense pressure on women to subsume their identities in Mom when they give birth.  In this most recent edition of Bitch, Sara McAbee has an article about mommy bloggers, and a lot of it focuses on the bile that’s poured on a handful of mommy bloggers who’ve made a lot of money at it.  (McAbee herself doesn’t seem to have completely resolved whether or not making money as a mommy blogger is a good thing.)  The problem is that these women made a lot of money as writers, but they’re perceived by the haters to be making money as mommies.  The criticism takes on a very “how dare you!” tone—-how dare you make money! how dare you brand yourself!—-and I think that kind of nastiness is rooted in this growing pressure for women to compete in the game of self-sacrifice and self-abasement to prove their motherly love.  Also, I think people get confused, because the motherhood-trumps-all mentality makes people think someone like Heather Armstrong is making money as a mom, and that’s considered mercenary, when in fact she’s making money as a writer.  I’ll point out that in the day when women could be more openly bashed for not changing her name to her husband’s, writers like Shirley Jackson or Erma Bombeck who made a living writing about their kids were not castigated as evil, mercenary bitches in nearly the same way Heather Armstrong is. 

Seems to me we need a new feminist movement, one where women stand up and say that just because they insist on having lives and identities of their own after they give birth, and just because they refuse to downplay the importance of their non-motherhood careers once they become mothers doesn’t mean that they don’t love their children.  We got to a point where the accusation that you don’t love your husband/partner because you work or keep your own name—-or don’t get married at all—-has lost its steam.  Surely we can get there in pushing back against the mommy-uber-alles culture that we have now.

I mean, we all knew that, since the people most likely to blather on about “strengthening the family” are also the least likely to support those things that actually strengthen the family, such as delaying marriage and childbirth with the help of contraception and sex education, expanding educational opportunities, and expanding the middle class.  But it’s nice to get a straightforward reminder that conservative talk about “family” is strictly about restricting women’s freedom and opportunities.  In Frederick County, Maryland, the Board of County Commissioners is slashing funding for Head Start and the reason is that women need to get back in the kitchen.

  COMMISSIONER C. PAUL SMITH (R): I think its very significant that we did make this marriage week announcement today, because that is the best long-term way to help our children, as marriage is strengthened in our community. As many of you know, I had a lot of kids, and my wife stayed home, at significant sacrifice, during those early years, because she knew she had to be with those kids at that critical age. I know everybody isn’t able to survive doing that, but clearly, as we can strengthen marriage we can decrease the children that we have to reach.

  COMMISSIONER KIRBY DELAUTER (R): My wife, college educated, could go out and get a very good job. She gave that up for 18 years so she could stay home with our kids, we had to give up a lot to do that. I agree again with Commissioner Smith, you know, the marriage thing is very important. I mean, education of your kids starts at home, okay? I never relied on anyone else to guarantee the education of my kids.

I particularly like how Delauter characterizes his wife as being literally no one.  To say “I never relied on anyone else”, when in fact you relied on your wife, i.e. the woman who gave birth to those children?  That’s some ballsy erasing of women’s contributions right there, fuckwit. 

I enjoy this peek into the workday wingnut version of “logic”.  Staying at home is a sacrifice, and therefore women should be forced into it.  I thought sacrifices were, by definition, something you gave up willingly.  But more than that, it’s clear that they’re saying women choosing to work somehow weakens the family.  Like divorce is generally a matter of men saying, “That’s it!  I can’t stand that you have a job and our family is better off financially than if I was the sole source of support.  I’d rather eat dirt than have a wife who works every day.”  Maybe back in the 50s, but things have changed dramatically.  And even if some men are still like this, the people weakening the family are those making the inhumane, stupid demands, not those who refuse to comply with them. 

But obviously, this isn’t about “strengthening the family”.  This is about having a single, very narrow model of what constitutes an acceptable family, one built around female subservience and dependence.  And making sure that anyone who veers from that path is punished severely.  Even—-and especially, I’d say—-in cases where they don’t have a choice, which is true of most working mothers who need the income, full stop.  Republicans, as those who didn’t realize before are quickly learning, really enjoy the idea of adding more burdens to the already burdened to punish them for the sin of not being rich.

