When Slut-Shaming Is Not Enough ...

... then it's time for a legal crackdown!

According to the Columbus Dispatch, an Ohio legislator has proposed a bill that would define "sexting" by teenagers as a first-degree misdemeanor:

Rep. Ronald Maag, R-Lebanon, said he will soon introduce a bill making the creation, exchange and possession of nude materials between minors – commonly known as “sexting,” – a first-degree misdemeanor.

“Local prosecutors have brought to my attention that under current Ohio law these teens could be charged with a felony and classified as sex offenders,” Maag said. “There is concern that this may not be appropriate for these minors.”

Now, in Maag's defense, it's an obviously good idea to ensure that teenagers don't get charged as felony sex offenders! But why criminalize this behavior at all? Adults can send legally naughty photos of themselves via cell or post them to the Internet. Obviously, nude photos of minors bump up against child porn laws, so there's good reason to restrict them on the Internet.

But as long as sexting remains an activity between two consenting teenagers, I see no reason for them to run afoul of the law. Why not use this chance to decriminalize it altogether?

Of course, teens shouldn't have sex until they're mature enough to handle it. Sexting is likely to magnify their vulnerability. I wouldn't want my kids involved in it when they're 13 or 16. There's too much scope for harming themselves and others. So this is an area that sex education ought to be addressing. I don't mean just sex education in the schools; I mean parents, the media, churches - anyone who cares about kids.

But it's a sign of moral bankruptcy, on the social level, if we think the criminal justice system should take over a role that properly belongs to education.

By contrast, it should definitely be illegal to disseminate a person's photos without permission, because it violates his or her consent. The sad story that spurred Maag's bill involved a girl in Cincinnati, Jessica Logan. She killed herself after her photos were circulated throughout her whole school. What drove her to despair wasn't her initial act of sending pictures to her boyfriend; it was the subsequent deception and breach of trust. While this isn't identical to rape, her consent was violated all the same, and in analogy to sexual assault laws, that violation deserves to be punished under the law.

The Beaver: An Endangered Species

Happy Beaver, photo by Flickr user stevehdc, used under a Creative Commons license.

Weeks ago, I posted a Kotex ad featuring a cute, furry beaver. In comments, Euchalon Grandy asked where the term "beaver" comes from, anyway. At first I was surprised he asked, because I happen to know he came of age in the early 1980s, just like I did, at a time when there was lots of discussion (feminist and otherwise) about "beaver shots" in porn. And so I thought, "Duh! It's because beavers are furry. Everybody knows that."

But then I started wondering. Why a beaver, anyway? Why not some other mammal with a thick pelt? (I'm pretty sure this is what Euchalon was actually asking, and I just didn't get it.) Why not a raccoon, or a skunk, or a lemur? I suppose there's a stripe issue with those critters. Then again, the patterning of kitty fur is infinitely variable, yet the term "pussy" persists even though few of us sport calico or tabby markings. (I wouldn't rule out tortoiseshell, however, especially as we get older.)

Why "beaver," indeed? When I showed the beaver ad to the students in my women's studies capstone class, some of them were totally perplexed. They didn't get the ad, because to them a beaver is merely a furry woodland creature. They'd never heard the term applied to women. And so an ad with a beaver representing a pussy was just incoherent to them.

The reason for this came out in class discussion: The norm for pussies is now hairless, as anyone who's flipped through Cosmo in the past decade ought to know. If you don't take it all off, no guy will want to put his package anywhere near your vajajay (in Cosmo's anatomical lexicon). So our kitties are all supposed to be sphinx cats, and the beaver is on the verge of extinction.

Posted by Flickr user *n3wjack's world in pictures, used under a Creative Commons license.

This is a seriously generational phenomenon. It's not really possible for me to fathom it from my perch here on the far side of 40. I know young women, self-declared feminists, who believe that pubic hair is disgusting - that it makes them disgusting unless they're always smoothly waxed or shaven.

Maybe the closest parallel in my generation is that when I hit puberty in the 1970s, people took it equally for granted that girls would shave their legs and armpits. I've lived in hippy co-op houses, I spent years in Europe, I've considered myself a feminist since sixth grade. And guess what? I shave my legs. Inconsistently, irregularly, and often plain incompetently. (Being blind in the shower really doesn't help!) Ditto for my armpits, though more regularly and with less blood.

I choose to do this. But I don't claim that I do it without reference to social norms. That's where I part ways with my friend figleaf, who basically argues that any hairstyle is cool (so far so good) because it's a matter of personal style and choice (um, not entirely).

One of the college-aged women I know told me that a boyfriend pressured her to shave her pubic hair because she didn't look like the women in porn. She, too, made her choices. She shaved it. She hated the ingrown hairs and itching. She grew it out again. She ditched the douchey boyfriend.

She's not the only woman to discover that grooming pubic hair, even just the bikini line, is different from legs or armpits in some crucial ways. It's harder to achieve a smooth result by shaving. Waxing produces a smooth finish for a few days, but it can't be repeated until the regrowth is well past the stubble stage. (There's also some risk of infection, especially with Brazilians.) Laser treatments are expensive and don't work for all types of hair. Whatever the method, it's likely to result in red bumps and ingrown hairs. I'm not a dude, but I assume that red bumps are the very opposite of sexy.

In fairness, men, too, are subject to social pressures to shave. While we women can camoflage stubble under our clothes, they can't so easily hide their chins. Sure, a guy can get away with a ZZ Top beard if he's a lumberjack. For most white-collar jobs, he'd better make sure it looks distinguished and professorial - or just shear it off altogether.

I'm all for choice - but what exactly does choice mean when all the social pressure tilts in a single direction? Where is the pro-growth movement (as figleaf memorably calls it)? What magazine is extolling the glories of the unpruned bush? Organic Gardening, maybe?

I'm not saying women are anti-feminist dupes if they shave, and I sure don't want to shame anyone for doing it. I'm not opposed to grooming. Like I said, I do some of it myself. (And no, I'm not going to overshare on my more personal topiary choices.) But until there's actually a pro-growth faction, our choices will be tightly bounded and subject to pressure and penalties. That's not much of a choice at all. Especially when the pressures are greatest on young women who are still finding themselves and discovering their own bodies and sexuality.

Hard-Wired to Dehumanize?

