When the Catholic Church and organizations are trying to exert influence over our laws, making abortion and contraception harder to access, they tend to portray their religious teachings against contraception as if they have nothing to do with misogyny. Instead, it's talked about as if it were one of those harmless religious laws governing behavior that's arbitrary, like eating kosher or praying before meals. In fact, the kosher analogy came up a lot during the debate over health care coverage of contraception, even though under that analogy, the benefit should be offered. After all, Jewish business owners aren't allowed to forbid their employees from using their compensation for non-kosher food.
Digression aside, the reason that this framing of contraception rules in Catholicism misses the point is that the rules are rooted in a very misogynist ideology, one that holds that women exist for no other reason as to be appendages for men. Contraception threatens that ideology, because it suggests women showing overly high levels of independence, that they may feel they have other things to do in life but producing a man's babies. That men themselves often want contraception should disturb this viewpoint, but they kind of get around that problem by embracing the rhythm method*, which gives men a lot of control over reproduction. They're counting, I think correctly, on the fact that men will cajole women for sex---and in the sort of patriarchal relationships where contraception is shunned---women don't have a lot of right to say no. In fact, considering the taboo of women bothering men with their lady stuff, a taboo strongly reinforced by religion, a lot of women will go along with sex just to avoid upsetting their husbands with talk of periods and counting and ovulation and god forbid, mucus thickness.
You can see this ideology about women in the choices that the Catholic hierarchy makes about their female followers, even when it's not about reproduction or sex at all. A couple of examples:
Exhibit #1:Via Feministe, there's been a crackdown on nuns for showing overly high levels of intellectual independence.
A prominent U.S. Catholic nuns group said Thursday that it was “stunned” that the Vatican reprimanded it for spending too much time on poverty and social-justice concerns and not enough on condemning abortion and gay marriage.
In a stinging report on Wednesday, the Vatican said the Leadership Conference of Women Religious had been “silent on the right to life” and had failed to make the “Biblical view of family life and human sexuality” a central plank in its agenda.
Shorter Vatican: The role of ladies is to scold other ladies to know their place. But wait, it gets worse!
It also reprimanded American nuns for expressing positions on political issues that differed, at times, from views held by U.S. bishops. Public disagreement with the bishops — “who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals” — is unacceptable, the report said.
Needless to say, women can't be bishops, precisely because the Church teaches women simply cannot have that kind of moral authority. After all, their job is to obey, and to be appendages. Attempts to rise above their station---even to do something as mild as to work against poverty---will get slapped down. The idea that a handful of women are getting uppity is such a concern that the Vatican itself had to be the ones to make a fuss over this. I hope those nuns quit
Exhibit #2: Via Skepchick, a story of how a high school girl learned that in the eyes of her church, she's nothing without a male presence to define her.
The 17-year-old girl was all set to go to the prom, she was excited, but things took a turn for the worse this week when her date backed out. Then, the girl was shocked to learn that she is not allowed to go the prom by herself due to a rule by the Archdiocese.....
But when Amanda’s date cancelled on her earlier this week, she slammed right into a wall. She says she was told by school officials at Archbishop John Carroll High School she could not go to the junior prom next Friday without a date......
Amanda already paid the $95 for the prom tickets, add that to the cost of the dress, the shoes, flowers and she says it’s close to $1,000.
After the story came out, the girl did in fact get her invite to the prom restored. But not because the archdiocese changed their minds! Nope, it's because she finally got a date. And a very valuable lesson was taught: That without a man to validate you, you're nothing. Especially in the eyes of your god.
To be clear, not all Catholic schools are this adamant about compulsory hetereosexuality. But with the Vatican crackdown, I wouldn't be surprised if you saw more of this sort of thing.
*I don't like the "natural family planning" language, which indulges the naturalistic fallacy and is a non-subtle attempt to imply that it's superior to other methods that aren't described in loaded language. We don't call the pill the "maximum convenience family planning" or condoms the "dual action family planning". We stick to value-neutral terms.
Jamelle Bouie's review of Romney's Big Speech is palpably angry. It's actually pretty awesome, because it's easy to get jaded as a journalist and political writer, but once in awhile, someone lies so gleefully, with so little regard for reality, that it can return you to that state of rage at the sheer immorality of it all. Romney spoke pure Conservatese, and they've grown so used to lying that actual truths would sound strange in their mouths. Still, the audacity of Romney's bullshit was dazzling....and enraging. Jamelle explains the reality:
The other thing was less remarked upon at the time, but no less important: Congressional Republicans, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, pledged to make Obama a one-term president by any means necessary. Their plan was to use legislative rules like the filibuster to create a supermajority requirement for everything from confirming nominees to passing new legislation. Far from harming Republicans—who would be unified in their opposition—the blowback would tarnish Obama, who would be blamed by the public for gridlock and obstruction......
