[Crossposted to 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.

Read the rest…

[Crossposted to 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.)

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[Crossposted to 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?

Read the rest…

[Crossposted to 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.

Read the rest…

[Crossposted to my Vox blog.]

Amy Gahran has a good post up about apologies and why they’re necessary.

The post was sparked by Amy Alkon’s advice column about cheating, entitled “Along Came Polyamory.” Understandably, many polyamorous folk were miffed at the equation of the concepts. (It’s hard enough figuring out who’s okay with the concept without it being confused with unethical behavior.) But rather than apologize for causing offense, Ms. Alkon decided to take the offensive, complaining that those who had a problem just didn’t understand her irony, and basically just being a big bully.

Coincidentally enough, I had just discovered Ms. Alkon’s anti-feminist screed “Victims Gone Wild” the other day. She seems to be one of those “postfeminists” in the vein of ifeminists or IWF that figure that since they’re privileged, anyone who complains that they’re not is just adopting a “victim mentality,” and that feminism is unnecessary because of what someone said Dworkin or Mackinnon said a couple decades ago.

Ms. Gahran’s post, though, could have been sparked by any of the non-apologies of late (Ann Althouse, Harlan Ellison, and so on all the metaphorical way back to “she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.”) Why is it so hard for people to apologize for offending people? It can be done.

(…and we all screw up at some point.)

[Crossposted to my Vox blog.]

From Hugo Schwyzer’s post on the Valenti/Althouse incident, after he himself got called on an offensive comment he made:

For the record, I will happily pose for a picture with anyone. If the local leader of the Klan came by, I’d stand for a photo with my arm around him and grin for the camera, and then promptly give him a good earful. If the camera only captures my smile, and not my rebuke, that’s not my responsibility. Bill Clinton is not in the Klan. * Clinton’s private failings are better known than the failings of any other human being alive. But compared to the other living men who have held the office of president, he has clearly been the one most committed to the overall goals of the feminist agenda. And for that, he deserves our — qualified — gratitude.

*Sometimes I post things I ought not to have. Once they’ve been commented on, though, I don’t delete them — just strike them as evidence of my foolishness.

While we can debate whether it’s better to delete altogether or use strikethrough, either approach is a heck of a lot better than Althouse’s (and Ellison’s, and Kos’s) tactics of denial, minimization and blame-shifting. Thanks for pointing out the high road, Hugo.

[I've got a new 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.)

Read the rest…

(I’ll be away for the next few days at 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.

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“I’ve had it with this m*****f***ing sexism on my m*****f***ing plate!”

Over on 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.

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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.

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In the comments of my earlier post on the idea of alpha males jeffliveshere asks:

What would be an example of a man calling another man on sexism that doesn’t also fall into the problem of domination hierarchies–if, indeed, we (men, women and those of other genders) find ourselves steeped in them like fish swim in water?

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Jeff over at Feminist Allies has a series of posts up on the intersection between feminism and “alpha males.” In his latest post (part three of the series), he writes:

The first prominent train of thought in this regard is along the lines of “the term “alpha male” is just too fuzzy a term (or is an inappropriate term, or is the out-and-out wrong term to use here)” to the point that, rather than helping us understand the realationships between men (and women, and those of other various genders) and feminism, it actually gets in the way.

I’m all aboard this train of thought; I’m never exactly sure what “alpha male” means at any given time. Sometimes it seems to be an application of observations about animal behavior to humans (the “evo-psych definition”); other times it seems to be more a way of dividing people up into “winners” and “losers” (the “ranking definition”).

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What do you do when someone makes a claim of personal experience that just isn’t believable? Specifically, do you accuse them of fabricating the claim?

I’m sure many of you have heard by now about the anti-choice blogger who mistook an Onion article for a serious editorial. In a response to that article, he made the claim that the reason he thought the article was genuine was because he would “meet people like her in the field all the time.” Most readers of feminist discussion forums have encountered other experiences of dubious veracity, such as the tale of the poor man harangued for opening a door, or the malicious women’s studies professor who lowers the grades of her male students.