Thank you (should I say “thank” you), Scott Lemieux, for linking this display of really first class wingnutty sex hysteria from Maggie Gallagher, where the head of the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage argues that legalizing abortion is bad for women because now they have anal sex, which I guess wasn’t an option before because of the fear of making santorum babies.  I really needed this, because I spent yesterday morning taping a Bloggingheads with an anti-choicer who kept repeating as a mantra that antis oppose abortion because it’s the taking of a human life.  (I did not, sadly, have a chance to point out that so is ejaculation, because sperm are, like fetuses, both human and alive.  Plus they do fetuses one better, which is they can live outside of their host, sometimes for days.)  So, this was a nice refreshing bit of sex-phobic honesty from Gallagher to cleanse the palate. 

And yes, she seriously jumps from abortion to anal sex.  Her logic is pretzel-like, as it often is from antis who are trying to argue against sexual freedom without using the tools they’ve had for thousands of years of simply saying someone’s a pervert and letting that be enough, but this is how it goes: Abortion rights convinced young women that their sexuality is “like a man’s”, i.e. something you do for fun instead of grimly tolerate so you can have babies.  But deep down inside, women don’t really want to have sex for fun.  Women just want to get married and make babies, and sex is a means to that end.  But now they all feel they should be pretending to enjoy sex for its own sake, which opens the door not just to casual sex, but to doing things like anal sex, which you have to grimly tolerate to prove you’re “like a man” (even though few straight men are up for having someone put dicks up their butts), when in the past the only sex you were required to grimly tolerate was vaginal intercourse within marriage.  We’re doing it to please our boyfriends, which we don’t even have, because boyfriends are a quaint relic from the time before men had all the power.

Oh yes, Gallagher—-this is standard wingnut nonsense now, by the way—-argues that women had more sexual power back when they were forced to give birth against their wills, raped without any hope of legal recourse, and ushered into marriage before they were often old enough to know what they wanted, where they were then expected to give up, if they could afford it, any paid employment they may have enjoyed outside of the home.  The logic here is basically that women love men, but men don’t love women, so women need leverage in order to force men to be with them, and pregnancy is that leverage. 

Needless to say, while Gallagher and others like her try to claim this is a “feminist” argument, because they’re totally trying to get women what they want, it is in reality incredibly misogynist.  This belief is based on the premise that men are good and women suck.  Think about it.  In this formulation, women obviously want men for their personalities, bodies, intellects, values—-they love men’s whole entire lovable selves.  But men don’t love anything but boobs and vaginas (and buttholes), and will only tolerate women’s odious personalities if forced to in order to get access to the vagina.  Babies, in this formula, are the weapon used to force men to do this.  I’m afraid I don’t see the “feminism” there.  My feminism is one that suggests that women are men’s equals, and that just like men, we totally have value outside of our sexual functions.  And that men can and do love women, instead of just pretend to love them in order to get access to their vaginas. 

Hell, I’d go a step further and say that not only are men perfectly capable of loving women, but women also can love women.  And men can love men!  No wonder Gallagher finds homosexuality so threatening—-since men are lovable and women aren’t in her world, what’s to stop all dudes everywhere from just quitting women altogether so they wile away the rest of their days gloriously loving each other?  Well, that, and same sex attraction really undermines her notion that all of human sexuality can be reduced to “women want men, and men hate women but really like vaginas”. 

Taffy Brodesser-Akner asks the same question that keeps cropping up over and over: why are there mommy wars?  In this particular case, she’s asking why Erica Jong couldn’t write an article critical of attachment parent ideology without creating over-the-top flamewars?

But take a closer look at the comments on Jong’s piece. They’re not just defensive; they’re personal. The arguments aren’t well reasoned overall, just huffy, and with the requisite all-caps type to show the writer means it. Jong’s responders say, “Sorry LADY but being a parent PERIOD is a LOT of work! Don’t know if you got THAT memo.” Another snarls, “What you call prison, I call FREEDOM.”

I am reminded of my time in an all-girls school, where a girl could cut another down not with something as honest as a schoolyard beating but with a narrowing of the eyes, a whisper to a friend. No matter how pro-A.P. you are, no matter how green you strive to be, I think it would be hard to read Jong’s criticism of these movements as belittling or nasty. So why are all the responses so sour-mouthed and small-hearted? Why are they so mean?

She gets close-ish to what I believe is the answer later:

Nobody cared that Britney Spears was a young mother in a terrible marriage on the verge of a nervous breakdown; they only cared that she dyed her hair when she was pregnant and tried to escape photographers without strapping her baby into a car seat. But it’s worth noting who buys those supermarket tabloids. It’s mostly women—and it’s often moms.