Worse, the sudden reversal of Republicans on the issue of fiscal stimulus—which they supported at both ends of the Bush administration—meant that the economy was stuck without further support, even as it stagnated with slow growth and high unemployment. Obama, as the president, received the lion's share of blame from the public. The only people who noticed Republican obstruction, by contrast, were assorted bloggers, journalists, and Washington insiders.
If you read this history and really think about it, it's hard to escape the creeping dread that it may be impossible to save this country with simple reforms. Progressives like to focus on campaign finance reform---which is an important issue, don't get me wrong---but I honestly don't think that the money is the most important issue when it comes to electoral politics. I know that's blasphemy to say, but hear me out. I think one reason it's intoxicating to focus on campaign finance reform is that as unlikely as it is to pass massive reforms that actually matter, it's still possible. And it's absolutely important, so it becomes this focal point.
But at the end of the day, the real problem with this country is that one of our political parties not only doesn't give a shit about the stability of this country, and in fact has powerful incentives to dismantle it. It's both an ideological thing---stability is dependent on more equality, which they oppose above all other things---but it's also a political thing, which they've come to realize. Republicans have been kept in check in the past by fear that if they destroy this country, they have to pay a major price for it. But it seems what they've learned from the Bush debacle is that if they destroy this country, all they have to do is make sure the Democrats can't fix it properly, and then they can blame the Democrats and return to power to deliver more destruction. There's no incentive to behave, and many incentives to tear shit up.
This strikes me as a problem that can't be fixed with gumption or policy reform. Campaign finance reform can only go so far, because Republicans just need to hold on to enough seats to be obstructionist when they're out of power to make the system work. And those seats they get because the voters have powerful fears regarding women's power and people of color making gains. The rest just works itself out. The only thing I see fixing all this is for the country itself to change enough that people stop voting for Republicans in sufficient numbers. Which may happen naturally, as demographic changes make the country more liberal, but I don't know that it can be fixed with the usual reformist approach.
Still, the nice thing about politics is there's always some chaos afoot. For instance, Republicans put all this effort into creating the perfect situation for getting the country to blame Obama for their problems, and voting for the generic Republican candidate. And then they nominated a robot who scares people. Not a slick move, though I suppose we watched months of them trying to to bargain their way out of it. By no means am I saying this is over; I think Obama's campaign skills are formidable. But the long term situation is scary, since the dynamic isn't going to change. It's only going to be changed when the voters stop falling for the bait-and-switch.
So far, it seems like a slow news day, but because of this, I had an opportunity to read this revealing story in the NY Times about a bunch of paranoids buying slightly less hideous pants. The pants are a pair of chinos that have hidden compartments for a concealed weapon, but unlike most pants that have these kinds of compartments, they aren't quite as baggy. Here are the pants:
So you can just imagine how miserable the previous options were. Not that it mattered that much, in my experience. The kind of douchenozzles who loved carrying everywhere also enjoyed the big, baggy pants that screamed "I conceal carry and I'm too much of a man for stupid girly stuff like looking like I try to look remotely attractive". I suppose there was a point where that was unsustainable, and the need to at least be occasional presentable, if still broadcasting that you're too manly to actually look good, had to come into play. Maybe for going to dinner on your wedding anniversary or something.
As you can tell, I'm not fond of this overbearing anxious masculinity that drives gun culture. It's the platonic ideal of trying too hard.
This passage is rather important, I think:
Gun experts suggest that there are many reasons for the growth in the number of people with concealed-carry permits. They say it is partly due to a changing political and economic climate — gun owners are professing to want a feeling of control — and state laws certainly have made a difference.
I'm curious who these "gun experts" are, but not because I disagree with them. "Wanting a feeling of control" is a very nice way of describing "in a state of abject paranoia that manifests itself in fantasies that people are coming around every corner to kill you". So why is this feeling on the rise? It certainly has nothing to do with actual fear of crime, since crime rates are down, not up. Like way down. No, the predominantly conservative white men that are deep into gun culture are feeling out of control for another reason. They see women and people of color slowly making gains in society, and they fear that they are losing their unearned dominance and control over society. So they buy a gun and carry it around to regain that sense of control and dominance. Sure, your wife has more of a right to leave you if she wants and you may have to compete with a black person for a job, but you can comfort yourself by feeling like you could just up and kill someone if the opportunity arises. Which it won't, but you can fantasize about it all the time. Unfortunately for the rest of us, as the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin situaton demonstrates, for the occasional gun nut, merely fantasizing isn't enough. The desperation to make the fantasy come true can occasionally lead to extreme measures.
An absolutely devastating and amazing hour of television: That's the first thing I want to say. The show has been escalating the levels of dread and fear for three episodes now, to the point where I was genuinely afraid that someone out there had murdered Megan because Don abandoned her. As we discuss in this episode, the theme was about the tension between "home" and "far away". Peggy lays it out in her ad campaign: Home is safety, love, warmth. Out there is scary, cold, and dangerous. But the ad gets rejected, because, as we learn in this episode, it isn't that simple. Some times home is where you can't be, and some times going on journeys leads us to greater truths. Even if they're scary. Watch the video for more on that.
