This week, in anticpation of the upcoming WAM Prom on Friday, I'll be blogging some thoughts on music and culture by the way of our mash-up theme of hip-hop and disco.

One of the myths about disco, one that I think that contributes to a lot of misunderstandings about it, is that it was a brief trend that collapsed as quickly as it rose up in the 70s. In reality, disco was just another step in a long 20th century evolution of dance music, and it ended for the same reason a lot of musical trends do: it morphed into other forms. If anything, disco had a larger impact than most music trends do, as elements of it came out in techno and all other electronic dance music, post-punk, New Wave, and most importantly, hip-hop (which is why we're doing a dual theme for this year's WAM Prom.) But one reason I think there's a sense that disco was its own thing in a way that other trends aren't is that the kind of dancing people think of when they think of disco is this elaborate, ballroom-style dancing that has no relationship to the bouncing and writhing that is most dancing people do in America, whether at a rock show, hip-hop club, or rave. You know what I mean. People think "disco" and they think of John Travolta playing Tony Manero.

Or Travolta's solo style dancing in the same movie:

Nothing against Travolta's unbelievable dancing skills, but this wasn't actually how people (at least prior to this movie) danced to disco, which was, from what I understand, much like they've danced to everything since, which is mostly formless bouncing and writhing. Now, all sorts of music trends have movies that exploited them to make semi-musicals with elaborate dancing, but Saturday Night Fever became synonymous in the public imagination with disco in a way that hasn't happened before or since to a musical form. Why? 

There's a lot of reasons: the dancing is really that good, the music is that much better, a zeitgeists was hit. But I think one reason is that Saturday Night Fever purported to be based on a true story, giving the audience the feeling that they really were taking a peek into the Brooklyn disco scene by watching this fictional film, in much the same way that 8 Mile got a little extra boost because it's so well-known that Eminem did in fact scrape his way up through rap battles like the one portrayed in the movie. But while I think Eminem's life is pretty well-documented, the "true story" of Saturday Night Fever is actually, well, a hoax. 

The whole thing started with a New York Magazine story by Nik Cohn in 1976 called "Inside the Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night", a story about the elaborate disco lifestyle of the Italian-American regulars at a Bay Ridge, Brooklyn disco. The story was a hit; it seems it must have gone into development as a movie in record time. The only problem wiht it is that Cohn made the whole thing up. 

He finally admitted the hoax 20 years later, in 1997.

For an article in the December 8 issue celebrating the 20th anniversary of the movie, Cohn tells of a disco deception born of frustration. The British writer describes how he went to Brooklyn's now legendary 2001 Odyssey searching in vain for a flamboyantly dressed fellow he had spotted in the club's entrance a week earlier. "I didn't learn much...I made a lousy interviewer: I knew nothing about this world, and it showed. Quite literally, I didn't speak the language.

"So I faked it. I conjured up the story of the figure in the doorway, and named him Vincent...I wrote it all up. And presented it as fact," Cohn confesses. "There was no excuse for it...I knew the rules of magazine reporting, and I knew that I was breaking them. Bluntly put, I cheated."

The culture and specifically the emphasis on dancing skills was a mish-mash of Cohn's own imagination and what he observed in the Northern soul clubs in Great Britain in the 60s. It's one of those stories that has drifted under the waves, because most people don't really think it's that important (though why not in our James Frey-bashing era, I don't know). But while it's far from the most important story of journalistic misinformation, I still think it's not something that should be waved off. After all, Cohn's imaginings supplanted the more reality-based portrayals of disco, most of which I think are far more interesting than the image that Cohn painted. To make it all worse, if people had a better idea of how disco actually was in the 70s, I think it would be easier to see it as part of the larger quilt of American pop music, which is always mutating as different genres swap and steal and morph into something new, yet still familiar. 

I don't know what else to add to the discussion about this shameful move from Politifact to grab the brass ring of "non-partisan" by declaring a non-lie the "Lie of the Year". Paul Krugman explains it succiently:

This is really awful. Politifact, which is supposed to police false claims in politics, has announced its Lie of the Year — and it’s a statement that happens to be true, the claim that Republicans have voted to end Medicare.

Steve Benen in the link above explains it, but let me just repeat the basics. Republicans voted to replace Medicare with a voucher system to buy private insurance — and not just that, a voucher system in which the value of the vouchers would systematically lag the cost of health care, so that there was no guarantee that seniors would even be able to afford private insurance.

The new scheme would still be called “Medicare”, but it would bear little resemblance to the current system, which guarantees essential care to all seniors.

How is this not an end to Medicare? And given all the actual, indisputable lies out there, how on earth could saying that it is be the “Lie of the year”?

I discussed this before when Politifact put out their shameful list of nominations that was transparently pandering to right wingers who scream "liberal bias!" if the a stiff breeze catches them. Living in fear of loud-mouthed wingnuts is no way to live, Politifact. But now, in their desperation to avoid getting letters from irate wingnuts, they jut went ahead and picked a straight up non-lie as a lie. This non-lie beat bona fide lies, such as the claim that "90%" of Planned Parenthood's services are abortion (it's 3%) and the claim that the economic stimulus created no jobs. Incidentally, these actual lies beat out the non-lie about Medicare in Politifact's poll, despite ballot-stuffing efforts on behalf of Paul Ryan's office. 

As many others are saying, this really should be treated as the end of Politifact. They have abandoned their mission of fact-checking for concerns about appearing "non-partisan", which means leaning right, frankly, because doing anything but is going to bring the letters from wingnuts. Their side simply has a mass of people who don't give a shit about the truth, who also have a lot of time on their hands. Those people are a pain in the ass, but they cannot be allowed to set the terms of the discussion. 

