Eric Boehlert has an excellent piece up really slamming the mainstream media—-including netroots sources like Media Matters—-for covering the James O’Keefe ACORN stories without fully delving into how deceitful those videos were. Boehlert focuses on one of the most obvious missteps, which is letting the heavy editing of the video convince you that O’Keefe actually pretended to be a pimp, wearing that outrageous costume.  The independent investigation reveals that O’Keefe wore business casual clothing and presented himself as a college student or an ordinary Joe just trying to help a friend.  Hannah Giles’ willingness to call herself a prostitute seems shaky at first—-she claimed to be a dancer, initially, but then got bolder with her prostitution story—-but if you were an ACORN employee who was one of the very few who fell for this (and there were very few), it’s because you didn’t see a pimp and a prostitute, but a prostitute accompanied by a man who acted like her friend. 

Boehlert and Brad Friedman have written exhaustively on how misleading the videos were, how they were heavily edited to make it look like employees were answering questions they weren’t actually asked (it seems that a lot of the “tax evasion” stuff was created in editing—-employees seem to be talking about strategies to escape an abusive pimp).  So read them to get the full extent of that particular angle. 

What I want to talk about is the story that O’Keefe and Giles presented, and how it demonstrates what deep down horrible, rotten, broken people they are.  They seemed to have variations on this story, but you’ll recognize the basic idea.  I took a screenshot from the independent report.

The video implies that the advice about the 13-year-olds was given with the intent of helping a pimp control them.  This doesn’t fit the circumstances.  In fact, it appears that what happened was that employees were responding to requests on how to get young girls out of sex work, not keep them in.

Now, it’s unclear to me how many of the people who heard this story believed it at all.  The woman they focus a lot of energy on in the video was spinning a bunch of lies at them to get them out of there, and fearing for her safety, she locked the door behind them.  I don’t blame her; both Giles and O’Keefe creep me out, too, and I’m sure the ill intent was radiating off them.  Also, people who think sex trafficking is a joke are scary people.  The report indicates that some employees did, despite their suspicions about Giles, try to play along and be kind to her on the off chance she wasn’t full of shit, and they basically told her to reach out to domestic violence shelters to leave the life.  In the Baltimore office, Giles presented as a sex worker who wanted out, and the advice was offered by an employee who took pity on her.  In Brooklyn, Giles said she needed help buying a house to hide trafficked girls from a pimp; they were skeptical, but gave her information on reaching out to domestic violence shelters.  In Miami, Giles once again presented herself as a prostitute under a pimp’s thumb, and once again was sent to a shelter.  In this case, Giles seems to have tried to “catch” them not turning in a woman for prostitution that presented herself as a victim of sex slavery.  Apparently, Giles and O’Keefe think women trapped in abusive situations deserve jail time. 

The lying, the media complicity, the vicious racism of O’Keefe and his buddies have been covered elsewhere.  I just want to point out what vicious misogynists they are, too.  They went out of their way to turn people’s kindness towards marginalized women into a bad thing. When they encountered decent human beings who take responsibility when asked for help to stop violence against women, they brimmed over with hate for those people, and they set out to destroy them.  And while they think kindness towards prostitutes is a weakness, and violence against women is a joke, they exploited the public’s horror at sex trafficking and violence against women to slur people who were the only people in the room who actually had a problem with violence against women.

That is some fucked-up, woman-hating shit.

Digby has a post up about the media’s handling the teabaggers with kid gloves, kid gloves that would be thrown aside in haste if they were covering liberal events and movements. In sum, right wing fanatic Joseph Farah made a speech at this latest tea party convention about how Obama doesn’t have an American birth certificate—-and got a standing ovation for it—-and most of the mainstream media coverage ignored this, and certainly didn’t ask hard questions about why someone who wants mainstream credibility like Sarah Palin is associating with these nuts.  Digby’s theory on why this is seems sound:

The reason, it seems to me, is pretty obvious: they’ve been worked. After all, we now know that the Washington Post was out there actively commissioning pieces about “liberal condescension” which tells you pretty clearly that the word has gone forth that the teabaggers must be treated with kid gloves. I assume reporters read the papers.

It’s a perverse piece of Villager logic to suggest that evil, snooty East Coast types need to rein in their condescending tendencies by…..treating conservatives like small children who cannot be held responsible for anything they say or do. 

How very convenient for the teabaggers that they live in a world of reverse logic, where assuming someone is an adult who can be expected to act intelligently and take responsibility is “condescending”, but smiling indulgently and figuring that it’s cruel to assume the fragile teabaggers can handle a little bit of criticism is not condescending.  I suppose it’s the same logic that creates our gender stereotypes, where men are assumed to be big children incapable of handling basic household tasks (so women are forced to do them all), but that men should be allowed to rule the world anyway, perhaps as a booby prize. 

Okay, the title oversells this a little bit, but I still found this amusing.  The NY Times, as part of the ongoing “who the fuck taught women to read?!” project they’ve been running, ran a concern trolling article about how more women are going to college and OMG THEY CAN’T FIND BOYFRIENDS. To bolster these claims, they dig up women who have bought the idea that life isn’t worth living if you go for entire minutes without basking in male attention, women who are sure to complain about the supposed drought. 

“This is so typical, like all nights, 10 out of 10,” said Kate Andrew, a senior from Albemarle, N.C. The experience has grown tiresome: they slip on tight-fitting tops, hair sculpted, makeup just so, all for the benefit of one another, Ms. Andrew said, “because there are no guys.”