I just want to add one more thing about all this: Because of all the talk of "far away places" and danger---particularly how badly it shook Peggy, understandably so, to learn that in another place and time, goofball Michael was almost surely born in a concentration camp---I think it was entirely reasonable to think Megan was in great danger after Don abandoned her. "Mad Men" is rarely that straightforward, however. We discover instead that where Megan isn't safe is in her home. She tries to be safe in there; she barricades the door and refuses to answer the phone, creating a little bubble of seeming safety. But Don kicks the door down (in a disturbing echo of season three, where he kicks the door down in an act of sheer awesomeness), popping that bubble and any illusion that home is where safety lies. Realizing that, the rest of the episode really came together, and we realized that "trips" often seem scary but can be exactly what you need, and "home" is not always so great. After all, Michael's first home was a concentration camp, and in order to feel safe, he imagines that he's actually from somewhere very far away. Still, like all things, it's complicated. I think we're meant to find it good that Peggy has a home with Abe, that he provides an anchor and makes her feel safe. It's not that home is a bad thing or trips are good. Just that we need both, and that home needs to be more than just home to be safe. That home has to be stable, and while a lot of people are uneasy about Peggy's storyline, I think it's clear that one thing that's true about her relationship is that she is with a man who really is kind and stable. In this world, that counts for something.
The historical context is important here, as well. It's important to know that "Mad Men" is a very New York show, and the city's decline is a major issue here. The larger "home" of all the characters---New York City---is increasingly unsafe and unstable.
On a side note: I read some forums last night after the episode aired, because it was a dense episode and I struggled to sleep after watching it. I wanted to see if others were picking up on the themes Marc and I lay out in the video. Unfortunately, the ones I read all were about adjudicating the fight between Megan and Don. I wish I could say I was surprised to see that most people I was reading right after the episode were Team Don, even though Don puts Megan through unholy hell, for no other reason that he genuinely fears that on some level, she doesn't want him. That's some classic domestic violence shit, and it's telling how many people out there are unwilling to see that Don is a bad fucking guy.
What were your thoughts? Did this episode make you rethink the Megan character as much as it did for Marc and myself?
Even the stories of Romney’s supposed temper are ridiculous. He was arrested, in June of 1981, for disorderly conduct while attempting to launch his family boat in Cochituate State Park. He got in a heated argument with a cop who noted that the boat was not displaying its registration. Romney was hauled in in his swim trunks. Charges were dropped when he threatened to sue for false arrest. At the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics Romney got in a public confrontation with a volunteer police officer directing traffic outside an Olympic venue. Police allege Romney said “fuck” multiple times while berating the cop. Romney declined to apologize to the cop, Shaun Knopp, and while the public berating did happen — he mentions it in his book — Romney made a big point of specifically denying that he used a bad word. (In fact, Romney insisted at the time that he specifically said “H-E double hockey sticks.” Like a child. A remarkably well-behaved child speaking in earshot of his second grade teacher.) He told the Boston Globe that he had two witnesses to corroborate his denial. “I have not used that word since college — all right? — or since high school,” he said.
It's worth noting that if he had been black, conservatives would be finding ways to defend the cops if they decided to up and shoot him during these interactions. But he's not, so I guess they're going to vote for him to be President.
A landmark Pointe Claire Village bar that was forced to stop selling alcohol in January is expected to get back its liquor licence this week but on the condition that no hip-hop or rap bands play the bar in the future......
Human-rights experts, however, were quick to sound the alarm. Although not the first of its kind, the apparent ban on hip-hop music imposed by the Régie sends a dangerous message, said Fo Niemi.
This being Canada, it seems the first concern was the obvious racism of this, but it's also a free speech concern, as far as I can tell. I don't need to hammer home how this is utter bullshit, I hope.
There's been a lot of speculation that Romney, now that he's the general election candidate, is going to run more to the center now that he's finally over the Santorum hump. That's basic common sense and a typical pattern in most elections, but there are some folks who are dissenting and saying that Romney is going to be the exception to the rule. Paul Waldman lays out the case:
One of the many differences between Bush and Romney is that conservatives trusted Bush. Even if he presented himself as "a different kind of Republican" (i.e. one who wasn't so cruel when it came to social issues), they knew that he was one of them. There was no doubt in their minds about where Bush stood on most things, and on most things he was with them. With Romney, they'll doubt everything.
