"Well, it's certainly uncontaminated by customers."

Dear used bookstore proprietor person:

Yes, you did remember me correctly as the same person who had sat down with a handful of books for roughly half an hour, and then left without buying any the other day. Yes, I was about to sit down with a handful of books again when you told me that unless I were going to buy something, browsing was not okay.

Speaking as someone who owns roughly a metric fuckton of books, I feel obliged to point out (again: yes, I did say something to this effect and I realize you were resolutely unmoved): generally speaking, most bookstores cheerfully allow for, even encourage unlimited browsing. This is not because they are kind generous people; this is because they understand that in bookstores, generally speaking, the people who sit there and browse are repeat customers; and yes, most of them do buy something, if not this time, then next time, or the one after that. For example, today I went and browsed in a different used bookstore, and they left me the hell alone, as they always do, and I ended up buying two books. See how this works?

Well, no, I can see that you don't. Okay. What I didn't say: you may also want to consider that maybe the reason you remembered me was because I was, that time, like this time, pretty much the only person in the store.

I mean, I'm not suggesting your attitude is the only reason for business being slow: the economy's bad, used bookstores aren't necessarily always exactly booming, and also your selection is kind of crap. But yeah, there was one book of food lit/crit I'd never seen elsewhere and I was seriously thinking about buying it. Even with the plastic on the cover and the relatively high price. Still, I'm sure it was worth it not to have to deal with the annoyance of watching someone look at books, in a bookstore, that you run.

You know what would really solve the problem? If you just got rid of all the books. You could have, like, those dummy copies they have in furniture stores, you know? It'd be great. And the customer could come in and be like, "Do you have anything in red?" and you could lead them silently to the back and glower at them until they found the right one to match their drapes, and paid for it.

Addendum: if you were even half this entertaining in your churlishness, I would have gladly let it pass. Sadly, you are not.

Dear political robocallers of various ilk ("live" included):

I am currently registered Apathetic. I am going to vote for (or against, respectively) the people and measures who/which seem least likely to fuck shit over even more than the alternative(s), based on what I READ from sources I trust, and that is It. No donations, no forwarding the emails to four thousand of my best friends, no joining your zombie blob campaign for no remuneration so that I can feel like Lucy with the football when you inevitably break the promises about the issues I most care about.

No, calling me twenty times a day and leaving long messages on my crap answering machine which doesn't fast forward do NOT make me more likely to want to vote for you, much less do anything else. Likewise, filling up my email box with spam about races I have not the slightest interest in/candidates I couldn't vote for anyway on account of I do not live in those places. They do make me more likely wish you into the fucking cornfield. Hope for your sakes I do not, in fact, have that ability. Thank you and piss off.

Addendum: WHY IN THE NAME OF BABY CTHULHU IS THERE A CARLY FIORINA AD TACKED ONTO ALL THE YOUTUBE BLACK BOOKS VIDEOS IS THIS SOME KIND OF SICK JOKE

All you can eat

So apparently the world championship for karaoke singing (you knew there was one, right?) was in Moscow this year. Some guy from New Mexico won (Usher: "DJ Got Us Fallin' In Love," if you want to know). The prize: a million dumplings.

It seems wrong, somehow, that the gastroenterologist was only the runner-up.

There's video somewhere, but it's not that interesting. At least not compared to what I was imagining, which was that the guy finishes his song and, instead of applause, he's promptly buried under an avalanche of the entire doughy prize at once.

Possibly this idea was prompted by vague memories of this cartoon.



(If you have ambivalent feelings about Eastern European dumplings in general, perhaps you can relate to the kreplach joke.)

I etn't dead

but, I'm not sure if/where this blog is going at this point. I have some vague thoughts of clearing out the blogroll and redesigning this as a writing/fan blog, with some food, or something along those lines. Maybe.

Basically, I'm busy with real life, and I've been rethinking a few things. I'm not posting about them because, bluntly, in the inchoate form I'm in it'd basically come out as a lot of wank. And, I'm trying to cut down on wank. That kind, at least.

Politically, it's kind of...a combination of laziness and denial, and depression at least wrt U.S. political headlines, which can basically be summed up as something like:

"Republicans: 'NO!! Suck our teabag.'"

That's not even it, though. It's not this subject either, although I thought about a response to this post (and seq. linked) at various points these last few weeks. Briefly. Maybe I will at some point. Maybe.

Mainly though I'm in a different mood, and I would just...like to talk about something...else. Mostly I've been doing that somewhere(s) that's else, but I have a certain reluctance to throw shit away, and I put a lot of energy into this blog. So, we'll see.

Meanwhile: I'm never going to be an adult either, but I need to have this woman's little cartoon children.

HOLY SHIT SOME ACTUAL GOOD NEWS

PROP 8 OVERTURNED. BOO YA.

Spam spam spam spam

You know, if blogger came up with a way to ZOT all the spam comments that have been collecting on my blog like dust bunnies in one go, that'd be ace.

Just saying.

and yeah, I think I *will* buy that Nigerian term paper about Viagra, thanks.

Gender and color survey results the xkcd way

I WILL EAT YOUR HEART WITH A FUCKING SPOON IF YOU ASK ANY MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT COLORS

On a related note:

"Women like pink things, possibly because of berries in a forest."

p.s.

I've pretty much given up trying to update my blogroll-it seems to have fallen to classic Hoarders'/Clutterers' Syndrome-but I need to say that this woman and her blog are full of win.