I don’t mean to be so harsh, but seriously, I never trust a woman who thinks that women only dress for men.  That sort of thinking tends to infect your entire worldview, and puts you in a position where you start regarding male attention like oxygen.  And because the NY Times may report on the fact that college-educated women are more likely to get and stay married—-but they will never believe it—-they resort to the time-honored “reading and marrying are at odds with each other narrative”.  And so they take very seriously the idea that because there are slightly more women than men on college, men cannot be bullied through sexual desperation to settle down (it’s assumed at all points in time that men find women’s personalities so repugnant that love is off the table, and only blackmail will work), and no woman can get a real date.  Ever.  We’ve heard this song before, though it’s never entirely clear what women are supposed to do.  I guess we’re supposed to give up our hopes of career and education in order to find a man—-or at least, that’s the insinuation with the other form of this article, the “mothers can’t have it all and have to quit” articles. 

Anyway, Jill dealt with this story in an interesting way, pointing out that because we are still stuck in believing college is for men and women who go are “co-eds”, women’s numbers seem higher than they are. 

But when you look at the actual numbers of women vs. men on campus, it’s not so unbalanced that dudes are pulling five chicks a night. It seems to be a problem of perception more than statistics — if there are roughly equal numbers of men and women in a room, or if there are a few more women than men, we perceive the situation as thoroughly female-dominated. The same phenomenon happens with race. We’re used to seeing men (and white men in particular) as the standard; we’re used to them dominating higher education and the workforce. When we up the numbers of non-men in a situation where men have traditionally made up large majorities, the perception is that no more men exist – even though men are nearly half of the room.

I’d point out that if the girls are as shiny and sparkly as described above, this is just going to make the situation worse.  When you’re talking about a population that makes itself very visible versus one that tries to look non-obtrusive—-and if you’ve been around groups of Greek-style students like the ones interviewed, the guys in their flip-flops and girls in their glitter and mini-skirts will present such a contrast—-that illusion is only heightened. 

Matt, while agreeing that the article blows the whole thing out of proportion in order to score some sexist points, still thinks there’s some truth to this idea that systems change dramatically with even small shifts in the gender ratio.

But there’s a core interesting fact in the article, which is that it really does seem to be true in a variety of contexts that even a very small surplus of heterosexual women over heterosexual men is tend to be associated with fairly dramatic shifts away from norms of monogamous relationships.

Except, of course, that college-educated women are more likely to marry, and more likely to stay married.  The norm isn’t abandoned—-it’s just put off into the future.  I just don’t think the disparities are big enough or long-term enough to produce the kind of social shifts Matt’s talking about.

Here’s what I think is happening in articles like this—-the norm on college campuses is to take relationships somewhat lightly, because both men and women know their futures are somewhat uncertain.  The model where you meet your spouse in college and get engaged belonged to an era where women went to college expecting to get married, and not to have a career.  Marrying right out of school didn’t seem that big a deal, because your husband made all the decisions about where you’d live.  Now, that’s changed.  My college relationship broke up for a number of reasons, but the one overriding factor was I simply wasn’t happy following him where he wanted to go.  That was true of a lot of college relationships I saw—-you change so much in the transition between college and adulthood that unless one of you is submitting to the other’s life choices, then it’s just not going to work.  Kids these days might just be smart to avoid commitments that aren’t going to work out anyway. 

That said, you can always find women that buy into our culture’s endless drumbeat pressuring them to make men and relationships the center of their lives.  Getting your MRS degree is a less and less popular fantasy all the time, but if you’re a determined journalist, you can easily find those girls, especially by scouting the sororities.  Many, if not most, college girls would be annoyed by the insinuation that they’re dying to have a boyfriend above all, and many would be embarrassed to even admit that they’d like that.  But those girls don’t fit the thesis, so they don’t get interviewed. 

Jesse started a thread on it, but I thought I’d weigh in with a couple of observations. You know it’s a rough year in misogynist Superbowl advertising when an ad suggesting that women’s role in bearing sons matters more than their very right to live can’t even win the title of “Most Misogynist”.  (Though it’s only on a technicality—-the Tebow ad that aired during the Super Bowl was too confusing to register as overtly hateful, though it did insinuate that the only reason women die in childbirth is they aren’t “tough” enough, and apparently had it coming.)  The debate raging on Twitter on who wins that game seemed to settled on the tire ad where a man sacrifices his wife for some tires, and that sacrifice isn’t deemed good enough, because everyone knows bitches ain’t shit.  The big theme this year was the tired sexist trope that implies not only that women rule over men with an iron pussy, and that we use our endless power to be screeching, emasculating harpies who hate male pleasure for the sheer fun of it. Dodge Charger and Dockers weighed in on this theme.  However, Dockers’ ad was incoherent, because they weren’t willing to go as far as the print ads and make the message clear.  In the print ads, the text openly blames feminism for men’s supposed emasculation, and calls for a return to male dominance that never actually left completely in the real world.  I haven’t yet seen a Dockers ad suggesting that one regains their manhood by putting on some khaki pants before smacking a bitch up, but judging from the ads last night, it may only be a matter of time. 

But my “favorite” in the woman hating Olympics was definitely the Flo TV “Spineless” ad.  The narrator follows a man who we’ve been told has his spine removed (because using the preferred term “pussy whipped” wouldn’t get past the censors, though that’s the implication), and the evidence is that his evil bitch of a wife makes him shop when he wants to stay at home and watch the game, and he goes along with it, even though we all know that doing feminine things like shopping is objectively stupid.  (Bud Light also argued that reading is something that is off-limits for dudes, because it’s so stupid and girly.)  The way for a man to regain his balls/spine, suggested the ad, was to get a Flo TV so that he could passively-aggressively watch his game while pointedly ignoring his wife on their outing while technically obeying her overbearing feminine demands he’s powerless to resist openly. 

This was my favorite, because it contained a structural flaw.  Its pitch was supposedly aimed at men who have harpy bitch wives who don’t let them watch sports.  But it was playing during a sporting event, when said victims of harpy bitch wives cannot, by definition, be watching.  Because they’re out in the stores pretending to give a shit about that she-creature that controls them with her pussy.  By airing during a sporting event, the ad basically admits that it’s lying, and that men are not helpless victims of the pussy-driven, sports-hating matriarchy.  And thus the only real reason for the ad is to bash women to sell products.  Or perhaps advertisers really believe that the harpies of the world only allow their men one game a year—-the Super Bowl—-and this is when they’ll make their desperate pitch, reaching out to these poor broken men who are eager to passively aggressively annoy their captors.  I’m not betting on that, though, because I bet this ad runs during other games.

