Going into the polls yesterday, there was strong reason to worry that Misssippi voters would vote to amend their constitution to declare fertilized eggs to be "persons". After all, a slight majority of voters favored the ballot initiative going in. And the people who strongly favorited it, basically white Republicans, are the ones who are sadly more likely to vote, especially in an off-year election. Still, seeing that 11% of voters were undecided gave me reason to hope. On a lot of issues, undecideds can break even, but on reproductive rights, they tend to break pro-choice. By a lot. 

It's not something I've ever seen an extensive study on, but the folk wisdom of pro-choice circles is "pro-life in the streets, pro-choice in the dark", as it were. In other words, there's an intense amount of pressure to identify as "pro-life" in conservative communities, even if you secretly disagree. To be vocally pro-choice is to be marked as a pervert and a feminist, and so it's avoided, to the point where some polling data suggests that half of people who identify as "pro-life" are actually pro-choice, at least to some extent. Certainly enough that they're not willing to see women thrown in jail for having miscarriages. Because of this intense social pressure, I suspect many people who side with pro-choicers on this law or that law won't say so to a pollster over the phone. Not only are you admitting out loud something that can get you marked as a "pervert" in your community, you may be doing so in front of friends, colleagues, or family members who overhear your conversation with the pollster. No wonder so many people say they're "undecided". But when you actually have your ballot in hand and you know that no one will ever find out how you voted, a solid percentage of voters go with common sense (and with sex!) instead of prevailing community pressures. Frankly, the way the poll numbers turned out, it appears many people who said they would vote yes on 26 instead voted no. 

I'm not just talking out of my ass on this, either. This happened before in South Dakota, when they tried to ban abortion both in 2006 and 2008. In 2008, the polling numbers going into election day weren't looking good for pro-choicers: 44-44 with 12% undecided. Again, you have the same problem of better turnout for more anti-choice demographic groups, as well. But when the ballots were finally counted, the abortion ban saw a surprisingly heavy defeat, 55-45. Seems like a combination of all the undecideds breaking pro-choice and more than a few people lying abou their views to pollsters. 

This trend reflects the larger situation with sex in the red states. In Bible Belt areas, the only thing more popular for teenagers than idealizing virginity is losing your virginity. Beyond that, you have the Saturday-night-is-for-drinking, Sunday-for-praying (yeah right) thing going on. I used to hang out at this honky-tonk-ish karaoke place outside of Austin, for instance, where more than a few people would get up and sing sentimental Jesus songs, then get liquored up and have a one night stand. You know, while no doubt fully believing that it's best to "wait for marriage". It's hard to explain, but they don't even seem to feel like there's a disconnect there, or not one that's much worth worrying about. Stringent sexual morality is put in the same bucket of ideals as going to church every Sunday, making your bed every day, and skipping dessert in order to go running: everyone knows that's what you "should" do, but no one is actually doing it. Openly rejected these prudish ideals is considered far more scandalous in many ways than simply not following them. Part of it is I think a lot of people think they'll eventually fall into a sexual relationship that fits within the narrow confines laid out by the religious right, so they're not ready for that big leap of questioning authority on this. It's very similar to people assuming they're going to get organized at some indeterminate date in the future, so they don't have to worry about it now. 

But of course, passing a law that truly could fuck with your basic freedom to live how you actually live, and not how you imagine your more upright and normative self will be living 10 years hence is a different story. Thus the sudden shift to the left in people's ideals when they don't think anyone is looking or judging. 

I'll add that the severity of the restrictions proposed in South Dakota and Mississippi didn't help the anti-choice cause. They do better when they aim for smaller restrictions that voters can convince themselves apply to other people, you know, sluts. That's why they were able to sell the defunding of Planned Parenthood to conservative voters, because it's easy for them to say, "Well, if you can't afford the pill, keep your legs shut." Anything where conservative-learning voters who fall short of fanaticism can feel they're sorting people into "good" and "bad" categories, and only depriving the latter of their rights, they'll support. It's why ultrasound laws pass easily; they invoke stereotypes of extremely stupid women who don't know that pregnancy means you're carrying a fetus. The non-fanatical supporter can imagine that should ever they need an abortion, that tactic won't apply in their case. Either they think they obvious superiority will get them an exception, or their obvious superiority will make it a less miserable thing to endure. Some may even like the idea of having to endure trials to prove you "deserve" the abortion. 

But this law put all women of reproductive age into a criminal class, as I explain at Alternet. Even the unicorns---women who wait until marriage, only have sex with their husbands, have the means and desires to have 5 or 6 children, and attend church twice a week---are eligible for criminal investigation for miscarriages, employment restrictions, and contraception denial. The whole point of the wingnut fascination with with sin and punishment is that there should be an ideal to aspire to, but this law made that impossible. This can't be discounted as a reason this ballot initiative went down in defeat.

Still, the most important factor is the casual hypocrisy of the Bible Belt. Sarah Morice-Brubaker asked this question in the wake of personhood's defeat: 

But sometimes a movement conducts itself in such a way that one wonders whether they truly grasp that most people simply do not agree with them, and are not likely to change their minds. Certainly this is not something that only conservatives (religious or otherwise) do. But those religious conservatives who argue against legal abortion, full stop; and who wish to see access to contraception curtailed… well, one begins to wonder: Do they get what a tiny minority they are?

No, they do not, because they wield so much social power in their communities. When they say things like, "the only way to prevent STDs is for two virgins to marry and stay faithful" or "contraception thwarts God's intentions for human sexuality", they face a chorus of amens from people who then often turn around and demonstrate, with their behavior, that they simply don't agree

In case you didn't just get to watch Herman Cain destroy any chance he ever had at becoming President or being in a room alone with a white woman again, a brief summary:

"The Democrat Machine of America is throwing these terrible allegations at me, although I cannot say who did it, precisely. As you heard from the lawyer who introduced me, because that's always a good sign, real victims of sexual harassment and assault do everything differently, even the stuff they did that's the opposite of the other stuff they did. Now, stop talking about Herman Cain sexually harassing people, because of the grandkids."

All I have to say is that if Herman Cain is getting high-tech lynched, I'm pretty sure everyone in history who's been low-tech lynched would gladly trade places with his black ass.

You know, it would be nice if intellectually vapid who got their jobs because their editors had a moron quota to fill would recognize their incredible luck and react with humble gratitude. But of course, if Megan McArdle did that, her job of being the Marie Antoinette of the Atlantic would probably disapper. After all, there are a number of other featherheads who have never spent a day wanting in thei life willing to pen broadsides against the poor for having the nerve to demand bread when there's so much cake to eat. 

As you're aware, there are many who loathe Mayor Bloomberg because they---we---suspect he's trying to turn New York into a playground for rich people, and the rest of us can go hang. McArdle gives up the ghost by straight up claiming that New York City---with all 8 million residents!---should really be seen as a very large gated golf community that is reserved solely for millionaires, and anyone who complains about that should go move to a trailer park in Oklahoma and live off killing squirrels. If you think this is an exaggeration, check out her claim that life in New York is and should be a luxury item, like a yacht. (Via Roy.)