L'chaim

A riff from elsewhere, on the general mantras regarding "you're too fat" messages, which in turn was based on this article with the shocking news that Bullies Target Obese Kids (who knew?):

I'm just thinking: the "it's for your health" crap. I mean, even besides the whole, it sort of gives the game away that someone doesn't necessarily have your best interests in mind when they also call you an ugly old hag or "bitchcunt" and other hilariously witty epithets. But, yeah, sure: health is a good thing. Eat better, if you can, get more exercise, assuming you're able. All over it. Eating more fruits and vegetables and fiber and fish. Haven't had fast food for quite a while. Doing Pilates twice a week now. Getting back into dance and yoga. Signed up for pole dancing next week, yah rly. Because it makes me feel better, physically and mentally. Health, yes. And yeah, I don't actually eat all that much, amount wise; mainly this has to do with the meds I'm on. Will it result in weight loss eventually? Maybe. Maybe not. All I know is, if I made that my priority, I'd make myself nuts, so I'm not. Again: in the interest of health. Mine.

So, but yeah, in terms of ingesting shit that's bad for you? Today it occurred to me: y'know, I could eat McChuck's three times a day and wash it down with a donut milkshake, and I'm betting it still wouldn't be as bad for me as swallowing the toxic go-ahead-and-hate-yourself-for-not-being-thin-enough (along with every other reason, of course) bullshit being shoveled at us from all sides. I mean, you can't not swallow any, fuck knows. But, just sucking it up undiluted? In the apparent belief that it's, I don't know, a health drink? Might as well go out into the Gulf right now and take a nice big gulp out of the noxious oil slick. And fuck yes, that eventually takes a physical toll, too. The more I learn about mind-body-well, that's another thread.

I got a fair share of bullying as a kid, surprise. The main theme wasn't fat, although that was certainly a motif through at least some years. I hovered around the "high end of normal" until I was 21 or so, except when I was dieting. Which, the first time I did that, I was 10. Yeah, ten. Why? Three guesses. It didn't quite develop into an eating disorder, but I have a feeling I was well on my way; for whatever reason, at some point the suggestion by a doctor that if I remained as underweight as I was I wouldn't hit puberty upset me more than the prospect of getting fat, so I started eating again, and that was that; by the end of sixth grade I was back to normal, if not well before that. There are pictures of me from that proto-anorexia or whatever it was period, though: you can count all my ribs through the T-shirts I'm wearing. I'd throw away lunch and exercise till I was dizzy and nearly passed out.

Then, when I was 17, Mom and I decided to do Jenny Craig together, (Mom's idea, natch) because we'd both hit the horrifying weight of-what was it? 138? At 5'4? My god, we were sometimes into the double digit sizes. Thank fuck we straightened that out in time, I say. Mom's instructor was a "former" anorexic who would lecture about how she trained herself out of having a glass of wine at the end of the day by chanting about how she didn't need it a hundred times. Something like that. But by the end of it I was wearing a size 4, at least for a year or so; no one made fun of me for being fat at that point.

So, instead, for instance, the same boy who'd started our acquaintance by randomly calling me a "bitch" in class back in junior high, before I'd so much as spoken to him or he knew my name (it took me till much later to realize it had happened when I knew the answer to something he didn't) prank calling me drunk in the middle of the night and making remarks about, like, the shape of my face. Seriously. Or the shoes I wore. Like that. In itself? No big deal. Years and years' worth of that kind of shit? It gets old.

I know a bunch of people who don't like the Judy Blume book "Blubber" because it's depressingly-some would say gratuitously-true to the way kid harassment works: the name calling, the hazing, the sheer thoughtless nastiness. It seems to suggest that the bullies are right, is the argument from those people. Personally, I still think it's one of her better ones. There's a point where the title character has brought a "diet" meal to school, and when the ringleader points it out she says something like, she's going to lose weight and then they won't be able to make fun of her anymore. To which the ringleader responds by forcing her to repeat that "My name will always be Blubber" and then telling her not to forget it, because "even if you only weigh fifty pounds you'll still be a smelly whale." It is rather instructive, at that. And then when the protagonist stands up to the ringleader, she becomes the goat for a while. She fights back, and she manages to get off the hot seat, but it's not really a moral victory; life just kind of goes on.

And yet, of course, it's not pure randomness that the designated goat is the "fat girl." You do get a glimpse behind the scapegoating impulse that can, in fact, land on anyone; but fact is, it does land more often on some people than others; this is was we call "structural" shit, of course.

As for not standing up for yourself...well, it's an interesting set of mixed messages out there, for sure.

Frex: vacations, I'd go to my grandparents' house in Arizona, a "safe space" for me, on the whole. I liked to read the books on her shelves-I was always a reader; most of them had been around since the year one. She had the original "Weight Watchers" book from 1960, beehive do's and pointy boobs on the front cover, glowing testimonials on the back. One of the chapter titles, as I recall:

"You Have To Hate Yourself Enough."

To lose weight, that is. Motivation to go on a diet starts through hating yourself. It was that bald.

Oh, they've softened that line since then, I'm sure, have WW. That, and bits like the inspirational little stories sprinkled throughout like:

the one of the sweet but painfully sad and alone (what else would she be?) fat woman who began to "blossom" as the pounds came off. And then, one day, she Met A Man! And it was wonderful and romantic! And he proposed to her! Swoon! But, he also told her he could "never marry a fat girl." Panic, when she hit the dreaded "plateau!" She'd "never make it to her wedding," she cried to her WW buddies! But, somehow, they got her through it, the pounds started to come off again, and she wore her beautiful size seven wedding dress to marry her wonderful husband, and they lived happily ever after^. Seriously. That was in the book. I remember it well; I read it over and over again, along with the Dr. Spock book and the ten year old guide to the best restaurants in Phoenix.