In general, the theme of this year is that that masculinity is barely surviving a vagified assault, and the modern man needs a bunch of products in order to revolt and/or survive the hellish matriarchy that men were too foolish to put down in the 70s, when they had their shot to stop the rising tide of women working, women controlling their own bodies, and other hippie shit like that. Even Audi—-Audi!—-put out an ad on this theme, implying that that modern man has to suffer this horrific police state of overbearing environmentalists, and that they need this Audi product to survive the inquisition.* I kind of wish it was put up next to the Tebow forced childbirth advocacy, because perhaps someone would realize there is something fucked up about the modern right wing argument that we need so many more children that we have to force women to provide on pain of imprisonment, and that we need to give all these children the shittiest, most disgusting, unlivable planet possible.  And if we don’t do this, your balls will fall off. 

The most transparent pandering was when CBS aired an ad telling women that they can have heart attacks, too, so watch out for that.  Overall message: yes, we helped craft an ad suggesting women should risk their lives in childbirth, but we don’t want you to die of a heart attack, so we don’t hate women!  Here’s another ad showing how women are bitches!

The good news is that the Saints really pulled it out.  That was awesome and exhilarating.  No, it’s not going to solve New Orleans’ continuing post-Katrina problems, but I think it’s okay to be happy for them.  All the shots of people partying in the streets in the Quarter—-plus all the jokes about boozing it up, taking it off, and eating Cajun food that dominated the sports news and overall news cycle—-probably will end up being good for tourism, which is the sort of thing that will help get them back on their feet.

*And this was supposed to be an ad for a “green” product!  I realize it was supposed to be ironic, but it was mostly incoherent. 

I didn’t see this yesterday, and for which I feel a mixture of regret and gladness that I had one day more on earth without knowing that Maureen Dowd prefers to masturbate while thinking of douchebagy frat boy types over the sexy nerds.  Not that I judge her preference, of course.  Part of me is pleased that feminism has reached a point where women are free to express their trashy sexual fantasies instead of always insist that their libidos line up with the social expectations of who they should mate with.  Dowd clearly has felt a lot of pressure throughout her life to nest with some skinny nerd with an Ivy League education, and she’s rebelling by having dreams that shockingly resemble this:

To each their own, I say.  This is the sort of sexual fantasy that Scott Brown inspires, but good on Dowd for having such a darlingly tepid one. 

However, for many of us, this sexual fantasy sounds as appealing as having jalapeno juice rubbed in your eyes.  This is no judgment of what gives Dowd a squish, of course, but just noting that people are diverse, and not everyone shares her sexual fantasies.  So why does she insist that everyone does share her fantasies?

Obama’s Oneness has been one-upped. Why settle for a faux populist when we can have a real one? Why settle for gloomy populism when we can have sunny populism? Why settle for Ivy League cool when we can have Cosmo hot? Why settle for a professor who favors banks, pharmaceutical companies and profligate Democrats when we can have an Everyman who favors banks, pharmaceutical companies and profligate Republicans? Why settle for a 48-year-old, 6-foot-1, organic arugula when we can have a 50-year-old, 6-foot-2, double waffle with bacon?

Dowd’s fantasy life is all-encompassing, it seems.  She seems to forget that neither Scott Brown nor Barack Obama is pounding down her door for some afternoon delight.  Since this is strictly a fantasy world, Maureen, why not both at once?  Hell, didn’t they teach you about the endless bounds of imagination in elementary school?  You can, if that’s what turns your crank, imagine Brown and Obama leading a circus into your bedroom.  Let your imagination run wild.  But seeing as these two are married men who’ve expressed, as far as I know, exactly no interest in Dowd, its seems a little premature for her to explain her decision-making process to the public at large while assuming we all share her sexual preferences for guys who drive pick-up trucks over guys who intimidate you with their cool.  I assume she insists that America as a whole shares her sexual preferences because she feels a little ooky and guilty.  After all, she notes that Brown is pro-choice.  (He’s not really.)  She’s like the girl who digs douchey dudes, but insists that this specific douchebag isn’t like all those other douchebags—-he won’t insist that you ask your sister to have a threesome after a few beers!  He’s a good guy!

The real question you might be asking is this: So fucking what?  It’s a good question.  The issue is not that Dowd has sexual fantasies that embarrass her and that she seeks validation.  The issue isn’t that she can so vividly imagine both Obama and Brown at her door with bouquets of flowers that she forgot that this never happened and she doesn’t have a choice to justify.  The issue is that these matters are her private business and not the business of the NY Times.  If she wants to publish her erotic musings on LiveJournal, or try her luck with Penthouse letters, she should feel free, but the NY Times political pages are about discussing political matters, not Maureen Dowd’s tepid sexual fantasies of doing a former centerfold in his pick-up instead of the President in his Prius. 

Not that she doesn’t make a half-assed effort at trying to make her sexual fantasies relevant political opinion, but if I can sum up her argument, it seems to be: Scott Brown makes me hornier than Barack Obama, so screw this election shit and give Brown the Presidency.

The only question left is: Why isn’t Scott Brown delivering the State of the Union? He’s the Epic One we want to hear from. All that inexperience can really be put to good use here.

But even then, she can’t help but make it clear that she finds the clumsy fumblings of a douchebag not used to making an effort sexier than the presumably more practiced hand of one of those boring liberal dudes who has always thought sex was some sort of shared experience.  I fail to see why Dowd’s editors thought that anyone wanted to know that Dowd believes Real Men Don’t Go Down, much less that this opinion has anything to do with evaluating whether or not we should throw over the system to indulge Dowd’s momentary infatuation.  Perhaps they should have handed her a vibrator and told her that she shouldn’t write until she’s calmed herself down.