He goes on to explain that because of this concern, Romney is going to be constantly pushed around by conservatives, and really unable to distance themselves from him without creating a backlash in right wing media. Honestly, we can only hope, because I'm still pretty certain that conservatives are better at falling in line than liberals typically give them credit for. (It's the "everyone else is like me" problem; liberals don't fall in line very easily, so we assume that's true of conservatives, but it's not.) Still, there's now evidence for Waldman's theory:
Chancellor Jerry Falwell, Jr. announced today that Gov. Mitt Romney will address Liberty University graduates at the 2012 Commencement ceremony to be held at 10 a.m. on Saturday, May 12, at Arthur L. Williams Stadium.
“We are delighted that Governor Romney will join us to celebrate Commencement with Liberty’s 2012 graduates," said Liberty Chancellor Jerry Falwell, Jr. "This will be a historic event for Liberty University reminiscent of the visits of Governor, and then presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan to Liberty’s campus in 1980 and of President George H.W. Bush who spoke at Liberty’s 1990 Commencement ceremony.”
Of course, making an allegiance to Liberty is a big part of the standard Republican campaign, but it seems to me that it's more politically toxic of a move than it was in the past. Before, Liberty didn't really make the news much, despite being founded by Jerry Falwell, and so it was a good opportunity to pander to the Christian right without really getting the notice of the mainstream. But the Bush administration was heavily staffed by people who went to these fundie universities, drawing attention to how they're basically shoddy places that don't offer real education, but instead are about indoctrination.
I simply have to imagine that Romney really doesn't want to have to go kiss the Falwell ring, but he feels he has no choice. Which is good news, actually, because it suggests he's genuinely afraid that many fundamentalist Christians would rather stay home than vote for a Mormon. If that's true, then two things are also true: 1) He won't be able to stop trying to win them over and 2) a lot of them will sit this one out anyway. Fundies are notoriously hard to budge once they've got an idea in their head, and those who already think Romney is too much of the Other to be voted for are probably not going to change their minds. The only real question, then, is how many of them are seriously that wary of Romney. I'm skeptical that it's a high number, but this decision from Romney's camp suggests they believe that it's high enough.
If you want closed case evidence on how conservatism is mostly about sadism and mean-spiritedness, look no further than how general wingnuttery views young people. Student debt and high unemployment are major problems for the Millennials. You would think that conservatives could muster sympathy in this case, because a) the people suffering could be their own kids and grandkids and b) these are people who are working hard, studying hard, and still getting screwed. But no. Instead you get folks like the evil monster Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, saying this about the student debt crisis:
"I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there's no reason for that," Foxx continued. "We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that. I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' You don't sit on your butt and have it dumped in your lap."
I decided to figure out how doable her "just work your way through school, and you won't have debt" solution is. If you're lucky enough to get in-state tuitiion at UT Austin, which is one of the better and more affordable options for a quality education, tuition and housing for two semesters will run you about $18,800. That's not counting books, food, or general cost-of-living expenses. You have to do school full-time to maximize the cost-effectiveness, since the amount of money you pay per credit hour if you don't goes up susbstantially in direct and indirect ways. If you can somehow manage to do that and are lucky enough to get a full-time minimum wage job in this economy, then you'll make about $15,000 a year. So even if you work 80 hours a week (remember, there's only 168 hours in a week, 49 of which must be spent sleeping), you won't make enough to pay for two semesters worth of school. And that doesn't even take into account cost of living expenses over the summer. It's literally impossible for someone to pull off the Virginia Foxx Plan For College, even if you're superhuman in your energy levels.
Needless to say, Foxx considers herself "pro-life". I point this out, because "pro-life" people want you to believe that they're in it not to punish women for being sexual, but that they just really are The Protectors of the Young. Well, that's clearly bullshit. Anyone who really cared a whit about the young would take this student debt and employment crisis seriously. I'd argue that instead of actually being protectors of the young, conservatives are haters of the young. Anti-choice is actually a piece of this, because the idealized victim of their policies is a young woman, being punished for her youth and sexuality. It really comes across in the comments of this article about the employment/debt crisis that Atrios linked:
They want to go to a boutique college, borrow money or receive grants to cover the $50K tuition, major in an arcane subject like gender studies or urban anthropology, and then have someone hand them a well paying job, so they can maintain a hipster lifestyle in a trendy neighborhood.
Here are the most popular majors, in order, according to the Princeton Review: business, psychology, nursing, biology, education, English, economics, communications, political science, and computer science. It seems that kids are mostly picking majors that will lead to the kind of professional careers that they're told they should want. This commenter betrays himself with his ignorance, sure, but also with the phrase "hipster lifestyle". This is all about hating the young for being young, wanting them to suffer because they still have hard bodies and high libidos while your aging body makes it increasingly hard to ignore that death is coming for all of us. It's basically asshole behavior, believing that you had a right to be young, but no one else does now that you aren't anymore. The next comment was more of the same:
Parents need to do a far better job in helping young adults understand that the money spent on education needs to be able to be recouped in the form of a real job on the other side. Parents would also do well to explain the importance of hard work, personal responsibility, vision, personal sacrifice and minimizing the sense of entitlement.
