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

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

And the more illiterate and egregious:

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

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

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

It's 4 minutes and well worth your time. 

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

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

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

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

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

They should've just stuck to Awareness Doritos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So today, Tom responds with this:

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

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

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

He's got nothing. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh yeah and: 

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

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

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

Let's start at the top:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: I should have noted earlier, but there's a cool slideshow to go with the article.  I like how my eyeballs look.

In the world of Lady Issues, most of the bandwidth this week is going to be taken up by the sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain. I may have some thoughts on those later---I mean, who doesn't?---but first I want to highlight an article that just came out in the online and print edition of New York Magazine about the feminist blogosphere. This is really exciting for me, because most media coverage of other media tends to be in one of two categories: 1) A profile of someone specific who has done something above and beyond what the rest of us do and 2) A generalized profile of a bunch of Young Turks who have energy and new ideas. The latter tends to get people's ire up, not because they have anything against Young Turks, but because women are ignored, over and over again, for that sort of treatment. Women are seen in the media world as the worker bees (which is why they have a stronger presence in the editorial staff than in the front pages), which means that we're not looked to as innovative thinkers, even if we are. In fact, one of the early concerns when I was first blogging---which is discussed in the article---was how men, especially white men, were sucking up all the oxygen when it came to the liberal blogosphere. Those of you who were around then probably remember this:

Left-wing blogging was on the rise, a phenomenon that was strikingly male. As writer Amanda Marcotte says, laughing in recollection, “We had a running joke about how every three months, another guy would publish a post about ‘Why don’t women blog?’ And we would all comment, ‘We’re out here; fuck you!’ ”

That doesn't happen anymore, thank god. It points to why I have so much faith in the blogosphere and in internet media in general: I think it has demonstrated more flexibility and the people involved are more willing to change. Part of the reason is that the constant output of material makes it easier to portray your changes as evolution; in stale mainstream media, changing your mind or outlook is easier to see as some kind of waffling. Therefore, some of the men who were gave us pains in the early days are now some of our best allies. But mainstream media isn't so quick to change. They have a model of what an innovative writer looks like, it that model doesn't include a vagina. When women are innovative, we're generally seen more as silly and hysterical, but mostly we're not allowed to be seen as innovative. I won't belabor the point any further. You can just go read Ann Friedman's delightful satire of the problem here.

So I'm thrilled to see feminist blogging get the Young Turks treatment. Granted, it's by New York Magazine, which is one of my favorite magazines because they are willing to reject media norms and do their own thing. Hopefully, they're opening a door for women to be considered eligible for this sort of treatment.

Mainly, I wanted to highlight this because the writer, Emily Nussbaum, did a good job of making this piece about you. Instead of concentrating on a handful of blogs that get the most traffic, she sees the feminist blogosphere in its entireity, and includes the LiveJournal confessionals and Tumblr satires and all the other various forms of feminist discourse that are happening in the broad world of blogging. One of the major problems of media coverage of feminism is it rarely captures how much of it is about dialogue. Nussbaum understands feminist history really well, and how the archives of the second wave show a lively and diverse movement that had a lot more women in it than Gloria Steinem. She sees the blogosphere the same way: as a jungle of voices, and one where digging in the stacks instead of sticking to the chart toppers can often produce some truly fascinating reading. There's a reading list of blogs and a portrait slideshow that focuses on some of the most prominent voices, but the actual article itself is about the vastness of the discourse. Which is important, because it's a remarkable counter to the same tedious storyline about how feminism is dead. That so many people are online writing about feminism, and that it's not just a few prominent voices, demonstrates how much feminism is not dead, but is in fact undergoing a 21st century revival. 