But that’s the only time gender is mentioned.  To read this article, you would think the only people in the world who are tasked with the job of raising children are female.  The words “dad” or “father” never are mentioned.  “Parenting” is mentioned, but it’s seen strictly as something moms do, which means it’s probably time to revert to the old-fashioned word “mothering”.  If parenting is so incredibly hard and confusing—-which I’ll grant that it probably is—-you would think it would sure help to have other people around to help you with it!  Perhaps even just to bounce ideas off.  But the only other adults these moms interact with appear to be other moms.  They judge, they read, they flame war, they occasionally help each other out.  But it’s just them and their kids.  No men whatsoever to share their worries or their workload.

I’m guessing not all of them are single moms.

But moms aren’t just filled with rage that makes them flip out defensively at even the hint of disagreement.  Nor are moms just filled with control issues that make them start to reject things like modern medicine because their egos needs the stroking of feeling like they’re smarter than all those scientists and that history of disease eradication.  Nor are they just so competitive about their mom-jobs that everything becomes a competition over who is the better mom, as if there’s raises or promotions you can get from winning.  A lot of moms are depressed, or at least suffering from anxiety, and have to be medicated to handle their mental health problems. 

I felt like my shoulders were hung up on a clothes hanger every single day from the moment I woke up until the moment my children were in bed. Once they were there, asleep or at least safe in their beds and crib, not falling down staircases or eating or stuffing Legos up their noses or pummeling each other, I slumped. Visibly, physically, emotionally slumped. I was exhausted, and I was anxious. The anxiety made me a miserable person and a miserable mother.

The medication helped me. It gave me a pause button.

Lots of whys in this piece.  Lisa Belkin, in her intro, has lots of questions.  The blogger she quotes at length has lots of questions:

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In retrospect, this story seems a bit inevitable and yet, at the same time, almost impossible to believe.  For those who don’t know (and shame on you!), the New Pornographers are a beloved indie rock band who have taken on the admirable task of filling the needs of a nation that has burned holes in their Replacements and Cheap Trick records. 

They also have a great name, the origins of which are disputed (naturally) on Wikipedia.  I’ve always appreciate their name, insofar as wearing the T-shirt when I’m flying tends to reduce the number of people who strike up pointless conversations with me despite my obvious investment in the book I’m reading.  What I really like about their name is that they skip right over the cutesy nickname “porn” and go straight for the dirtier-sounding “pornography”.  Plus, there’s a pleasant fissure derived from the dramatic difference between their sunny, cheerful power pop and the name, which seems dark and mysterious in all the ways their music really isn’t.  I love incongruous band names, like The Smiths. 

Alas, their name has caused them to be canceled from a performance at Calvin College.  All we know from this press release is that the university determined that many of its students and staff were simply incapable of understanding irony.  No, I’m not really paraphrasing to make fun of them. This was their exact conclusion:

However, after weeks of discussion and consideration, the irony of the band’s name was impossible to explain to many. The band’s name, to some, is mistakenly associated with pornography. Consequently, Calvin, to some, was mistakenly associated with pornography. Neither the college nor the band endorses pornography.

The ongoing battle between rock music and Christianity—-at least conservative Christianity—-continues to amuse and fascinate me.  Rock musicians belligerently continue to do their thing with little regard for how many sad little wannabe rockers want to join the party, but are bound by their faith to avoid most forms of fun that are too, you know, fun.  Calvin College seems to have a long history of bringing bands on campus to entertain the kids, including many that I’d probably think have content more troubling to conservative Christians than the lyrics of the New Pornographers. 

But what do I know?  I’m the kind of asshole who thinks that the real problem that should worry conservatives is that the family values teabagger crowd turned out in large numbers to nominate a man for New York governor who thinks it’s fucking awesome to send a bunch of people pictures of a woman being fucked by a horse, a situation that I highly doubt was fully consensual.  But what do I know about morality?  My brain’s been fried by overindulgence in power chords and peppy harmonies. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the homobigots out there who are worried about the downfall of marriage if gays and lesbians are allowed to partake in it, let this be an example of how mundane and committed married life can be for some of us working hard on The Homosexual Agenda.

My lovely wife Kate and I decided, instead of eating babies and participating in an orgy, to spend Friday night cleaning out the pantry and fridge of outdated and spoiled food.

It was a revelation of sorts, with various “science projects” in the fridge, and long-outdated canned goods in the pantry. And some of the dates were frightening.