There's a bit of a kerfuffle about a new study by Susan Fiske of Princeton that, according to the Guardian, shows men are hard-wired to objectify women. Young male volunteers were shown images of women in bikinis and their brains were scanned with MRI to measure their responses. Their scans showed activity in regions of the brain normally activated when using tools.

As Vanessa at Feministing points out, while the study corroborates a long-standing feminist contention - that ubiquitous images of scantily-clad female bodies encourage the objectification of women - arguments for the hard-wiring of men's responses can hurt women more than help them:

[S]uggesting that men are hardwired to objectify women is really dangerous, and for obvious reasons. Simply taking naked women out of the picture (figuratively and literally) is not going to resolve the problem, and implying that "men can't help it" will just be used to contribute to the same sexist customs and rape culture that we're fighting against.

However, even the Guardian's exceedingly shallow reporting reveals that the studies' findings are more complicated than that. Only men who scored high on a questionnaire measuring basic sexist attitudes had MRI scans indicating a lack of empathy toward the women whose images they viewed:

In the final part of the study, Fiske asked the men to fill in a questionnaire that was used to assess how sexist they were. The brain scans showed that men who scored highest had very little activity in the prefrontal cortex and other brain regions that are involved with understanding another person's feelings and intentions. "They're reacting to these women as if they're not fully human," Fiske said.

(Source: The Guardian)

Hmmm. In other words, the MRI revealed what parts of the brain remain dormant when a man fails to perceive another person as a human. But does that prove hard-wiring? Perhaps, but only after years of socialization. The research subjects are college students. Their brains are the product of two decades' worth of learning about how the world works. The brain is an amazingly plastic organ, and its functions are not all inborn; they are shaped in response to environmental stimuli. The fact that not all men responded the same - and that objectification correlated with sexist attitudes - undermines the interpretation that all baby boys will inevitably grow up to regard women as objects. Upbringing and society must play a role.

How solid is this research? Figleaf frets that there's no original study available online to back this up, and he's right: the study has only been presented at a conference (the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago), and it's not yet published in any journal. So we can't dissect it properly.

On the basis of a report in the National Geographic, however, we can pinpoint some of the study's limitations: It was small, with only 21 experimental subjects. It only looked at hetersexual men (no women were tested at all). And all of the subjects were college students, which means that the sample would not measure responses of men at various stages of learning over their life course.

In one respect, the study is actually more disturbing than either Vanessa or figleaf notes (again, because the Guardian article was so flimsy). The sexist subjects didn't just regard women as tools to their pleasure; they went beyond mere objectification in to a much scarier realm. This comes out in how The Independent described the study's findings:

The study focused on a region of the brain called the medial pre-frontal cortex, just above the eyes, which, when activated seems to damp a man's tendency to express hostile sexist thoughts about women, Professor Fiske said. Men who express the strongest sexist tendencies tend to have a less active medial cortex. It becomes decactivated in men who are the most hostile to women, but only for women in bikinis, she said.

"So basically they are particularly likely to treat these women as objects, at least that is the interpretation of the data we have so far. It is a preliminary study but it is consistent with the idea that they are responding to these photographs as if they were responding to objects rather than people."

It was "shocking" to find that the pictures of scantily clad women deactivates the medial pre-frontal cortex, Professor Fiske went on. "The only other time we've observed the deactivation of this region is when people look at pictures of homeless people and drug addicts who they really don't want to think about what's in their minds because they are put off by them."

In other words, subjects prone to sexism didn't just objectify women; they dehumanized them.

That's a crucial distinction. We all objectify people we don't know well but find attractive. Women do this too: We look at someone and think to ourselves, "Yummy!" That's not a response to someone's stellar character or personality. But there's a big difference between one-dimensional appreciation of sexiness and reducing the object of your lust to less than human. It's only the dehumanizing response that nurtures rape culture and other potential violence.

To the Highest Bidder

This evening my university is hosting an event that makes me deeply uncomfortable, yet there's been not a peep of protest. Probably because it's "for a good cause."

Over the past two weeks I've gotten two emails asking me to support this event - a formal dance - either by attending or by purchasing an ad in the program booklet. This already struck me as vaguely weird. Why would students solicit faculty to buy ads? What am I selling, my ideas? They may be priceless, but their value on the open market is mighty low. Plus, I don't know any faculty who are keen on attending undergraduate parties. The colleagues I hang with understand the importance of appropriate boundaries.

But what really got me is this: The sponsoring groups are going to hold a date auction. Proceeds will benefit the March of Dimes. I don't care how good the cause, or how pure the students' intentions. The idea of a date auction still creeps me out.

First, there's the obvious insensitivity of evoking slavery in any lighthearted manner. There was nothing funny about slavery. The ritual of auctioning a person even for temporary services - no matter how much in jest, no matter how good the cause - can't help but echo the history of real slave auctions.

To complicate matters, this particular date auction is being sponsored by a historically Black fraternity. As a white person, I don't want to impute "false consciousness" to the organizers, but I do have to wonder if anyone thought this through. Is it possible for Black people to subvert the history of slavery by parodying it? Maybe, if the parody is very evident. But I don't see that happening in this case. There was nothing ironic in the email I received, and black-tie affairs don't usually mix with mockery.

Then there's the exchange of cash for a person's potentially romantic company. Now, I'm pretty sure that at this dance, both women and men will be auctioned as dates. Yet it means something different when a woman is "for sale." We don't live in a society where women routinely purchase men's sexual favors. Even if there's gender parity on the auction block, only the "sale" of women resonates with the gender inequities built into prostitution. I'm not ignoring the existence of male prostitutes, just saying that realistically, this auction is much less likely to conjure up images of a gigolo.

My concerns aren't just theoretical. A 2005 article from The Daily Northwestern quotes dean of students Mary Desler as seeing problems with date auctions:

"I think they have the potential of putting students -- women and men -- in compromising and hurtful situations." ...

"What if no one bids money for a date with someone? Might that be hurtful? What if someone purchases a date with someone else and there is something about the purchaser that makes the student feel uncomfortable or, even unsafe? What if something happens on that date that is hurtful?" she said.

"I was involved in a situation a few years ago that was not at all positive for the student 'purchased.' I can't forget that situation," Desler continued.

The article doesn't specify exactly what happened, but in a culture awash in masculine sexual entitlement, I'd worry that women could be at somewhat higher risk of sexual assault when going on a bought-and-paid for date. Most men will be perfectly respectful, I'm sure. But when a guy has put out cold cash for the woman's companionship, aren't the odds increased that he'll expect her to put out, too? To be sure, this is a problem with dating in general - and a good reason to insist on going dutch whenever you don't want to get physical with your date. It seems to me, though, that at the very least, "buying" a woman's company at a date auction is reinforcing rape culture. That's the last thing I'd like to see colleges supporting.