Round two on the NY Times struggling with the shocking! information that some men will actually allow themselves to be married to a woman with more education or income. Round one featured blatant denial—-even though the research indicated that the number of marriages where women make more is rising, the Times ran a story that featured a bunch of single women swearing that they can’t get a date because they’re too smart or rich.  I don’t know if round two was run in reaction to a bunch of bloggers pointing out that stories about these marriages might actually be a better illustration of a story about these marriages, but that’s what they did this time out.  Subsequently, the story is much better.  It’s interesting to read about how people who buck the gender roles they were brought up with struggle sometimes not to lapse into roles they’ve decided don’t work for them.  It makes sense that many women unintentionally sabotage the situation by trying to exert control over their husbands’ domestic choices, and how you really have to not do that if you want the situation to work.  And that even well-meaning men have trouble shaking off thousands of cultural messages about how you’re emasculated if your wife makes more money than you. 

But even though writer Tara Parker-Pope seems to have her head screwed on straight, she does drop a doozy of a statistic that will probably be the thing that people looking to bash working women will latch on to:

Kristen W. Springer, a sociologist at Rutgers, has found that among men in their 50s, having a wife who earns more money is associated with poorer health. Among the highest earning couples in her study, a husband who earns less than his wife is 60 percent less likely to be in good health compared with men who earn more than their wives.

This is listed in the section on men’s struggles with changing gender roles.  The implication is clear—-that the income difference probably has some sort of causal relationship to the health problems.  But there are so many other possibilities!  The first thing that came to mind for me is that men with poor health might face more difficulties at work that make it hard for them to climb up the income ladder.  The mere fact of having protections for disabled people, for instance, doesn’t mean that people with disabilities in our society don’t face a lot of obstacles in their careers that negatively impact their income.  “Poor health” folds in a lot of disabilities, and that alone could account for the difference. Especially when you’re looking at such dramatic differences like that. 

I’m just hypothesizing, of course.  I looked around for more on the study she cited, but couldn’t find it.  Springer has done a lot of research on marriage, gender, and health, and it was hard to comb through it for this specific study. Whatever the actual relationship between women earning more and men being in poorer health is might not established, or they might have a very good explanation that’s not alluded to in this story.  But the larger point is that when you drop a statistic like that, you imply a causation chain that may not be there.  Most people, when reading that sentence, will think that women earning more money causes men to be in poorer health, and that men should avoid marriage to higher-earning women out of self-preservation. When in fact, what we might be seeing is the opposite—-men with poor health whose burdens are lightened because they are married to women who bring more money into the household, and may even cover their health insurance. 

I don’t want to give a bad impression of the overall article, which I found sound and nuanced.  I think it’s useful to understand that it’s not like most people set out to have marriages where women earn more or men earn more, but that who earns more in a marriage is usually just a matter of outside forces, personal choices, and happenstance.  And that what feminism has created is the chance for women to have more opportunities, and marriages are changing as a result.  The takeaway message for feminism is sound, which is that if we want more egalitarian marriages, the most important step is creating the social circumstances that make that possible—-equal pay being one of the most important factors.

I’ll confess; when this article came out in the NY Times about how more marriages are ones where the wife makes more/has more education, I didn’t read it.  I thought, “Duh.”  I read Matt write about it, and made fun of the wingnut in his comment thread who tried to claim that women don’t pay taxes, and then went off on a baffling attempt to backtrack while still maintaining that women are an inferior sex who shouldn’t earn money.  I appreciated the graphs Matt put up that demonstrated that equality is far from here:

I noted that the headline of the Times article implied that women sit on a shelf waiting to be picked, while men are the only ones making active choices: “More Men Marrying Wealthier Women “.  We’ll marry anyone who asks, amirite, ladies? Gotta get that validation bling!  But I thought to myself, “Well, they need an active verb, and headlines are hard to write, and so whatever.”  Should have realized that even when the actual story contradicts their anti-feminist narrative, the NY Times will trot out an anti-feminist narrative.

So, while the story should have been, “Turns out some men aren’t such huge wimps that they need to have a woman around who is purposefully subjugated in order to make them feel big.”  The story is, “These stupid statistics say that a lot of men are perfectly capable of accepting that women have money, education, and ambition, but we don’t believe those stupid numbers.”  Every single woman they interview for the anecdotal color aspects of the story is a single woman whose intelligence, income, and education supposedly prevents her from dating.  So the conclusion is, “Don’t believe the numbers.  You can have love or your career, but you can’t have both, ladies.”

If you think I’m kidding, that’s literally the conclusion paragraph in the story:

Ms. Zielinski, the fashion stylist, said her best friend, a man, told her once: “ ‘You are confident, have good credit, own your own business, travel around the world and are self-sufficient. What man is going to want you?’ He laughed, but I found that pretty depressing.”

They even managed to work in the implication that this woman is stuck in the Friend Zone, though honestly my experience is that women with lots of male friends tend not to want for dates, though of course, YMMV. 

The author Sam Roberts did manage to interview Stephanie Coontz as the voice of reason, and she pointed out obvious stuff, such as men benefit when their wives make more money, because their standard of living goes up as well.  And that women with college degrees are more, not less likely to get married.  And that men generally benefit more from marriage and logically want marriage more.  And then basically Roberts argues that’s not what he’s hearing—-trust in stereotypes about lonely cat ladies whose college degrees may have seemed like a good idea, but don’t keep you warm at night.

But some women find that the dating pressures are intense. Syreeta McFadden, a 35-year-old Columbia and Sarah Lawrence graduate who is between jobs after working in real estate development, said: “With men of any ethnic group, it’s a little intimidating for them to encounter smart women. Money is tricky.