Some of the fun discoveries in the fridge:

• Moldy green Sargento swiss cheese
• Ziploc bag containing two boxes of leftover Chinese food, one had leaked through and discolored the box
• Rubbermaid plastic container with what looked like was a half of an onion at some point.
• Jar way in the back with one dill pickle floating in its water
• Deli drawer with various opened packages of deli meats at least a month old.
• Apples that have been in there at least 2 months at least and do not look spoiled (that seems unnatural, no?)
• Applesauce that was ancient and still didn’t look spoiled (scary)
• Various discolored, freezer-burned meats that we didn’t Foodsaver

Some treasures in the pantry:

• Three cans of Healthy Choice soups with expiration dates of 9/2009 and 7/2008(!).
• Can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup (that one I’m blaming on Kate), date: 7/2006(!)
• Cans of corn dated 8/2009
• Open boxes of pasta and rice, who knows how old.
• Open box of Lorna Doones
• Open bag of Original Goldfish crackers from June

And that was our deviant Friday night of marital bliss, Maggie, Brian, and the rest of you homo-haters out there.

Feel free to share your pantry and fridge purge nightmares in the comments, or tell us about your progressive Friday perversions that should scare the fundies.

You know what I really, really don’t get?  The whole Twilight thing.  I just don’t get it.  I mean, I analyze and observe it like a good feminist critic of pop culture, but on the most basic, gut level, I just don’t get why it’s appealing to anyone, much less some big blockbuster hit.  It just sounds so reprehensibly, tediously, unbelievably anti-feminist that I can’t see why any tween—-much less a teenager or a grown woman—-would get into it.  I’m wracking my brain and trying to think of what we had when I was that middle school age bracket that’s even remotely comparable, and nothing comes to mind.  There was New Kids on the Block and Johnny Depp to provide images of “safe” young men to crush on, but while that was all very corny, there wasn’t anything close to the hyper-patriarchal “getting married at 18 to a guy who stalks you!” kind of thing going on there.  When I went to high school, there certainly wasn’t anything of this nature even close to my radar.  Then again, my teenage years were, in retrospect, a startlingly feminist time in terms of pop culture.  You wouldn’t really see, for instance, a band like L7 get the kind of promotion to teenage audiences that they got back then.

We’re in the midst of some kind of anti-feminist backlash and at the hopefully tail end of a surge of evangelical Christian power, and so I get that pop culture is probably going to reflect that to a degree.  But at the end of the day, I don’t understand why young women and girls not only enjoy being insulted like this series insults them, but why they eat it up. Garland Grey watched the latest movie in the series, and this is his takeaway:

I would say I’m Team Jacob, but both of them are just such colossal assholes. So little of this movie is Bella telling them about what she wants, and so much of it is the two of them talking about her like she’s not STANDING RIGHT THERE. In one scene, Bella makes it extremely clear: she does not want to bump werewolf uglies with Jacob. He kisses her anyway. She punches him, but BOW she almost breaks her hand. (In the book she apparently does break her hand. I say apparently because I never finished any of the books.) I guess the verdict is in: don’t fight back ladies, it won’t do a damn bit of good.

The Twilight Series has always been a warped, frightening prism through which we are encouraged to view the power dynamics of modern relationships. Bella meets Edward, a possessive man who scares her and invades her personal space, and she cannot swoon fast enough. This teaches young women to ignore the signs that their relationships are abusive and glorifies a pernicious form of Stockholm Syndrome, which society calls The Good, Faithful Woman. For only The Good, Faithful Woman can find TRUE LOVE. What is True Love? Well, you can’t control it, it consumes you totally, and once you’re in it, there is no escape.

I’ve had people explain that young women eat up the fantasy of having a guy that wants you and only you so badly, which is a fantasy that particularly resonates with young women who find themselves in a sea of young men who are afraid to be too nice to a girl they’re dating, lest everyone thinks they’re gay.  But this shit is so over the top that it seems like it would embarrass young women, and I have to wonder if they just make ‘em a little more earnest and harder to shame nowadays.  Humiliation aside, I’m truly and completely amazed that fans don’t balk at obviously fucked-up messages like the whole get-married-for-eternity-at-18 thing.  Or the way the books positively glorify completely subsuming your identity in a man.  When I was a kid, plucky heroines who were wholly themselves captured our imaginations, which is why Judy Blume was able to make so much money off us.  Why are girls so different now? 