Politifact bills itself as a site dedicated to correcting the lies that come out of the mouth of politicians and political operatives. It's a great and necessary service. The problem with it, as you can imagine, is that the field of liars is so tilted to the right that if Politfact did an honest and thorough job, they would basically read like Media Matters, except focused on politicians and not media. This shouldn't be a problem, I would think. The right does the vast majority of the lying, and if you want to do a good job at being a non-partisan fact checker, you have to grow up and accept that. But Politifact, for whatever reason, is infected with a strong case of Bothsidesdoit. I don't know if it's a matter of avoiding a tax situation or if it's just that they've bought into the mainstream media fear that accepting reality will make them look "partisan", but either way, they have an ugly habit of dishonestly exaggerating the extent to which Democrats lie to make things look more "even". This is really evident in their contest for the 2011 Lie of the Year. The Republican lies all deserve to be runaway winners: that Planned Parenthood basically does nothing but abortions, that the HPV vaccine will make your kids retarded, that global warming isn't real and doesn't have scientific consensus behind it, that the economic stimulus created no jobs. 

But the "lies" they grabbed from Democrats to make it look more even and avoid accusations of partisanship? Well, the problem is that they mostly aren't lies. They may be hyperbole or over-simplifying, but nothing---not one---comes even within spitting distance of even the most mild Republican lie. They stretch so hard to find Democratic "lies" that they literally cite people blathering on Facebook and try to equate that with Rick Perry telling people that scientists are abandoning the theory of climate change. I'm not kidding. The most mild Republican lie they cite is that President Obama "went around the world and apologized for America," which was dropped by Romney, and I deem the most mild because it's vague enough that you could really stretch and find a way to rationalize it. Not a single Democratic "lie" uttered by a politician even comes close, and in fact most of them aren't even really "lies" by any normal sense of the word.

*Obama's claim to be the first administration that has done a comprehensive review of regulations and cut them. This is by far the biggest lie they dig up on the Democrats. And that's fine; Obama lied. Or at least didn't bother to look up the history before making claims about his bureaucratic prowess. They get to use it. But here's my question: is this really a competitive-level lie? By putting this lie into the finalist list, many others have missed the cut, from Perry saying that he hasn't seen Obama's real birth certificate (i.e. claiming that what Obama released in May is suspect, when it's not) to Herman Cain claiming China doesn't have nuclear weapons.

*The Democrats' claim that Republicans want to end Medicare. This isn't a lie. Politifact really streeeeeetches by using the fact that Republicans merely want to end Medicare gradually by cutting off anyone under 55 from ever receiving Medicare coverage. If Democrats said, "Republicans want to end all Medicare starting tomorrow," then that's a lie. But the fact of the matter is Republicans offered a plan to end Medicare, and saying so is not a lie. Politifact also tries to suggest that pushing people off Medicare and requiring them to buy private insurance with government vouchers isn't ending Medicare. That's like saying kicking kids out of school but giving them a few free textbooks isn't ending public education. You don't get this one on a technicality; you're lying to cover up the radical nature of the Republican plan. 

*Debbie Wasserman Schultz claiming that voter ID laws are a return to Jim Crow laws. Basically, Politifact's argument against this could be used if you brought back any kind of Jim Crow law without bringing them all back, which is, sure, it's basically Jim Crow, but it's not as bad. I'm not kidding! They basically argue that since a smaller percentage of minority voters will be disenfranchised, we all have to pretend the intent and the methods are not the same. They straight up claim that new voter ID laws aren't racist, which is a judgment call and not a matter of fact. And one that's very easy to argue down, since the naked racism behind many voter ID laws is not that hard to see. Many Jim Crow laws also pretended to be race-neutral, but history has judged them correctly as racist. C'mon, Politifact. Even bringing back a percentage of Jim Crow laws is unacceptable. Certainly it's not true that it's a lie to characterize something as "Jim Crow" when it is, in fact, a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise minority voters. At best, you get to whine about "tone", but being forthright in your speech is not lying. In many ways, it's the opposite of lying. They're dinging Wasserman Schultz for being blunt, and that's a much different thing.

*They claim that Obama's claim to not have raised taxes as President is a lie. This one is just sad, it's stretching so hard. The claim is that Obama lied when he said, "I didn't raise taxes once. I lowered taxes over the last two years." They just plain ignore the last one, because admitting the tax holiday that Obama gave on payroll taxes and admitting that he extended the Bush tax cuts makes this claim sound incredibly solid, and they want to make him sound like a liar, in order to appear non-partisan. So they focus strictly on the first part, even pathetically going so far as to claim that a new cigarette tax and a tax on tanning bed is "raising taxes", as if anyone really gives a shit about that. They also do some three card monte with health care reform, trying to claim that the tax penalty for not buying insurance is "raising taxes", when what it is would be better described as a tax penalty. The only thing they got on him for real is the slight tax raise on the wealthiest Americans to pay for health care reform---an additional .9% tax raise on people who make over $200,000 on their Medicare taxes. That's a legit tax raise, but it's inconsequential enough that I really don't think this lie rises to the level of biggest lie of 2011. It's not even in spitting distance of claims that Obama wasn't born here---which again, weren't even nominated---or claims that global warming isn't real or many of the various accusations leveled at immigrants that are simply untrue. 

Shame on Politifact for pandering so much. If they want to be considered a beacon of honesty and truth, they need to start at home.  Right now, they're basically saying that if a Democrat claims to have $2 when he really just has $1.99, that's the same lie as if a Republican says he has $2 and in fact he's got two nickels and a penny. That's some shameful shit right there. 

Today at XX Factor, I counter a lot of the reporting on a Johns Hopkins-based study of 6 sub-Saharan African nations and the factors that influence sexual frequency.  Researchers found that the more decision-making that a woman did in her household, the less frequently she reported having sexual intercourse. For those of us who spend a lot of time reading about public health research, this study read like many, many others that are like it, which are looking at the intra-personal politics in areas where there's a lot of negative health consequences related to sex (high maternal mortality and HIV transmission are the biggies), with an eye towards developing interventions that will reduce the incidences of these kinds of problems.  For instance, what someone might take away from this study is that women who have a lot of power in non-sexual negotiations at home probably has more power when it comes to sexual negotiations, which can in turn make it easier for a woman to prevent HIV transmission and time her pregnancies.  