On a personal note, I have to say it's been amazing watching all this happen. There was no "feminist blogosphere" when I started, which is part of the reason I write largely about politics and pop culture and not just about feminism. (The other reason is: I want to.) But that anyone was writing about feminism at all in the early days turned out to be more inspiring and expansive than those of us typing in our kitchens and living rooms years ago could have imagined. Except maybe Jessica Valenti---I think she had ambitions for Feministing, but the rest of us were just doing our thing for the hell of it. And so much has come from it, for ourselves and for the larger internet community. Now you see feminist discourse normalized in all sorts of unexpected online spaces. And hopefully this article suggests that next on the list is the real world.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of Clarence Thomas's Senate hearings that led to his confirmation as a Supreme Court justice, which the country has been paying dearly for ever since. The whole thing was a disaster, of course, but one extremely important and good thing came out of it all; Anita Hill's brave testimony of enduring some really ugly sexual harassment at Thomas's hands ignited a public conversation about sexual harassment. And while we have a long, long way to go on this issue---most women endure sexual harassment, often on a regular basis still---the idea that sexual harassment is wrong has really taken hold in a way that simply wasn't true in 1991. It's an important first step. 

There was a conference honoring this 20th anniversary that I sadly had to miss, but that can be watched here.  The Nation had an excellent issue dedicated to it, with memories and reflections from a variety of writers, including one from Jessica Valenti on being 12 years old because she believed Anita Hill. 

"I believe Anita Hill": it was a battle cry of sorts then, and to an extent now. It seems like a straightforward statement---between Thomas and Hill, you find her story more believable---but if you really start to scratch at what happened then, it turns out it's quite a bit more complex than that. 

I was 14 when the whole thing happened. I wasn't really politicized yet, so I don't really recall having a strong opinion on it. Not that thinking deeply about the question was really an option; in my community, believing that Hill as both lying and making a mountain out of a molehill was an article of faith. That these two ideas people held simultaneously directly contradicted each other didn't seem to occur to anyone, much less me. Not at the time. She was lying, and anyway, he was just flirting with her and clearly she's an uptight prude with an agenda: faith, not reason supported this conclusion. Being skeptical of it would have received the same hostile treatment that all widespread faith beliefs are protected by. 

I mainly, at that point in time, liked reading books and listening to CDs, and it was the latter that pulled a brick out of my mental wall on this issue. Sonic Youth had a song on their 1992 record Dirty titled "Youth Against Fascism", and it had the lyric "I believe Anita Hill/Judge will rot in hell" on it. It almost feels like an understatement to say that this lyric blew my mind. A man standing up for a woman---a woman he didn't know, especiallly---in a dispute between a man and a woman over sexualized mistreatment? I had never experienced that before, and probably thought of it as simply impossible. Most women treated other women who spoke up about this stuff like pariahs, so the idea of a man calling bullshit, and being so angry about it, was just unbelievable to me. It felt so incredibly subversive. I didn't want to be caught listening to that lyric. It seemed dirty to suggest that there was any alternative to simply enduring sexual harassment in silence. 

Because, like Jessica, being young didn't mean I wasn't already well-versed in the problem of sexual harassment. By my first year of high school, I'd had teenage boys and even men try to get me into their cars with them on isolated roads (thank god my parents warned me about that one), had guys grope me in the hallways, had guys make lewd gestures at me, and generally been sexually abused at the hands of my male peers and occasional, scarier incidents with older men.  Like Jessica, I think I had no idea that this would be a lifelong problem. What I did know was this: It was not a compliment. You often hear, though far less than you used to, this notion that cat-calling was a compliment and only stupid women could therefore object to it. But it was, along with Hill's mendacity, an article of faith in my community that I was ugly and probably a lesbian and no one male could ever actually want to defile themselves by liking me. Thus, it was literally impossible for a lewd gesture to be a compliment. Most of the boys who did this stuff to me would have sooner endured someone putting a cigarette out on their arms than actually have anyone believe for a second they thought that someone like me was anything but scum for spitting on. I had no illusions, none, about what cat calls and groping meant. It was putting you in your place, a casual reminder that you had no value in their eyes and, more importantly, so little value to the community at large that no one would ever come to your defense. And no one ever did.