Please review that list of the most popular majors to understand what an asshole this guy is. One in every four degrees handed out is a business degree. The notion that kids aren't viewing their education as job training is a farce. On the contrary, the complaint now is that students are too focused on how to get from school to work, and find any class that doesn't have immediately obvious relevance for future employment to be a waste of time. Once again, the underlying sentiment here is that now that the commenter is no longer young, no one else has a right to be, and that young people should have grim, colorless lives so that he feels better about not being young anymore.
These people aren't the protectors of the young. Remember these attitudes every time a conservative waxes on about how they love babies. If they really did, they would want those babies to have meaningful lives with joy and color in them, not the grim existences of all work and no play that these wingnuts feel is the only acceptable youth now that theirs is gone.
In case you were wondering, yes, I do have opinions on the show "Girls" and all the press it's been getting. I wrote a piece that I definitely hope you check out at The American Prospect on the whole thing, were I lament how much ink is being spilled about how it's scary and upsetting to see women performing the same kind of comic tropes that men have done for roughly forever. Now, most critics don't see it that way. They didn't stop for a second to wonder if they'd issue the same criticisms if it was a male-centric show. For instance, I highly doubt Madeline Davis of Jezebel would write a piece where she lambasted a sitcom about a man because the comic main character made a bunch of stupid choices she feels are irresponsible and she hopes that young women out there don't make. Like I said in my Prospect piece, the double standard is staggering. Men in comedy get to be stupid, get to make mistakes, get to make bad decisions and have comically exagerrated bad sex, and we all laugh because we know it's a comedy, not a symposium on How To Act Right. That so many feminist-minded women don't notice what they're doing here is distressing to me. The only critique that I really felt was something other than an excuse not to watch the "girl show" was Jenna Wortham's at The Hairpin, mostly because she isn't interested in that narrative at all, but using the intense media scrutiny of this show to anchor a larger discussion about lack of racial diversity on TV.
The great unspoken issue here is what I like to call the politics of the remote control. It's one thing to get men to agree that women should have equality in the workplace and the doctor's office, but the great taboo in our culture is really delving into the inequalities that persist in the home. Point out that women still do domestic labor more than men, after all, and expect to be buried under a sea of rationalizations and "nuh-uhs!" in comments. As I note in the piece, "Girls" is an extremely rare thing---a show about women where there's no male authority to calm anxieties---which means it's going to make a lot of men uncomfortable. They're going to look for reasons to get out of having to do what women are used to, which is watch a show where none of the important characters are the same gender as you. Let's be honest; most men wouldn't watch this unprovoked by a woman.
And that's where this gets interesting. Women by and large get to avoid having to deal with men's unquestioned sexism around what's acceptable on TV because there's not really any completely lady-dominated shows that they might want to watch and then have to go through the ordeal of listening to their partners come up with a bunch of rationalizations for why this show somehow doesn't seem quite like all those other shows that he likes that are very much like it. The issue basically doesn't have to be dealt with. Now "Girls" has come along, and it basically cuts off many objections by being obviously influenced by "Louie" without being a rip-off, and so it's basically forcing the issue. Finding a reason that it's not quite perfect and therefore not even giving it a shot keeps things where they're at, where women watch shows with prominent or even exclusively male characters, men don't have to watch shows where men aren't in charge, and no one has to discuss if possibly there's sexism emanating from the couch and not just from Hollywood. I'm acutely aware of this dynamic because in past relationships, I've experimented with standing my ground on lady stuff I like, mostly in the way of music, and it's been pretty upsetting to see how much bullshit a man who identifies as liberal can come up with for suggesting your otherwise excellent taste failed you, in a truly remarkable coincidence, when the product you like is being made by women. In fact, the terror of this is so ingrained that a lot of women just sort of generally avoid being too femme-y in their tastes, even when it comes to the good stuff, for fear that it's threatening to potential boyfriends and not just actual ones. I'm just saying, I bet even avid straight female fans of "Girls" won't be putting it on their OK Cupid profiles.
This kind of pressure, I think, helps explain why the strange belief that female characters on TV need to be paragons of virtue and excellent choice-making for their very existence to be defensible. You know, even though that's boring. The heightened emotional stakes around women watching women have created this sense that women need to be getting something important and useful out of this, because if it's just about having a good time, why not just stick to the guy shows and make it easier on everyone? There's other reasons that women on TV have unfair expectations that they abandon being entertaining and instead be educational for their female audiences (which is just so.....paternalistic), but I suspect couch politics don't make it any better. At this point, the belief that a female character's job is to be a Good Example for her apparently child-like female audience members is so ingrained that it's beginning to go unquestioned. Thus, arguments that "Girls" is troubling because the main character makes stupid decisions. Well, look, people who always make good decisions are boring as characters. TV relies on drama to work, and good decisions are often ones that minimize drama. (Except when smoking out unexamined prejudices, then it's necessary drama that good decision-makers sometimes provoke.) Young women who have men and sex all figured out, who don't struggle to know what they want out of their careers, and who know better than to experiment with drugs are great role models, but watching a show about them sounds about as interesting as watching paint dry. Comedy especially is interested in the foibles of human beings, and women are half of human beings. For fuck's sake, they should be able to have foibles. I don't see why this is such a hard concept to grasp.