(^That is, he carried her over the threshold with one arm, no doubt, and they lived happily ever after until she gained the weight back again and he dumped her for his secretary, or she didn't gain the weight back and he dumped her anyway because she got too old for him or she got breast cancer and it was too upsetting or he didn't like the way she snored, or he didn't leave her but he beat the shit out of her or just wore her down till she took a wee fistful of Valium every day, or...yes well they left that bit out, never mind, moving on)

Attack on Moscow metro

Natalia Antonova has the story from a Muscovite perspective.

Quote of the day, 3/18/10

Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go.

--e. e. cummings

Fucked up books of my childhood

Respectively, the Sweet Valley High (and satellites) books, as examined at The Dairi Burger

and VC Andrews (Inc), Trapped in the Attic.

If you, too, had your formative years at all warped by these literary classics, and had blissfully put most of the details out of your consciousness, now's your chance to have it all come flooding back to you, with hilarious commentary.

If you don't know what I'm talking about...check the sites out anyway. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll spork. Most important, you'll realize "Twlight" had nothing on the 80's for professional Mary Sues. Tragic orphans! Terrible accidents! Murder, even! Ghosts, werewolves, and vampires! And that's just the Sweet Valley series.

Perfect size six suburban twins with sparkling blonde hair! Perfect helpless heroines locked away in secret-and-spider-riddled garrets! With sparkling blonde hair! Many, many lovingly described outfits and other material details, which were of course in no way why I read the things in the first place. And of course, a whole shitload of men, some of whom are teh sexxy and buy pretty things before revealing themselves to be as bastard-y as all the others, not that there is ever any other ultimate goal besides landing one.


******

Edited to update:

A conversation elsewhere got me thinking more seriously about this essay by Joanna Russ in To Write Like A Woman on the modern Gothic, "Somebody's Trying To Kill Me And I Think It's My Husband." It's basically second-wave feminist analysis applied to lit crit, but she's by far one of the better ones out there.

More details and quotage shortly, but essentially her point is that in the Gothic the female "subject" position isn't really much of one; the protagonist doesn't really initiate plot, she stands there and things happen to/around her. Her main task is figuring out the "mystery" of what the hell is going on around her. Much of which involves figuring out other peoples' feelings
(especially the Man, natch).

It's interesting because her thesis not only fits the gothics she was writing about as well as the more sensationalistic VC Andrews books that probably came out after she wrote the essay, but also applies to True Blood and of course Twilight, no doubt among other contemporary hits.

As far as that goes, I was snarking when I first noted that the Sweet Valley Books, once they started not just jumping the shark but doing trapeze acts with it, eventually have all the elements associated with more standard "gothic" books like the VC Andrews books, but actually, it's not that dissimilar. There *is* no real action in SVH as such-the girls don't really *go* anywhere, despite having cunning plots to defeat rivals and hook boys and career aspirations and such-they stay forever frozen at a perfect age, and they don't ever really set anything in motion. So in order to be "exciting" it has to get soapier and soapier...

I had figured that the reason for this in the SVH books was more because having them actually change and grow would defeat the magic fantasy stasis of Perfect Teen Suburbia, but actually the Mary Sue-ism isn't at all unrelated to that fetish. I mean, it's specifically a woman's fantasy Perfect Teen Suburbia (Francine Pascal, more or less, via her many ghostwriters), a retro one, I mean. So the "waiting for something exciting to happen, which will almost certainly come from a Man" is probably kind of implicit in that.

Anyway, here's Russ in her own words:

The Modern Gothic is episodic; the heroine does nothing except worry; any necessary detective work is done by other persons, often the Super- Male. Whenever the Heroine acts...she bungles things badly. [Hi, Bella!] There is a period of terror, repeated sinister incidents, ominous dialogue spoken by various characters, and then the sudden revelation of who's who and what's what. In terms of ordinary pulp technique, these novels are formless. Even so, they obey extraordinarily rigid rules. There must be a reason for these rules.

I would propose that the Modern Gothics are a direct expression of the traditional feminine situation (at least a middle-class [white] feminine situation) and that they provide precisely the kind of escape reading a middle-class believer in the feminine mystique needs, without involving elements that either go beyond the feminine mystique or would be considered immoral in its terms.

...and here she puts a finger on the Mary Sue phenomenon in all but name:

Most striking about these novels is the combination of intrigue, crime and danger with the Heroine's complete passivity. Unconscious foci of intrigue, passion, and crime, these young women (none of whom are over thirty) wander through all sorts of threatening forces of which they are intuitively, but never intellectually, aware. Most of all, *they are of extraordinary interest to everyone*-even though they are ill educated, ordinary, characterless and usually very hazily
delineated (as one might suspect) as a stand-in for the reader.

Sometimes Heroines are very beautiful (although they don't know it) or heiresses (which they don't know, either) or possess some piece of information about the Secret (which they are incapable of interpreting). Their connection with the action of the novel is always passive; they are focal points for tremendous emotion, and sometimes tremendous struggle, simply because they exist...

In the face of this really extraordinary passivity-for if the protagonist of a novel is not active in some way, what on earth is the
novel about?-it is tempting to see these books as genuine family romances, with the Heroine as the child who is trying desperately to figure out what the grownups are up to...At their best Heroines merely stand (passively) for love, goodness, redemption, and innocence. They are special and precious because they are Heroines. And that is that."