Many New Yorkers believe that they should be given some sort of income tax abatement because of the expense of living there (with the lost revenue being made up from "really rich" people, natch).  Slightly less affluent New Yorkers frequently believe that landlords should be forced to offer them "reasonably sized" apartments at a modest fraction of their income, because after all, otherwise they couldn't afford to live in New York.....

There's a sort of irritating supposition in all of this that living in New York (or San Francisco, or Boston) is something that just happens to you, like getting cholera.  And that therefore high incomes, expensive real estate, and so forth, somehow don't count for the purposes of assessing how well off you are relative to the rest of society.  In fact, perhaps society should get busy making it up to you for all the hardships.....

Living in a blue state is a choice.  If coming to New York meant that you had to put four people in a three bedroom apartment that's uncomfortably far from a subway line, instead of buying a nice little condo in Omaha, this does not mean that you are not "really" better off than your counterpart in Omaha; it means that you have chosen to consume your extra wealth in the form of "living in New York" rather than in the form of spacious real estate, cheap groceries, and an easy commute.

Let's count the assumptions:

1) That the entire city moved here to participate in the glamor of living in New York City, except perhaps a few trust fund kids born in penthouses in Manhattan. McArdle claims she used to live here, and so I find it surprising that in her entire time here, she never once spoke to a native New Yorker. In fact, that's technically impossible, unless she had a single driver take her solely to the homes of other transplants (where only other transplants were invited), and never entered a restaurant, subway car, bank, or grocery store. My guess is that she spoke to lots and lots of native New Yorkers, but most of them registered to her as the staff of this well-appointed resort she lived in, and not really people per se. So she can simply ignore their existence for the purposes of her Scarlett O'Hara-style rant. The irony here is that McArdle is herself a native New Yorker. Maybe growing up here really honed her skills at not seeing other people who aren't so privileged. 

2) That the exact same jobs available in New York City are available in Omaha, Nebraska. Hell, I'm a writer and can, in theory, write from anywhere. In practice, however, working out of New York or D.C. makes a huge difference for your career. But even the technical ability to work from anywhere is simply not true for everyone, especially not everyone of the people that McArdle considers "people", i.e. the professional class. A lot of people with middle class jobs come here because that's where the jobs are, especially if they're in a field like the arts or politics of some sort---jobs that have a lot of cachet but don't pay rich people salaries. Sure, we can indulge in the increasingly virulent American game of "who do you think you are anyway?", but the fact of the matter is that these people, along with working class people, are required to make New York a pleasant place for rich people to live. Without them pumping life into the culture of the city, you, a rich person, may as well move to a golf course gated community. Which brings me to the next assumption she makes. 

3) That New York City doesn't need the working or professional class to be what it is. The reason rich people flock here is because of the amenities and the culture, which non-rich people provide. McArdle, who clearly can't perceive you as a human being unless you have granite countertops and space for a large but expensive wine collection, may not notice that. Perhaps she thinks those rock shows perform themselves, those paintings are conjured by magic in the air, those shop girls helping you buy nice clothes are just fancy robots, those ever-interesting restaurants have ghosts preparing and serving the food, and those cabs and subway cars work by automation. But they don't. Rich people even require the rest of us to be hanging around the streets to add color to their exciting New York lifestyles. Again, without the rest of us, there's no reason to live here. McArdle snootily suggests that people should pay a premium for living in such an interesting city! Too bad she doesn't think that rule applies to the rich. Since they benefit from living here, they should also pay their fair share. 

I'm not surprised when McArdle snots about how she's glad she moved away from here. I'm sure that D.C., where there's more space to push the working class to the margins so the McArdles of the world don't have to rub shoulders with them, is much more her speed. Reading her piece (and Bloomberg's fucked up petulant claims that the poor brought this financial disaster on the country, and not the rich bankers) had the opposite of its intended effect; she sold me on the idea that we should levy a tax on millionaires and spend it solely on subsidized housing for the poor, with an aim towards driving down the rents on everyone else. I loved Roy's take so much that I just want to quote a chunk of it here:

She's not limiting herself to the simple point that some things are expensive and if you don't have the money you can't have it. She's talking about the desire to live in New York -- not just to move there, but to keep living there if you'd been there a while without getting rich -- as if it were the desire to live on Park Avenue -- no, better, to live in a fairy palace on a cloud, in fact, a palace and a cloud you wished to steal from your betters. It's not just that you can't afford New York -- it's that you're insolent to even think you should be tolerated there. You just don't deserve it.

Never underestimate how much not having to endure shared breathing space with those they perceive as beneath them motivates conservatives, especially of the "libertarian" stripe. It was the basic urge underpinning the outrage over health care reform---much of the propaganda about it basically centered around the argument that precious you may have to share waiting rooms with them. That you may even be examined on the same tables. It's unsurprising that this naked loathing for the not-so-privileged is coming out in waves as a reaction to Occupy Wall St. So let's take a moment and be thankful the weather is nice this week, giving the protesters a little boost to keep on not moving. The longer the stay, the more petulant the wingnutty tantrums like McArdle's and Bloomberg's get, and the more the rest of us can see them for who they really are. 

I'll add that McArdle was laying down this foot-stomping as part of her insinuations that the Occupy Wall St. protesters who can afford NYC housing prices have no business being down there. Which, of course, demonstrates the conservative deliberate misunderstanding of the whole thing; they keep insisting that it's a pity party thrown by the poor for themselves instead of a targeted protest of a corrupt economic system. I thought this post neatly dismantles the claim that you can't speak up against horrible wrongs unless you yourself are on the verge of starving to death:

If you believe that your betters are tilting the playing field not through luck, not through accident, not merely through hard work, but through the greasing of palms and the escaping of the same rules that apply to you—then I think it's fine and appropriate to speak up. 

This is a similar logic to those who suggest (say) American women shouldn't complain about disparities in the United States because, hey, Afghanistan! Burkhas!  It's a logic that allows the people at the top to deflect the complaints (merited or not) of people in the middle and even people near the bottom—in in deflecting, serves those people at the top quite well.

And just to make the whole situation more irritating, McArdle issues a disingenuous denial of what she's doing:

So yes, the people at those protests--at least the ones who get arrested--really are, on average, unusually affluent.  (Or at least, their parents are).  Whether that matters is a different question I won't opine on.

Oh nonsense. You just dropped a bazillion petulant, spoiled words whining about how only the rich can and should be able to live in New York. If you really weren't offering an opinion about the right to protest the corrupt system, here's an idea: why not avoid offering an opinion by not offering an opinion?

There's been an interesting surge lately in protests against online misogyny, kicked off by the rather strange case of douchebags dogpiling of Alyssa Rosenberg for having the nerve to be an even-tempered pop culture blogger for Think Progress. Oh yeah, and with a vagina. That, it is believed, was her real crime that justified a torrent of unprovoked abuse in the comments at Think Progress, which led her to start speaking out about online misogyny. Sady Doyle has now joined up with a Twitter hashtag called #mencallmethings, which is useful for an eyeful of the routine abuse dished out at women online for daring to think they have a right to write. I added some examples of my own. 