I get why student organizations turn to date auctions. They can raise hundreds of dollars and - unlike raffles or auctions of products - it's all pure profit without any need to seek donations.

Maybe I'm just a killjoy. Still, I'd love to see schools and universities actively discourage date auctions. Citing concerns much like mine, the Office of Student Activities and Leadership at the University of Michigan has issued a statement opposing them. (It's not clear whether this statement came out before or after a student group at Michigan held a date auction two years ago to benefit a Peruvian women's shelter - oh, the irony!) Am I asking too much to want my own university to adopt similar guidelines?

Update 2-1-09, 9:30 p.m.: Duh! I meant to mention this in the original post: Though I wasn't there at the event, I'm pretty sure date auctions are mercilessly heterosexist, too. Can you imagine the fuss if one college-aged dude tried to buy another? Maybe it'd fly as a joke - humor is the main way that students deal with discomfort about homosexuality, 'cause they know that overt homophobia is uncool - but never, ever as a for-real date. Then again, if the girls started bidding on each other, that'd be hawt. Ugh.

God O Thunder Falls to Earth

Lego version of Thor, the Norse God of Thunder; image by Flickr user Dunechaser, used under a Creative Commons license.

Yesterday, Columbus police arrested a guy who'd been an active member of an Internet discussion board for johns, where he reviewed prostitutes and issued advice on not getting busted. The Columbus Dispatch reports he posted under such charming screen names as "God O Thunder." Among the allegations is that he promoted online the prostitution services of a 17-year-old.

The real name of this Thor wannabe: Robert Eric McFadden.

Previous government position: director of Ohio's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Before that, he was field director for Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.

Current employer: Ohio's Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

So (assuming the charges are true), he's managed to come pretty close to maxing out the hypocrisy angle, and he's making good headway on the irony angle, too. Does his current job mean he might be able to oversee his own prison sentence?

It gets even more sordid (again from The Dispatch):

Police said they have seized a computer and two vehicles. One was his wife's car, which detectives said was the setting for photos of the 17-year-old girl that McFadden then posted online.

Eeeew. This man sounds like he's got some serious boundary issues. Not that I think it'd be perfectly kosher if he'd used his own car. Still, using his wife's vehicle speaks to a level of hubris and/or passive aggressiveness that too-neatly matches his pseudo-Norse-god alias.

There's also a nice irony in his being busted through one of these john forums. I'm pretty grossed out even at the idea of such forums. The little I've seen of them looks to me like they're more about reviewing a product than a service. They confirm my sense that too many johns view women's bodies as commodities. They underscore my suspicion that for too many of them, paying for sex is both an exercise in and confirmation of masculine sexual entitlement.

Professional escort Peridot Ash, who obviously knows a heck of a lot more about sex work than I do, seems to concur. She recently had a smart post on the demeaning terms johns use in these "reviews." She concludes that their disparagement of prostitutes' bodies is just an extension of contempt in which they hold all women's "saggy, fat, and ugly" bodies. She writes:

This list says to me: women are THINGS. And we only like certain kinds of these things. And the consumer has a right to prefer these things. Because in business, the market decides. Female bodies are consumable and the market has decided that fat, black, old, or flat-chested ones are not as economically valuable as nubile, white, young, big-boobied ones. BUYER BEWARE.

(Read the whole thing.)

And that's why - even though I'm sorry for McFadden's wife and others who'll have to deal with the fallout, and even though I'm convinced that criminalizing prostitution only multiplies its ills - I can't feel sorry that this particular God O Thunder is apparently hoist on his own lightning bolt.

A LOLbeaver? Or The Patriarchy at Work?

I'm not gonna comment on where I stand on this until after I use it in my Women's and Gender Studies class today, but I'm curious what others think of this ad. I'll update with my stduents' thoughts and mine after class. In the meantime, leave a comment! (Via Samhita at Feministing.)

Labiaplasty: How Common, Really?

Just a quick follow-up to last week's post on how the media deals with plastic surgery on women's genitals. I cited an estimate from Time magazine that put the number of labiaplasties and similar procedures at about a thousand annually in the U.S.

A study just came out that makes me think that estimate is way too low. In the December issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery ("Aesthetic Labia Minora and Clitoral Hood Reduction Using Extended Central Wedge Resection"), Dr. Gary Alter reports performing 407 surgeries over two years. This was just one particular procedure and just one physician - albeit one in Beverly Hills. I couldn't access the article's full text but Dr. Alter's website doesn't mention any partners, only that he's got a second office in New York and a teaching appointment at UCLA, so I assume he's a player in both of the main markets and is relatively prominent in his field. (He also has a hilariously perfect last name for his profession, doesn't he?)

If Dr. Alter alone is doing 200 surgeries per year, there's just no way only 1000 women are getting it done each year. Even if Dr. Alter is a big fish, he surely isn't covering 20 percent of this market. Googling "labiaplasty surgeon" turns up oodles of other practitioners scattered around the country.

My googling also enlightened me on some other aspects of this business. For one, I got the impression that dilettantism may an issue. While Dr. Alter specializes in genital surgeries (ranging from repair of botched surgeries on intersex people to penile enhancement and transsexual reassignment), he doesn't seem to be typical. Most surgeons who perform genital cosmetic surgery also offer a spectrum of other, purely cosmetic procedures ranging from facelifts to boob jobs (here's just one example among many). I'm not letting anyone with a knife near my O'Keeffean bits, but if I did, I'd go for the real specialist. I'd want that doctor to know the map of pelvic nerves better than his own hand.

Perhaps even more striking is the apparent absence of gynecologists and urogynecologists from this field - the specialists who repair the real functional damage that can result from childbirth. I can readily believe that large labia do pose functional problems for some women. But if that were the main issue, wouldn't regular gyns be more involved in labiaplasty?

I also found that most of these surgeons post before-and-after pictures on their sites. I'm far more curious than squeamish, so of course I looked. (They do not post pictures of the surgery or of fresh post-surgical wounds, in case you were wondering.)