That's a Facebook post from a captain in the Miami-Dade fire department. In case you're one of those idiots who believes that the proof for racism should be held so high that even lynchings don't qualify, let me contrast this post with the fact that Martin's mother is a program coordinator at the Miami-Dade Housing Authority, and his dad is a truck driver. Not only are they not on assistance, but they're pretty solidly middle class. Sounds like Martin's mother's job is about the equivalent of Beckmann's here, in fact: mid-level government job. Not that saying these things about people on assistance is any more true, but the point is that this guy is so racist he didn't even bother to pause for a moment to check the easily Google-able facts.
This sort of thing is upsetting for a plethora of reasons, but I want to point out two right now. One is that, as an atheist, you constantly get asked what's to stop you from running around gunning people down in the streets if you don't believe that god is going to spank your naughty ass. Well, I have to point out that it's conservatives, who are much more likely to not only be religious but to think that religion should be pushed on people for their own good, who are currently supporting a legal right to run around in the streets gunning people down for no other reason than you find their skin color to be darker than what you prefer around these parts.
Second of all, these kinds of attitudes are, unfortunately, not uncommon amongst emergency workers like Beckmann. This attitude doesn't evaporate when folks like Beckmann get off Facebook and go to work. Which means overt racists who believe that black people are worthless and don't deserve help are tasked with going out there and helping all people of every race. I don't know about you, but the idea of having an emergency worker who hates me just because of who I am tasked with the job of caring for me? That's fucking scary. (Which is why the number of anti-choice politicians who used to be gynecologists freaks me the fuck out.) This is one reason why I'm a little averse to the liberal eagerness to write off individual racism and try to refocus on structural issues, because that oversimplifies the issue. Individual racism is a major contributing factor to structural racism. Yes, people of color are right to be wary of emergency help because it's often under-funded and structurally unsound, but also because you run a high chance of pulling a worker who hates you for who you are. It's important not to underrate that.
This Orange Couch is a little later than I usually like to get it up, but I've been running around trying to get my IDs replaced after losing them in a bus.
Last night's episode cemented to me that this season of "Mad Men" is going to really focus on how chaotic the 60s actually felt for people at the time. Marc and I focus on three aspects of the episode: the overt examination of masculinity and male violence, the various ways that fantasy plays out in life, and the entire Pete situation. Marc and I are both from Austin, and so the Charles Whitman shootings loom larger in our imaginations than perhaps the rest of the country's; knowing so many details about Whitman and his crime made it clear how much the show was drawing a direct line from Pete to Charles Whitman. Watch Orange Couch to hear our thoughts.
What I want to add is this: There's a tendency with history for complexity to get mowed over as time passes. Now that we're 5 decades past the 60s, it seems that people are beginning to forget that it was a time of great dread for the nation. We tend to look back and see it mostly through a political lens, which is appropriate because it was a political time: Hippies and anti-war? Check. Feminism and civil rights? Check. Reactionary responses to all of the above? Check. But what that tends to paper over is that it seems there was a lot of cultural change that's harder to box in. It would be nice to say that the dread was simply the result of reactionary anger about changing social norms, and sure, there was a lot of that. But it was more existential than all that. This episode really managed to touch on a lot of cultural shifts that were optimistic and awesome, especially when it comes to Ken's writing and the 60s explosion of highly imaginative genre fiction that is still with us today. (See: "Mad Men"'s chatter competition, "Game of Thrones".) I'd definitely put Don and Megan's playful sexuality and just Megan's overall life into that category. It was an era of embracing the possible, and that was good. Thus, the moon landing. But it was also an era where there was a definite sense that the old gods, as it were, were bubbling up and spilling blood. Thus, the Manson family murders less than a month after the moon landing. These things don't fit into neat political boxes, but are more primal than that, about our greatest hopes and our worst nightmares. And this episode really dwelled on that. It built on last week's episode, which was about a more banal kind of masculine violence.
I'm not sure what to make of all this. I think they're going to go dark places, which is appropriate. "Mad Men" is at its best when mining the 60s for the complexities that most people forget about, and the growing fear of crime and the air of violence in the 60s is something that fits in that category, fading with time because it's so hard to categorize or explain what it meant. I'm really curious to see what they do with these themes.