That's why "believing" Anita Hill was such a complex and frankly radical thing to do in the early 90s. It wasn't just that you were accepting her version of events. Many of her fiercest critics seemed not to deny that the events she described happened, after all. To believe Anita Hill was also to believe that Thomas was wrong to do the things he did. "Youth Against Fascism" made this clear. Thurston Moore didn't just affirm that he believed that Hill's testimony was factually accurate. He said that treating a woman like that was so wrong that a man who did such things would "burn in hell". He said that it was a man's fault if a man chooses to sexually harass a woman. No one around me was saying those things.

I think the message must have wormed its way into my head, because by the end of high school I was standing up to guys who sexually harassed me. It didn't make anyone defend me, of course. Most people who see a woman speak out against injustice treat her the way they treated Anita Hill---they're furious that she's making a scene, not that he abused her without cause. But standing up for myself made me realize that I didn't need to internalize the shame these assholes were dishing out. I could be proud of myself, even if no one else around me agreed that I deserved that. Hey, Thurston Moore agreed with me, you know, and none of these fools were making Sonic Youth records, so what do they know anyway?

Panda Party!  Last week, Marc suggested I put up a list of rules for Panda Party in a public document, so here it is. For those interested, that list plus the Turntable FAQ should give you a good grounding.  It's now open to anyone with a Facebook account; no need to have a friend already using the service.  

Today's Panda Party is dedicated to Slutwalk, which is coming to NYC tomorrow at noon at Union Square in Manhattan. I really like these pictures from Slutwalk in Argentina, where they call it Marcha de las Putas.

What I don't get about all the confusion about the Slutwalk methods and message in the U.S. is examples like this: Slutwalk's sense of humor and message is so obvious, so straightforward that it crosses borders without much struggle. If read the satellite list at the original, Toronto Slutwalk, you'll see that the march has expanded beyond culturally similar, English-speaking countries, but that's jumpinng language barriers with relative ease.  This is because the message is actually simple and what women have been dying to say. This is a protest march that fits the "yes means yes" mentality.  This is women saying, "I have every right to say yes to sex with who I want, to wearing what I want, to going to parties, to getting my education, to working in a male-dominated environment, to having interests that threaten anxious men's ideas of masculinity, to being butch or to be femme, to being single, to being out at late hours, to having a job that may not be so great but pays the bills, to being a sex worker, to having a less than virginal past, etc. None of these things mean you have a right to rape or sexually abuse me."

This year hasn't been a good one for that message.  This year was practically designed to remind people of how rape isn't taken seriously by authorities and/or by the public if the victim is considered less than "worthy" for any of the above reasons.  People still believe that the price of admission to a party, a boy's club, a sexually active life, a miniskirt is being groped, cat-called and raped. 

I was just reading another example of this problem this morning, as Rebecca Watson came out about all the abuse that she's faced over Elevatorgate. Elevatorgate is a perfect example of the problem here; Rebecca made what should have been an uncontroversial point about how, because a woman enters a male-dominated space like atheist/skeptic circles doesn't mean she's an object whose personal space and privacy can be violated by anyone who wants to do it.  Her critics disagree, and feel that simply being a female skeptic means that you have to forsake your right to dignity, safety, and quite possibly to declining sexual invitations that aren't going to be enjoyable for you. For her simple request that men not corner her in elevators and make her worry that she's about to be violently assaulted, she's been called the usual names. The message from these men are clear; women in the atheist/skeptic community have two choices, to either tolerate sexual harassment in silence or to leave the community.  They believe the price of admission to what they believe it their club---after all, they're men!---is to be reduced to an object whose feelings about sexual interactions are irrelevant. 