I always worry about doing stuff like this, because sexist pricks are eager to interpret you speaking out about this as complaining that your feelings are hurt. Since they want to hurt your feelings, this means that they are actually getting positive feedback for their behavior. But being silent has its own drawbacks, as well. Abusive fuckwits enjoy the cover of darkness, after all. Sexual harassers wait until no one is looking for a reason, and the online equivalent is the prevalence of abusive men who go to elaborate lengths to hide their identity. The vast majority of crap I've gotten from men is from men who start separate email accounts and even use IP masking software in order to conceal their identity. They are extremely devoted to their misogyny. Simple silence doesn't help because that can contribute to the sense that they're trying to establish that they get to victimize in private and you have no recourse. 

The ideal is calling it out with humor that demonstrates that you understand that they are lowlife scum who lean on misogyny to boost their self-esteem. Men who fling this shit out grasp that they suck as individuals, and so they try to convince themselves that they're superior to half the human race because their gonads hang on the outside. I know; sad. Coming to this realization allowed me to hang in with humor, and hanging in with humor has meant that over time, I've been getting way less misogynist abuse than I used to. Or maybe I just care less. 

I mention this, because many women have asked me over the years how to deal with it. That's my main piece of advice: don't go away. And when these guys dish it out, try to imagine who it is cowardly hiding behind his fake name and fake email address, dishing out crap. Imagine them in their stained underwear, shoving cold fried food in their mouths while they whine online that women keep overlooking them for dates, inscrutably choosing to go out with guys who take frequent showers and don't spend hours online combining and recombining the words "cunt" and "dyke". Imagine how truly pathetic you have to be to spill the vicious, woman-hating shit these guys spill. They attack you because they know how much they suck, and it's easier to shit on women than to strive to be a better person. That makes it easier to hang in. And the longer you hang in, the more they realize their bullshit isn't going to work. And eventually, it starts to fade. It never goes away completely, but it does get better. Just don't let them win. 

I think what's really awesome about this hashtag is that it has largely struck exactly the right tone: amusement at the pathetic things that desperate, angry men will say, with an eye towards educating the public. This tone is what wears down the misogynists; they are desperate to get a rise out of  you because they have so little going on in their lives. No need to give that to them. 

This primary season has really been remarkable, in terms of exposing the fantasies and motivations of the right, especially with regards to the strange enthusiasm for Herman Cain, even though he's probably not really running at all. 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Pokemon? Really? 

Even though a thorough examination leads to the conclusion that Cain is running  a faux campaign for reasons that we can only speculate about, he's wildly popular with the base now, because reactionaries frequently have ill-developed senses of humor plus an all-consuming rage at liberals that obliterates common sense, and thus can be easily pulled in to agreeing with Poes. As many people predicted, the sexual harassment charges aren't hurting him. Interestingly, the fact that there's so much evidence that something happened---I continue to arch my eyebrows at the notion that "innocent until proven guilty" is a factor in a situation where there's already a settlement (next we'll be asked to assume innocence after a guilty verdict---hey, you didn't prove-prove it!)---seems to actualy be making this better for Cain. Since denying that it happened is basically off the table for conservatives, denying that it matters is their only real gambit. They're far more comfortable scolding women to endure sexual harassment and abuse with a smile than quibbling over the facts, since doing the latter requires reluctantly conceding that men shouldn't grope and leer at their colleagues. Calling women who complain about sexual harassment hysterical bitches is emotionally easier for them, since that's what they meant to say all along. 

I sensed that this was going to be the narrative last week, when I wrote this at XX Factor:

Still, I think there's a counter-explanation for why GOP base voters could be rallying around Cain in light of these revelations beyond a simple disbelief that he said or did anything. After all, Cain hasn't really been so great at outright denials, and, of course, there's the problem of the National Restaurant Association settling with the women involved. My alternative explanation is that many conservatives have still not come around to agreeing that there's anything wrong with men saying lewd and harassing things to women they work with.

I had a couple of examples of where I thought this was going, but since then, there's been a real dogpile of accusing, without a shred of evidence, all of the women claiming sexual harassment of being hysterical bitches. The same day that I wrote that blog post, Media Matters put out a long list of conservatives dismissing the idea that there's any such thing as sexual harassment. Dahlia Lithwick followed up my post with a piece at Slate detailing how intense this narrative has become, saying:

Remember, we don’t know what happened, beyond the fact that several employees came forward with complaints and received cash settlements. That’s not a lot of information. Cain defenders could have stopped there. Instead, great swaths of them have opted to assert that there could never be a valid sex discrimination claim because the whole thing is just a racket. And they went even further: The same folks criticizing the National Restaurant Association employees who came forward with claims that they were uncomfortable in their workplace are willing to deploy the most archaic and gender-freighted stereotypes to get there. Sexual harassment can’t be “real” because the women who claim it are money-grubbing, hysterical, attention-seeking tramps.

Dave Weigel explained why he thought the "sexual harassment is just a fraud" argument has the most traction with the Republican base:

This one took a while to come out. It’s a hard conversation to start. Conservatives don’t like to admit it. But hell, time to say it: They just don’t think that the stuff Cain was accused of was all that bad. 

This week on Reality Cast, I interview Corey Robin, the author of The Reactionary Mind. His argument is fairly straightforward: reactionaries, who we call "conservatives", are people who angrily reject any attempt to make society more fair and equal. They cherish strict hierarchies. I recommend listening to the whole interview (and buying his book!), because he has a fascinating take on why liberals who distinguish between women's issues and labor issues are missing the point---for conservatives, it's all one and the same, because bosses and men both are seeing their supposed right to exert control over labor and and women threatened. With sexual harassment, you really see the two issues intertwined. At the end of the day, sexual harassment doesn't really make sense to conservatives. The point of having women, especially women down the food chain from you, at your job is so you can get your jollies with petty power plays, and if they knew their place better, they would take it with a smile. In the reactionary mind, sexual harassment isn't the problem, it's uppitiness. That Cain isn't going to be able to slip away from this situation with heavy denials is probably a relief to many; time to drop the pretense of giving a shit about sexual harassment in lieu of demanding a return to a workplace where you could pants your female coworkers and they couldn't do anything about it. 

CSA Week #21

Unrelated to the CSA, but the snow has now definitely killed my basil. The leaves that are on there are hanging in, with some brown spots, but new ones will not be forthcoming, it seems. I don't think what I have left will make a good pesto, but I will think about it. What I did use it for was to make lots and lots of marinara, which I froze. I may like marinara more than pesto at the end of the day, and so with what's left, I may just do more of that. Yes, it takes up more space in the freezer. But the flip side is you get to eat more of dishes like this. In fact, I'm enjoying an egg poached in marinara sauce as we speak.