What I saw: A few of the women who get these surgeries do have labia large enough that I can imagine it being uncomfortable. That wasn't the case for most, although obviously only the woman who inhabits that body can say for sure. It's also a little hard to tell, because many "before" photos show one or both lips being stretched to the sides as far as possible, while the "after" photos often omit the stretching.

My guess is that in most cases, "discomfort" is a label for insurance purposes. The discourse of discomfort may also help plastic surgeons conceive of themselves (and promote themselves) as serving a higher purpose than a pornified beauty ideal. It lends legitimacy when these surgeons publish their results.

Oh, and I learned that the amount of variation in normal color and shape really is tremendous. Even in the "after" photos. The flower analogy may be trite, but it is apt. And I have to wonder - once more - why bother taking dahlias and irises and tulips, and turning them all into uniform carnations?

I took this photo of a bearded iris in my garden last spring.

Staying Abreast of Men's Fashions

Y'all know that I teach women's and gender studies. You know I'd take to the streets for the right of all human beings to express themselves in whatever genderqueer manner they like - and to be safe and respected while doing so. That's a basic principle for me.

And yet ... the allure of some things just mystifies me. Exhibit A: Holly of Self-Portrait As recently linked to this feature on bras being marketed to men in Japan. (There's video but I couldn't see a way to embed it, so you gotta click and go there.)

As Holly said: "I don't know what to say." I'm not so sure I do, either, but I'll try anyway.

First, this strikes me as the latest example of the viral nature of capitalism, especially where bodies are concerned. The beauty-and-body market for women is so swamped, it's hard to find a new niche. Compared to women, men's bodies haven't been nearly so thoroughly shaped and fashioned, at least not in commodified ways. Enter the metrosexual, who spends a larger chunk of his budget on fashions, hair products, and the like than does the typical dude.

And it's not just masculinity that's in flux. Bras, too, have evolved tremendously since their invention just about a century ago. The bra emerged as the corset was on the wane, but it took decades to really catch on. For the flapper styles of the 1920s, the goal was to flatten, not support. In the 1930s, cup sizes became standardized and bras began to be sold as a ready-made garment, but they still weren't universal. Only in the postwar era, with its buxom icons like Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, did bras become a staple in American women's wardrobe. By the 1970s, bras were in decline; though feminists didn't actually burn them, some women stopped wearing them. The bra made a comeback again in the buttoned-down 1980s. By the 1990s you saw bras being worn as outerwear - and the Wonderbra was born.

As Joan Jacobs Brumberg writes in The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, the history of the bra is primarily the history of its commercialization. Once the postwar market had been saturated, bra manufacturers cast about for a new market. They found one in young girls who hadn't yet begun to develop. Allying with physicians, they convinced mothers and their preteen daughters that for the sake of health and beauty, girls needed to start wearing bras even before they had breasts.

So I'm inclined to see Japan's new man-bra the intersection of the metrosexual with a saturated but always ravenous body-shaping industry. Engrish.com (an irreverent and not always PC blog on Japanese culture) notes that these bras are most likely targeting metrosexuals with transgender tendencies, since the bras are really too petite to be targeting full-fledged transsexual or transgendered persons. That seems pretty plausible to me: a man who's truly trying to pass as a woman won't settle for a AAA cup.

There may be something specifically Japanese about this product, too. Take a look at an ad for it (swiped from Engrish.com, which has more along these lines):


I totally don't understand Japanese culture beyond what I learned from the movie Lost in Translation, but I'm fascinated by how the ads for this product harness conspicuously Western models. I know that this is a common trick in Japan (and the whole premise for Engrish.com, which chronicles this tactic gone hilariously wrong). This makes me wonder if - within Japanese culture - transnational masculine beauty standards might somehow grant greater license for transgendered behavior. Or if Caucasian models just give the product a certain metropolitan cachet. I'd love to know more.

However you slice it, the advertising for this man-bra engages in some major gender-bending. Engrish.com provides a translation:

Times like these call for a Men’s Bra:

• Even us guys want to know how a woman feels!
• We want to reel in our emotions! (lit. “strain/tighten our emotions”)
• I have the body of a man, but I’m a guy who feels like a little girl!
• I want to remember a gentle feeling.
• I need support for my chest!
• There are sure to be many reasons, but the most important thing is to feel gentle/tender.

So far, there seems to be a modest market for wanting to "know how a woman feels." About 300 of these had been sold at the point when this hit the media a couple of weeks ago. That's not a huge number, of course, but it's definitely more than zero. I'm hoping that most of the buyers are hoping to "feel gentle/tender" rather than "like a little girl"; that diminutive sort of creeps me out, to be honest.

I guess my feelings about this are similar to my reaction to makeup for men: cool for those who really are into it. But at the same time, I'm glad my own mate won't hope to find a man-bra under the Christmas tree - and not just because airmail won't get it there on time. I may teach gender studies, but I guess I'm just kind of limited that way. Then again, one of the main things I've learned from feminism is to honor desires - my own and others - as long as they do no harm.

But the cat-bra? Now that's where I, personally, draw the line.

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

Pussy Politics and the Media

From I Can Has Cheezburger? captioned by me, Sungold.

The November 19 issue of Time magazine has an article on "Plastic Surgery below the Belt." If you're thinking it's not a man's belt, you would be correct. The article is on cosmetic surgery for your girl parts.

It goes without saying that we here at Kittywampus are friend and ally to all pussies. Not to be a simpleton about it, but we pretty much endorse the old nursery rhyme - for felines and human alike:

I love little pussy, her coat is so warm,
And if I don’t hurt her she’ll do me no harm.
So I’ll not pull her tail, nor drive her away,
But pussy and I very gently will play.

To my mind, that motto rules out anything involving a knife. I'm not referring here to pelvic reconstructive surgery intended to repair falling organs or incontinence. The surgeries in question are done solely for cosmetic purposes. The best known of these is labiaplasty, which involves surgically trimming a woman's inner lips to look symmetrical, tidy, and small. While I think women's motivations for plastic surgery are much more complex and interesting than feminists sometimes assume, I also think that mutilating one's potential for sexual pleasure - just to meet some totally artificial beauty ideal - is plain stupid and wrong.

The Time article reports that about 1000 such procedures are performed in the United States each year. If so, that's not exactly a trend.

What's more significant: the fact that labiaplasty and similar procedures are now being publicized in a major American newsmagazine, thus introducing a whole new cohort of women to the world of genital insecurity. (Arguably, I'm fueling this fire, too, but let's be realistic about our relative readerships; Time has a few more subscribers than I do.)