So I'm marching for people like Rebecca, whose sexuality is used as a weapon against her to silence her voice and keep all the plum spaces male-only. I'm marching for women like Nafissatou Diallo, who prosecutors still believe was raped but whose case was dropped because we really do hold rape cases to a much higher standard of proof than pretty much any other crime. I'm marching for the victim of the NYPD rape cops, who saw her abusers walk free in no small part because the jury just couldn't get past their disapproval that she had been drinking so much that night (I'd bet most of them have done the same a couple times in their lives). I marching for myself, and in memory for all the stupid names the rapist called me and weak excuses that he came up with for why he decided it was okay to crawl in bed with a sleeping woman who had absolutely not invited him. I'm marching for women whose access to the sidewalks is restricted by catcalls, who avoid taking the jobs they want because they know the men in those environments will react with sexualized hostility, who endure groping and catcalls at school as the "price" they pay just trying to get an education, who have to spend much of a night out monitoring each other's safety because men will corner your or slip drugs into your drinks, who try to make a living in the hard world of sex work and who know if they get raped, they have no recourse, who can't escape abusive marriages because people are so worried about wondering what's wrong with you that you married an abuser they forget to ask what's wrong with him that he hits and rapes you. 

But first we party at the Panda Party. Because hey, part of the whole point is that we should have fun without being guilted, abused, or shamed for it. One half of Slutwalk is to say that we shouldn't be forced to suffer, and the other half is to say that we should be allowed to be free to do our thing. 

SIGH: that is usually my reaction anymore to seeing yet another dude whip out the "I'm pro-choice but Roe was wrongly decided/decided too soon" argument.  Scott Lemieux is the champion of shooting that one down, so I tend to leave it to him.  But I have to respond to Garrett Epps of The American Prospect ruining what was otherwise an interesting article by arguing that Brown v. the Board of Education was correctly timed and Roe v. Wade was too soon, because the latter had such an appalling backlash.  You hear variations of this argument a lot, and the sole evidence for them is that anti-choicers are such loud-mouthed assholes and they're willing to attack the decision directly, in a way that no one is willing to do with Brown.  But that's extremely limited evidence for the assertion, especially since it focuses more on what people say than what they do.  It's true that people are less likely to openly condemn desegregation than abortion rights, but does that mean the backlash to desegregation (and all it means) was less severe than the backlash to abortion rights (and all they mean)?  I think this deserves a look, from a number of angles. 

Structural differences in the decisions.  If you want to compare Brown and Roe, you should make sure you're comparing apples to apples.  Initially, it may seem that you are: both decisions granted rights to oppressed people that were expected to lead to their betterment and help them obtain political, social, and economic equality. Both had political movements behind them.  That's where the similarities end, however.  The big difference is that Brown addresses what is functionally a structural inequality---they forced schools who had previously closed their doors to non-white students to open them up.  Roe, however, addresses an individual right. An individual now has a right to choose to abort or provide abortion.  Abortion was a criminal matter, and segregation a matter of public accommodation.  This difference structures the backlash to it.  Opponents of Brown realized right away that they could re-establish desegregation by changing the systems so they seemed compliant, but with Roe, that's harder to do. When you're dealing with people making private choices, it's much harder to control without invoking law enforcement. In a sense, they don't have a choice but to oppose Roe directly, because without being able to use law enforcement, they're kind of fucked. They've finally figured out a way to get around Roe, but it really hasn't been easy.  The fact that Brown openly invoked equal protection and Roe didn't also makes Roe easier to criticize without going on the record as being hostile to the abstract principle of equality.

The backlash to Brown has been more severe than the backlash to Roe in many ways. The National Guard wasn't called to let women get abortions.  In fact, what was remarkable about Roe was that it was implemented with relatively little fuss. The violence agaisnt abortion providers didn't start up until the anti-choice movement had really developed into a hardline fundamentalist terrorist breeding camp. They have to work themselves into a frenzy to commit violence.  For civil rights activists, violence was a constant problem from the get-go, and it was more frequent, and it was often less tied to organized hate groups. In fact, it still goes on. Not to downplay the ugliness against abortion providers in the slightest, but it's important to understand that both decisions and the movements around them have resulted in a terrorist response.