It may not be the prettiest thing in the world, but man it tastes good. And humanely-raised, omega 3-heavy, super-tasty eggs are available year-round at the farmer's market. So why not?

I pick up this week's shipment in about an hour, so we'll see if the snow had a negative impact. Certainly the squash pickings have been slim because of Hurricane Irene.

Dinner #1

I decided to finally learn my lesson about broccoli, and cook it the same day I got it, while it was still super-fresh. I made this recipe, but with ricotta instead of feta. I was going to use basil instead of parsley, but it was sleeting like a mofo, and frankly I didn’t want to step on my balcony to fetch the basil. So I used the parsley. I added a little actual red wine with the red wine vinegar.

I also discovered that I had one whole pear left in the giant drawer of fruit in my fridge that I’m trying to go through (to which apples keep piling up), so using the mesclun mix and that pear, I made salads.  The pasta and the salads were both dressed with Parmesan cheese.

Because I need to get through apples, I cracked and made an apple crisp, using basically this recipe.   

Dinner #2

I decided to make sweet potato pancakes using this recipe, except I added some cornstarch and baked them instead of fried them. I topped them with the greens, after sautéing them, and some ricotta cheese.

I took the fennel and some farmer’s market squash and made this roasted squash and fennel soup with it.   

Dinner #3

Used the bok choy and the daikon radish to make a tofu stir fry using this recipe, minus the mushrooms, since I was too lazy to go buy some. Served over rice.  

I try, and often fail, to end the week on a positive note. But this week, I can actually do that for you. Online, for obvious reasons, most of the fussing over NY Mag's look at feminist writing was over the piece on internet feminism. But I also want to recommend this piece on the history of Ms. Magazine, which may be a bit stale these days, but really had a lot to offer in the day.

And one thing really jumped out at me and made me glad. I think it can be a little depressing reading some feminist history because you really see how far we haven't come in so many ways. Back in the 60s and 70s, feminists were fighting the same forces that we're fighting on every front from sexual violence to men speaking to you like you're a child just because you have a vagina. In many ways, we've backslid; after all, we're still fighting the fucking abortion wars they really did have a reason to believe they'd won. Still, this article is a reminder that they won many important battles. The most obvious ones are things like giving women (some) access to male-only jobs---we have the legal right to them now, even if we still face discrimination. Gay rights have come a long way. Women are not only able to have their own money and property, but they're basically expected nowadays to pay as much attention to that as men. If you didn't have a credit card in your own name because you're married, people now would assume that you're a part of a religious cult, but that sort of thing was normal then. 

But one thing stood out to me that isn't discussed much but is really obvious reading this: they succeeded in improving the everyday interactions between men and women.  Well, maybe not for everyone, but absolutely they did on the left. This article leaves it very clear that in supposedly liberal, pro-feminist circles back then, men still felt fully empowered to treat women like meat, or openly support this woman over that woman, career-wise, because they thought she was hot. And worse. Like this story of how Warren Beatty treated Gloria Steinem, even though he was a politically liberal guy who supported the ERA and probably considered himself a feminist sympathizer. 

She said she’d had dinner with Beatty in London, and he got down on all fours and looked under the tablecloth to see her legs. She was wearing a high miniskirt, and you know, she had these perfect legs. She said to me, “Okay, look, let’s just see if Warren Beatty will do it first.”

So, that's changed a lot. There's still a lot of sexism in liberal circles, and even just sexualized idiocy like this, but it's much less and much less obnoxious. Jon Stewart isn't going to crawl under a table to leer at some woman's legs that is supposedly a colleague. On the contrary, when wingnut blogger Ann Althouse made a fuss over Jessica Valenti appearing in public with boobs still attached to her body, the male liberals of the blogosphere largely defended Jessica. In the more professional-left world that Steinem was running in, men who leer like this are the exception, and back then they were the rule. Obviously, there's flirting and hooking up, but that's not the issue here---no one is against that! But being treated like meat by the majority of your male allies, to the point where they expect to get away with shit like this? I'm sure it happens, but not that much. Not anything like it used to be. So big win on that front. Now for the world. 

Whoop! Panda Party time! Let's make this Panda Party a toast to the douchebags and the assholes. 

Why toast douchebags? For giving us the opportunity to be deeply amused at their expense for being such easy marks for marketers. (Via.)

Unilever accompanied roughly 100 males (identical studies were later carried out across other European countries, North America, and Latin America) ages 15 to 50 to the pubs until three or four in the morning and (soberly, while secretly taking copious notes) watched them in action. After poring over their pages and pages of notes, via a process known in the industry as "segmentation," the Unilever team isolated six psychological profiles of the male animal -- and the potential Axe user: the Predator, the Natural Talent, the Marriage-Material Guy, Always the Friend, the Insecure Novice, and the Enthusiastic Novice......

So with the Insecure Novice as the primary target, Axe came up with a series of 30-second TV commercials that preyed on what its research had revealed to be the ultimate male fantasy: to be irresistible to not just one but several sexy women. 

Axe may have been trying to rope all sorts of insecure dudes, but what they ended up getting, as you can imagine, are Nice Guys®. After all, insecure guys who are actually nice and/or intelligent don't see women primarily as unfortunate obstacles between them and vaginas. The Axe customer views women in the same way they view that really unpleasant level in a video game that you have to finish to get to the fun level, and so they're constantly looking for cheat codes. The notion that flirting, dating, even---god forbid---getting to know a woman could be pleasant in and of itself is something they simply can't fathom. And so as ludicrous as Axe's claims were that their product was essentially a cheat code that made it possible for men to skip the process of speaking to women, flirting with women, and being charming to women, douchebags believed it. They needed to believe it. And Axe paid the price. 

However, the brand's early success soon began to backfire. The problem was, the ads had worked too well in persuading the Insecure Novices and Enthusiastic Novices to buy the product. Geeks and dorks everywhere were now buying Axe by the caseload, and it was hurting the brand's image. Eventually (in the United States, at least), to most high-school and college-age males, Axe had essentially become the brand for pathetic losers and, not surprisingly, sales took a huge hit. 

Anyone who has ever blogged about Axe's stupid commercials can attest to this. Posting on it inevitably draws comments from douchebags who swear it works, because of pheromones or whatnot. You would think their own personal experience would dissuade them of this notion, but no.

So, in honor of the douchebags and assholes, Panda Party!

Today I happened to have a little bit more of the most mainstream of American culture cross into my view than I usually do, and it's all been kind of fascinating. Thought I'd share some thoughts on it. 

1) Apparently Kim Kardashian is the Worst Person in the World for getting a divorce as soon as the checks accumulated from her show pony wedding cleared. The TV at the gym showed her being absolutely mobbed by reporters as she was traveling from one place to another, probably involving a courthouse of some sort. You would think she just got acquitted for murder even after being caught in the act of slitting the throat of one of America's treasures, such as Prince or something. 