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Earlier this month, Collie of Collie’s Bestiary posted about her experiences with Planescape: Torment.

A short while ago I started playing the computer game “Planescape: Torment,” and stumbled across this issue again, with painfully eye-opening results. Keep in mind, this game won numerous awards for its storytelling and quality in 1999, the year it was released — which makes me wonder in appalled horror just how awful the other games were. But to continue: I first noticed the sexual objectification of women with the game’s job/species designations, which float above the head of the graphical character on the screen. There were monsters, and men and women. As I recall, men were classified about 50% as townsmen and 50% thugs. Women were similarly classified as either townswomen… or harlots.

What?! Um, hold on. Why were there no male harlots? Why no female thugs? Is the game trying to teach us that women can only be for sale, and only men are capable of violence? I found myself bewilderedly wondering: are the creators of the game afraid of women or something, that they feel the need to so dehumanize women in the game?

My first reaction was to attempt to excuse these aspects of the game as “ignorable.” There’s no need to look at the portrait gallery to play the game, and the “harlots” don’t actually have much in-game purpose (they can improve Morte’s Curse ability; that’s about it). It seemed a waste to miss out on a game that had so much else going for it. This, of course, is precisely the wrong framing - it puts the burden on the player to put aside her own discomfort. Besides, there are other uncomfortable aspects to the game which are not so easily ignored, such as the geek-girl fetish of the Brothel of Cartesian Dualism Slaking Intellectual Lusts, or how every girl’s crazy for a gothed-out Hulk. A better way of approaching these issues is in terms of the costs and benefits of the design decisions - is it really worth alienating a sizable portion of your audience for this?

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I recently saw a commercial for the Sony Bravia which billed itself as “The World’s First Television for Men and Women.”

At first, I thought they were advertising something like this, but after checking out the web site it turns out that it’s just a marketing campaign for a high-end HDTV.

I’m trying to figure out what the advertisers were thinking this one. I’ve narrowed it down to the following possibilities:

• They noticed that purchasers of HDTVs were disproportionately male, and saw women as an untapped market; however, they were worried that a women-centered ad campaign would lose more male buyers.
• They’re looking to provide the stereotypical man with justifications to his stereotypical partner for the purchasing decision.

Given the blatant sexism of the advertisement, I’m leaning toward the latter.

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So my latest infatuation is Terry Moore’s comic Strangers In Paradise, which I discovered through the immensely fun Scans Daily Livejournal community. It’s well-drawn and well-characterized, and is erasing that reluctance to check out indie comics that viewing the hipper-than-thou movie adaptation of Ghost World instilled.

What struck me, though, was a letter to Mr. Moore printed in the second issue of the first run, which asked:

I do have some criticism about the writing… is it me or do you hold a dim view of males?

[Spoilers for the first issue of Strangers in Paradise follow.]

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[Quick intro in lieu of the full introduction I haven't bothered to write yet: tekanji invited me to guest-blog here a few days ago. I don't currently maintain a blog, but I moderate the Gender Roles and Patriarchy Hurts Men Too communities on LiveJournal, the latter of which I've crossposted this article to. Like the other bloggers here, I'm especially interested in the intersection of feminism and popular culture.]

There have been quite a few discussions lately (On Hugo Schwyzer’s blog, at Punk Ass Blog, and at Pandagon (also this post), Saucebox and Neurath’s Boat, about young men who think that feminism and heterosexual male sexuality are incompatible. (Which is even more interesting given the discussions here and Putting the “Fist” in “Pacifist” about how most men aren’t feminist *enough* to be worth getting involved with.)

I originally started this post as a “how-to guide” for these (presumably) sincere but frustrated nice guy types (I’m probably giving their professed sincerity more credence than it deserves, but the ones who are just the larval form of MRAs don’t really deserve much mention - I’m talking more about the ones Protagoras calls “Shy Feminist Men”), but was quickly overwhelmed by how much “how to” would be needed, and it was increasingly obvious what was fueling these misconceptions.

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