What this wasn't was an evolutionary psychology study, as far as I can tell. But, as I report at XX Factor, that's exactly how it was read by many journalists.  Reporter after reporter decided to spin this as if it were researchers suggesting that not only do "bossy" women get laid less, but that the researchers were suggesting that this is due to an evolved, genetic response in men to abhor assertive women. The Huffington Post even went so far as to compare this research to some bullshit nonsense being asserted without evidence by a evo psych devotee at Florida State. (He found evidence that greater gender equality leads to women having more sex in various countries, but he did not actually establish evidence for his convulted theory that this shows women are hurt by feminism because it forces them to put out more---which he asserts, evidence-free, women don't like to do.)  There's nothing in the comments from the researchers I've read that suggest that they were saying such a thing, or that they were interested in extrapolating genetic theories from their research at all. The head of the Johns Hopkins study is Michelle Hindin from the department of population and family health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health---I'm guessing a public health researcher who has no relationship whatsoever to evolutionary psychology, because she's probably too busy doing real research.

As I note at XX Factor, what this study probably shows even more is that sexual choice-making is highly influenced by culture and circumstance, because these women, living in areas where HIV prevalence is way higher than here and where it's primarily transmitted through straight sex, have a different environment than empowered women in countries where women have lower risks. I suspect strongly this influences their idea of how much and what kind of sex is good for them. 

So why was this study touted as some kind of evo psych bullshit "proving" that men lose their hard-ons when women start making decisions, and that this is inborn and not something anyone can change by changing society?  Well, I think it's because there's such a constant stream of such bullshit evo psych research being sent to newspapers in chipper press releases that this has become the dominant model of reporting on science looking at sex and gender. Evo psych ideologues don't even need to spell out their claims that most to all sex-and-gender choices are programmed genetically and unchangeable.  They've trained (oh irony!) journalists to fill in that assumption themselves.  So much so that when a study that has no relationship to evolutionary psychology comes across reporters desks, they apply the "men are like this, women are like that" evo psych model of assuming that misogynist stereotypes are biological facts, and they run with it. 

It's really disturbing to see the 21st century version of phrenology  get so much play in the mainstream media. But now it's gobbling up real science coverage.  That's fucked up.

With all that in mind, I'd like to invite anyone that's going to be in Brooklyn tomorrow night to come to Union Hall for the next installment of the Story Collider series. Story Collider is a story-telling series that focuses on stories about the personal impact that science has had on the lives of the story tellers.  I'm honored to say I've been invited to tell a story, and I'm going to write about how being a critic of evolutionary psychology made me more interested, as a writer, in science overall.  The headliner is Carl Zimmer, and he'll be joined by Anna North, Mark Katz, Bora Zivkovic, Tricia Rose Burt and myself. Buy your tickets in advance, if you can, because it often sells out. 

Update: A victory!  The Daily Beast has switched the picture out to this one:

I've replaced the picture below with the same stock photo that they were using, which was also used by the BBC.  So you can see what caused me to be annoyed.

One of the great fears I have writing about reproductive rights as often as I do for online newspapers and magazines is that one day I'm going to pull up one of my pieces and it will be illustrated with a misleading picture of a hugely pregnant woman.  So far, I've been incredibly lucky on this front.  I write about abortion rights for XX Factor a lot, and I often get to choose my own art, but even when I don't, their editors are smart about picking things like medical imagery or pictures of anti-choice protesters or anything but a picture that implies that women getting abortions had to waddle into the clinic under the weight of their just-about-to-burst bellies.  The Guardian has kicked ass for me as well on this front.  Take, for instance, the art used to illustrate my piece about Rick Perry and his ultrasound law that just got halted by a federal court pending a court date. 

Michelle Goldberg also wrote a piece about Perry and what this case means for his presidential campaign in The Daily Beast.  It's a great piece, and should be read (right after mine!), but whoever chose the art screwed the pooch. 

Ever since Michelle Kinsey Bruns started her awesome Tumblr The Inevitable Preggobelly, which is dedicated to tracking this phenomenon of showing heavily pregnant women to illustrate stories about first trimester abortions, I haven't been able to stop noticing how widespread this problem really is.  With news coverage of the sonogram law, it's gotten really bad, because pretty much all pictures of sonograms in stock art show really big pregnant women.  And the reason, of course, is that sonograms on women in their first trimester are boring.  Which means there's no pictures of the event. There's nothing really to see for the layperson on a first trimester sonogram, and if they're done, it's mostly for the eyes of experts who can make sense of the teeny embryo or fetus onscreen.  We only take pictures of women who are having their babies getting sonograms much later in the pregnancy when there's something of interest to see, because at least those women are having a meaningful experience.  

The problem with showing women that are hugely pregnant to illustrate stories about abortion should be obvious.  That's because it's misleading.  This is how much your average woman getting an abortion is showing when she goes into a clinic:

(Sorry, I wanted more pictures of average-sized women who aren't visibly pregnant where you can see their stomachs, but most of the ones I could find are fat-shaming and inappropriate.)

In other words, the vast majority of women getting abortions aren't showing yet.  And even the ones who are aren't really in the giant-round-belly stage, but more the beginning-to-get-a-gut stage.  Obviously, just showing a random photo of a non-distended stomach won't work either for stories about abortion, since it would mostly be confusing to the audience, though maybe at this point we're so used to seeing bellies used to represent pregnancy that perhaps the audience would get the picture. But, as my experience shows, there's so many more useful ways to deal with the art problem.  That's what's so annoying about this entire issue.  Abortion is a complicated issue!  It involves medical science, leering Republicans, crazy anti-choicers, determined feminists, the court system, you name it. There are pictures of all of these things!  Use those instead. Please, art editors.  Just use your noggins. 