I for one support her fully in her awesome con job on the patriarchy-mad idiots who eat this shit up. She did more damage to the bullshit pretty princess submissive bride ideal in one, super-money-making blow than any of us grumpy marriage skeptical feminists online could do with years of writing. I'm delighted. Madonna wishes she could push people's buttons so easily. If it turned out that Kardashian is actually a performance artist deftly exploiting American's patriarchal fantasies and hang-ups, I wouldn't really be surprised. I hope she gets married again soon, and this time has like 10 gowns. 

2) For some reason, after the Kardashian clip, the TV showed Dr. Oz hauling women on to stage and feeding them food from around the world that he claimed would help them lose weight. I couldn't hear the sound, since I had on my headphones and was trying diligently to read some actual political reporting, but it kept grabbing my attention for like five minutes. Some of it was obvious woo, such as some tea from South Africa, but some of it probably had an argument in its favor, such as muesli (fiber) and pickled foods from Hungary (I suspect pickled foods slow down how quickly you eat, which probably prevents you from eating until you're uncomfortably full). Beats me what he was saying; I couldn't hear his ridiculous patter. Which left me free to watch the women as they ate the food. All three that I watched put the food in their mouths, and immediately made a face like they were being punished. Seriously, they all made the same face I make when I had a really fun outing planned and I have to cancel it because of bad weather. I found their reactions to the food incongruous; muesli might not be the greatest thing ever, but it's not like lighting matches on your tongue or anything. 

And then I flashed on this interview I read with Mindy Kaling yesterday. Her comments about dieting, I thought at the time, were a tad silly:

"We always think of a diet with a big groan," Kaling tells Renee. "But I think diets are fun. I think it is an American pastime for a lot of women. I don't know. I think that Kelly [her character on "The Office"] thinks of dieting as a fun hobby to have."

After watching those few minutes of Dr. Oz, I realize that Kaling wasn't exagerrating. What I was witnessing was some bizarre S&M ritual transplanted from sex to food and being presented as wholesome family entertainment. The women were naughty girls. They'd eaten cheesecake and pizza. And now they were getting their punishment of pickles and muesli, deftly administered by the firm but loving (and so muscular, so handsome!) hand of Dr. Oz. The actual taste of the food didn't matter, just that it symbolized discipline. And so it tasted like discipline.

So much to me about our culture and food became clear then. Also, Dr. Oz's appeal, because seriously, I didn't get it before. 

3) This.

Beware the Beliebers. Mariah Yeater found herself bombarded with death threats on Twitter after the Star magazine reported she had filed a paternity suit against Justin Bieber. “Dear Mariah Yeater, Roses are red, violets are blue, stay away from Bieber or Beliebers will kill you,” wrote one person. Yeater claims in her lawsuit that she had sex with Bieber backstage at one of his shows last year. Bieber denies the allegations. Yeater shouldn’t be surprised at the violent reaction of the Bieber fans. Last year Kim Kardashian got death threats after she met Bieber at the White House Correspondent’s dinner. Selena Gomez, the singer’s current girlfriend, has also received threats.

Surely this is something that better comprehensive sex education could go a long way towards preventing, isn't it? I feel that if these girls could start by giving a name to the urges that compel them, they would be able to move on to channeling their emotions more productively. 

Since I know you readers are deeply interested in fighting the good fight for social justice in the bedrooms and parlors of this nation, I'm sure you've seen this horrible video:

This was posted by Hillary Adams, whose father is Judge William Adams, who is a judge for Aransas County, which is in the Gulf region of Texas. Adams admits that it's him in the video, and in the style of abusers everywhere, is leaning on the "just a scratch" excuse, as well as skepticism-inducing claims that his behavior here is somehow out of character. (Compare to Cain's statements this past week for another example of how this works.) No one is buying it, of course, since we all see with our eyes how hard he whipped his daughter with the belt. Additionally, since Hillary set the camera up in her room specifically to capture this, we have to assume a) that this had happened enough before to compel that choice and b) that she was getting really good at predicting when he would go off like this. Research into domestic violence shows that it's not uncommon for victims to become well-attuned to when their abusers have a desire to whip the shit out of someone, and they do in fact get good at predicting it. This also belies the abusers' claim that it's a matter of "losing your temper", but that they are in control of their emotions. 

When something like this happens, it's important to put it into context so people realize that behavior like this is not isolated or unusual, sadly. Jill has addressed how common it is for people with disabilities, who are often especially dependent on caregivers, to suffer abuse like this. Hillary has stated that Adams abused all his family members, but it seems he had a special hankering for whipping his only daughter, who happens to suffer from cerebal palsy, so we can see how it fits into this pattern. I want to add to this, and discuss abuse in the context of fundamentalist Christianity. 

Now, I couldn't find any religious information about Judge Adams, but he is a Republican, raising the chances to "high" that he's an evangelical Christian. More importantly, if you watch the video---which I only recommend you do if you have the stomach for this sort of thing---one thing will really jump out at you if you follow the workings of the Christian right. Adams keeps using somewhat strange terms like "disobedient" and "submission". For secular people, even those who have witnessed abuse, it's really rare to see someone spell out their goals of inducing submission and obedience. (Or maybe not. I'm sure commenters have some thoughts.) Other language is employed, in no small part because abusers also have to enact a mindfuck on their victims, and convince them that the abuse isn't somehow apart from the values of their time, which for secular people and moderate religious people include equality and individuality. But the words "obedience" and "submission" are flung around Christian right circles without any hesitation. When speaking to outsiders, they often try to play that awful-sounding language off as something not as bad as it sounds. Their schtick is to pretend that they're just using archaic words for the funsies, but when they say something like "submission", they don't really mean submission. (Michele Bachmann tried this tactic when asked about her pride in being submissive to her husband.) But they do mean it. It's impossible to believe otherwise, when you're reading, say, James Dobson extolling the virtues of whipping your kids into submission, or Christian housewives on blogs discussing how much of a struggle it is to frame their legitimate concerns into a submissive framework where even asking questions can sometimes be seen as an affront to a man's godly right to have the final say over household manners. They do in fact believe in a strict hierarchy of power in the household, and in fact, I would argue that fighting against feminist progress on the home front is their main organizing principle. 

Spanking your children is therefore a big fucking deal to the Christian right. I would honestly say, reading their materials, that being able to whip your children at will is number two in their list of political concerns, right after abortion. Gay marriage was rising on that list for awhile, but it doesn't seem to have the endurance that fears that the government is going to take their spanking rights away do. In fact, the Christian right has been successful at blocking the United States from ratifying the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Children. (We are the only nation besides Somalia not to ratify it.) Within Christian right circles, enthusiasm for spanking is really, really high. At Stuff Christian Culture Likes, the blogger describes the general pro-spanking attitudes:

They don't feel that spanking is the same thing as hitting. They will defend it to their dying breath. Christian culture is very concerned that the government may take away their right to spank.