In addition,  Roe was implemented without that much of a fuss in rapid order.  Law enforcement immediately stopped throwing abortion providers in jail, and doctors started hanging out a shingle without much concern of running into the authorities. Brown was basically rejected in many communities, however.  (My high school didn't desegregate until more than 20 years after the decision, if I recall correctly.)  And when the authorities forced schools to segregate, local governments moved in rapid response by redrawing district lines, changing tax structures, and implementing policies that basically reinstituted segregation. Private schools shot up in rapid response to take the white kids that were being yanked from school. Busing was basically abandoned.  White flight intensified. The result? American schools are more segregated now than they were in the late 60s.  You know, when people were still openly flouting the decision. And Brown has had huge chunks of it functionally overturned in a way that is just as, if not more severe than the restrictions that have been placed on Roe. 

Meanwhile, while it's been getting harder to get an abortion in this country than it used to be, women who want one are likelier than not to get it.  It's not as good as it should be, but I think abortion rights are still doing better than desegregation of the schools. 

The big picture.  Brown and Roe cannot be assessed in a vacuum. Both were decisions that were made in response to activist lawsuits from people who had a bigger picture in mind. I'd say it was the same picture, in fact.  Anti-racism and feminist activists wanted a world where the group they were advocating for were equal to white men in terms of education, career, personal freedom, personal stability, wealth, and access to those transcedent aspect of human life such as reputation, joy, creative freedom, role models for aspirational purposes, that sort of thing.  You know, equality. Both decisions were seen as major moves in that direction.  Brown addressed education inequalities that fed into economic and social inequalities.  Roe addressed the way that pregnancy and childbirth are used to constrain women's economic and social opportunities. 

Again, I have to look at the situation and think feminists have been allowed to go further in their goals. Women's status relative to men has improved more than black people's status relative to white people's.  It's a complex question, of course---after all, half of black people are also women, and racism is different than sexism, so it's really hard to measure.  One the measure of income, it's clear that race hurts more than gender: black people make 62% of what white people do, while women make 79% of what men do.  I believe this is a sign that desegregation has faced more backlash than reproductive rights.  Much of what made it hard for women in the past to get access to educational and employment opportunities was the assumption that they would get pregnant and be forced to drop out or downsize their careers in order to get married and have babies.  That expectation has been curtailed greatly, especially for average Americans.  Women can time their pregnancies and limit their family size, which gives them a great deal of control in the rest of their lives.  But black Americans continue to be pushed out of educational and employment opportunities that would help make that income number more equitable.  

It's true people are more willing to say grossly sexist things in public than grossly racist things (though the election of Obama has shifted that), but I think a larger look beyond what people say and what they do will indicate that the situation is more complicated than that. 

What does this all mean?  Well, it sure as hell doesn't mean that Brown was wrongly decided. What it does mean is that we can't judge a court decision granting human beings their full rights based on our fears of a backlash. Often, the only way to change the status quo is to force a confrontation, and courts granting rights are a good way to do that. Just quit pissing on Roe. It was a good decision and it came at a time that the country was actually supportive of abortion rights.  The backlash against is shaped by the trajectory of women's gains differing from the tragectory of African-American gains, but reading the tea leaves of specific court decisions isn't really all that illuminating as to why. 

Via Caperton at Feministe comes this mind-boggling rant from Peg Aloi claiming that women today are eschewing the "tough gals" model to be weak, frivolous bubbleheads.  Caperton takes this nonsense on, but I'd like to address it myself, because while I somewhat sympathize with a tiny fraction of what Aloi is saying, she's just so incredibly wrong in her assumptions, and it causes her rant to be vicious, depressing, and nonsensical.  Aloi is working off three false assumptions:

1) That "feminism" is about creating "tough" women.  While feminism certainly is about making social space for women Aloi would describe as "tough", in reality feminism is about making women and men equal, just as importantly---pay attention to this part---dismantling toxic gender roles that limit the lives of men, women, and anyone who has a gender identity that doesn't fit into neat little boxes.  A feminism that is obsessed with "tough" women isn't a feminism that's prepared, for instance, to help women to get out of domestic violence situations, since women in those situations don't need a valiant rescue or to stand up to their attackers so much as to be sympathized with and given the tools to escape.  