Watching all the stupid fighting over Ann Romney posing as Saint of the Housewives, I finally realized why this whole thing has been so meaningful for Republicans. Ever since Democrats started calling bullshit on all the various attacks on women coming from the right, Republicans have been desperate to claim that this isn't a war on women so much as a war on some women. You know, sluts. Bad girls. The problem is that their attempts to reframe the debate keep failing miserably. Trying to cast women who use birth control as the bad girls didn't work, since pretty much all women use contraception. Trying to crown Sandra Fluke the Queen of the Sluts hasn't really worked well, either. They haven't even bothered to try to make equal pay a matter of bad girls vs. good girls, but instead try to ignore it in hopes people quit asking them about it.
By trying to turn Ann Romney into a martyr of motherhood, what they're doing is trying to create a Good Girl that can stand in opposition to the Bad Girls they hate. Distract from actual policy, and make it about the same ol' politics of resentment. Ever since they latched onto Hilary Rosen, the right's narrative has been, "See? This isn't about pay or birth control. It's about those feminists running around having fun and being free while you're stuck at home with your ungrateful husband and whining kids. Who do those bitches think they are, going out at night with their lipstick on, just seeing where adventure takes them? They should be at home like me. I'm so much more moral, more American than those sluts. Yeah, I use birth control, but man, I really do want to stick it to them. Especially the lesbians, who think they just get to go their whole lives without having to pick up a man's underwear."
I know that sounds a little harsh, but if you look at the chatter in right wing channels, that's definitely the narrative that's shaping up. It was always the narrative that they were pushing, but until they had Ann Romney as the symbol of a right-thinking patriarchal woman, it wasn't taking.
But you know what? I still don't think it's taking. It's allowing conservative women to resolve their cognitive dissonance between wanting to relate to the conservative, misogynist position but also wanting to be treated decently despite being female. Convincing themselves that their all-American goodness will save them is what they need for that. But I don't see this message selling to moderate or swing voters. There are more single women than married women in this country, for one thing. More importantly, I don't think the politics of resentment have that much hold over maried mothers. The same things that affect single women or childless women---equal pay, reproductive rights---affect most married women with children. I realize not all women see eye to eye on all issues, but in this case, I think the usual things that affect the female vote, especially a since of compassion and fairness, won't be moved by the Good Housewives vs. Dirty Sluts narrative the Republicans are trying to establish.
Thrilling stuff! I get to be here all day today, so I'm really looking forward to listening to Panda Party while I catch up on work. Come join me, and enjoy this video by Y.A.C.H.T. that has two---count 'em--two songs in it.
Oh boy, Rick Santorum is out of the race for five minutes and already there's stupid and disingenuous media outrages stemming from the general election. Buzz Feed has the story. It started when Mitt Romney started saying he understands the concerns of working women because he's married to one of those lady-things. This, of course, is part of his larger plan to appeal to female voters, which goes like this:
1) Act like the only woman he's met in his life is his wife. She is All Women.
2) .......
3) Win the female vote.
Hillary Rosen sensibly goes on TV and points out that this claim doesn't even make sense, since Ann Romney is hardly the expert, being a lifelong housewife married to an incredibly rich man who doesn't know the first thing about what it's like to try to live off a paycheck:
But Romney has a secret weapon up her sleeve: Housewife Romanticization. She knows the feminine mystique still runs strong in this country, and that there's a strong tradition of idiotic platitudes about the greatness of housewives that exist to conceal very real concerns about inequality and female dependency, concerns that were raised in the 60s and haven't ever been completely killed off despite heavy use of meaningless platitudes. Romney trotted one of those out:
It was a three-fer, demonstrating that Ann Romney is a master at the language of meaningless bullshit: Invoking the questionable assumption that fertility equals goodness, I CHOOSE MY CHOICE, and of course, posturing about how stay-at-home mothers work so hard and YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW.
The last one may be one of my least favorite of meaningless platitudes in circulation in the U.S., the whole "stay-at-home moms are the hardest working, bestest people that ever worked!" one. It's a common feature on STFU Parents, with housewives braying about how, unlike everyone else, they work 24/7 and don't get vacations and blah blah.
There's a very serious and insulting problem with this platitude: It carries with it the assumption that working mothers (a term that is commonly understood to mean women who have paid employment while raising children at home) don't raise their children.
Think about it: Romney is saying she made the "choice" to raise her five boys by staying home, as if her boys would have gone unraised if she'd had a job outside of the home. To which I say, screw you. My mom worked. In this country, most moms work. Their kids don't run around like wild animals, naked and barefoot and killing pigeons to survive. Hell, in some families, believe it or not, dads some times pitch in and raise their kids. (That last bit was mega-sarcasm, for the utterly literal.)