This becomes a lot more evident with VC Andrews, who made the "family romance" part way more explicit than any of the earlier goffics Russ was examining.

As per the Mary Sueism, passivity and all, I think that's what had irritated me so much about True Blood, more so in the first season. Sookie is a *classic* of the type. And she only gets more special and precious and besotting of others as it goes on.

BTVS, whatever its flaws, was satisfying because it explicitly *doesn't* do this: Buffy really is a true protagonist, a Hero with a journey, not just someone who radiates goodness while all the fighting takes place all around her.

That said, I'm digging True Blood more in its second season probably precisely because there's so much more focus on all the subplots and secondary characters, most of whom have a more interesting "story" imo than Sookie.

So Russ concludes:

"The Modern Gothic, as a genre, is a means of enabling a conventionally Heroine to have adventures at all. It may also be a way that conventionally feminine readers can see their own situation...validated, justified, and glamorized up to the hilt, without turning Heroines into active persons or into sexually adventurous persons, both of whom violate the morality of conventional femininity.,

[It'd be interesting to see her take on the later Judith Krantz and such genre. wherein the Heroines do become much more sexually adventurous-within certain strictures-and nominally have careers, but a lot of this still applies. The "Lace" books as I recall them could be termed the Cosmo Gothic. More sex, more designer name dropping, the women become successful fashion designers or that sort of thing, and the rest is still pretty similar]

...

1. Housework, etc. is banned. I'm on holiday.

2. I'm upper-middle class, not lower-middle class.

3. My upward mobility is achieved through marriage.

4. I'm a good girl-modest, not too pretty but quite pretty, not too rich but rich enough, womanly, loving, dependent, and somehow "average" (even though I am uniquely precious)

5. The Super-Male *really exists* (all evidence to the contrary)

6. He really loves me, even though I am not strikingly beautiful, brilliant, talented, famous, or rich. I do not see why he loves me, but he does. He may appear to treat me badly or brusquely; still, he loves me.

7. I do nothing. I do not have to do anything. Merely because I exist, violent emotions and acts spring into being.

8. I am rewarded for being good. Aggressively sexual, beautiful, worldly women are wicked and are punished accordingly. Men don't *really* like them.

9. I have intense emotional relations with places-houses, weather, nature. (Scenery-painting is often the best-written part of these books).

10. I have pretty, romantic clothes (but not sexy or flamboyant ones). Clothes really are very important.

11. *My sexual value is my personal value and is respected by all but villains and villainesses.* Men's desire is a testimony to my personal, individual worth. I have no character, interests, or achievements, but those who do come to a bad end (if female).

12. I am a virtuoso at interpreting faces and feelings. [Sookie in True Blood takes this one further by being actually *psychic.*] This ability is not "wasted" on the everyday drudgery of infants' needs or husbands' grumpiness-it is vital in saving my life and the happiness of all about me. (Even if I come to the wrong conclusions, my intense over-reading of everybody else's emotions is still justified).

13. If I don't know what's happening, that's all right: my man does.

14. I can't save myself, but my man will do it for me. [More often torqued these days, if not consistently; Sookie's killing Rene in self-defense has shades of Final Girl, but she still has the men running to her aid, the distraction helps enable her to defend herself, and they do outright rescue her on many other occasions]

15. Life with the Super-Male is *really satisfying.*

Sookeh! SOOKEH!!!...

annnd

*sparkle out*

Oh joy, just what we all needed: PUMA 2.0

aka: "Shut up, Hamster."

Srsly okai.

Or, I guess, I had a long sit, as my partner drove. I read Deoliver47's post about 'Ms. Hamsher' and it rather annoyed me. I've lived for most of my life amongst those people who now go by "tea baggers" (their own moniker) and I knew that no matter what happened in politics, I could never accept an alliance with such hate-filled individuals and I couldn't understand a progressive that might advocate such a move. Then I read a diary that said Ms. Hamsher had gone on Faux and Friends to appeal to their audience to 'kill the bill'. It wasn't much of a diary (sorry diarist!), so I checked the Fox site itself and damned if it wasn't true. Not only had she gone on Faux, she'd not even asserted herself to decry what the party of "no" had done to decimate the hcr bill. She talked about how the bill would increase costs to the middle class and would effect your current coverage and "causes it to be worse"; it sounded like right-wing talking points.

So, despite my struggle to remain objective, I was getting a lil subjective. When I logged on tonight, the first diary I saw was about Ms. Hamsher joining forces with Grover Norquist to force Rahm Emmanuel to resign. Grover Norquist? Really? I'm sure readers here know who Norquist is...founder, supported by President Reagan, of American's For Tax Reform; opposition of President Clinton's attempt at health care reform; Contra and North supporter; co-author, with Messr. Gingrich, of the "Contract with America; Abramoff aficionado; supporter and promoter of President G. W. Bush. Need I say more? That sort of perked my ears.

But it wasn't until a poster noted that Ms. Hamsher had tweeted about Senator Bernie Sanders losing his seat unless he killed the bill. Losing his seat. The only self-professed socialist in the political spectrum. Losing his seat because he wasn't progressive enough? Bernie Sanders, promoter of single-payer health care? That guy who passionately argued for, and offered an amendment that would provide health care and dental coverage for every American? I almost couldn't believe it. But I clicked the linky, and sure enough...there it was, in all its glory...

moar:

Grover Norquist is a lifelong Right-Wing warrior. Destroying all progressives and any progressive/liberal agenda is his life’s work. He is very good at and has been finding useful idiots to help him divide and conquer progressives for over thirty years.