Time definitely skewed the article in favor of the critics of such surgeries, and I'm grateful for that. They quote Leonore Tiefer, a feminist psychologist who is fighting the medicalization of female sexuality on several fronts, including the quest for a "pink Viagra." They also gave the final word to sexologist Laura Berman, who suggested

the best way to start enjoying your body could be far simpler than surgery: "You may need a new boyfriend."

That last line points to the article's major blind spot. Time fails to ask: whence the pressure for a tidy pussy?

Clearly, the usual culprits - Cosmo et al. - are not providing the visuals. Time notes that before-and-after photos can be found on the web; I won't link to any but if you're inclined to track some down, you can find key phrases (though mercifully also no links) at The Daily Bedpost.

But why would a gal start googling for photos of a pretty pussy if she weren't worried about it in the first place? Cosmo might be stirring up insecurities. I only ever read it at the hairdresser's but in every recent issue I've seen, it seems to harp on the new "necessity" of waxing one's kitty. Which, in turn, leaves every fold exposed. This is why I'm not in favor of Sphinx cats, even though I can warm up to just about every other breed. The feline form looks divine, regardless - but it's far more fetching when it's furry and pettable.

Then there are a few guys who regale their female friends and/or girlfriends with their narrow notions of pudendal beauty. I don't personally know any men in this category but Em and Lo at the Daily Bedpost report on this real gem of a guy, as described by one of their readers:

He said that some vaginas resemble "kebabs" and that a lot of guys are really put off sex when they get a hot girl naked and find that her vagina isn't as "neat" as they imagined it would be. It made me feel really self-conscious about my own, even though I never have been before.

If any man had ever said that to me, back when I was single, every last friend of mine - and every friend of theirs - would have heard about his sublime douchiness.

But maybe that was back in the day. Maybe young men today have raised their standards. Maybe it's not just younger men. I live in a pretty sheltered bubble that way, surrounded by men who are progressive, who genuinely like women, and who would never dream up that kebab comparison - and not just because we women would never let them live it down.

So what's changed? Porn has got to be at the root of this. Where else is there a plethora of images that allow women's labia to be scrutinized, judged, and found wanting? How else could a young woman feel so worried about her perfectly "normal" adult anatomy that she writes to sex columnists to inquire about surgery? (Em and Lo gave her a very sensible answer that's worth the read.)

Why are oodles of teenage girls (!) writing to Scarleteen (as Time reports) and expressing a similar self-loathing? By the way, that's another quibble about the Time article: It's great that it led off with a reference to Scarleteen, but dispiriting that it didn't mention the great work Heather Corinna and her associates are doing. Scarleteen has devoted a whole page - currently the first link on their homepage - to debunking the myth of the perfect pussy and advising these girls that they are really and truly lovely and sexy just as they are. Maybe Time was too prissy to link to a page with anatomical line drawings.

Anyway, I blame industrial porn. And frankly, I wonder - of the 1000 or so annual labiaplasties and similar surgeries - how many of them are performed on aspiring porn stars?

Penis Spam, Not Even Close to Barely Legal Edition

This, in my junk mail box:

Miley Cyrus was shocked at the size of my tool when we started getting it on ...

Eeeeeeeeeeew.

Palin, the Object of Our Obsession

I know it's time to move on from Sarah Palin. Somehow, we have to shift everyone's focus off of her and back to Obama's promise of - well, not salvation, maybe not even transformation, but at least starting to remedy the fuck-ups of this country that I love.

So why am I having trouble shifting focus, myself? Yeah, I'm scared because she's a wingnut who could too easily become President. But I'm not normally this obsessed about any individual 'winger. Huckabee alarmed me, too, but you didn't see me blogging about him for ten days straight.

I think I've finally figured it out after reading this post by Jessica at Jezebel:

When Palin spoke on Wednesday night, my head almost exploded from the incandescent anger boiling in my skull. ...

And the question now is why? Why does this particular pitbull in lipstick infuriate — and scare us — so viscerally? Why does her very existence make us feel — and act — so ugly? New York Times columnist Judith Warner calls Palin's nomination a "thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women," because "Palin’s not intimidating, and makes it clear that she’s subordinate to a great man." ...

I think what Ms. Warner is dancing around, but not saying outright, is that for a certain kind of feminist, Palin is a symbol for everything we hoped was not true in the world anymore. We hoped that we didn't have to hide our ambition or pretend that our goals were effortlessly achieved ("I never really set out to be in public affairs, much less to run for this office," the Governor has said.) We hoped that we could be mothers without having our motherhood be our defining characteristic, as it seems to be for Palin. We hoped that we did not have to be perfect beauty queens to get to where we wanted to be in life, that our looks, good or bad, wouldn't matter. ...

I think the correct high school stereotype is of the homecoming queen. For many of us looking back at high school, we can now feel a smug superiority towards the homecoming queen. Sure, she was pretty and popular in high school, catering to the whims of boys and cheering on their hockey games, but what happened to her after high school? Often, she popped out some kids and ended up toiling in some not particularly impressive job. We can look back and say, we might have been ambitious nerds in high school, but it ultimately paid off. What's infuriating, and perhaps rage-inducing, about Palin, is that she has always embodied that perfectly pleasing female archetype, playing by the boys' game with her big guns and moose-murdering, and that she keeps being rewarded for it. Our schadenfreude for the homecoming queen's mediocrity has turned into white hot anger at her continued dominance.

(I've excerpted a lot of it but the whole post is worth reading.)

You know, I don't have any real issues with Palin's beauty queen past. I'm not a great beauty, myself, but I'm also not hideous. I don't know what it's like to have men drool en masse over me, but I've always been attractive enough for nearly all of the men who interested me. So I don't have jealousy issues about beauty. Nor do I discount the intelligence of women who happen to be conventionally beautiful. In high school, I even got along just fine with the homecoming queen, who was the band's drum major.

(In fact, in an odd chapter of my past life - which I'd forgotten until very recently - my band friends nominated me for "basketball homecoming queen" my senior year of high school, a very obscure honor indeed. It was mostly of a joke, and I was sort of an anti-candidate. I so didn't fit the type and I was never "popular" but I did have plenty of friends. I vaguely recall coming in second.)