“But, I think for me, it comes down to compatibility,” Ms. McFadden said. “Can you grow with me? Or as my genius friend the textile designer says, she asks on first dates or meeting men in bars, ‘Do you have a passport and a library card?’ ”

Elaine Richardson, who is in her 50s, is divorced and owns a health care consulting firm in Westchester, said that men “call you high maintenance if you look like you don’t need anyone to take care of you.”

Thus, the problem with the game of anecdotal evidence—-it’s always more vivid and always on hand.  Education and money make you more eligible as a rule, but that doesn’t mean everyone who has it is beating ‘em off with a stick.  And so you can totally find someone who thinks that they aren’t getting the action they believe they should, and use them as a counterpoint.  And since the human mind is more attracted to narrative than statistics, most people who read this story, a week out, will probably remember it being about how women with college educations can’t find mates. 

There was another way to write up this story.  I’ll bet you could find more than one educated, high-earning woman who bought the hype that she was selling out her love life for her ambition, only to find her true love who thought that her education and her status made her a catch.  Or you could find a couple where the wife’s high-earning job made it possible for the husband to rethink his career path, take some risks and go without making money for awhile, and have him talk about that with gratitude.  Or you could interview a stay-at-home dad.  You could interview random dudes who say that they’d find it a drag to have to pay for every date.  These people aren’t any harder to find than someone who’ll complain that her heavy wallet makes her hard to date.  I’ll bet a lot of them are actually pretty easy to find.

I’ve been somewhat amazed that there hasn’t been more feminist-baiting on this whole, overblown Tiger Woods scandal.  Or maybe there has, and I haven’t seen it.  Usually these prominent infidelities give conservatives an opportunity to adopt their all-time favorite stance: disingenuous outrage.  Disingenuous outrage over the sex, and disingenuous outrage over feminist indifference.  It’s a very weird kind stance they take, which was at its height during the Clinton impeachment.  They define feminism for feminists and then get mad when we do what we want to do, instead of what they’ve told us we want to do.  Feminism is about organizing women and male allies to fight for women’s equality—-in the home, in the workplace, in the government and even in the church.  We support equal pay, reproductive rights, education—-things that make it possible for women to have real power in the world and real control over their own lives.  But conservatives act, during these infidelity scandals, like feminists are mainly (or should be mainly) organized to lay claim to the penises of America, and make sure they’re only dipped into approved holes.  And that this goal should naturally eclipse any work done to make women’s lives better.  Ironically, the work that we do to achieve women’s equality actually does probably have the effect of discouraging male infidelity to a degree, since a man who can’t trap his wife with financial dependence is likelier to think twice about cheating on her.  But that’s not why we fight for equality—-we do it, because it’s the right thing to do.

Anyway, there’s a predictable pattern of bad faith outrage at feminists for not being outraged when some public figure cheats on his wife.  We’re accused of thinking it’s just great, or of being partisan because the target is usually someone conservatives already have problems with, since of course feminists will totally go after conservative politicians who restrict other people’s sexual rights while doing whatever the fuck they want.  Eventually, some feminists take the bait, out of a combination of that liberal tendency to want to prove they’re fair-minded by occasionally letting the other side score a point, and often because they’re genuinely annoyed at the man’s behavior and want a political hook so they can talk about it.  And conservatives feel great, because they’re reinforced the idea that feminism is not about equality for women, but about controlling men like men have always controlled women.  And we lose more ground.

Since this Tiger Woods thing was so big, and the angles were in place for conservative grousing (Woods, being non-white and non-Christian, is exactly the sort of target that conservatives want to eat up while making baseless accusations against feminists that we’re scared to speak up), I was sort of surprised to see that conservatives were being a little more reticent about feminist-baiting than usual. And this morning it occurred to me why: Because this entire media circus has been so overtly misogynist that even conservatives can’t pretend that feminists should take part.  Most of the coverage has been about the media types titillating themselves and the audience by shaming Woods’ lovers for being bimbos (which is something of a profession in this modern age, but many of the women he slept with don’t actually have that as a profession). There’s calendars. Cutesy, sexist nicknames (the “Tiger cubs”).  What we have here is an old-fashioned media frenzy of slut-shaming craziness, all under the guise of “concern” and “outrage” aimed at Tiger Woods. 

Pamela Merritt has a piece up at RH Reality Check pointing out what is sort of amazing: even as the media frenzy tears apart every tiny detail of this ridiculous scandal, the issue of the serious dangers of doing what Woods purportedly did—-have unprotected sex with dozens of women—-is being studiously ignored.  I’m hesitant to suggest that the media grab at one more angle to chase on this story, but Pamela’s right.  It’s a glaring omission.  And a dangerous one, since 99% of Americans are aware of this story, which means that most of us are consciously or unconsciously absorbing the idea that it’s normal to think of infidelity in emotional and social terms, but to ignore the health risks. 

But if you think of this story as a misogynist feeding frenzy, the pointed ignoring of the condom issue becomes a lot easier to understand.  While a lot of us did absorb the post-AIDS crisis message that condoms are primarily about preventing STD transmission and therefore important for everyone to use, regardless of gender, that’s still not really the popular conception of what condoms are and what they’re for.  They’re still in the general category of lady stuff, and are associated with protecting women’s health and interests specifically, at least when it comes to heterosexual sex.  And since the general theme of this feeding frenzy has been misogynist titillation, bringing up the question of safety would be a mood killer.  Who wants to think about the safety of the bimbo parade, besides the boring feminists who think all women deserve respect and safety?

It’s this sort of nasty misogyny that’s in play when it comes to the way that women carrying condoms is still being criminalized in places like D.C., San Francisco, and New York—-in all these cities, having condoms on your person is being used as evidence against women accused of prostitution.  Talk about driving home the message that sexualized women don’t have a basic right to health and safety! You would think that even if the government is indifferent to the health of outcast women, they would still be interested enough in men’s health not to discourage health measures that could reduce STD transmission, but I think the Tiger Woods example shows that by and large, most people don’t really think of condoms that benefit men as well as women. 