Norquist started this work with Jack Abramoff at his side. One party rule has always been their goal and Democrats and liberals have always been their blood enemies. Destroying progressives and everything we believe is their life's work. It is what they do.

Grover is deeply connected to Abramoff. Perhaps nobody goes back as far with Jack as Norquist...

...These two created Ralph Reed and inflicted him upon the world and they spawned a host of other lobbyists, activists, media whores, think tankers, staffers and politicians that make up the extreme conservative movement in America. Jack Abramoff’s ability to lobby and be successful as the point of the spear for the K Street Project depended upon Norquist and his weekly gathering of DC conservatives (Jack’s in jail, but these weekly meetings go on—perhaps Ms. Hamsher will be Grover’s featured guest at a future meeting). The sweatshops, sexshops, human trafficking and systematic labor abuse on the Marianas Islands have Grover Norquist to thank for their protection by Republicans just as much as they have Abramoff to thank (and Jack kicked back funds to Grover as part of the circle of "thank yous"). Norquist should be in jail, but he was protected by McCain, Rove, Bush and Congress. Now he is still out on the streets of DC and making fresh "alliances" with gullible and foolish people within the progressive movement. Sadly, Jane Hamsher is one of those foolish people.

...And the heart of her alliance with Norquist is the fact that she is lending her support and credibility to the conservative conspiracy theory that the financial meltdown was caused by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae lending money to poor people through the Community Investment Act and Community Banks. It is an article of faith among conservatives that Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama forced Freddie and Fannie to engaged in risky loans and that these two mortgage giants forced the big banks to do the same. And then the system crashed. See, in wing-nut world everything bad that happened to the economy was caused by poor people taking advantage of the system. This is a scandal that the wing-nuts want exposed just like they want that whole birth certificate thing exposed, and the ACORN thing exposed, and the death panel thing exposed, and the government’s dirty hands on your Medicare thing exposed, and the socialist takeover of America exposed, and the...

...If you want to fight with Rahm Emanuel, fine. If you want to pretend that he is your chosen personification of evil on this earth, go ahead. Whatever. But, if you decide that your hatred of Rahm is stronger than common sense, if you decide that you must join Jane Hamsher in making common cause with a shitbag like Norquist to attack Democrats, the President and his agenda, well then—and I mean this in the most civil way possible—go to hell. You have let your anger and your desire to piss farther and harder than you think Rahm can piss cloud your judgment.

Honestly? I'm listening to people on the left who are against the hcr bill as it stands now, even though I'm leaning toward the "hold your nose and support it, after making it as good as possible till the very end, because whatever that is is as good as we're going to get." But, joining up with Grover "drown the vulnerable anyone who gets in my way the government in a bathtub" Norquist to try to unseat Bernie Sanders because Sanders isn't progressive or aggressive enough in upholding progressive values. Because the guy who's been actually doing work, even brought up a bill for single-payer, has said this bill is worth supporting; and you think you know better, so you're gonna go side with the people who don't think we should have health care (reform) *at all*. Ooooookayy.

As for Obama and (some of) the Congresscritters supporting this bill (Lieberman can also be devoured by roving wolverines, yes, that goes without saying):

Listen, if I'm going to be supporting actual moderate-to-conservatives/self-aggrandizing cynical corporate sellouts going under the progressive flag whose "help" in this case not only doesn't much but may (*may*) even make things worse, I'm at least going to stick with the ones who aren't complete fucking boneheaded losers. That would be the ones who got elected into office, have some proven ability to find their ass with both hands, and are at least *trying* to make some kind of useful policy that will *help* *some* actual people be better able to not, you know, die. Hint: P.R. disasters like the Lieberman blackface stunt do not count as "progressive activism." They do count as "boneheaded loser moves."

p.s. how the hell did I get on Hamster's mailing list, anyway? No, I'm not signing your stupid petition. GOE AWAY.

Damn.

p.p.s. This, dammit.

If anyone thought that Obama's language about bipartisanship and compromise were just a ploy to get elected, and the fierce passionate liberal would then pull away the mask, they were deluded.

To me, Obama's open, bipartisan and cross-ideological tone was never just a pose. It was how he intended to govern, defining a mild, modified liberalism as centrism and putting the opposition on the defensive. A fierce, aggressive liberalism, the counterpart to the high point of conservative exercise of institutional power in the middle of this decade, was not going to succeed. Recall, that such an approach ultimately failed conservatism.

However, Republican senators' refusal to participate in any meaningful way in the health-care conversation, with the small and notable exception of Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe's single, hesitating vote when the bill was before the Finance Committee, is a painful revelation that Obama can't govern the way he campaigned. And that revelation is in itself a kind of cost, a useful illusion now lost. As recently as a few weeks ago, every savvy Hill insider would tell you that health reform might get 58 votes and fail, or it might get 61 or 62 votes. But it wouldn't, couldn't get exactly 60 votes, just because some Democrats -- Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu -- would insist on Republican cover. The biggest surprise of the last week is that health reform had to hit that target 60-vote target exactly, and that it did.

Health care's passage shows exactly how small the target is for any future Obama initiative, from cap-and-trade to financial reform. With no room for bipartisan compromise, and also no room to tell Joe Lieberman what everyone surely wants to tell Lieberman, the path forward is hard to see. As long as Republican opposition holds, even with the occasional press-release exception such as Sen. Lindsay Graham on cap-and-trade, there will be no room to the right and even less room to the left..

Yes, that'll work.

Maggie Gallagher of NOM! sez conservatives should have Moar Babeez in order to stave off gay marriage.