If you're anything like me, you probably spend a lot of your time fretting because right wingers have grown incredibly bold about bald-faced lying, and so far it seems there's literally nothing that can be done about it.  We have extensive freedom of speech protections, which is a good thing of course, but leaves us with few options to stem the ever-growing tide of lies emanating from a right wing that knows that it can't make an honest argument.  The mainstream media has basically abandoned its mission to correct lies with the truth.  Some publications continue to fact check claims made by pundits, activists, and politicians, but it's just not enough to counter the endless stream of lies and misinformation coming from the right. That's why Fox News hates Media Matters so much---they have a machine-like approach to the lies, just debunking them in real time.  Media Matters can't get 'em all---that's a super-human feat---but they're the only people out there even approaching success with this.

Well, there is one door that is available, but not used especially often: lawsuits.  Part of that is that it's difficult to show damages with some of the lies that right wingers float, but not always.  Some lies are actionable.  Which is why I'm glad someone fought back against the aneurysm-causing lie that was in non-stop rotation during the health care debate, which is that health care reform somehow meant taxpayer-funded abortions.

A judge is allowing former Ohio congressman Steve Driehaus to sue the anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List for defamation, because as he sensibly pointed out, they were lying about whether abortion is "taxpayer-funded" under the Affordable Care Act.

The irony is that Driehaus is anti-choice. He did, however, vote for health insurance reform, which meant that SBA decided to run the above billboards against him. Despite the fact that abortion is never paid for by federal funds (except extremely limited cases of rape and incest victims on Medicaid) and the ACA didn't change the status quo, anti-choicers have been obsessed with insisting that it does by focusing on federal subsidies to private plans. In fact, after the fight over Stupak-Pitts and abortion nearly derailed the entire proceedings, pro-choicers were the ones wringing their hands over what Planned Parenthood called "unacceptable provisions on abortion." Those were the ones outlined in an executive order affirming the Hyde Amendment and emphasizing enforcement of existing separation of federal funds and abortion services.

Granted, in a perfect world, the guy who fights back wouldn't actually be a fellow misogynist, but I also suspect a defamation suit will be easier to prove when the victim of this particular lie is himself anti-choice.  It would be weird for a pro-choicer to sue because they were "defamed" by false claims that they did what they actually wished they could.  It'd be like me suing because people were out there spreading rumors that I slept with Jon Hamm.  On one hand, it is false.  On the other hand, the defense attorneys could argue that it was only because of lack of opportunity.

So, it's far from perfect.  I may still, should I meet Driehaus, ask him how he came to be a Democrat when he's such an asshole about women's basic rights.  But the SBA List was flagrantly violating election laws that require some kind of tentacle of truth to touch your claims, and they need to be held accountable for that.  I'll take it.  Anything that might put the fear of consequences into right wingers who believe their god has given them free moral license to lie whenever they damn well please. 

There's been a lot of attention paid, rightly, to the Citizens United decision and the role money plays in politics. I think we should also think long and hard about the impact that all this free-wheeling lying has on our discourse.  I honestly think it's just as toxic a problem as money.  You can spend and spend but if people aren't ready to hear what you're saying, it's hard to get through to them. But stoking paranoia throw shiny-sounding lies is pretty much free, and right wingers never leave that trough for it.  I bet you could clock the lies-per-minute rate on Fox News at around 2-3 per, easily.  A well-placed lie can do an amazing amount of damage, as was demonstrated by the "taxpayer funding for abortion" lie that nearly derailed health care reform.  What's frustrating is the Democrats, knowing that taxpayer funding for abortion is a toxic issue in the current political climate, didn't even consider putting it in, and it didn't matter.  Who cares what you do if you can't get credit for it because the opposition claims you're doing the opposite?  The media basically abandoned its duty to vigorously correct the lie, pulling a lot of that "both sides" crap.  Without a reasonable handle on what is actually true, we can't even begin to have real political discourse in this country.

Obviously, just suing the hell out of all the liars isn't an option for various reasons.  But I would like to see more well-placed lawsuits like this, hopefully causing groups like SBA List to slow their roll when they're thinking of lying again.  Of course, their very name is an act of dishonesty (they pretend Susan B. Anthony shared their view of women as ambulatory baby factories who don't deserve basic rights, which is kind of like saying MLK was pro-segregation), so it's possible they wouldn't know how to tell the truth if they ever vowed to start doing so. 

If you follow the world of media folk on Twitter, you probably noticed that making fun of Frank Bruni for today's column is the sport of the hour.  There's even a hashtag #futurebrunicolumns that Dave Weigel appears to have started, with suggestions for column about how airplane food sucks.  Don't waste one of your 20 articles a month clicking through.  Here's the shorter version: "Some would say that 200 million people can't be wrong, but I would argue that 200 million people pretty much have to be wrong.  Which is why I know Harry Potter is stupid."  

The main criticism of this column being floated online is that it's pure hack writing, using the esteemed space of the NY Times op-ed piece pounding out drivel that Andy Rooney would be ashamed to submit.  But I would like to point out that on top of being hack writing, this piece is the most hackish snobbery I've ever been exposed to in my life.  Bruni is actually---and I read it twice to make sure---arguing that simply refusing to even investigate the latest trend makes you a more interesting person.  Because you're a non-conformist and shit.  

As a bona fide snob, I disavow this cheap attempt to be a snob without actually doing the hard work of developing taste.  The knee-jerk assumption that something must suck because it's popular isn't any different than the knee-jerk embrace of every trend that comes down the pipe.  You're still letting the masses dictate your taste to you.  If anything, you're even sillier and more deluded than people who embrace every trend, because at least said people are getting a sense of community out of their trend-whoring.  Even teenage miscreants who pride themselves on being outsiders have a more refined understanding of the relationship between being trendy and being snobby than this.  

If you want to be a snob, I believe you have to work at it. Simply assuming that popularity equals suckage won't do it.  In fact, some of we more practiced snobs are experts at taking occasional pop culture products and spinning out golden arguments about how artful they really are.  Being good at this is becoming a minimum entrance requirement for being a serious rock critic these days, for instance.  

So well-done, Bruni.  Second column in, and you managed to turn in hack writing and hack snobbery.  Maybe next time, you can introduce even more hackery, perhaps hitting a triple header.  