But the cheerleaders! A few of them had this slightly simpering, dumbed-down way of dealing with boys. They weren't dumb, they just played the part. They hung out with the girls who were "popular," which - as in most high schools - was not at all the same as being well-liked. They acted just slightly frosty to the rest of us, enough to register with the girls but pass under the boys' radar. (Just to be clear, I have a couple of friends who were cheerleaders in high school. I'm not casting aspersions on all cheerleaders, just a select few from my high school.)

To this day, I have a real allergy to that sort of woman. Sarah Palin strikes me as one of them - as a woman who will fake and flirt and cajole and act stupid to please the menz - and then turn around and stab women in the back, individually and collectively.

Patriarchal systems have always required women like these. Every era has had its Anita Bryants and Phyllis Schaflys. Madame Bitch at Open Salon suggests that far from being the target of sexism, Palin is the very apogee of playing by the patriarchal rules:

What are the ways in which Palin embodies these sexist rules?

• She's number 2, not the top of the ticket.
• Her very appointment is a testament to the paucity of women leaders in the GOP -- had there been more choices, perhaps McCain would have chosen someone with fewer drawbacks.
• She's a mother of 5 children, so her "woman" credentials cannot be challenged.
• She constantly downplays her ambition and her accomplishments, even though the ambition is oozing out of her ears.
• She dumbs herself down.
• She embraces the frantic mommy role, both literally, and figuratively for her leadership roles.

To me, Palin seems not like a trailblazing, hard-charging battering ram, but a gray fascimile of that ideal, and one that is neatly confined into the small allowed space for her to exist, completely controlled for the comfort of the men who created those rules.

(Read the rest here.)

Palin is quite literally being controlled by the men, at least for now. She's being groomed and prepped and the press is not being allowed access to her - although word came out today that she'll grant an interview to Charlie Gibson later in the week. It reminds me a little of Old Testament descriptions of girls being prepared for entrance to the king's harem. The Book of Esther recounts how they spent a full year being beautified with oils and perfumes and makeup before they ever had a private audience with the king.

Palin has her beauty routine down pat, but the patriarchal grooming is no less intense for being focused on the names of foreign leaders and the pros and cons of privatizing Social Security. (I'm not suggesting that these are in any way "patriarchal" subjects. It's only the GOP take on them that's steeped in patriarchal assumptions.) My hunch is she's a quick study, judging from her convention performance. She seems to be smart and very, very tough. If Palin were transported back to the Old Testament, she wouldn't be a girl in the harem. She would be the woman who runs it. (For those of you who've read The Handmaid's Tale: Palin would be Aunt Lydia.)

Palin's experience in beauty pageants is not irrelevant; pageants teach and reward poise, self-possession, and smooth performances. So does cheerleading. I say this sincerely, not snarkily. These are good life skills for anyone. They're invaluable if you're a politician.

I'd like to think we're all beyond knee-jerk high-school emotions, despite the results of the past two elections. But I can't help thinking of another memory, this one from the back of the school bus, where my friend Kate and I were using our halting French skills to disparage the cheerleaders in what we assumed was our secret language. Eventually, one of them - a platinum-blonde named Mary - turned around and glared at us. We'd forgotten that Mary was in third-year French. Oops.

We underestimate the cheerleaders at our peril.

The Leathered Look

I'm sort of fried tonight because I just finished photocopying the syllabus for my new course on feminist theory. It's an existing course in the program but my first time teaching it; expect me to spout off about it for the next ten weeks. It starts with Mary Wollstonecraft and ends up with Judith Butler and intersectionality. It will kick my students' asses - and probably mine, too. Karmic justice.

But since I'm fried, I'm only good for a brief rant. Driving to the office at 9:30 p.m., after the kids were tucked in, was an obstacle course. With human bodies as the obstacles. Two days before classes begin, my little college town is a bacchanalia of late-summer partying. The college boys saunter along in their baggy shorts. The college girls teeter along, clad in strategically placed scraps of fabric. By the hundreds, they're tripping off the edge of the sidewalk or walking down the middle of the street.

Yeah, the dress code is pretty sexist. But that's not what got my dander up. I was struck, again, by how tan the young women are. I can appreciate the slenderizing value of a good tan. On the rare occasions when I've managed to get some color on my thighs, they seemed to shrink three sizes.

But as a pasty-faced native of North Dakota, I've rarely been tan. Best case: People stop asking why I'm so pale. If I live long enough, maybe my freckles will merge.

You know what? That's okay. I'm 44 now, and while no one will mistake me for 20 anymore, I'm holding up reasonably well. I'd be nothing but a mass of misplaced origami folds by now, had I visited the tanning salon as often as my young female students do. The demand to be tan has escalated dramatically since I was their age.

There are lots of things to criticize about the beauty ideal, but the imperative to be tan is particularly evil because it imposes a double bind with a time lag. What makes you "sexy" at age 20 will make you look haggard and old 20 years later. (I realize I'm leaving skin cancer out of the equation. Clearly, if you're having to undergo surgery and chemo, that won't make you prettier, either.) My students realize that tanning will lead to wrinkles later on, yet it all seems abstract. For them, aging is still something that happens to other people. I thought the same thing at age 20.

I wish there were a way to get this across to young women. I joke about it and my point sails right past them. I don't know how to discuss it seriously without sounding like an old scold. I suppose I could tell them that they'll still want to appear sexy and desirable in 20 or 30 years - but that's probably a little too close to hearing that your mother still wants to get off.

LOLcat in a bind from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Feminist Porn: Where Are the Men?

Heh. Did you think I'd provide a picture? You'll have to keep searching, long and hard.

At Feministe, KaeLyn has a well reasoned defense of sexual pleasure (including "politically incorrect" forms). The ensuing discussion is one of the most civil ones I've seen on the Web, which otherwise just seems to re-ignite the feminist sex wars again and again.

But I have to admit, I hurried through her argument in order to get to the promised not-safe-for-work links. (Follow the link above to KaeLyn's post if you're curious, too.) KaeLyn presents a bunch of sites that I'd never even heard of. It was fascinating to see that the Internet is big enough even for feminist-inspired menstruation porn. (Yeah, really. And they're not just doing it to gross you out.)

It didn't take long, though, before I could see that among the eight sites she listed, only a couple of the (No Fauxxx and VegPorn) showed any men at all. Absolutely nothing I saw got me even slightly heated.