It’s been 19 years since Susan Faludi’s seminal tome on the anti-feminist backlash of the 80s—-titled, of course, Backlash—-was released. The book covered a lot of ground, indicting everything from the film industry to the legal system, for waging war on American women’s rights and dignity.  One of her biggest coups in the book was the devastating expose of Newsweek, for an irresponsible feature story that implied that feminism has run men off of marrying in retaliation, with the notable and completely false claim that a woman over 40 was more likely to be killed by a terrorist rather than get married.  Faludi not only disproved this claim, but also attacked the larger narrative about how women are desperate to marry unwilling men, pointing out that polling data shows that men are more, not less, eager to marry than women.  Newsweek was so thoroughly and famously devastate by her critique that they actually had to recant the story, albeit 20 years later and with lots of defensive caveats. They even went so far to dig up 11 of the “unmarriageable” women they profiled in the original story, and found that 8 of them have married since then, and others have decided they really don’t want to marry anyway. 

You would think after an embarrassment like that, journalists and other writers might think twice about trotting out thinly disguised hysterical warnings to educated, professional women that all those brains and all that independence was going to run the menfolk off.  You would think that the fact—-admitted in the Newsweek recantation—-that college-educated women are more, not less likely to marry would cool the jets a little. But there is no fucking way that some folks will let little things like facts and evidence get in the way of anti-feminist backlash fun. Irina Aleksander has introduced a quirky new take on the whole genre of making shit up about how American women can’t get married (at least, college-educated, professional American women can’t)—-proposing that American men hate the idea of committing to those nasty female things so much that American women would be better off marrying foreign men, who are more eager to settle down. Or, to be fair, she’s narrowed it down to New York women, probably hoping the geographic specificity will shield her from those nasty facts and evidence.

Her argument has giant holes in it, even taken on its merits.  Here’s how it begins:

It was the boozy hour of 1:30 a.m. during a recent party in Carroll Gardens, and the 30-something hostess was telling a flock of women a story about a friend who moved to Berlin last year, after a series of tragic breakups, and met a man who almost immediately wanted to marry her. There were “oohs” and “aahs” all around. The women had to contain themselves from outright applause.

The hostess looked over at her live-in boyfriend of several years, who was sitting across the room with the other boyfriends. “I guess nowadays you have to go to Europe to find a husband,” she said, looking at the fair, upturned faces around her.

For now, I’m going to set aside my skepticism about the idea that a whole roomful of women would be so impervious to the shame of bullying your boyfriend to love you—-or at least, present a realistic facsimile—-in front of company.  Let’s assume this happened, and that there was indeed a roomful of people that merely lived together, and that this is evidence that no one was committed.  Then what to make of this?

Jane Yager, 31, a writer, moved to Berlin four years ago and met a British man with whom she now cohabits and has a 16-month-old son (though they are not married; in Europe, American gals’ preoccupation with “getting the ring” is viewed in many quarters as hopelessly bourgeois).

By her own measure, if an American man moves in with you, it shows his lack of commitment, but if a British man does it, he’s totally committed.  Perhaps these recalcitrant New York men also find marriage hopelessly bourgeois?  That seems the likelier explanation to me, far likelier than assuming that all men in New York are filled with such loathing for showing that they might like a girl (which is SO GAY) that they’ll put off the wedding indefinitely.  But what do I know?  I’ve only lived her for a month.  Maybe I’ll discover that New York men are a special breed of asshole, though I have seen exactly no evidence for this contention and have instead hung out with a lot of men who are married or otherwise happily committed to their female partners.

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Protect thy keyboards as you watch and read this flaming pile of crap:

Buddhism is inferior to Christianity when it comes to forgiveness of sins, according to Fox News pundit Brit Hume. Tiger Woods should turn his back on Buddhism and become a Christian to be forgiven for cheating on his wife, Hume told Fox News Chris Wallace Sunday.

The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith, said Hume. He is said to be a Buddhist. I dont think that faith offers the kind of redemption and forgiveness offered by the Christian faith. My message to Tiger is, Tiger turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.

How does this prescription for redemption explain Ted Haggard, Mark Sanford, John Ensign and all of the rest of the Christian GOP sexual hypocrites?

Salon has put together a list of the 11 most bogus media stories of 2009.  A few of them, such as the balloon boy hoax or Lady Gaga’s non-existent penis, are just those silly stories that capture the public imagination from time to time.  I don’t actually mind those stories—-except in the case where the coverage gets so intense it starts to seem like a human rights abuse of its targets, such as the Tiger Woods story (which didn’t make the top 11!)—-because you often learn something about your fellow Americans by which stories fascinate them.  Then there are a couple of others, such as the phony Abu Gharib story and the overblown role Twitter was given in the Iranian protests, that I can chalk up to a weird confluence of events.  But the majority of the stories fit one theme.  See if you can guess what it is:

*Death panels
*Dick Cheney doesn’t like President Obama!
*Some kids punked ACORN through videos that were badly shot but suspiciously professionally edited
*Tea baggers exponentially multiply through making up numbers
*Obama bowed to the Emperor of Japan
*Some scientists said something in a private email that could be taken out of context, so THERE IS NO GLOBAL WARMING SHUT UP AND START DRIVING A HUMMER

I’m sure you guessed correctly.  All of these bogus stories are right wing conspiracy myths and/or hoaxes that were taken seriously by the mainstream media when they should have been debunked immediately.  By compiling this list, Salon does create an excellent run-down of how much right wing bullying of the mainstream media has been effective.  Right wing bullies claim they want a better media, but it’s obvious here that they want a worse media, one where common sense and reasonable reporting are thrown out the window, and whatever the Drudge Report claims is news goes.