Greetings from Netroots Nation!  I moderated a panel called "Challenging Mainstream Media Narratives on Right Wing Extremism", and Jesse was one of the panelists.  You can watch it already here:

Other panelists included Sarah Posner, Adele Stan, David Neiwert, and David Holthouse.  We talked about the militia movements, hate groups, Tea Party extremism, the Christian patriarchy movement, and the way that the relatively unremarkable New Black Panthers situation got far more media attention than the more serious acts of voter intimidation that go on all the time in this country.

I want to run a little thought experiment by you:

Let's say I know a guy name John.  John is really popular amongst our social networks, because he's a nice guy and always there for you.  But I hate John, because John stands for everything I despise (perhaps he's a Dave Matthews fan), and that makes his popularity extremely threatening to me.  If only there was no John, I start to think.  Then people wouldn't be so quick to dismiss my radical anti-Dave Matthews feelings by saying, "Well, John likes them...."  I start to go a little mad from the hatred.  And then one day, John really seals his popularity by having a birthday  party that's considered the party of the year.  My jealousy and rage causes me to snap.  I follow John home one night, murder him, and dump his body in the sea.  

I then get a cardboard cutout of John and start trying to pass it off as John.  Our friends are outraged and want to know where John is. I'm eventually arrested for his murder.  At my trial, I argue that it's unfair to say I killed John, because (pointing to the cardboard cutout), there's John right there.  

I go to jail, right?  

Apparently not if Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post or Uwe Reinhart is on the jury. They would say the prosecution has no case, because what I did was radically alter John---I may have killed John as we know him---but since there's still a cardboard cutout named "John" in the world, he can't be really said to be killed. To say that I "killed" John is to be a big, fat liar, worthy of four Washington Post Pinoccios.

Ridiculous, right?  But sadly, that's where the discourse on Medicare stands.  The eagerness to believe that Republican aren't as bad as they really are has driven even so-called fact-checkers to a place where they're whining that destryong Medicare and replacing it with coupons can't be said to be killing it.  Even though, in a sense, Medicare is even more dead than the John of our story, since most parts of John are currently here---he's just not animated---but everything about Medicare but its name would basically be gone.

Okay, I'm so incredibly sick of this stupid Anthony Weiner thing, but feminism has been sucked into it, and bigger issues are being attached to it, so what are you going to do?  I can't pray for this country to grow up, since there is no god and prayer doesn't work.  But this morning I wrote about women, feminists even, taking on the schoolmarm role, and I forgot to load it down with caveats about how sex needs to be consensual, and so concerns about consent naturally came up.  I honestly hoped that my long track record of being all for consent would spare me the need to write a few hundred more words, but alas.  

Dana Goldstein and I are on Bloggingheads today rehashing our debate about Weiner and whether or not politicians should be held to a sexual standard.

In it, she raises the same concerns about consent, as did Ta-Nehisi.  It appears that one of the women involved has been clear that she did not engage with Weiner in any sexy talk prior to the penis picture.  And while she's not accusing him of harassment, I think that likely rises to the level of it.  I hope it's obvious that this is a much different kettle of fish.

But I still think most of my concerns are firmly in place.  This isn't a consent scandal.  To be fair, we do have consent scandals in our media.  Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a consent scandal, for instance.  But can anyone look deep into their heart and say that this would be going down any differently if every single woman involved was saying, "I was completely into it.  Cock pictures, yum!" No, we cannot.  Hell, if anything, that would probably just make it worse.  

I think what I'm getting at here is that this isn't about defending Anthony Weiner. This is about how much power we give to right wing fucktards like Andrew Breitbart who are completely unconcerned with consent, and whose sole purpose is to start up sexual witch hunts.  One of the reasons that I wasn't completely aware of the compromised consent issues is that it's been treated like an irrelevant aspect in the media.  Weiner's completely consensual chat logs are being given even more attention than the single picture we know was non-consensual, and the reason is there's more there to feed the prurient interest.  I think it's important to tease out these various issues, as complicated as it is.  The next target for a witch hunt is probably going to be 100% consensual stuff that simply is humiliating if put in the public square, because consent has no impact on why this particular scandal is a scandal. 

For instance, in my post this morning, I was addressing two separate situations that had zero to do with the consent concerns.  The Jezebel piece was about cheating and lying, and the Democratic women are playing up the female-judges-of-philanderers angle.  I've seen more ink spilled on the question of whether or not there's an angle with the fact that he did this in his office and at the gym than the consent question.  (As I noted in the video, I don't really see a gaping difference between using your down time at work to send sexy messages to people and using it to play Angry Birds, so long as you're careful not to involve coworkers.)  Since the media is making this about sex, I'm addressing my media critiques to the sex angle.  If we're having a conversation about consent, that's a much different conversation.

My concern that I've been on about is bigger than a single politician who is probably going to be redistricted away anyway.  It's about the future of politics and placing such prudish standards on private behavior that no one will actually be able to meet them. And it's women, I believe, who will pay more.  At Double X, I wrote about this piece in the NY Times, and one thing that was noted was that women are easily discouraged from running for office because they're afraid of being picked to death by an often-misogynist media and their political opposition. This is a legitimate fear!  And in our new post-Weiner era, when your bedroom doors are being flung open and your truly personal behavior is being considered part of your job qualifications, women will get it way worse. There are many people who will feign outrage if a woman simply sleeps with a man she's not married to, and who wants to deal with that? If we want more gender equality in politics, this is not going to help in the slightest.  