Pretty much all right wing Christian child-rearing manuals are paens to beating your children. And I mean beating. If confronted about this, fundies tend to backpedal and play off their obsession with spanking as if it's the same thing as a mild pat on the ass delivered to a toddler who has tried to run out in traffic or something. But they lean on the "rod" talk in the Bible, which means they are big on using weapons to beat your children. James Dobson believes you should beat children with a paddle or a tree branch, which he has somehow managed to rationalize into "loving" behavior. And he's probably the most mainstream! Other, less popular family "advice" books get even more elaborate when it comes to describing how to select the weapons to use against someone so much smaller than you. Now, that doesn't mean that all or even most fundamentalist Christians whip the shit out of their kids like this guy did. However, once you've created a cultural expectation that abusing your children is not only acceptable but expected, you can expect people to take it to the next level. Outside of the cursing and the threats to hit her in the face, in fact, there's not much in this video that falls outside of the Christian right prescriptions for "disciplining" a child.

Regardless of Judge Adams' personal beliefs, Christian right ideas about family hierarchy and paranoia that the government is coming to take away their "spanking" rights (I hate calling it "spanking", which allows people to equate it with painless bottom pats, which I still think aren't such a great idea but can't be meaningfully compared to whippings in any way) are the water that conservatives are swimming in when it comes to the Bible Belt. That context needs to be understood when looking at this video. It's not enough to be angry with Judge Adams and call for him to leave his job. We need to look at an entire culture that teaches that beating your children is a good thing to do.

By the way, I want to quickly address the people who are all over internet defending Adams by saying, "I was whipped and I turned out okay." Using the surival skills of victims to condone abuse is not okay. That's like saying it's okay to throw yourself downstairs because two years from now, that broken leg will be completely healed. The here and now counts as much as the later. A child is more than the adult they will become. They are a human being now, and their pain and suffering now matters. 

I'm sure many of you know that today has been declared an action day to pressure Facebook to take down sites that promote rape. Yes, I said promote rape. Change has a petition up that I urge you to sign, because while I generally am angsty about the idea of censorship, Facebook already has a policy of avidly censoring offensive content, so by not doing so in this case, they're quasi-endorsing the pages. (This, incidentally, is why we have a wall between editorial and advertising at Pandagon, where we don't take down ads unless they feature imagery that we can't endure, because that implies endorsement of the ads that are left up.) I'm sure the people who put up pro-rape pages on Facebook would claim to be "just joking", but since these pages aren't funny, that holds no water. There's only humor if you assume that forcing a woman to have sex against her will is an awesome thing to do. Even then, it's not funny, but a power fantasy these guys are sharing with each other. Since rape is a really common crime, there's no reason to believe that these pages aren't being used by rapists to buck themselves up to perform more rapes. One reason that rapists justify their behavior to themselves is they see so much social support for rape, such as pages like these.

Still, I have one thing that really bothers me about this whole campaign, and that it's got such backlash potential. One of the reasons the sad fucktards who do this sort of thing do it is because they have mommy issues and they hate women and so they enjoy getting a rise out of feminists, who they consider some kind of fascist police stopping them from sexually harassing women as openly as they'd like. Policing them adds to their victim complex, allowing them to stew at home about how the evil feminists don't have a "sense of humor" about their non-jokes about rape. Now, that may just be the price you have to pay to get the pages down. We can't control the feelings of men with psychological issues that lead to such bone-deep misogyny, but hopefully we can interfere with their attempts to recruit more resentful young men to mold into the ass-grabbers and rapists of tomorrow. But there may be more we can do besides just ask Facebook to take the pages down. 

I believe, after all, that sunlight is the best disinfectant. There's a reason that online misogynists are so careful to write under false names most of the time (with a few psychotic exceptions)---because they are cowards and don't want to be held accountable for their public words.* But the thing with Facebook is that it is, as I saw someone describe it once, the driver's license of the internet. Most people create an account with their real name and picture. I think this is going to be a good thing in the long run---look at the sharp decline in trolling on websites that use Discus, for instance. And maybe we can make it work here. If you're willing to be a fan of rape on Facebook, why keep that information on Facebook? Wouldn't it be more useful in more open areas of the internet? If men openly and publically support rape, at bare minimum that useful information about them should be available in a quick Google search performed by anyone considering a date with them, so she can say no. It may hurt those dude's fee-fees, but women's safety could really benefit.

I couldn't find any information on how to generate a list of people who "liked" a page on Facebook, but you know, some of the people who support these pages are avid users on the wall. So for instance, on a page called "Riding your Girlfriend softly, Cause you dont want to wake her up", there was a link to another page called "Feeling bad after hitting your mom, cause u thought it was your girlfriend". Lots of people thought that was just awesome! 

Now, clearly some of the people commenting are protesting the site. But some aren't! Let's take a look at the supporters of this "kidding on the square" promotion of violence against women. 

First we have Jase Mcmullins Vladimir Jr. (His father must be so proud!) Sad to say that Jase has a girlfriend, according to his Facebook page. Wonder if she knows about his enthusiasm for trolling women just because they're the "nazis" who believe that women are people? Sadly, she probably does. It's appalling what pieces of shit women will date because they don't think they have any options. I clicked her page and saw that she seems like a cute girl who is into nerdy shit; honestly, she could write her own ticket if she played her cards right. No need to deal with a guy who thinks that rape apology is funny because he hates feminists so much. 

Then you have Duncan Johnson, who claims this stuff is harmless. We have plenty of research to show otherwise, of course, but I also have to point out that the promotion of douchebaggery has effects beyond just creating a welcoming community for rapists and wife beaters. It also convinces guys that it's okay to groom yourself in the Duncan Johnston style:

Rape and domestic violence may not be funny, but holy hell, that sunglasses and hair style combo sure is. 

Pete Bohnhof is really opinionated about this! He thinks, among other things, "Besides, what if the broad deserves a crack in the mouth, then this page is doing a public service," and "America was such a better place before we allowed them to talk & participate in conversations & vote and shit." He lives in Manhattan, so for you New York readers, there's one guy to strike off the list of potential dates before you even get to the first drink with him! I mean, without this critical information about him, I'm sure women would be lining up to get with him. 

Pete---surprise---has a lot of links on his Facebook page to articles about how the Occupy Wall St. people  need to all become libertarians, and then through libertarian no-bitches magic, the economy will fix itself. 

I could literally do this all day with these pages, but I have other work to get to. That said, you the readers have blogs of your own! Since Facebook is still defending these pages as freedom of speech---while taking other, more harmless ones down---I say good. Personally, I like my assholes right out where I can see 'em. And since these assholes graciously provided links to their Facebook pages, I'm only happy to amplify their public opinions. And you can play along at home, too. There are many, many assholes I didn't get a chance to help out with airing their opinions. 

*Yes, I get that there are other reasons to be anonymous. No one is denying that. But the misogynist community has a much greater share of its members who hide behind screen names than any other community I've ever seen, at least political community. 

I'm with Atrios; cut the crap. Kim Severson is way too kind to "Southern gentility". She admits that a lot of it is about reinforcing gender and racial hierarchies, but there's still a whiff of trying to bamboozle the Yankees by exoticizing our quaint Southern ways in this article. Particularly since "chivalry" was the defense in the nakedly racist incident that inspired her article:

One August night, two men walked into a popular restaurant attached to [Atlanta's] fanciest shopping mall. They sat at the bar, ordered drinks and pondered the menu. Two women stood behind them.