I'm sure some heterosexual women get off looking at other women - we've all been trained to view the female body as eroticized and the male body as just outside the frame. As commenter "Shy" wrote on Feministe:

As a mostly heterosexual woman, I feel that I have internalized the male gaze to the extent that now I am supposed to be (and sometimes am) turned on by naked women and expressions of female sexuality. What about men expressing their desire to sexually please others? What about men reveling in their own beautiful, natural bodies for the enjoyment of others? If porn and sex work were really about the full range of sexual expression and not about rape, domination, and the continuation of patriarchal norms, then there would be just as many men featured on feminist sites as women.

I get that some women do respond to other women's sexualization. But female flesh totally doesn't work for me. And Shy is right on when it comes to the dynamics of social/sexual domination.

And there's more. When I say that Fauxxx and VegPorn feature a few men, I'm using the term "men" very loosely. The guys featured on both those sites were really young. Like, they could be my students. They could be my offspring. They could credibly pose for "barely legal" sites. Too many of them share the skinny boy-model aesthetic that I criticized a few months ago. Not sexy, in my book.

No Fauxxx is specifically soliciting male models, but they're calling for "boys." While this might cater to a very small subset of hetero women, to me it looks more like they're following certain conventions in gay porn.

So where, please, is the porn featuring attractive men? Where are the grown-ups? Where are strong but not musclebound, ordinarily be-haired, men between 25 and, oh, maybe 60, who aren't overly prettified? Where are the men who can credibly project experience and maturity, as well as plain old naked beauty? And dang it, I'm not talking about Ron Jeremy; he's got experience and maturity, and he's certainly not pretty - but having seen him speak at my university last winter, I know that he turns me on about as much as menstruation porn.

I don't think we can speak of real feminist porn until there's serious turnabout, with women authorized to enjoy the visual pleasures of adult male bodies on our own terms - to look, as well as be looked at. Once objectification becomes a two-way street, I'm not sure it continues to be objectification after all. And that, to me, would be a necessary prereq to any truly "feminist" porn.

Female Desire Week - Klinsi Edition

Since it's been declared female desire week, I'm going to post a few pictures of one of my favorite all-time lust objects. This is not a theoretical post. Nor is it a fitting response to the original question from Laura at the F-Word, who was asking why there are so few images of sexy men on sex-positive sites or porn for women sites. Kittywampus is neither of those things (well, I guess we're sort of ambivalently sex-positive) but we do like us our men. That's not to ignore those like belledame who were asking - rightly - what about lesbian and bi and queer desires. It's just that I'm an unreconstructed hetero gal and so I'm going to post what makes my pulse quicken.

And I might feel goofier about this if purtek hadn't already covered the hockey beat, or if Lynn Gazis-Sax hadn't declared her earlier penchant for Björn Borg, but here's the thing: for sheer perfection of the male form, soccer players leave me weak in the knees. They don't have the overdeveloped upper physique that football or baseball players tend to cultivate; they're not inconveniently tall like many basketball stars. Some do have an unfortunate tendency toward mullets, but that can be easily remedied with some sharp scissors.

I do love the game, too. That's one of the main things I gained from my time in Germany. I love the excitement of it, the aesthetics. I even kind of love how - to paraphrase Clausewitz - soccer is the continuation of war by other means, because it usually gets no uglier than Zinadine Zidane's famous head-butting incident in the final game of the 2006 World Cup. It's a pretty civilized way to carry out national rivalries (apart from the occasional hools). I love how it can bring a million thrilled fans onto the streets. I love how it's okay not to have a winner at the end of the game.

But: I also really, really love those legs. Tremendously powerful, muscled, well-defined legs.


And they are devilishly hard to find on the Internet. Believe me, I spent a chunk of this afternoon searching for photos that show my all-time favorite soccer player, Jürgen Klinsmann (aka Klinsi), from head to foot. I didn't find many but I sure had fun trying.
















Mostly I found some lovely head shots, maybe because he's a coach these days (for the German national team in the 2006 World Cup and now for Bayern München, Germany's strongest league team). I guess once you're a coach, you've landed on the mind side of mind/body dualism? I'm pretty sure he still has spectacular legs, but I can't muster actual recent evidence.

So note the forearms in the next shot, which are pretty hot in their own right. And then scroll down for some video that gives you a fuller picture from his days as an active player.

(AP)

(Reuters)

I've provided photo credits where the original source included them, but many were uncredited at their source. Clicking on the photos will take you to where I found them. Usually I try to be overscrupulous about copyright, but in the service of lust this time I picked up the nicest pictures. If anyone objects, I'll take 'em down.

And finally, for a glimpse of legs and motion and the unrestrained joy that I think makes him not just handsome but sexy (hit mute if you don't think the Europop adds to the atmosphere):

Staying A-Breast of Human Rights

Good news for mamas and babies who don't want to live in seclusion until the kid is weaned. The AP reports:

The Vermont Human Rights Commission ruled there are grounds to believe Freedom Airlines discriminated against a woman ordered off a plane after refusing to cover up while breast-feeding her child. ...

The panel found grounds to believe that Freedom Airlines, a subsidiary of Mesa Air Group, Inc., "violated Vermont's prohibition against discrimination against women breast feeding in places of public accommodation," said Commission Executive Director Robert Appel.

First off, how fucking cool is it that Vermont has a Human Rights Commission? A quick Google search on "Ohio" and "human rights" turned up a hit for Ken Blackwell (who served on the UN Human Rights Commission! WTF?) and a colleague of mine here at the university who's got an intriguing project on human rights and feminist ethics. But no Ohio commission for human rights. Maybe one exists; but doesn't the name matter? How can we get one of these?

And how ironic is it that the offending company is called Freedom Airlines?

Here's the incident that sparked this case, again according to the AP:

On Oct. 13, 2006, Gillette, her husband and their then 22-month-old daughter, River, were headed to New York. While waiting at the gate to take off, Gillette, seated next to the window in the next to last row, began to breast feed her child.

She says a flight attendant handed her a blanket and told her to cover up. She refused. A short time later they were removed from the plane.

If you're reading my blog, you probably already agree that this is just silly. America really stands alone in so thoroughly sexualizing women's breasts that we're scandalized when they're used to give a child a healthy start.

What I want to add is how impractical a blanket usually is. Both my boys - but especially the Bear, who was born with his eyes wide open and pretty much hasn't closed them since - would never settle for eating under a tent, at least not once they were able to lift their heads. I mean, try throwing a large beach towel over your head during dinner and see how much you enjoy your meal! Better yet, move your plate into the bathroom and then savor your towel-bedecked meal. That's what babies and mamas are repeatedly demanded to do.