Hope you guys had a great holiday weekend!  For those who checked out of following the internets for a few days, lucky you!  You missed the Democratic Penis That Wasn't.  There was a minor frenzy of excitement when Andrew Breitbart started galumping about how Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York was supposedly having an affair with an arbitrarily chosen college student in Seattle, and the evidence for this was a screenshot of a picture that Weiner supposedly tweeted to the woman, though the main evidence for all this was a retweet from a man that has been both harassing Weiner and this girl for weeks. The girl's main crime, in her harasser's eyes, is that she's 21 and cute and not fucking him.  You know, the usual.  She seems to be incredibly traumatized by all this (and understandably pissed that someone took her calling Weiner her "boyfriend" on Twitter literally, which I grasp, since I've called various hunky celebrities my "boyfriend" on Twitter myself, and I'm 33 so age is no excuse for not getting the joke).  Weiner initially blew it off, but now he's talking to lawyers.  I hope any lawsuit keeps in mind how the young woman that was chosen for her sin of being a young woman was a victim as well. 

Our response from Pandagon was to open a Yelp page for the Rep. Weiner Peen Pic Emporium.  Feel free to leave your reviews!

Alas, the saddest part of all this is that the mainstream media hasn't yet learned that the only proper response to Andrew Breitbart, when he goes off like this, is to dismiss him as you would if you heard a random person on the street reeking of booze and ranting about how the space aliens are out to get him. That Breitbart can operate a computer doesn't give his rants any more credibility.  Many media outlets ran with the story that there were "questions", and as more details came out and it became clear that what is really going on is that a random dude on Twitter is sexually harassing Weiner and one of his Twitter followers, there was a bit of bitterness.  

The New York Times really takes the cake this morning by demonstrating that anyone, even a man, who is victimized by sexual harassment is eligible for victim-blaming.  Their argument is that Weiner brought the sexual harassment onto himself (and this poor young woman, apparently) by wearing his opinion skirt too short. Also, by being a social networking slut. 

Mr. Weiner always knew that his sharp tongue, combined with his frequent use of Twitter, had a potential risk. But over the weekend, Twitter trouble found Mr. Weiner in an unexpected way.

I wish I could say this is the first time that I've heard that victims of sexual harassment deserve to be abused because they dare to have a presence online and they aren't ladylike or mincing. Granted, I never thought that the person accused of slatternly use of social networking bringing sexual harassment onto zirself would be a dudely congressman from New York, but okay.  It just shows that "she had it coming" is incredible versatile. 

In a way, it makes sense.  Much of the mainstream media, and especially much of the New York Times, views Democrats as symbolically female.  Therefore Weiner can be dinged, in their minds, for unladylike behavior.  But still, it's kind of strange. 

And of course, the closing paragraph is about how, even though the victim has been punished by a cranky old asshole who uses sex as a weapon against people he doesn't like, the victim isn't going to learn his lesson, roll down his skirts, cross his legs, and shut the fuck up.

Despite the unwelcome attention over the weekend, Mr. Weiner has continued sending his unabashed Twitter messages. Late Saturday, alluding to the problem picture and to Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, he posted, “Touche Prof Moriarity. More Weiner Jokes for all my guests!

Unabashed! Unashamed!  Weiner is such a slut. Doesn't he know that Democrats who don't keep their opinions to themselves deserve to be buried under penis pictures?

I suppose we should be grateful, at least, that the author of this piece, Ashley Parker, didn't blame the other victim in this, the young woman who received the penis picture.  But don't worry; there are plenty of right wing bloggers carefully examining the random college girl's skirt length and breast size to make sure that you understand that it's her fault for asking for it, not theirs for dishing it out. 

This week on the podcast, I was lucky enough to interview the amazing Stephanie Coontz, who is one of the nation's experts in the evolution of family life and women's roles in the 20th century.  In it, we spend some time talking about the amazing levels of overt misogyny women faced in the 50s and 60s, and though the words "mad men" were not uttered, rest assured, she's basically confirming the accuracy of that show's portrayal of the era.  The notion was unchallenged in many parts of the country that women were a) stupid and b) unambitious and perfectly fulfilled by fetching bourbons and wiping asses, and while <i>The Feminine Mystique</i> has many flaws---which we also talk about---it was still an important book because Betty Friedan was able to reach people who may not have been exposed to the idea that women are people before. Her recent book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, is well worth checking out.

Via the newly-moved Man Boobz, I found this Goodyear ad that encapsulates exactly the attitudes that Coontz is talking about:

Like David says in his post, one of the most stunning things about it is that it's not even cheeky.  The idea that women are literally too stupid to be expected to drive cars with minimal competence is taken as a given.  I'm reminded of the first episode of "Mad Men", where Joan says, without irony, that the typewriters were designed to be simple enough for women to use.  This, even though it's clear that her entire staff went to two-year colleges where they did nothing but learn things like how to use typewriters, and this despite the fact that many men in that office probably couldn't use the typewriters.

Anyway, I got to thinking about this ad and how feminism has managed to lay to rest many of the media narratives about women's lack of basic competence.  It's not that women aren't still considered stupider than men---as any woman who's had to endure mansplaining (aka, all) can tell you---but much of the time the areas in which women are considered stupid are more abstract.  I find that I'm talked down to more when it comes to understanding abstract concepts or complicated systems, but very rarely will you see anymore the ready assumption that a woman cannot operate basic machinery or work other systems that require competence more than abstract intelligence.  If anything, we're entering an era when women are considered more competent than men much of the time, which is why women are populating competence-oriented jobs in low and mid-level management and administration, while the glass ceiling is still firmly in place when it comes to more exciting life-of-the-mind kind of jobs. (You even see this divide in the sciences, with women gravitating more towards biology than sciences deemed more abstract, like physics.  You also see it in publishing, as Ann Friedman parodied brilliantly, pointing out that full-time, high profile writing jobs are mostly reserved for men, whereas women are the workhorses doing the thankless, behind-the-scenes work of editing.) But the idea that women are too stupid to breath is being put to bed, and even replaced often with an image of women as hyper-competent at tasks like cleaning, organizing, and other basic competencies, while it's often men who are portrayed as too bumbling to handle certain tasks.  The divide is no longer men smart/women stupid, but more men having higher intelligence/women excel at learned skills, but aren't so creative.  Still sexist, but with a little more space for women to be considered valuable.