How did this get so bad?  Well, it’s been dealt with before, but it bears repeating—-it’s surprisingly easy to guilt-trip the mainstream media about the “unfair” treatment right wing ideas get just because they’re crazy and full of shit.  Many in the media are desperate for an opportunity to show how fair-minded they are, and so they too quickly pounce on an opportunity to say, “Okay, the right wingers are right on this one.”  This is true, no matter how many times the right wing nuts burn you.  No one wants to be caught with their pants down on that one day that the right wingers actually land a fair punch, without lying or misrepresenting the situation.  Then you will be accused until the end of time of not being fair-minded, simply because you exercise reasonable caution with people who are known liars and charlatans, who repeatedly and openly lie to you over and over and over again. 

Hey, the right wing nuts did land one blow this year.  Many of them were on the side of right on—-of all things!—-a rape case.  If Roman Polanski hadn’t been the epitome of a hated Euroweenie film director with rich friends, though, I hardly think the same crowd that tends to dismiss women at every turn would have stumbled into being right on this one.  But there you go.  If you want to score a point for being fair-minded to people who have proven that they don’t have an ounce of respect for the truth, there’s your point.

Not that bloggers don’t do it, too.  Feminist bloggers are easy to guilt trip, and I say this as someone who has to monitor herself for this very thing.  Sarah Palin and her followers exploit this to the hilt, demanding that feminists be outraged at every little thing that happens to her, whether real or imaginary.  Liberal bloggers aiming to be serious are easy to hoodwink, too.  If you’re a right wing nut who wants to play them for fools, all you have to do is be not-crazy on some issue, and they’ll be so eager to show they’re fair-minded that they’ll rush to ignore the fact that you are batshit crazy until you do something so batshit they have to throw in the towel.  Ross Douthat managed to ride that train until he got a spot at the NY Times, where the elevation of his position made it impossible to ignore what a megawatt asshole he is, and how he has no qualms about giving air time to overt right wing lies.

In other words, right wingers get a handicap.  It’s almost like we pity them for their continued inability not to ever get anything right, and so we toss them “gimmes” like the ACORN debacle so they can be right once in awhile, even when they’re not.  Clearly, we all think right wingers are mental children, or else we wouldn’t play along with their delusions on occasion to make them feel better, relieving them of the responsibility not to be lying assholes.  But, as the ACORN debacle shows, real human beings pay the price when everyone pretends that we’re not seeing what we’re seeing in order to throw right wingers a bone.  It was shockingly obvious how much a put-on those videos were, if you actually bothered to watch them.  Voice-overs? Giggles? Heavy editing to imply that things happened in offices where they didn’t?  The obviously fake costumes that precluded anyone actually taking them seriously?  The lying about how often the cops were called on their asses? 

I refuse to believe that there are that many fools in the mainstream media.  It was all a matter of throwing the right wingers a bone, handicapping things so the mental children can play with the grown-ups.  (Like letting kids have more money or more chances to buy property when playing Monopoly.)  Even Jon Stewart played along.  The problem is that right wingers aren’t children, and they shouldn’t be treated like children.  And indulging their lies to make it “fair” was deeply unfair, to ACORN and all the people that they help.  Sure, ACORN has serious management problems that need to be addressed.  But that wasn’t the purpose of this stunt, and that wasn’t its effect, either.  Instead, people lost their jobs, ACORN lost its funding, and a whole lot of people who need help will go without.  So that the mental children get to play and feel important, too.

The lesson for 2010 should be this: Remember the story about the snake and the mountain. When right wingers float a story, you are not obliged to take it on good faith.  They are snakes, and they will bite.  Heavy duty skepticism should be your automatic response when dealing with known con artists.  If, after the story has been thoroughly and skeptically researched, they have a point, okay, give it to them.  That won’t happen often, if at all.  But if they actually are held to the same standards as everyone else—-i.e., they don’t get to float obvious bullshit as legit stories—-maybe they’ll actually try harder to produce something real.  Or give up, which is more likely.

Rebecca Dana has an article up at the Daily Beast examining the question of why there aren’t as many sex scandals with women at the center of them. There are many theories that are 100% bullshit: that women aren’t as interested, that women only fuck up and so powerful women have nowhere to go, that women are too busy for affairs, that women are less careless because they have more to lose.  The only thing that seemed remotely plausible to me was Emily Gould’s theory.

“Men are typically seen as having agency and women are typically seen as being acted upon in romantic relationships,” says New York writer Emily Gould (a survivor of her own small-scale sex scandal). “So then even when those stereotypical power dynamics aren’t really the ones at play, the culture-making machinery will simplify whatever the real story is until it is a more familiar wronged-woman, lothario-man narrative.”

I think there’s a lot to that.  It’s not like there’s a lack of scandals involving women, but most of them are about being scandalized that someone is just so unladylike.  Having an affair is actually pretty ladylike, or can be seen that way if it’s spun the right way.  So I think there’s something to this theory. 

But I have another theory that I think is closer to the truth.  There are fewer sex scandals involving women because there are fewer women in roles prominent enough to cause a sex scandal. Think of the categories of people that there’s sex scandals about: athletes, politicians, late night talk show hosts, basically people who have more than celebrity, but who have authority.  (Though this is increasingly less true of athletes, which is a good thing.  They’ve never really been that upstanding a crowd.)  There’s not much scandal if the person having the illicit sex is someone who is supposed to be doing that, like a movie star or a rock musician.  It’s only someone with gravitas, and the ranks of those people are overwhelmingly male.  At this point, it’s a numbers game.  For instance, there are exponentially fewer political sex scandals involving female politicians because there are exponentially fewer women holding high office. 

One thing I know for certain is this sex scandal crap has officially gone too far.  Now the only hook necessary for the mainstream media to cover a sex scandal is “just because”.  No need for a public interest hook.  When the Letterman thing happened, I knew it was all over.  The blackmail arrest was the official hook, but that’s a thin excuse, and really it shocked me how much people were willing to pretend to be shocked that someone like Letterman would have an affair.  That’s what made all this Tiger Woods crap unavoidable.  The hook is the car accident, but at this point does anyone really believe that?  No, instead we’re being subjected to the bizarre faux outrage and titillation at the fact that a world famous athlete who has literally millions of people sucking his butt got it into his head that he could cheat on his wife.  This is exactly as surprising as the sun coming up in the morning.  Why do people give this much of a shit?