I finally got some insight on this from Tanya Erzen, who I had the pleasure of interviewing today for an upcoming podcast, and who wrote an excellent analysis of the fan relationship to Twilight recently.  In her piece, she describes how the fans really get off on the juxtaposition of the banality of Bella’s life playing the role of the housewife for her father after her mother left and her exciting life with the vampires and werewolves, one that is still patriarchal as all hell, but at least not boring.  And she winds up with this:

The enchantment of Twilight doesn’t reside in Edward’s proclamations of love but the other dazzling possibilities in the text:  the vampires don’t eat actual food so Bella is liberated from ever having to cook a meal once she becomes immortal.  She eventually lives as part of an extended clan of Cullen vampires who are always on call to babysit and provide free daycare.  Sex is always awesome.  And then there is immortality itself.

Tanya assured me during the interview (stay tuned in to future podcasts!) that she doesn’t think the fans really think about it on this level.  And she would know, since she’s interviewed thousands of them.  But that said, I think she’s on to something here—-feminists look at the patriarchy that Twilight serves up and we wrinkle our noses in disdain.  But it’s still absolutely a more fun and exciting form of patriarchy than the one where you don’t have awesome sex and have to cook all the time, and there’s never any exciting adventures at all.  Being the passive victim of exciting adventures is better than being the passive victim of your boring ass ordinary life.  And I realized, with sudden sadness, that basically that’s the appeal.  It’s not like most of the fans are living some great, empowered lives that make the Twilight fantasies look like a nightmare.  Despite the gains of feminism, most women still have lives that involve a lot of shit work done for ungrateful family members, a sex life where your desires and needs are considered secondary if considered at all, and lots of boredom.  For them, the fantasy of a choice between two patriarchies resonates.  Maybe for many, it’s because the fantasy of something outside of the patriarchy is too far out of reach to be a fun fantasy, but instead is just depressing.  We are, after all, living in a backlash time where we’re being asked to take seriously the proposition that Sarah Palin is a feminist.  A little subconscious fatalism is perfectly understandable in this environment. 

Niall Stanage has a piece up at Salon examining how David Vitter has managed to survive a rather comical sex scandal involving prostitutes and diaper-wearing. He makes a lot of good points about the situation in Louisiana and how Vitter is benefiting, but I think it’s useful to think about why the scandal itself doesn’t seem to hurt Vitter, when other Republicans—-even ones who have straight sex like Mark Sanford and John Ensign—-were so dramatically damaged by falling in the eyes of the “family values” crowd.  Stanage addresses these specifics towards the end.

There is another element to Vitter’s resilient popularity worth mentioning: the nature of his offense. His encounter was (presumably) with a woman; the fact that he used an escort agency rather than picking up a prostitute from a street corner; that rumors of other similar episodes have not been substantiated; that he has stayed with his wife and family: All of this probably helps his case seem less egregious than, say, the male restroom arrest that ended Idaho Sen. Larry Craig’s career.

“Same-sex [scandal] would be a killer,” Maginiss says. “Or even if there was evidence that this is part of a pattern of continuing behavior—that would be hard to overcome.”

I’m going to take a moment to point out that I’m sure most people, especially evangelical Christians, are probably full well aware that it was not a one-time deal. 

Jessi Fischer, a California-based writer on sexuality who blogs as “The Sexademic,” suggests that the contrast between the cases of Vitter and Craig “is significant because when you are talking about people having a kind of moral panic, often what we are talking about is the crossing of boundaries. That could be when the two people are of the same sex, but something like race and the crossing of racial boundaries affects these things as well.”

“You can’t cross too many boundaries at once,” she advises.

I think a lot of this is getting close but missing the point.  The question at hand is why Vitter is able to sell himself to “family values” conservatives, and the assumption here is that going to prostitutes is transgressive in a way that it should be especially threatening to them.  But I think the problem here is applying liberal values to the situation.  But “family values” is really just a euphemism conservatives use for supporting the patriarchy.  In this worldview, I’d argue that it’s less of a problem if a man goes to a prostitute than if he does something confusing and emasculating, such as expressing affection for a woman outside of the dutiful bounds of marriage.  The fundie worldview, especially, has never been one that pretends that men don’t feel lust.  On the contrary, they tend to argue that, when it comes to sex, men are basically uncaged animals who can’t control their own behavior very well, and so society has to do it for them.  When you read a lot of evangelical grappling with pornography, this comes across loud and clear.  Men who look at pornography are considered “addicted”, and the main concern is that it might weaken the sexual bonds in the marriage and lead to a divorce.  I wouldn’t say I see a lack of understanding as to why men would look at porn.  In fact, the fundie obsession with eliminating distribution makes it clear that they think men are mostly unable to control themselves.  The internet has changed things somewhat; realizing that you can’t stop porn on the internet has made space in the evangelical world to talk about men actually taking self-control.  But their preferred worldview is one where men are tempted by sex (not so much by love), and the women who tempt them bear the blame.