Which will totally work, because if there's one thing that never happens, it's the children of right wing conservative homophobes growing up to be Teh Gay. Trufax.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with any -other- right wing Population Anxiety...

Oh.

See what The Nation had to say about this, two years ago:

“The real root of racial tensions in the Netherlands and France, America’s culture warriors tell anxious Europeans, isn’t ineffective methods of assimilating new citizens but, rather, decades of “antifamily” permissiveness–contraception, abortion, divorce, population control, women’s liberation and careers, “selfish” secularism and gay rights–enabling “decadent” white couples to neglect their reproductive duties. Defying the biblical command to “be fruitful and multiply,” Europeans have failed to produce the magic number of 2.1 children per couple, the estimated “replacement-level fertility” for developed nations (and a figure repeated so frequently it becomes a near incantation). The white Christian West, in this telling, is in danger of forfeiting itself through sheer lack of numbers to an onslaught of Muslim immigrants and their purportedly numerous offspring.”

"'No' to the notion of Bilerico"

On edit: You may want to start here. Or, for a more charitable view, here.*

*a follow-up, less charitable view by the same author

Otherwise, here's the direct link:

http://www.bilerico.com/2009/12/transgender_a_disease_that_doesnt_exist.php

And no, Bil, it's not good because it's (ffs) "controversial," already. You get a modest increase of hits now, because people rubberneck at the transphobic fail. You -lose- readers after the initial flurry of outrage, because, well, see above re: fail. And any readers you -gain- from this are not people any self-respecting "LGBT" advocate, no matter how notional the "T", wants to have.

p.s.



p.p.s. THIS. **

Q: What are the sources of transphobia? Is it best combatted by telling it to go away?

A: Its source is not mere prejudice, but old and complex power relations that must be changed, a task that is neither quick nor easy, and is not accomplished by adding a letter to an organization's name. It is based in heterosexism and heteronormativity masked as "radical" critique...This needs to be called out and addressed by the gay community. It should not be up to the transgender community to battle alone, thus furthering the divide.

...By arguing that those born male must retain identification with maleness, even if not with masculinity, his critique lags well behind the radical curve, and begins to merge with the opinions of conservative traditionalists. At one time the use of bronze tools was the latest in technology. To advocate their use today would be silly.

Gold's opinion isn't silly, however, because it is still held by many. It is a hateful ideology. It is alive and well today and often deployed against the trans community. We may yet see it rear its ugly head in the ENDA wars of 2010. I pray that we do not.

**yes, it's also on Bilerico. I appreciate not wanting to give the blog as a whole any more traffic. I felt a bit weird-since I was already sending them traffic-not even at least linking to one of the follow-ups by trans contributors, not to let Bilerico off the hook but because this is a much better post, and honestly I don't think it necessitates Gold's bilge for posts like this to be on their front page in the first place, especially AT Bilerico, which seems to be one semi-apologetic argument ("it's an ill wind..."). That said, I'm resuming my policy of not reading/linking to them after this. I like a lot of the individual contributors there, but it just doesn't even feel like Bil sees what the damn problem is, even now. The suggestion of having trans editors would help, I expect...then again I apparently missed a bunch of other fail as well (Polanski apologism, too? -LeVay- apologism? Seriously? Argh)



ETA Better. (removed Gold as well as the O.P.) It'd be nice to believe that this is happening because it's really understood why and to what degree this was problematic, not just because the wheel finally squeaked enough to get some grease and the bottom line looked like it might be in danger from this one, after all.

ETA again: if you missed the original fail, a lot of it is cached in fisk form at Autumn's post at PHB. Wherein it is also speculated (not the only place by any means) that it is by the way rather interesting timing considering ENDA is up again and apparently so is the possibility of once again throwing trans folk under the bus.

Also, via a commenter from one of the above-linked posts (Angela Brightfeather):

...We need to be on the offensive with Mr. Gold and tonight while driving home and listenting to Michaelangelo Signoreli's radio show on OutQ radio, he announced that due to all this fuss on Bilerico, he will be talking about Mr. gold's post next week on his show. I immediately called him and told him that I object to giving Mr. Gold any airtime on his show and would consider it an insult to myself to let his kind of non-thinking comments be given any air time at all.

So be ready folks. This isn't over yet and I fully expect that while Mr. Gold will not make a personal appearance on the show, I am sure that there will be any number of gay men calling in about those whinning Trans folks who are such a problem to deal with.

Quote of the day, 12/9/09

Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days, in books and plays and movies, is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love: husbands and wives who can't communicate, children who can't communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books and plays and so on, and in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up.

—Tom Lehrer, That Was The Year That Was

On female socialization and grimly logical conclusions

Read this post by fugitivus.

If women are raised being told by parents, teachers, media, peers, and all surrounding social strata that:

it is not okay to set solid and distinct boundaries and reinforce them immediately and dramatically when crossed (“mean bitch”)
it is not okay to appear distraught or emotional (“crazy bitch”)
it is not okay to make personal decisions that the adults or other peers in your life do not agree with, and it is not okay to refuse to explain those decisions to others (“stuck-up bitch”)
it is not okay to refuse to agree with somebody, over and over and over again (“angry bitch”)
it is not okay to have (or express) conflicted, fluid, or experimental feelings about yourself, your body, your sexuality, your desires, and your needs (“bitch got daddy issues”)
it is not okay to use your physical strength (if you have it) to set physical boundaries (“dyke bitch”)
it is not okay to raise your voice (“shrill bitch”)
it is not okay to completely and utterly shut down somebody who obviously likes you (“mean dyke/frigid bitch”)
If we teach women that there are only certain ways they may acceptably behave, we should not be surprised when they behave in those ways.