Rosen's point stands. Romney's tweet actually confirms that she has no idea what it's like for most women to be out there, worrying about how to make enough money to take care of themselves and their families. That she had the choice to stay home makes that very clear. And that's even if you don't know about Romney's financial situation. The reality is that she could afford economic dependence, because if she ever got divorced, her alimony payments would be enough to keep a whole neighborhood of single mother-led households afloat. Hell, Romney doesn't even have much in common with most stay-at-home moms. In the real world, many stay-at-home moms are living in poverty, unable to afford a job because of the costs of child care, and often living on a patchwork of family help, food stamps, and under-the-table employment. Even those who don't live in poverty are often living in a much more financially precarious situation than the "choice" stay-at-home mothers the media loves so much. The reality is that most mothers work, since most middle class families rely on women holding paid employment to stay afloat. More than 3/4 of women with children under age 15 at home have paid employment outside of the home.
Unfortunately, a bunch of Obama people are falling all over themselves to shore up the narrative that stay-at-home moms are the bestest people that ever worked and they work much harder and longer than everyone else. Buzzfeed has David Axelrod, Jim Messina, and Stephanie Cutter pretending they're too stupid to grasp Rosen's basic---and accurate---point that a wealthy housewife is hardly the expert on the needs of women who live paycheck-to-paycheck. Cutter's tweet was the most irritating in terms of empty platitudes:
If anything, this is more blatantly offensive than Romney's tweet, since it more overtly implies that the solid majority of mothers who have paid employment outside of the home don't work hard and don't raise their children. Of course, when you ask the rare "choice" stay-at-home mother why she made her decision, many will say they tried to juggle a job and raising children and found.....wait for it....that it was too hard, that the work levels were unmanageable. I believe them! It's plain common sense that raising children while holding down a job is going to be more work than raising children by itself. This isn't to say that staying at home isn't hard work. But the danger of trading in empty platitudes like this is that they're rarely as content-free as people hope. Over-the-top poetics about the greatness of stay-at-home mothers do tend to imply that working mothers don't care for their children. In this case, it also obscures the fact that a woman who lives in extreme wealth and has a team of servants to handle the parts of staying at home that really are hard work---you know, like all the endless cleaning---really has no idea what it's like to either be a working mother or what it's like to live as most stay-at-home mothers do.
Steve Kornacki has a rundown of different primary races where a losing candidate was able to make life hell for the eventual nominee, with an eye towards the possibility that this may not be the end of Santorum's influence on this race, particularly with regards to dragging Romney to the right. I'm even more skeptical after reading the history of situations where this did happen. In pretty much every situation, the challenger had a belligerent personality. Santorum is an asshole, but he strikes me as a bit too much of a conformist quislling to really mount a post-loss challenge to Romney. Part of the reason I think this is that he dropped out a bit suddenly; a real brawler would have carried his nickel and dime delegates to the convention. That he's dropped out shows he really did think he was in it to win it, and not that's out of his grasp, I don't really see what benefit he would get from continuing to be a pain in Romney's side. He barely campaigned at times as it was. Unless you can convince him that god has chosen him to bother Romney, I suspect Santorum fades into the background.
I'm not happy about this situation, mind you. I think the country is better off when more conservatives with verbal diarrhea have access to the microphone. The number one problem with modern conservatism is that most conservatives are adept at disingenuous rhetoric that allows them to promote classist, sexist and racist ideals without coming right out and saying what they mean. Someone who has a compulsion to talk in public like they do behind closed doors can help bring some air to the situation, and make it that much harder for a motivated public to continue pretending not to see what's obvious about conservatism. That's why I'm annoyed about the firing of John Derbyshire; it allows everyone else who said basically the same thing in slightly less obnoxious language to carry on as if they're not racist, because you know, they fired the racist. And that's why I'm sad Santorum is out so soon. His unvarnished misogyny and tendency to get very close in public to saying blatantly racist things that he and his buddies say behind closed doors was clarifying. It was eroding the Republican brand by the day, which is probably why get got out.
Now that Romney is rid of him, he has nearly 7 months to wash the wingnut stink off him, and present himself as a moderate Republican. That may not sound like a long time right now, but in politics it's huge. As much fun as it is to watch pouty-faced idiot Santorum throw in the towel in a snit, I'm really sorry that he's not hanging in until August. The voters that swing elections tend to be low-information ones, after all, and they don't really start tuning in until the fall. A lot of them will only vaguely understand that there was a primary contest to begin with, much less have an idea of how radically right wing Romney had to be in order to save himself in it. Which sucks, because if nothing else, Santorum's overt hostility to women meant that questions about women's rights to health care and contraception particularly were being asked pretty regularly, which hurt Romney. He couldn't support that stuff without losing votes to Santorum in the primary, after all. Now that Santorum is gone, Romney can probably start being far more pro-contraception. He may even cut out the attacks on Planned Parenthood. Which means he might be able to close the gender gap that's opened up in the polls.
I don't want to be Debbie Downer, but I just don't see how Santorum's departure plays out any other way.