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It’s important not to listen to Marcia Pappas about anything—-her version of feminism doesn’t resemble our Earth’s version. She, for instance, suggested that Barack Obama was basically a rapist because he campaigned against Hillary Clinton.  Not an authority, but sadly, treated like one in the press, because she heads up New York NOW. And therefore, creates these awful situations where people get the mistaken impression that at least some feminists are saying X, when usually it’s just Marcia Pappas. 

Latest example is this whole thing with New York becoming a no-fault divorce state.  Because Pappas has this important title, she’s been able to convince the press that “feminists”—-at least some feminists of importance—-are angry about this.  The reality is that feminists were the ones who pushed no-fault decades ago, and feminists who deserve much of the credit for the relative ease of divorce today.  This is because feminists saw what is still true, which is that women are more likely to be unhappy, treated unfairly, or abused in marriages, and more likely to want out.  Even thought it’s evened out more that it used to be, women still file for divorce more often.  Even when you have no-fault divorce, it’s still shockingly easy for an abusive husband to use the court system to make it impossible for his wife to get a clean break.  Many abusive men get with those “fathers’ rights” groups and learn tactics from each other on how to come up with increasingly silly lawsuits over child custody and other issues in order to break a woman emotionally and financially and maintain your power over her.  The effects of abuse by court are nothing to sniff at, as this woman who was rendered homeless because of it can attest.

No-fault is hardly the end-all, be-all, but it’s a big improvement over a system where abusive spouses can stop the divorce itself, as well as file one frivolous lawsuit after another.  Simply knowing that you can get out easily can often make it easier to leave sooner, when an abuser has his hooks less into you.  As this post at Salon indicates, this is nothing to sniff at—-the introduction of no-fault divorce leads to a 30% drop decrease in domestic violence.  As this lawyer explained:

I’ve practiced in two states with radically different no-fault laws, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told a controlling, psychologically abusive spouse, “No, Mr. Jones.  You can’t make her stay married to you if she doesn’t want to be.”  (I also can’t tell you how many times, while teaching a pro-se divorce clinic, I hear the question, “Can I take back my name from her?”  But that is another story for another time.)  Fault-based grounds usually include mental cruelty, but true mental cruelty has a psychological component that can make it very difficult for the abused spouse to articulate that abuse.  More to the point, the abused spouse may be terrified to describe the relationship on paper and testify about it in a court.  And of course, a controlling spouse will always choose the path of most resistance to whatever it is that the other spouse wants.

I say we need to go a step further than no-fault and sever as many rights that a person has over their ex-spouse as possible.  There’s a lot of talk about tort reform in this country, but almost none of it addresses what is probably the single biggest abuse of the courts, which is the constant bullshit lawsuit filing done by angry, abusive men who can’t let go.  Why not limit the number of times you can sue an ex-spouse, or put a statute of limitations on it?  These men will tie women up in court for years, sometimes decades.

Pappas’ excuse for her stance is that fault-based divorce systems protect housewives.  That’s always struck me as a stretch of an argument, since someone can just leave you in the lurch without formally divorcing you if you’re dependent.  At least formal divorce systems do try to make sure that someone’s in-marriage investments count for something, even if it’s not much in practice.  Certainly, that’s how the lawyer they consulted at Broadsheet saw it:

Does unilateral divorce favor the spouse holding the purse strings? Not really. “It benefits the spouse who wants out of the marriage the most. That’s not always the ‘moneyed’ spouse. In fact, research suggests that it is more often the wife,” she says.

Pragmatic issues favor no-fault, but so does the simple ethical principle that feminists call “enthusiastic consent”—-the belief that all sexual relations should only occur if all parties are not just conceding, but wanting to be there.  Obviously, I’m not suggesting that a marriage should be glorious every minute of the day in order for it to be a real relationship.  But if one person is genuinely not happy and has truly withdrawn consent to be in the relationship, holding them in it against their will is a violation of their human rights.  There’s something creepy about Pappas’ image of housewives getting some kind of pointless revenge on husbands who leave by making it harder to dissolve the formal relationship.  It’s admittedly difficult to sympathize with a man who convinces his wife to become dependent on him and then abandons her, but even in this worst case scenario, I fail to see the value in keeping a zombie relationship alive instead of just ending it already.  And the vast majority of divorces aren’t anything like that.  So good on New York for finally coming to their senses.