And we should not be surprised when they behave these ways during attempted or completed rapes.

Women who are taught not to speak up too loudly or too forcefully or too adamantly or too demandingly are not going to shout “NO” at the top of their goddamn lungs just because some guy is getting uncomfortably close.

Women who are taught not to keep arguing are not going to keep saying “NO.”

Women who are taught that their needs and desires are not to be trusted, are fickle and wrong and are not to be interpreted by the woman herself, are not going to know how to argue with “but you liked kissing, I just thought…”

Women who are taught that physical confrontations make them look crazy will not start hitting, kicking, and screaming until it’s too late, if they do at all.

Women who are taught that a display of their emotional state will have them labeled hysterical and crazy (which is how their perception of events will be discounted) will not be willing to run from a room disheveled and screaming and crying.

Women who are taught that certain established boundaries are frowned upon as too rigid and unnecessary are going to find themselves in situations that move further faster before they realize that their first impression was right, and they are in a dangerous room with a dangerous person.

Women who are taught that refusing to flirt back results in an immediately hostile environment will continue to unwillingly and unhappily flirt with somebody who is invading their space and giving them creep alerts.

People wonder why women don’t “fight back,” but they don’t wonder about it when women back down in arguments, are interrupted, purposefully lower and modulate their voices to express less emotion, make obvious signals that they are uninterested in conversation or being in closer physical proximity and are ignored. They don’t wonder about all those daily social interactions in which women are quieter, ignored, or invisible, because those social interactions seem normal. They seem normal to women, and they seem normal to men, because we were all raised in the same cultural pond, drinking the same Kool-Aid.

And then, all of a sudden, when women are raped, all these natural and invisible social interactions become evidence that the woman wasn’t truly raped. Because she didn’t fight back, or yell loudly, or run, or kick, or punch. She let him into her room when it was obvious what he wanted. She flirted with him, she kissed him. She stopped saying no, after a while.

...Women are taught both that these rules will protect them, and that disobeying these rules results in punishment.

read the rest

Also see.

Off that latter, and the "how hard this also makes dating/hooking up," which should not be the first consideration but is still a consideration, I just wanted to add:

As someone who got more or less the standard female socialization + introvert + no real incentive to go after men in any case (usually):

Fucksake, it's not like I don't fucking get how hard it is to meet people, -women-, hello. Women who "just want to be friends;" women who stand you up; women who huddle together with cliques of their friends in the bar all night, all with their backs turned outward; women who give you the runaround because they, too, have the socialization that you recognize oh so well of "never say no directly, because that would be too confrontational, and smile harder to make up for it." And yes, the mixers and such can be extremely forced feeling and dorky. I KNOW.

Yes, I sometimes talk to strangers, the ones -I- want to talk to (and who want to talk back). Yes, I don't live in a hole, thank you, and believe me, it's damn hard to drag myself out of one a lot of the time, what with the chronic depression/anxiety and shit. Yes, it's frustrating as all hell.

And somehow, I do all this -without- all of media and social/cultural expectations drumming it in that my desires -should- be catered to, that they're normal and appropriate, even necessary to grease the wheels of society.

Top that off with the het men in question continuing to pull the same bullshit on me as any other woman because no one is exempt, really, and it's not like the assholes listen to what you want anyway, and it's generally safer to -not- go "actually I'm a dyke" to such people because hey! whole new level of potential shit! and you know something? My sympathy, it is limited.

And now, a spoonful of kitteh

to make the ughsome go down.



(h/t Ethyl)

WANT KITTENNNNNNNNN

Sure thing, Joan Kelly, will do.

Re this post and the preceding ones.

Yeah, enabling Howly Blog does put you beyond the pale. I'm afraid so. I mean, truthfully, personally, I never cottoned to you much anyway, so no great loss. But, seriously? You are sucking up to a couple of vile trolls who would basically be Fred Phelps with a couple of small adjustments. Glad to see you've found a "spine" of some sort, though. It does take guts to "agree to disagree" about blatant hatemongering, fuck knows.

And, for the record, the tu quoqueing you've been doing? Yeah, those women (yes, women) are *also* toxic hateful assholes. Amazingly enough, the existence of some assholes doesn't excuse vile bigotry, which is, let me repeat, exactly what you are oh so magnanimously choosing to ignore as "disagreement." Let's not even get into the "what? I'm not saying I -like- infanticide, I'm just saying it beats the alternatives."

So, yeah, posting this will no doubt feed the martyrdom complex as well as the vomit monster machine, and, yeah, I keep swearing I'm giving up the dwama, but you know, I can live with it. Because, wrt the whole "if you don't like them, just don't read them?" You're full of shit. They post flaming gauntlets like that and especially leave hatespoor trackbacks to any trans blogger post they find for a reason. They wanted a reaction. They got it. And now, so have you.

Enjoy.

"Voracious hunger is a sign of manliness"

Footnoote to two preceding posts, off a snippet from one of the links.