On the home front, women aren't being portrayed in the media anymore as daft housewives who can barely hold it together, and men aren't playing the role of exasperated husbands who could easily do a better job at women's work if they had the time or the willingness to be so emasculated.  You don't really have TV ads where a wife has bumbled some easy task at home, been screamed at yet again by her husband, and is rescued from her own stupidity by a product---the implication behind this Goodyear ad and this coffee ad, which also brings up the threat of male infidelity to bully women into purchasing the product:

Still, that doesn't mean that misogyny is gone from advertising.  Far from it.  In fact, I would say that advertisers haven't abandoned misogyny so much as they've shifted the narrative about why women suck. Nowadays, it's less that women are exasperating because they're stupid, but that women are exasperating because they're annoying, screeching harpies who need to shove a cock in it.  If anything, women's growing reputation as being competent is being held against us in advertising, as more evidence of why we're overbearing.  Oh, we're so organized and shit!  Well, that's annoying to the men who have to tolerate honey-do lists that proliferate in the absence of men actually creating those lists for themselves. 

We've drifted from "women are stupid" towards "women have no value to men beyond sexual release and are otherwise annoying", and since our society still judges women's value on what use they are to men, this means women have little value in this media landscape. Take this infamous Bridgestone ad from just last year:

Another aspect of this stereotype is that women are portrayed as having a basic, if banal intelligence, but also as being dull workshorses who are unable to experience sensual or transcendent pleasures. This view comes out in two ways, one that's more "egalitarian", where men are shown as condescending to women for being so boooooring, and women are shown as exasperated by men who won't play by the rules governing social relationships held together by banalities.  Take this Bud Light ad:

The women in the ad are competent people.  They can read a book and understand its themes and characters.  But in this ad, they have no passion for literature.  Book clubs exist in the media landscape to show women as people who read because it's what you're supposed to do in order to be a Good Person, and the clubs are there to hold together female relationships in the absence of true shared passions or affection.  The man is portrayed as a rude loaf, but he's also---and this is important---portrayed as someone who actually lives.  He doesn't drink beer because it's there, he drinks beer because he can experience pleasure and will go out of his way to do so.  He's impulsive and fun-loving.  We in the audience aren't expected to wonder why his wife puts up with him, but to simply understand that women tolerate this bad behavior from men because men are our only door to a world where actual passion and lived experience resides.  It's the higher intelligence vs. competence thing, spun in another direction.  It's unclear what men get out of this arrangement, besides a steady supply of beer on the table.  Which is why the Bridgestone ad comes into play---at the end of the day, this is still basically misogynist and women are portrayed as being annoying and lucky that men will have them at all.

Of course, some ads don't try to balance the message "women are oppressive, dull-minded machines that will ruin your life by draining your soul out of you" with a little humor about how men are a bit childish.  Some just portray men directly as victims of women's dull-minded conformity.

The assumption is that men resent having to be responsible people who get shit done, and women relish it.  In a way, it's that different from the 50s, when the assumption was that women are completely fulfilled by wiping asses and men and only men needed to have a public life with meaningful work to feel fulfilled.  In fact, it's basically the same message.  The one thing that's improved dramatically is the notion that women are too stupid to tie their shoes without a man's guidance, but the underlying message that women aren't really people continues to dominate much of advertising.

I can’t do food blogging this week—-it’s been insanely busy, and I just didn’t have time.  I don’t really have time now to blog, because I’m going to the WAM! conference in New York, but I thought I’d tell you a little story about the history of blogging, which is what I’m going to speak about.

Once, a long long long time ago (2004 to around 2006), there was an interesting new tribe of people called The Bloggers.  These folks didn’t have traditional media jobs, mostly, but they fashioned themselves as worthy of expressing written opinions.  So they armed themselves with URLs and some primitive HTML skills, and got to work opinionating.  Some times they did actual journalism, even.  A subset of The Bloggers were remarkably young by the standards of punditry, so they were called the Juicebox Mafia. 

At first, The Bloggers were treated as a curiosity by the mainstream media.  Then as a threat.  Then as peers.  Then The Bloggers actually started to get paid by larger organizations for their work.  They started to go on TV to be treated as experts, which they actually were.  Many of them now support themselves as full time writers. 

And according to the New York Times, all the members of this curious tribe of bloggers-turned-professional have penises.  And they’re remarkably pale of skin tone.

I find myself disagreeing, though I don’t have time to discuss why.  But I leave it to you, commenters, to spot the flaws in that article.

FYI, I have nothing against Brian, Matt, Ezra, or Dave, all of whom I think are awesome and who I link and tweet at.  This isn’t about them, but about the article.

Yesterday, I wrote a lengthy post debunking an almost-shockingly deception-thick article written by Kirsten Powers, and the reason is to show that this is what it, frankly, takes.  Which is why lies get disseminated so far and are rarely checked in any way, because, as I estimated, it’s five times harder to actually check lies than to tell lies.  (Which is why even egregious hacks like Powers make money in the lying business.)  Which means it literally can’t be done, since most people in a position to check lies are busy with other work, and even as they’re busy fact-checking one lie, five more are being generated to take its place. 

But honestly, the time-effort gap may not even be the largest problem that those of us dedicated to reality-based politics face.  What may be more disturbing is the increasing willingness of the mainstream media to entertain the lies of people who have been thoroughly demonstrated, through the painstaking and time-consuming work of truth-telling, to be pernicious liars who should never be trusted ever again.  Like James O’Keefe.  For what it’s worth, I thought paying attention to the ACORN videos without a thorough fact check was unforgivable.  Maybe I could forgive some writers for it, but anyone who works in television knows for a fact that it’s easy to manipulate video, and could tell at 100 paces that these videos were not only manipulated, but not even that good at disguising their manipulations.  (Distorted audio, weird cuts that indicate that something is being concealed, an unwillingness to show O’Keefe in the videos.)  But okay, he got one pass based on the assumption of good faith.