Broadsheet has a post up about the marketing push to sell “singles” diamond rings to presumably very silly ladies.   According to the website, you wear it when you’re not one of the fortunate ones with an engagement or wedding ring, to show that you’re happy with who you are, and to “signify the attraction to others.”  Diamond companies have been trying to push this sort of thing for awhile, and as far as I can tell, they’re not doing so great.

What’s funny about being a feminist critic of pop culture is that whenever you point to something in the media or advertising that is sexist, you inevitably get a dude come to explain to the little ladies how The World Works.  Invariably, the mansplaination goes something like this: “They sell that item/put that image in the media for one reason and one reason only.  To make money.  This isn’t sexism or the patriarchy out to get you ladies.  It’s just capitalism.”  Mansplainers bringing up this point hail from the right, of course, but also from the left.  Right leaning mansplainers are just dismissing you.  Left leaning ones are dismissing you and explaining that feminism isn’t real politics like the kind that his anarchist/socialist/patchouli club engages in. 

Indeed, the first comment at Salon was a dude mansplaining this.

1) Create a “need”.

2) Sell stuff to fulfill that “need”.

3) Profit!

But either way, what I find interesting is the assumption that is held across the political spectrum that marketers can sell bacon to vegetarians if the ad is shiny enough.  After all, if you’re saying that it’s not sexism that sells when sexism is being used to sell, then it’s only selling because marketers are wizards who can turn otherwise cheerfully unsexist people into raving materialists by just using enough white space in their ads.  I’m suspicious.  I think that marketing is far from foolproof, and that good marketing taps into pre-existing human desires, prejudices, and emotions, and that it’s not “just” the magic of marketing when some consumer product takes off. 

I bring this up, because feminist analysis of engagement rings and the entire wedding-industrial complex is often waved off as irrelevant, because the only real reason that people feel it’s necessary to spend incredible amounts of money on rings and dresses and place settings has nothing to do with patriarchy, but is just more magic-of-capitalism.  And certainly, capitalism is why the spending on wedding stuff has blown up so dramatically, but wedding-industrials don’t make a ton of money selling shit to people that they don’t want.  I think without the patriarchy, and particularly the pressure on women to prove that they’re full human beings because someone wants to marry them, the wedding industry wouldn’t make shit.  (The expensiveness of gay weddings isn’t really an argument against this.  Gay couples are under similar pressures to prove that they’re good enough, and the wedding industry is poised to take advantage.)  The vulnerability of a woman when she’s about to embark on the socially approved display of her worthiness (and to a smaller degree, for the man, his adulthood) is what makes it so easy to get brides to buy and buy and buy. 

And of course, the engagement ring is a big part of that.  Sure, it rose to prominence because of a major marketing campaign by De Beers in the early part of the 20th century, but they couldn’t be selling if no one was buying.  Engagement rings are popular because they speak to a lot of human desires: the desire to impress others, to signal that you’ve been validated by love, and for men, to signal that you’ve taken a woman off the market.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that engagement rings rose up as there was more pressure for men to wear wedding rings—-the need for a social signal that a woman is more possessed than a man in marriage hasn’t gone away.

And that’‘s why I don’t think these stupid singles rings will sell.  They’re not really tapping into a deeply felt desire.  On the contrary, they provoke uneasiness.  Women who aggressively market themselves as single are seen as a tad desperate in our society.  You wouldn’t walk around with a T-shirt that says, “I’m single and while I put on a brave face about it, I’m just dying for some man—-any man, really—-to make an honorable woman out of me.”  Or something that says something similar, but at T-shirt length.  And that’s what this ring seems to scream, no matter how many cheeky pictures of women having fun with their friends they put up around it. 

M. LeBlanc at Bitch Ph.D. wrote an excellent polemic against women changing their name when they marry.  I realize that “the personal is political” is phrase that meant that we should see how the political influences personal power dynamics—-that things that shape women’s lives are patriarchal and social, not just individual—-and so neither M. nor I am saying someone’s a bad person or a bad feminist if they caved on this issue.  But it is kind of a peculiar one, because the path of least resistance to me has always been not to change your name, especially if your husband isn’t insisting, which women often swear up and down isn’t the case.  Why do women choose the headache over the non-headache, especially when they know it’s a sexist tradition?

Well, if you’ve seen blog posts on this topic before, you know the answers that will pop up in comments.  I don’t want to call them rationalizations, because that’s all meanie bear, but it is fascinating how there is an epidemic of two very awful situations that happen to women and apparently only to women:

1) Having a hard to spell/hard to pronounce last name.
2) Having a shithead of a father you want to distance yourself from.