A bartender asked if they would mind offering their seats to the ladies. Yes, they would mind. Very much.

Guess the races of the men and the women in this story. With your guess in mind, consider this:

Angry words came next, then a federal court date and a claim for more than $3 million in damages.

The men, a former professional basketball player and a lawyer, also happen to be black. The women are white. The men’s lawyers argued that the Tavern at Phipps used a policy wrapped in chivalry as a cloak for discriminatory racial practices.

After a week’s worth of testimony in September, a judge decided in favor of the bar.

"Chivalry" was the reason. What Severson neglects to mention is that "chivalry" has always been used as an excuse for racial discrimination and worse, lynching in the South. Segregation was justified in no small part as a way to protect precious white women from supposedly unchivalrous black men. She just goes straight into this: 

At least, it used to be. The Tavern at Phipps case, and a growing portfolio of examples of personal and political behavior that belies a traditional code of gentility, have scholars of Southern culture and Southerners themselves wondering if civility in the South is dead, or at least wounded.

This is where the B.S. is at its thickest. Texas has the same kind of chivalrous codes as the rest of the South, even if we don't put up the front of gentility.  I have never had a strange man offer me a seat at a bar on the grounds of being female. It's simply not expected. Just like in the North, someone might give up a seat to someone whose shoes look uncomfortable, but it's not gendered, per se. Certainly you would never expect a bartender to demand it. There is a chivalrous ritual of giving up seats in crowded bars, but men generally only offer to women they know. So, if a stranger is standing near you, you wouldn't igve up your seat. But if a strange woman is introduced to a man, he will often immediately offer up his seat. Of course, what's not discussed about chivalry is that it's often about a man showing off how generous he is than a woman being coddled. (Not always; a lot of men are just generically gracious, and you can often tell the difference because they don't object if women offer generosity in return, or they don't get ruffled if women politely decline.) If you actually take him up on the offer, he gains a little power over you because men who show even minor generosity are supposed to be fawned over, and you're supposed to be a little more lax in setting boundaries with him. Which is why it's pointless to offer your seat to a woman you haven't been introduced to her. Men who make these offers to strange women are generally assumed to be angling for an introduction, which of course will be made with you in social debt to him, so you pretty much have to give him some flirtage time, lest you be deemed a bitch. Chivalry is not to women's benefit in the South.

Anyway, it's all bullshit. I've never heard of a man being expected to give up a seat to a woman he doesn't know, and that it was so racialized suggests that this was no coincidence. The same act can have different meanings in different situations. A man offering his seat to a stranger is generally going to be read as "hitting on her", unless there's an extenuating circumstance such as a huge age disparity or she's obviously not well. A man being told to give his seat up is being demeaned, and having his manhood questioned. Elaborate social codes are there to be endlessly manipulated in this way, to give plausible deniability to abusive or power-mongering behavior. I'm a big fan instead of having a "do unto others" philosophy of etiquette. 

That said, I am hypocritcally grateful for the linguistic passive agressiveness that I bathed in my whole life living in Texas. The practice of cutting someone down while pretending to say something nice about them teaches one the finer aspects of the creative use of insulting language. I suspect that's a reason that so many fine wits come out of Texas, where there's a bizarro but intoxicating mix of Western bluntness and Southern gentility. You learn how to simultaneously call someone an asshole if the need be, but also to bless someone's heart if that's going to cut closer to the bone. 

Every year around Halloween, it's important to have a post explaining the ridiculous and seemingly growing fundamentalist hostility to the holiday, which they consider too fun demonic. And then after waging actual war on Halloween, these fucktards then go on Fox News and cry that we're trying to kill Christmas with innocuous phrases like "Happy Holidays". That America allows this sort of thing to continue happening demonstrates why we don't deserve nice things. Oh sure, some of us bloggers out here make fun of it, but on the whole, the whole "fundies are trying to destroy Halloween" crap doesn't get the attention it deserves. I mean, just for sheer comedy value, their belief that trick-or-treating invites Satan into your home should be enough for coast-to-coast cackling until they retreat in shame. But mostly, anti-Halloween sentiment gets no coverage, even though it's a) real (unlike anti-Christmas sentiment) and b) surprisingly widespread. 

How widespread? Well, I think it's the primary reason behind this story:

Yale University researchers have looked into whether there are increases or decreases in cesarean section births on holidays. They found a 12 percent increase in "c-section" births on Valentine's Day and a nearly 17 percent drop on Halloween.

Emphasis mine. The first one can be explained by a combination of sentimentality and the stress of having to give birth during the coldest month of the year, I'm sure. Plus, you may have an eyeball towards making sure they get badass birthday gifts as a grown adult with a romantic life.* But the Halloween thing? What kind of horrible monster would deny their child the chance at being born on Halloween? I mean, think of the lifelong advantages of having your birthday fall on the best holiday of the year! You get to eat cake and candy. Your birthday party is always a costume party. No one ever forgets your birthday, plus they give you cool macabre stuff as presents. It's a popular holiday, but it's not a religious one or a present-oriented one, so it doesn't overwhelm your birthday. It's like hte opposite of having a Christmas birthday, which is the worst birthday to have, unless you have a family that doesn't celebrate Christmas at all. 

So what kind of monster are you to deprive your child? Well, you're probably a fundamentalist Christian who believes in demons, that's what kind of monster. Depending on your measurement, conservative evangelicals are 14% to 35% of the population, a solid enough chunk to completely explain this 17% drop in C-sections on Halloween. 

Of course, some fundies are going beyond just being scared assholes about Halloween, and openly trying to combat it. How? Well, apparently by locking people up in houses and showing them blatantly false representations of how abortions are performed. I know; that hardly seems like a good way to stomp out the practice of wearing costumes, being a little drunker and sexier (for adults) for a night/trick-or-treating (for kids), but with fundies, all roads lead back to the grave evil that is women being able to say what happens to their own bodies, no matter how not-sorry they are that they touched a penis. So it goes:

Ybarra tells KTRK that while the tickets came with a vague warning about graphic images, like you'd see at any event featuring wounds applied with spirit gum and buckets of fake blood, there was no indication that it was hosted by Potters House Christian Fellowship Church — or that it contained disturbing depictions of what the church considers evil acts. Ybarra says that inside Hell House,

"There was a young lady lying on a gurney, and two nurses. And one of the nurses was reaching into the lady and pulling out a bunch of gunk, and throwing it on the floor."

She felt the scenes were too "realistic" (though safe and legal abortions obviously don't involve guts being thrown about the room) and quickly asked to leave, but she was told she had to stay and go through the whole house due to safety concerns. Good thing she wasn't having a heart attack.

Hey, when you're dealing with people who want to control what women do with their uteruses, don't be surprised if they think it's acceptable to hold you against your will and be subjected to their hysterical attempts at proselytization.