This kid was nearly two years old, so you can imagine how gladly she would've accepted a blanket over her face. Of course, if she'd thrown a tantrum as a result, that might've gotten her ejected, too. Then again, if your kid just repeatedly says "bye-bye" and you refuse to dope her with Benadryl, that alone can get you booted these days.

It doesn't have to be like this for nursing mamas and babies. I did most of the early care and feeding of the Bear in Germany, where he was born, and you know what? Breastfeeding in public was just a non-issue. Like most civilized people, the Germans recognize that sometimes, a breast is just a breast. And that mother's milk is a human right.

LOLmama and well-nursed LOLkitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Prostitution, Commodification, and Power

For the past couple of weeks, I've been thinking about the objectification, sexualization, and commodification of women, and now my friend figleaf has brought the topic (inadvertently) to a boil by questioning the motives of men who pay for sex. I have a lot of sympathy for his perspective – not so much for people who immediately take umbrage at any discussion of the ethics of sex work, or for those who willfully misconstrue people's arguments. Being "sex positive" doesn't oblige anyone to gloss over ethical issues related to sexuality.

So, while I welcome comments on this topic, including from those who disagree, I'll only entertain those that are civil. I see no point in engaging with people at either extreme of this issue who consider either sex work or any criticism of its structure as ipso facto offensive.

I say "its structure" because my intent here is to reflect on the structural relationships that sex work entails – specifically in prostitution since that's what prompted the dust-up at figleaf's and got me thinking. I won't make any arguments about the experiential level of sex work because I'm simply not qualified to do that. Many sex workers say that they're satisfied with their work on the whole, and I have no wish to call their feelings or experiences into question. I recognize that not all are coerced (though too many are), and that sex work may be the best-paying option for many women. (But this in itself says something damning about the choices society offers us: Something is seriously screwed up when women write to advice columnists asking why they shouldn't finance their Ph.D. work by stripping. And getting that degree might not help. I suspect many sex workers make better money than I do as an adjunct college instructor, never mind my fancy-pants diploma.)

Anyway: A key structural feature of prostitution is that it commodifies sex workers' bodies. This is one thing that sets it apart from most other occupations under capitalism. Instead of selling only one's labor power that has been alienated from one's body, one is selling one's body itself. One's body becomes a commodity.

The relationship between the buyer and the seller in prostitution is thus characterized by more intense exploitation than in most other sorts of occupations. This doesn't deny the prostitute's agency: nearly all humans take part in exploitative relationships of one sort or another, without totally giving up our own agency, intelligence, etc. It does mean that this particular relationship merits closer scrutiny.

I want to emphasize that exploitation entailing the body itself and not just labor power is not specific to sex work. Traditional marriage, in which women essentially cede unlimited access to their bodies in return for economic support and protection, is a more extreme form of such exploitation because it's usually a life-long, irrevocable contract. Surrogate motherhood (for remuneration beyond medical expenses) is a similarly exploitative type of relationship because a woman's body is rented out and sometimes her genetic material is sold outright. Most medical ethicists condemn the sale of human organs for analogous reasons.

As in any exploitative relationship, ethically the onus would rest on the buyer to put a stop to the exploitation. Practically and politically, it's almost always the seller of labor power who throws a wrench into the gears of exploitation because they are the ones who stand to benefit. But that doesn't neutralize the buyer/employer's ethical obligation.

This is why it's the client and not the prostitute who enters into an ethically problematic transaction.

Does this mean it's always wrong to hire a prostitute? Maybe not. In some cases, where a person would truly have no other access to sexual activity over the long term, it might be the lesser harm. That's a question for individual judgment. But I think such judgments can only be made fairly if one first acknowledges that buying a prostitute's services isn't just ethically neutral. I also suspect that such situations are quite rare, unless you accept the premise that people have a right to sexual gratification that requires little patience or effort on their own part.

So far, I've been writing as though this were a gender neutral problem. Of course, it's not. Whether the prostitute is a man or a woman, the client is almost always a man.

And here's where I think ethical reasoning alone is inadequate, because at a macro level, this is an issue of gender, class, and power, not just a matter of individual rights and choices. If you assume a right to sexual satisfaction not just through solo sex but through access to another warm body, why then has our society basically guaranteed that right to men but not to women? Yes, there are male prostitutes who cater to women, but they are very few. You sure don't see them on street corners (or at least I never have).

The ethics of prostitution thus have a political dimension, and figleaf is absolutely right: As an institution, prostitution shores up masculine sexual entitlement. It also undergirds the idea that there's one class of women willing to have sex with men for money but not so much for their own pleasure, while the majority of women are consigned to what figleaf calls the "no-sex class" – a scheme that envisions female sexual pleasure as largely irrelevant to both groups of women.

Photo by Flickr user Love_is, used under a Creative Commons license.

Easy Targets

I'm going for minimalist commentary here, because I'm going to make my poor students check out these images and I don't want to pre-empt even the most obvious observations. Don't expect any analysis from me - just snark, ingeniously disguised as questions, which are as subtle as the images themselves.

So, is this ad sexist? Or just, y'know, kinda free-spirited and irreverent?


Does your answer change if you know the ad is actually a 20' x 20' billboard in Times Square?

What if you consider the original use of targets (and please don't think too hard about the arrows, it gets painful really fast)?

Can you imagine a male model in this ad?

If it's not sexist, then we shouldn't be upset if little girls want to be playful and clever in the same way. This shirt is being marketed to toddlers:


But the sexualization of little girls is old hat, as this ad from 1976 shows:


So maybe we shouldn't get too heated up about that, either. Besides, sexualization is now the hottest theme in the presidential campaign. Just take a look at the emblem of a newly formed non-partisan anti-Hillary Clinton group, whose sole purpose is apparently to sell this classy logo on T-shirts:


It turns out there are oh-so-many ways to creatively use the c-word in politics. Here's one for the music fans:

So, as you can see, if these images are just silly, or tacky, or maybe a teensy bit sexist after all, it doesn't matter anyway. Because we all know that women's issues are all about identity politics, or special interests. They surely don't have much to do with real politics.

Images:
Target ad via Shakesville
Hooter's toddler tee via Feministe
Love's Babysoft ad via copyranter
Anti-Clinton logo via Salon's Broadsheet
Anti-Clinton T-shirt also via Broadsheet