2) That traditionally coded masculine behaviors and values are automatically superior to traditionally coded feminine behaviors and values. The only argument Aloi has against things like gardening, baking and knitting are these are traditionally considered women's work, and should be shunned for it.  This is actually not a feminist belief, but a sexist one, since it's about reinscribing the gendered nature of certain activities and valuing the masculine over the feminine. 

3) That women having, enjoying, and discussing leisure time activities is un-feminist.  A lot of what makes Aloi mad is her assumption that women are, heaven forbid, having fun. Some of the activities she denounces women for participating in aren't even coded as feminine, but she still hates them because they're leisurely---such as making vintage cocktails.  The pop culture role models she trots out are role models because they seem to have no life of their own outside of duty to family and to work place.  This isn't just not-feminist, but actually sexist.  Already women have far fewer leisure hours in the week than men.  Feminism is actually about demanding that women get to live full lives that include leisure activities.  We're trying to break away from thousands of years of women being treated like workhorses who only get a carrot after everyone else gets everything they want---and really, does everyone else ever have everything they want?

I said I was somewhat sympathetic to Aloi's point, however, and I want to explain: I don't think she's wrong that there's an ongoing backlash against women's gains and that it's resulting in pressure for women to be as unthreatening and powerless as possible.  Some of her examples even fit into this pattern: pole-dancing classes (for most women, though there are a few that are legitimate athletes at it at this point), the explosion in childish things.  There is a disturbing trend of women playing at being overgrown children who are legal to stick penises into, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl taken to the next level, where she dances non-threateningly and without shoes in fields of cotton candy.  But most of what Aloi is talking about isn't that.  I'd even argue that the cupcake trend has more to do with portability than cuteness.  Kristen Wiig's character in "Bridesmaids" was a cupcake expert, and there wasn't even a whiff of childishness about her, so I would argue the two really aren't that wed in the public imagination.*

And that's the problem here.  There's nothing inherently childish about tradtionally feminine activities, and many traditionally feminine activities are a valuable use of your time.  I realize the amount of sacchrine on Etsy can make anyone sick, but don't let the people with bad taste define the concept for you.  Many---most?---of the work coded as feminine in our history was still vital, necessary work, and often it's empowering to learn how to do it.  For instance, I really wish I knew how to sew, which means you could constantly alter the clothes you have or fix up thrift store ones for basically free.  And why the hostility to knowing how to garden and cook?  One of the benefits of feminism is that men feel free to pick up these valuable skills that improve your health and your diet, and I would argue improve creative thinking, while providing often-needed stress relief. ** Plus, baking is often a good, inexpensive way to make unique gifts for parties or friends.  And a lot of women start off with small, safe crafts and end up moving into fixing up furniture or wood-working.  I think it's true that some women retreat into crafts because it's cute and non-threatening, but just as many find that being able to make things with your own hands is empowering.  It can help you get away from the helpless little girl act. 

What's particularly telling is Aloi's hostility to vintage cocktails.  That's not even gender-coded as feminine!  Like working the grill, making cocktails has always been considered a masculine activity that women can do if necessary.  It indicates a generally negative view Aloi takes towards women having leisure activities.  Let's just put it this way: she disses heirloom tomatoes.  Twice. At a certain point, you have to imagine that Aloi's problem is with pleasure itself, not with women being cute and non-threatening.  A heirloom tomato hardly signals, "I'm a submissive little girl, don't fear me, easily startled man!"   I'd actually imagine an easily threatened man would find a heirloom tomato threatening.  Women who know their tomatoes are like women who order the wine without blinking.  It signals an intelligence and willingness to pursue mature pleasures---the sort of thing that easily threatened guys are trying to avoid.  It's not like having a Hello Kitty T-shirt and sticking to workout routines that don't do icky things like make you strong and powerful.