Anyone ever notice how evangelicals and time share salesmen have the same M.O.? Lure you into an enclosed space under a false pretense, use social pressure and  a whiff of physical intimidation to keep you from leaving, hit you up with the hard sell? It's pretty despicable. Though I suppose if they'd done this to Ybarra in service of hitting her up for sex instead of hitting her up with some Bible-thumping, we could expect a hearty defense of this tactic from many in the dudelier sections of the atheist community. 

*This is not an endorsement of Valentine's Day, which I consider a foul holiday that I've come around to boycotting. You might as well call it Single Shaming Day or Our Love Can Never Measure Up Day. It functions in the same way photoshopping impossible proportions on fashion models does: to fill you with shame for not being good enough (which is impossible by the standards set) so you buy more shit. 

So, after a day of floundering, Herman Cain has decided to respond to the revelations about sexual harassment complaints in the past with the "hysterical bitches" card. When outright denial isn't possible and claiming that she consented and regretted is implausible, the "you know women, always overreacting to every little thing, amirite, guys?" card is coming out. It comes with an attempt to downplay what happened, usually speaking. Anyone who reads MRA stuff regularly has seen this in action, though it's often more of the "it was just a scratch, I don't know what she was complaining about" variety. (This excuse came into play in the suicide letter of the MRA who set himself on fire at a courthouse. He minimized the fact that he punched his 4-year-old daughter in the face hard enough to bust her lip, and portrayed his ex-wife as a hysteric for taking that incident seriously and divorcing him.) This is Cain's version:

"And then I did recall one mention in the formal complaint that my general counsel shared, and that was, one day I was gesturing standing near this lady that she was as tall as my wife," he said, gesturing to his own chin. "Five feet tall. Because my wife comes up to my chin, and I was gesturing to this lady, standing next to her, almost shoulder to shoulder, saying you're about the same height as my wife. That was mentioned in the allegation, to my surprise. And so that was the only thing I could recollect that was mentioned as one of the possible things."

It's possible, of course, that's all he said to her. If so, that would be really strange. Most of the time, a one-off comment about someone's height isn't so elaborate. Elaborate discussions of height come up in the context of other kinds of talk, such as if you were trying to lure an unwilling woman into a sexual conversation about how height plays into the act of sexual intercourse, such as the sort you have with your wife. Just a guess. Until we get more details, we can't really know what was going on. I mean, Cain is a strange dude. Perhaps he roams the countryside coming up with reasons to compare people's heights to his wife. Who knows?

As for the Republican base that everyone is so anxious about, I know that this won't hurt him. Nona explained the 10-step process for getting people to side with the accused, even if they think he's guilty (see: DSK, Clarence Thomas, Roman Polanski), and this process works better on Republicans than anyone. Conservatism is about siding with the powerful over the oppressed, and that means that their natural preference is to side with men over women, unless they're trying to score political points against that man. Since Cain is their guy, there's no doubt how this is going to go. Plus, his entire image is based on this goofy notion that he's some sort of rebel against the supposed liberal establishment. Since they believe women and feminists especially control everything, someone who pisses off feminists by sexually harassing colleagues until they have to leave rather than deal with him is poised to be a hero. They won't say it out loud, but the "boys will be boys" excuse is how that belief will be communicated. 

I have one major complaint about the media coverage of this. The incident that's been dug up is being called "the accusations". This may be true in a technicality sort of way, but it really conceals what's going on here. It implies, falsely, that the women are only now coming forward about something that happened years ago, which allows conservatives to apply a Clarence Thomas framework, aka claim that they're only coming forward now because they're political operatives. In fact, the original story made it clear that the women came forward at the time, long before Cain was a politician, and that they got some kind of settlement in exchange for letting the whole thing go away. Which, considering when the incidents supposedly happened, was exponentially more than most sexually harassed women could have dreamed of. Honestly, it's more than most can dream of now, no matter what legal protections are technically in place. I'm not entirely clear on if the women involved have even been spoken to by any journalists. The Politico coverage of it refers to "multiple sources", but the only ones that are named are people who worked with the women. The women, in fact, are cited as having signed a non-disclosure agreement to protect Cain from them telling people what happened. My feeling is they probably did speak to the women---they have their names---and fleshed out some details from them, but because of the NDA, they can only report what non-involved people heard about it, as well as what was in the documents detailing their departures.

From these reports, we get a very different picture than what Cain's saying. It seems mostly that the women claimed that he came onto them in lewd and aggressive ways while they were on the road, perhaps figuring he could use away-from-the-wife-time to get some strange, but going about it in a way that was more alienating that seductive. If the allegations are true, then I'm really not surprised at all. He comes across as a creepy dude, and I have no trouble picturing him thinking he could harass someone into bed. This is a surprisingly common belief amongst creepy dudes, and probably it works occasionally, if the women they target start to believe the safest way out of the situation is to give him some sex so he'll quit bothering you. 

Rush Limbaugh neatly and concisely lays out the conservative position on racism today: liberals are terrible.

The Politico and the mainstream media has launched an unconscionable, racially stereotypical attack on an independent, self-reliant conservative black because for him that behavior is not allowed. Now, if we had...

I want to look at a couple things today from a different perspective. What would the left be doing right now if, let's say, there were an assault on Obama of this nature. Let's say that some conservative publication ran a story exactly like this: Unnamed sources, 15 years ago, with every detail of Obama sexual harassment. What would the Democrat national committee and what would the media be doing? They would be going after the women. They would be targeting these women, and they would name names, and they would destroy them. That is what the Democrats and the media would do. They would set out to find out who these women are that talked to the conservative publication and they would destroy them.

They would call these women racists for trying to destroy a black politician. They would claim that they're working for the Republican National Committee. They would claim that these two women (or these women, whoever), had been hired by the Republican National Committee to engage in this smear and lie campaign against Obama. They would go after these women. They would destroy them. They would make the women the bad guys. They would dig into every minor thing in these women's lives that they have ever done. They would trash them, they would make them prove the unprovable -- because this is war, and that's how they fight it. Anything goes, as far as they're concerned, and they cannot allow a black or an Hispanic to rise to the top of a political establishment that is not Democrat.

I know, I know.  You're probably liberal, and therefore incapable of understanding this honest discussion on race unless it comes with mentions of imperialism and Dave Chappelle. This is a very simple argument.

1) This is a racist allegation against Herman Cain.

2) If the exact same allegation was launched against Barack Obama, the liberal media would call the people making the allegation racist, even thought it obviously wouldn't be.

3) Therefore, because the allegation wasn't made against Barack Obama, it is racist.

4) Marco Rubio, also.

The thought I've kept having today: the fact that conservatives keep calling this a "high-tech lynching" is really indicative of just how toxic an environment the GOP is for black people.  There haven't even been enough black Republicans of note in the past two decades to have another scandal. For a party obsessed with victimology, it's a rather stunning indictment of their complete incompetence on race that you can name every single prominent black Republican since Reagan was in office during the ad break before a YouTube video.