Official Shrub.com Blog » jfpbookworm http://blog.shrub.com Because we care about stuff Sun, 29 Aug 2010 05:38:43 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Baby, it's Cold Outside http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-12-26_491 http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-12-26_491#comments Tue, 26 Dec 2006 16:31:04 +0000 jfpbookworm http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-12-26_489 My Vox blog.] Via Majikthise, Brad Hicks has a good analysis of "Baby, It's Cold Outside." There's not much more I can say about the analysis, but the responses in comments are quite interesting, particularly in how the song is defended. It's illustrative of the ways in which the status quo with respect to rape and consent gets defended. Continue reading →]]> http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-12-26_491/feed 12 Great Moments in Jurisprudence http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-11-01_436 http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-11-01_436#comments Wed, 01 Nov 2006 18:25:02 +0000 jfpbookworm http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-11-01_436 my Vox blog.] Plenty of people have commented on the Missouri rape case where a judge decided that once penetration had been consented to, there really wasn't any crime. And as plenty of people have pointed out, this is a monumentally stupid ruling. (Trigger warning.) Continue reading →]]> http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-11-01_436/feed 3 You Make Me Feel So Young http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-10-31_435 http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-10-31_435#comments Tue, 31 Oct 2006 16:40:31 +0000 jfpbookworm http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-10-31_435 my Vox blog.] Just when I was starting to feel like I was getting old, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services comes through and treats me like a kid again:
Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available to the states under revised federal grant guidelines for 2007.
Up to 29? Heck, even if we don't take the usual tactic here of focusing on the endpoint, the average age of the cohort they're including is 24. Most unmarried 24-year-olds are going to be either in the workforce or higher education - presumably at that point they've merited a little autonomy? Continue reading →]]> http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-10-31_435/feed 5 I <3 NY http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-10-20_433 http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-10-20_433#comments Fri, 20 Oct 2006 17:03:07 +0000 jfpbookworm http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-10-20_433 my Vox blog.] It's been a while since I've heard good news on the reproductive rights front - it's been abortion bans and "conscience clauses" for so long. Yesterday the New York Court of Appeals issued a decision in Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Albany v. Serio upholding a provision of the Women's Health and Wellness Act which requires all but a narrowly defined category of religious institutions to provide insurance coverage for contraception if they provide prescription drug coverage. Continue reading →]]> http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-10-20_433/feed 0 Apolygys http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-10-04_408 http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-10-04_408#comments Wed, 04 Oct 2006 15:57:53 +0000 jfpbookworm http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-10-04_408 Continue reading →]]> http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-10-04_408/feed 11 What To Do When You Screw Up http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-09-19_387 http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-09-19_387#comments Tue, 19 Sep 2006 18:51:44 +0000 jfpbookworm http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-09-19_387 Continue reading →]]> http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-09-19_387/feed 0 Yet Another Take on the Althouse Incident http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-09-17_384 http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-09-17_384#comments Mon, 18 Sep 2006 00:42:42 +0000 jfpbookworm http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-09-17_384 blog on Vox, with these posts and a few others. Commenting, unfortunately, requires registration to the service, but I've got a few invite codes for it. Come visit.] There's been a bit of a kerfuffle this weekend over Ann Althouse's treatment of Feministing's Jessica Valenti. (I'm not going to call it "Boobiegate." It's been over thirty years since Watergate; can we stop framing everything in terms of the Baby Boomers and let that go the way of Teapot Dome?)

What It Was About

The short version: Ann Althouse responded to this photo of Bill Clinton with several bloggers by making an vague allusion to the Lewinsky scandal.
Let's just array these bloggers... randomly.
(As other folks have pointed out, the bloggers were arrayed not "randomly" but in terms of height.) The first commenter, Goesh, picked up on it:
Who is the Intern directly in front of him with the black hair?
The woman in question, Jessica Valenti of Feministing, takes offense at being reduced to an element of a joke:
The, um, "intern" is me. It's so nice to see women being judged by more than their looks. Oh, wait...