The more I think about it, the angrier I get.  Already women feel a ton of pressure never to kick back and enjoy the finer things in life, but instead to believe there's always a brow or a floor that needs mopping.  One of the toughest things a woman can do is say that she's taking some time for herself instead of just giving and working and giving and working.  

*Maybe "Bridesmaids" is sounding the death knell for the trend of passing off childish MPDGs as something for real women to aspire to be.  There was nary a woman wearing a romper while eating an ice cream cone with what "what, me?" expression on her face.  And men didn't run screaming for the hills, too afraid of women acting like adults to tolerate two whole hours of it. Suck it, Zooey Deschanel.  (Though you probably were sucking something already, chin pointed downwards, and eyes cast upwards as if you're ingratiating yourself with someone three feet taller.)  Kristen Wiig is the new boss in town. 

**That said, I retain the right to make fun of knitting.  I realize it's fun to do it, but unlike with baking or sewing, the final products are something to be endured instead of enjoyed.  Unless you get off on that sort of thing. 

And to make up for the lack of food blogging, I humbly submit this story from the NY Times:

“Just brown the meat, stir in the noodles, seasoning, then smite them, smite them with the liquid gold until there can be no more smiting,” says the blacksmith, played by David S. Lee with the precise diction and syntax of a Shakespearean actor, as he ladles the Velveeta cheese sauce included with the product into the pan......

In another spot, expected to first broadcast in mid-September but already uploaded to YouTube, a woman is pressing buttons on her microwave when the blacksmith grabs her wrist.

“Reject these cold technological contraptions,” he says. “Would you want the shoes of your horse forged in a microwave? Your stove: Use it!”

Adam Grablick, the brand manager for the Velveeta convenient meals division, said the new ads, and the Cheesy Skillets line itself, would resonate with consumers who wanted simplicity but had misgivings about meals that were too simple.

“Our consumer doesn’t want to be slaving away in the kitchen, but she may not feel great about just pulling something out of the freezer and putting it in the microwave,” Mr. Grablick said. “She wants the meal to be hands-on, and for the meal to come from her hands and her heart.”

It's fascinating that Velveeta has turned the growing concerns about junk food, fast food, and instant food and has decided that the reason the public is concerned about these things is because we're concerned that women aren't spending enough time in the kitchen.  Yes, Velveeta!  The nation as a whole is disturbed that a woman takes 10 minutes to produceartery-clogging crap, when she could have spent at least 30, perhaps even 45 minutes to make the same thing.  The entire national concern about food is really just a disguised desire to make women work harder for no reason whatsoever. 

I personally thought the turn towards more home cooking had more to do with Americans concerns about exploding heart disease and diabetes rates, myself. 

But what do I know?  It probably is just an irrational desire to make women work harder for no other reason than they're stupid bitches who need to show more effort around here.  Perhaps we can see more commercials promoting doing twice as much work for exactly the same results.  Maybe there will be a new trend towards women throwing out curling irons and getting back in to pin curls, or women being guilted out of mops and expected to scrub the floors on their hands and knees.  

So, we have a woman running for President who literally believes that her god made women to be the helpmeets of men, and that marriage should be built around women submitting to their husbands.  And this belief, being weird---especially for someone who claims she wants to run the entire nation---was asked about during a debate. 

And this is "sexist"?

No, it's not.  The belief she has  is sexist.  Asking a candidate about her sexist beliefs is well within bounds.  If a politician were running and followed a religion that believed that people under 5'4" were not fully human and should be routinely beat about the head by taller people, it wouldn't be sizeist to make her explain that belief to people she expects to vote for her, either. She's sizeist to believe that. 

It's pathetic that this is even being debated.  Stop letting conservatives who pretend to have the sense of very small children run us around in circles like this. Please.