That line, "voracious hunger is a sign of manliness:" Whopper commercials and certain sportsy or fratly subcultures aside, you may not have seen that as being particularly true these days, even though its converse clearly still is. Ever since at least the 80's and the spawn of yuppie culture there's been an uneasy coexistence between the ol' "real men EAT, make strong like OX" and at least a nod or so to the idea of being relatively "healthy," "cut," drinking protein shakes and running on treadmills and shit. There are obviously other factors at work here, class not least of them. Masculinity is still as associated with power as it ever was, but the sleeker and faster advanced technocracy gets, the more likely you are to see power reflected by efficient eating habits and fat-free bodies: the straightforward opulence of a Diamond Jim Brady becomes replaced by the more ascetic ostentation of personal trainers and individually tailored "special" diets, the better to achieve that lean, mean, hard look.

If you -really- want to see hilariously over the top odes to the Manly Appetite, though...well, let's take a trip in the wayback machine, shall we?

I'm reading this anthology called Endless Feasts, a collection of essays from the soon-to-be-defunct magazine Gourmet. (One thing I may or may not have talked about here is: I read food porn. A lot of food porn. While I'm eating, specifically. I have my little habits, which...some other post).

Anyway, in this compilation, there are several essays by one Robert P. Coffin, each more exuberantly masculine than the last. The first two have to do with huntin' and fishin' with one's brothers in the wild, having dispensed with such "suave and civilized meats" as sweetbreads on toast: ripping apart hunks of lobster with one's bare hands, scarfing down deer limbs washed down with whiskey from the bottle, that sort of thing. Very proto-Iron John, very...woodsy.

The third piece, "Down East Breakfast"-- I'll just give you a taste, okay.

The Maine morning meal is like a tune on the bagpipes which calls the stouthearted Scot to war. It is something that must strengthen him deep to his marrow, and only the masculine and downright victuals will do. The ordinary American breakfast, with its precooked and predigested cereals, its hummingbird nectar of citrus, butterflies of bacon, and anemias of eggs, is as much out of place in Maine as...a French breakfast of a dry roll and chocolat chaud... It would be an insult to his oily manhood. Fat is the foe of weather, and fat is the making of Maine's first meal...

...The Maine breakfast is a hefty meal for hefty he-men.

...It begins with a seething and bubbling of pork fat in the skillet or spider. Fat salt pork in chunks, not lean and feminine bacon rashers, is its base.

...The Down East flapjack is the outdoors, masculine, New World crepe Suzette. It is about as much like its relative in Paris, in London, or in our own Sunny South, as an All-American tackle is like a boy in pants six inches long playing with a ten-cent-store football.

...In any case, there must be the cheese. And when I say cheese, I don't mean something that starts out as a mollycoddle of a food for babies, like milk. I mean...calf's head cheese or pig's head cheese. I mean meat...This is strenuous and fine eating, and it makes a "stick-by-the-ribs-Billy" dish that dish that will take a man straight through three cords of beechwood...without a rest and with a song in the heart.

...Naturally--and this breakfast is all nature and good-natured eating--there is a liquid constantly drunk to float all these ships of heavy meats and fish and wheat or buckwheat on. It is tea...It is as black as your hat. It is about as near to the tea drunk as tea parties by women and womanish men as the male in three-cornered pants is to the adult one in overalls that can stand by themselves...

...Some of the older men a bit past their full bloom, or some younger ones not yet come to theirs and having peach fuzz instead of whiskers on their cheeks, dilute this tea with sugar or milk. But the middle and powerful males take its tannin into themselves neat. It galvanizes their "innerds," they say, against the damp and cold...[A] wise saying is that tea is tea only when it puts whiskers on the bottom of the soles of your feet. Maine men's feet have hair on their bottoms so they can cling to their dories and rolling logs...

...The Down East breakfast is the strong meal of strong men.

At the conclusion of a meal like this--or more accurately, writing up the vicarious experience of it, as the actual Maine he-men are already lumbering off to put in a hard day's work stacking cords in the bitter cold-- presumably one lights up not an effeminate cigarette but a foot-long, thick, masculine cigar with a fine strong honest smell. None of your Cuban imports either, but a plain straightforward -American- cigar, completely free of foreign impurities and effete insinuating subtext.

The gentleman, perhaps, protests too much. But what exactly is it that he's protesting?

At first glance it's not a "protest" at all; it's a celebration of, well, bigness. Male bigness, but also American bigness. Clearly the particular cultural myth the author is appealing to goes back a long way, at least as far as, say, Paul Bunyan, Giant in a Great Land,. This piece was written shortly after WWII, when America was on top of the world, and Gourmet, along with the idea that fancy eating is a legitimate American pasttime, was in its early years.

And yet one could argue that there's a hint of...anxiety, here. The author, remember, is writing for Gourmet readers, which from the onset was decidedly on the upscale, not-very-likely-to-be-doing-much-cordwood-chopping side. "The Magazine of Good Living." The Song Of Masculinity is all entangled with class: it's basically romanticization of Hard Work And Simple Living, Like Our Pioneer Forefathers (and Their Helpmeets) Practiced. And which, one gathers from the Huck-Finn like paens to escaping the study and running wild in the woods with his pals, doesn't much resemble the life of the author or his audience; otherwise, it probably wouldn't seem that romantic.

This is all decades before the "wealth gap" widened dramatically. Second Wave feminism's still in its nascency, but Rosie the Riveter now has to be considered as competition for the men returning from the war. We're still a long way from the analysis of, say, Stiffed, or Stuffed and Starved; ironically, the era Coffin is writing from is one that's now viewed nostalgically itself. Traditional Families, Hard Work In The Heartland, Father Knows Best. As the ulcerated CEO's on their treadmills can attest, perhaps, even the simple joys of gorging oneself aren't that simple anymore.

Whatever the men are hungry for-along with the rest of us- it's probably not going be satisfied with a big breakfast, if indeed it ever was.