But after it was demonstrated that O’Keefe had manipulated the ACORN videos beyond all recognition of what had actually happened?  After investigations demonstrated that people in the videos were portrayed saying one thing, but often were saying the opposite?  (Such as advice given to a woman to hide money from an abusive boyfriend/pimp was edited to suggest the advice was to hide money from the IRS.)  And then it was discovered his compatriot Andrew Breitbart was willing to promote a video the purported to show Shirley Sherrod saying one thing, when she was, you guessed it, saying the exact opposite thing.  Plus, O’Keefe’s arrests and his attempt to sexually harass and threaten, through implication, to assault a journalist, with the intention to tape the whole thing on the grounds that this would embarrass her.  (Which really goes to show how distorted his worldview is, though I suppose with heavy editing to erase the man who is striking threatening poses in a woman’s direction, you could somehow make it about her, though how I don’t know.)  After that, the only reasonable, rational thing to do is to take everything that O’Keefe produces, and put it in the trash without wasting your time.  Whatever potentially “shocking” stuff on there is definitely going to be manipulated and dishonest.

We know this.  This is not a mystery.  There is no excuse any more.

Which is why I was shocked and appalled when the latest video trying to ding NPR came out, and people took it at face value, as if we didn’t know for a fact that it was deceptively edited.  I saw people approach it with the assumption that it was mostly lies, but they figured they could somehow tease some relevant truth out of it, and judge it on that.  This is especially true if you’re unwilling to watch all two hours of footage that O’Keefe got, which 99.9% of journalists are unwilling to do.  (See: Lies, Time It Takes To Debunk Them.)  Instead, people decided that Schiller said a couple of things that were inexcusable under any circumstances, and that was good enough for them.  Never mind that the Sherrod example should teach us that context can literally mean that someone is saying “up” when, if you extracted just a fraction of their overall quote, it seems they are saying “down”. 

O’Keefe has learned that he can come in, lie his fool head off, create damage, and when the accounting is done, it’s too late to fix all the damage he’s done.  His is amply, and repeatedly rewarded for lying.  Unsurprisingly, a few days after the NPR video came out and people were fired and all that jazz, a thorough accounting of the video demonstrates that it is stuffed with lies. Which anyone at this point could have told you, sight unseen, even people that bought into it.  Lindsay did what almost no one else did, and watched all two hours of the taped con job.

If you watch the entire conversation, it becomes crystal clear that O’Keefe’s provocateurs didn’t get what they were looking for. They were ostensibly offering $5 million to NPR. Their goal is clearly to get Schiller and his colleague Betsy Liley to agree to slant coverage for cash. Again and again, they refuse, saying that NPR just wants to report the facts and be a nonpartisan voice of reason. Schiller pointedly informs the fake donors that NPR broke with some very generous Jewish benefactors who had supported NPR for over a decade because they tried to tell NPR that it “couldn’t have so much Palestinian coverage.”

“And we said, ‘sorry,’” Schiller says, “And we lost their funding, and it’s gone.”

During the ACORN days, O’Keefe actually tried to conceal the original videos, knowing that they proved he was a liar.  Now he’s realized that being a known liar doesn’t actually make any difference.  He doesn’t even perform a charade of being ashamed for being such a terrible liar.  At this point, he releases a video, everyone knows up front that he’s a liar, and everyone will just pretend that he’s not for the 12-24 hours it takes for the video to ruin someone’s life.  And he’ll basically gloat in public by releasing the full video, as if to say, “Hey, we all know I’m lying, but no one seems to give a flying fuck!”

And on that, he’s right. 

How do you fight against that?

It was during the half time performance of the Black Eyed Peas last night, precisely when the dancers with boxes on their heads came out, when I realized I was in a very Devo set of mind, which is to say, really enjoying the de-evolution of culture as described by the band Devo.  (Example: “Those two people over there in the polyester double-knit body suits driving that gas-guzzling Cadillac are more DE-vo than we could ever be.”)  Some people would put boxes on their dancers’ heads to symbolize or represent something, to create an emotional impact with artfulness.  BEP does it because why the fuck not?  It’s truly beautiful, if you have a real appreciation for mediocrity, which I occasionally do, and why I have come to enjoy watching the Super Bowl.  And last night was awesome, everything I wanted.  Besides the actual game—-the fact that football players are really good at what they do justifies everything else that happens around the game—-last night was a glorious sea of mediocrity. 

At its best, the spectacle of the Super Bowl proves the principle that aesthetics by committee will tend towards the mediocre, because that which offends no one will get more backing than that which is actually interesting. Of course, “offending no one” is another way of saying “boring”.  Clay Aiken is the epitome of this principle, but last night’s Super Bowl really was competitive.  The ads tended towards absurdity in an attempt to be eye-catching without having any of the bite that actual humor has.  (One exception was the little kid playing at Darth Vader, which still had some bite in it.)  The “jokes” in ads that dared to offend mostly were pretend daring to offend—-sexist jokes that are less about having bite than about reassuring the lowest common denominator that all their vicious prejudices are still acceptable. But the cake of mediocrity was definitely that BEP performance.  That was the most perfect “offend no one, entertain no one” balance of mediocrity I’ve ever seen.  I mean, they had the word “love” all over the place—-it’s unobjectionable, and in this context, utterly meaningless.  Love?  Who or what, to what purpose?  I don’t know, but isn’t it a nice word? 

They should have the Black Eyed Peas play every year, seriously.  They’re the perfect halftime band.  They can’t be too awesome, like Prince, which always causes complaints from the large idiot faction of the audience.  But they didn’t make you want to hide behind your couch at the tragedy of it all, like The Who last year.  They are white bread with butter: we can all tolerate it, but no one will really enjoy it too much.

Matt Zoller Seitz declared at Salon today that the Super Bowl spectacle (which is different from the game, which was actually interesting this year) is a temperature gauge of the national mood.  And that would mean that the national mood is one of not wanting anyone to be too happy or too sad or too thoughtful or too opinionated or too intellectual or too stupid.  The more meaningless and mediocre, the better. Add some sparkle to it so people don’t notice that it’s empty. It’s safer that way.