These are the reasons women change their names, apparently, and so your suggestion that perhaps they do it because they’re afraid to buck a patriarchal tradition is so off-base.  They are rebels, dammit!  They just suffer from one of these two chronic female-only conditions.  As I noted in comments, I think that only women are bestowed hard to pronounce names and that only women have shithead fathers seems to be a major problem that feminists should look into.  And yet we tend to act like unruly names and shithead fathers are something that happens to both men and women, despite all this evidence to the contrary! 

And in case you think that this is just anecdotal, let me point out that estimates of how many women change their names upon marriage range from 85% to 95%.  The number of men who do is so statistically insignificant.  So we have 85-95% of married American women who suffer from shithead fathers and/or hard to pronounce names, while men are not similarly afflicted? This is the sort of epidemic problem that perhaps the government should look into.  There should at least be research as to why so many women suffer from these female-only problems.

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Roy makes fun of a bunch of wingnuts who took the bait offered by the New York Post.  The article was one of those faux trend pieces claiming women in New York have discovered celibacy, and the official wingnut stance was, “Good idea; too bad it’s too late for you nasty sluts.”  Naturally, not a one was smart enough to see the bait and switch in the article—-to “prove” that women in New York had given up on casual sex, they offered examples of women who had given up on dating altogether, and were celebrating how productive they are when they don’t have to offer their attentions to a man.  Other examples of the “new celibacy” were a woman who refused a proposition to have sex for money and a woman whose most recent break-up scarred her so badly she took a break from dating.  The fact that women who don’t have male partners in their lives suddenly find they have a lot of time and energy to work on creative projects isn’t really a testament to traditional values, but a sad commentary on how the patriarchy still has enough of a grip that even supposedly liberated women find that being in relationships with men equals having to offer support often without getting as much in return.  Not one of their examples fit the model that conservatives claim works for women, which is waiting until marriage so that you attract a good man, with “good” being defined as “having incredible hang-ups about sex to the point where he can’t handle that you may have enjoyed it prior to meeting him”.  The reason one should want such a man is rarely explained, but the implication is that all men think this way.

No matter.  Wingnuts don’t pay attention to specific details or arguments.  They just respond to their buttons being pushed, and a big button is “Hatred Of Single Women Who Are Insufficiently Ashamed About Liking Dirty, Filthy Sex”. The more good stuff going on for the hate object, the better—-if she’s fashionable or has a good job or seems to possess self-esteem, the it’s time to double down on the hatred and wish for some horrible punishment to befall.  Since forced childbirth is out of the picture (at least for now), the preferred method is to wish really hard that these women will end up rejected and alone, and fall into believing that wishing makes it true.  Roy has collected a shining set of examples of this harrumphing and imagining horrible punishments on the sexy single ladies.  Cassy Fiano was perhaps my favorite, because all this hatred of liberated women and harrumphing is accompanied by a picture that can best be described as desperately grasping for the sexually charged attentions of her mostly male audience. She’s in a tank top, casting a come-hither look over her shoulder, and grasping the phallic symbol of choice for the wingnutteria, i.e. a handgun.  In case you didn’t get the hint, she makes it literal for you, with the tagline of her blog being, “Smokin’ Hot Commentary”.  In case you’re not completely sold, she has other helpful pictures of herself in low-cut shirts and a bikini.  Perhaps what’s so aggravating about the sexy liberal ladies is that they so rarely feel like they have to hit you over the head with their sexuality in order to get sexual attention.  In most cases, it’s not that they think they’re all that, though.  It’s because they give men the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re smart enough to figure out if they think a lady’s cute all on their own.  But I suppose you can be forgiven if you have to lowball your estimate of the intelligence of your average male wingnut.

Either way, all of this makes lines like these unintentionally hilarious:

Meanwhile, these New York women can’t figure out why their exes are buying diamonds for new girls while they’re still sleeping around. News flash: men don’t usually marry girls who sleep around. They marry the nice girls who they had to work for.

Apparently, she doesn’t trust this axiom when the goal is getting male readers to commit to reading your blog. 

The whole post is the typical bout of wishing mightily that women pay for actually having sex, with very little in the way of evidence that being sexually active (by the way, she admits she didn’t wait for marriage, either, but that’s different, because of the purifying powers of hypocrisy) creates either of the horrible consequences she feels so sure of: loneliness and depression.  But my favorite part has to be this:

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