And it all snowballs from there as Ms. Althouse gets defensive:
Well, Jessica, you do appear to be "posing." Maybe it's just an accident.
Jessica: I'm not judging you by your looks. (Don't flatter yourself.) I'm judging you by your apparent behavior. It's not about the smiling, but the three-quarter pose and related posturing, the sort of thing people razz Katherine Harris about. I really don't know why people who care about feminism don't have any edge against Clinton for the harm he did to the cause of taking sexual harrassment seriously, and posing in front of him like that irks me, as a feminist. So don't assume you're the one representing feminist values here. Whatever you call your blog....
She goes on to create a whole new post, entitled "Let's take a closer look at those breasts", in which she writes:
Sooooo... apparently, Jessica writes one of those blogs that are all about using breasts for extra attention. Then, when she goes to meet Clinton, she wears a tight knit top that draws attention to her breasts and stands right in front of him and positions herself to make her breasts as obvious as possible?
Maybe it's just overexposure to comics, but I don't really see that as anything more than standing up straight, turning to make sure she's not blocking out Mr. Clinton, and smiling. Other people, especially those commenters who identify themselves as Ms. Valenti's age or younger, seem to see it the same way. After that post draws 500 comments' worth of ire, defensiveness and trolling, she washes her hands of the whole deal with one more post:
I'm surpassingly sick of this comments thread from yesterday, and I'm not even going to read all the commentary on other blogs. The immense tiresomeness is actually undermining my will to blog this morning. I don't mind an intense, verbal fight about ideas, but this wasn't that. This was, every time you expressed a substantive idea, the answer was, essentially, "Stop looking at my breasts." (I'm picturing an SNL sketch based on that concept, and like the usual SNL sketch, it goes on way too long.)
Continue reading →]]> http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-09-17_384/feed 6 Harlan Ellison's "Apology": Sorry I Rubbed You the Wrong Way http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-08-31_376 http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-08-31_376#comments Thu, 31 Aug 2006 18:24:10 +0000 jfpbookworm http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-08-31_376 Fan Expo Canada in Toronto. If anyone else will be there and wants to meet up, drop me a line. As far as I know, Harlan Ellison won't be there.) Dora has written a great post on the subject of Ellison's behavior at the Hugo Awards. If you haven't read it already, stop reading this and go read that one first. She linked to Ellison's apology, which was the sort of non-apology I've gotten used to hearing from public figures when they don't understand that they did anything wrong. Continue reading →]]> http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-08-31_376/feed 12 Sexism on a Plate (Classism, too) http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-08-18_360 http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-08-18_360#comments Fri, 18 Aug 2006 18:04:37 +0000 jfpbookworm http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-08-18_360 Feministing, Sailorman recently commented about an entry on The New York Times "Dining & Wine" blog concerning the increasingly infrequent practice of giving menus without prices to some patrons at restaurants. (Feministe has commented on this as well.) The actual practices described varied from automatically giving a woman a menu "sans prix" when she dined with a man, to providing price-free menus only on request for people who wanted to treat a family member or business client. I was most surprised at the comments to the blog entry, which leaned heavily on the side of bemoaning the loss of "class," "chivalry" and "old world style" involved with this practice. Continue reading →]]> http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-08-18_360/feed 7 Feminist Video Games? http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-08-10_355 http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-08-10_355#comments Thu, 10 Aug 2006 16:17:18 +0000 jfpbookworm http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-08-10_355 This is disappointing. I've seen Beyond Good & Evil and The Longest Journey cited as exemplars of "feminist video games", but not much beyond that. Of course, there's the larger question of what would make a game good from a feminist perspective. In addition to being good from a gameplay perspective, I'd say such a game would include female characters who are full agents in the game world, and who are treated as subjects rather than objects. I think a variation of the Mo Movie Measure applies as well, in that female characters should interact with other female characters in ways that aren't centered around men. Continue reading →]]> http://blog.shrub.com/archives/jfpbookworm/2006-08-10_355/feed 21