Clearly, the answer is that America needs to get laid more.

Glory be—this announcement follows meetings between Lou “The Brown Menace Is Upon Us” Dobbs and Faux News Channel’s Roger Ailes. He made his intentions known during his 7PM ET show, talking about his “honest” commentary and how he will “pursue other opportunities.” The bigoted stench has left the building. (NYT):

Lou Dobbs, the longtime CNN anchor whose anti-immigration views have made him a TV lightning rod, plans to announce Wednesday that he is leaving the network, two network employees said.

A CNN executive confirmed that Mr. Dobbs will announce his resignation plans on his 7 p.m. program. His resignation is effective immediately; tonight’s program will be his last on CNN. His contract was not set to expire until the end of 2011.

Mr. Dobbs informed his staff members of his intentions in a meeting Wednesday afternoon. He did not immediately respond to a telephone call seeking comment.

Media Matters snared the video:

See ya, don’t let the door catch you in the posterior on the way out!

Sing it, Pandas…

When you’re on the road (dealing with big ups and downs on life’s roller coaster), this kind of hilarious flaming horsecrap is entertaining.

If only I had the juice (and cash) of sick, bloviating, untethered-from-reality-and-the truth Glenn Beck! The New York Times Opinionator Tobin Harshaw compares my call to shut down the gAyTM to the radical, racist, bigoted diatribes of Glenn Beck. His reasoning?

”We know that hard-line conservatives are riled up. But so are hard-left Democrats and their gay allies.”

Who knew my statement was equivalent to the nut-teabaggers and a radical call to arms:

“Let’s just say that a little leaked email proves LGBTs are seen as the easy gAyTM to the DNC that can be manipulated, ignored, and pickpocketed as mob rule strips us of civil rights without a finger being lifted to help at the eleventh hour,” adds the influential gay blogger Pam Spaulding of Pam’s House Blend. “It’s worse - stripping resources at the time of need.”

She offers a call to arms along the lines of MoveOn’s:

I don’t know about you, but at the very least, it’s a peek at the kind the two-timing that goes on in national politics with constituencies they find “troublesome” or a perceived “liability” (save the $$$, of course). The difference is that the peek inside makes you realize how easily you’ve been had …

Shut the gAyTM down; only give directly to candidates and organizations you believe are truly working in your best interest. Not a penny to the DNC; it’s the only leverage you have as an average citizen. The big donors in our community have to take a stand on this kind of nonsense, otherwise, they are enabling this kind of treatment of our community. It’s party-building at our expense each and every time …

Pam, you may not like to hear it, but that last line could just as easily have come from Glenn Beck. Just goes to show: it may be entertaining to watch your enemies rip themselves apart, but you might just want to keep an eye on the guy to your left.

WTF? It’s time to lay down the crack pipe, Tobin. Let’s see, how do you equate a call for spending one’s donation dollars wisely and directly to a candidate that supports your issues to, say, riling up teabaggers to show up in DC waving racist/Nazi signs with the President’s image, calling for a revolution, stoking the fears and anxieties of the working class who are losing their jobs and homes because of the massive f*ckups of the last eight years by the man who took off in the helicopter this January as the crowds cheered “Na na na na…hey hey hey…goodbye.” Please.

At least the folks in the comments had a good time shredding the comparison. A snippet below the fold.

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NOTE FROM PAM: If the right-wing bible beating set wants to go after Kevin Jennings and Chai Feldblum, then it’s time to remind them (and the MSM) about the “moral values” of Tony Perkins, for example. You see Family Research Council honcho Tony Perkins frequently on the air to represent the "family values" agenda, but the media seem to ignore his outlandish racist affiliations documented in this Blend diary (posted here with permission), including ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens, declared a hate group by the SPLC, and the KKK. More background, via Media Matters:

The Boston Herald reported in an October 16, 2006, article, "In 2001, [Perkins] gave a speech at a meeting of the Council of Conservative Citizens, which the Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] considers a hate group."

Indeed, a Fall 2004 article in the SPLC's Intelligence Report asserted that Perkins "spoke to the Louisiana Council of Conservative Citizens on May 19, 2001," during his tenure as a Louisiana state legislator. The SPLC characterizes the CCC as a "white nationalist" organization, and has reported that the group is "the reincarnation of the racist White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s."

We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called "affirmative action" and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.

When confronted with this information, an FRC tool said Perkins has "cannot remember" speaking to the group, but Perkins himself told the Vancouver Sunthat he "could not recall what he said to the group and that he said he had been unfamiliar with the CCC's history at the time."

The family values organization head has also sidled up to former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. While campaign manager for Louis E. (Woody) Jenkins's campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1996, forked over $82,500 to buy Duke's mailing list. Yes, Perkins wanted make sure to reach the white supremacist voting base.

Bricar1632's diary:

It's said that 'a picture is worth a thousand words.'  So I can't help but wonder what Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, must think knowing that this picture exists of him in the newsletter for the Council of Conservative Citizens, a well-known white supremacist group.  It seems he was a guest speaker at the time, which he's done twice, once in 1997 and another time in 2001.

He could probably claim he had no knowledge of the groups interests, but he would be hard pressed to resort to this lame excuse.

<;blockquote>;In 1998, nearly three years before Perkins spoke to the CCC a second time, both Sen. Trent Lott and Rep. Bob Barr received widespread national media attention (and outrage) for speaking in front of the CCC—and both politicians used the “I-didn’t-know-their-politics” copout.  The national tumult over Lott and Barr that year even prompted US Rep. Thomas Wexler to sponsor a House Resolution condemning the racism of the CCC.

Then there's the nasty detail of the white flag behind him at the podium, the one with the southern cross in one corner.

More below the fold. 

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