Adam, Eve, and ... Insurance?

A friend and colleague (who just happens to be both gay and Catholic) recently sent me this, brimming with blasphemic glee.

I'm still trying to figure out how this ad will sell insurance. If you have a theory, let me know in comments. Otherwise, just enjoy.

Time Travel to the Island of Lost Toys

From the annals of classic 1970s ads, here's a reminder of what's gone lost in the world of play since my childhood.

I'm not arguing for a pink-and-blue-tinged nostalgia. I remember how clearly trucks were considered a boy toy. My little brother adored his Tonka trucks while I stuck to my stuffed animals. I was no gender outlaw in the sandbox. He got a doctor kit for Christmas; I got a nurse kit. All we really cared about was the bottle of candy pills. Still, the message hit its mark.

But by 1972, marketers couldn't just ignore the burgeoning social ferment. In the first of these ads, check out how many dads are involved with their kids - sons and daughters alike. Note the nod toward racial inclusivity. In all honesty, toy marketing is no more racist or sexist in those ads than it is today; maybe less so.

And man, were these ads prescient for 1972! Thirty-seven years later, we're surrounded by plastic crap that breaks on contact. We're deluged by gadgetry meant to entertain rather than engage. I love the line:

You see, we've learned that when a toy doesn't need a kid, in a very short time, the kid doesn't need the toy.

But enough seriousness. If you're old enough to remember 1972, by now you're recalling the classic Tonka elephant commercial and wondering where it went. It's here in this clip, too; ain't YouTube grand? Unlike platform shoes and Richard Nixon, the Tonka elephant hasn't gone terminally uncool. (Well, okay, so Nixon was never cool.) Enjoy!

Sweet Schadenfreude: Adieu, Bill Kristol

Yesterday, in response to Amanda Marcotte's post arguing that that New York Times should give Steven Pinker a column on language to distract him from bloviating on ev psych, I said:

Now that you’re found the perfect job for Pinker, can we launch a re-employment program for Bill Kristol, too?

And lo! Today comes word that the Times has ended Kristol's contract (I read the happy news at Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.) I feel a lot of empathy for people getting laid off right now. For Kristol, it's pure schadenfreude, sullied only by the news that the Washington Post has already offered him a monthly gig.

So I may be cognitively impaired at the moment. (I'm feeling much like I did a few days ago: still much afflicted with these neurological symptoms, still waiting for an answer.) But I seem to be developing powers of prognostication. Maybe even mind control! I'm gonna go try to bend some spoons now.

Queering Masculinity, '70s Style

A few days ago, while I was having coffee with a colleague and friend of mine, we somehow got onto the subject of "Match Game." I spent hundreds of hours watching that show during those long, lazy summers when I was in late grade school and junior high, circa 1975. The fact that everyone's parents disapproved of the show's sexual innuendo, which was as wall-to-wall as our shag carpets, only added to the allure.

My friend said, "Well, there's a theory that Charles Nelson Reilly queered the game show!" Not her original thesis - I think it may come from Elana Levine's Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television- but looking back, I knew immediately what she meant. Back then, however, I had no clue that Charles Nelson Reilly was gay; I just thought he was funny. (Judging from this comment thread on Pam Spaulding's obit for him from 1997, I wasn't the only kid who didn't get it.)

Not that anyone used the term queer back then in the mid-1970s. It was still an insult, years away from being reappropriated. At least in North Dakota, all things homosexual were still very hush-hush, which helps explain my cluelessness.

But there was so much change in the media around that time. While people weren't yet regularly labeled as "gay," depictions of non-straight people were beginning to proliferate, even if Ellen DeGeneres was still unimaginable in my corner of the Upper Midwest. I grew up listening to Elton John and David Bowie. I just didn't have a handy label for what made them different from, say, Billy Joel.

In some ways, though, the more remarkable thing was the portrayals of "straight" masculinity that really don't look quite so straight nowadays. I mean, the hero of Saturday Night Fever was a dancer. The soundtrack was provided by the oh-so-fey Bee Gees. Luke Skywalker looks downright girly by today's standards. So do all the teen heartthrobs of the time: David Cassidy, Shaun Cassidy, Leif Garrett, Parker Stevenson. (Of course, that layered-look, blow-dried haircut can't help but be anti-macho. You have to wonder if they all had the same stylist as Farrah Fawcett.)

And then there was this commercial, which I hadn't thought about for thirty years until I stumbled upon it a few hours after my game-show nostalgia session: "I'm a Pepper, you're a Pepper ..." Imagine, if you can, a soda commercial today featuring a man singing and dancing like a leprechaun. (The head Pepper was, as it turns out, David Naughton, he of "American Werewolf in London.")

I'm not saying that those singing and dancing Peppers were gay. But man oh man, did they queer masculinity!

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.)

Is Blue's Clues Going Black?

Via image.fishpond, used under fair use provisions of copyright law for educational and critical purposes. Welcome message to Viacom spiders: We love Blue's Clues, so please consider this a free promo and don't make me take the pic down. :-)

I live very happily without MTV and VH1. I get most of my Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert online anyway. No one in my house is a big Spongebob fan. But losing Nick Jr. and Noggin? Blue's Clues and Dora the Explorer? That is a crisis.

The crisis is scheduled for midnight tonight. When the ball drops for the new year, my #%*&$ cable provider, Time Warner, will also drop all Viacom channels. A last-minute settlement is still possible but unlikely, since Viacom claims Time Warner is refusing to negotiate.

Why - instead of hearing this directly from Time Warner - did I get word of it instead from Skippy the Bush Kangaroo? (Thanks, Skippy and Jill!)

These are the fruits of media consolidation, folks. Time Warner and Viacom are mired in a spitting match to determine who's the more powerful player in their little oligopolous world. They don't give a damn about notifying their customers. Why, Time Warner isn't even reachable via their customer service number today! All I get is a recorded message claiming "technical difficulties."

These big media meanies don't even mind if they make my little Tiger cry. He loves Blue's Clues and Max and Ruby. He used to be passionate about Dora, though that has faded slightly. Gosh, the whole family likes the Wonder Pets. If Blue goes black, even for a few days, tears are sure to ensue.

Those tears might just be mine if I have to do without what a friend of mine calls "the bad parent machine." She means that in the most affectionate way possible, because she too relies on TV at strategic moments. Not constantly, not indiscriminately. In my house, the kids are allowed to watch TV mostly in the early mornings, and then mainly on weekend and vacation days.

Yes, I'm a slacker. I like to sleep in when I can. Blue lets me do that. So for the sake of us dedicated slacker parents, let's hope Viacom and Time Warner catch a clue.

The Facebook Creeper

Voyeur kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Full disclosure: I am a Facebook creeper. Or so says one of my students from last quarter.

She and I get along great, so I have reason to think she meant this in the friendliest possible way. Still she has a point.

When she said this, we were discussing Facebook in class. I was pontificating about how people shouldn't Do Stupid Things on Facebook. (And Facebook embarrassment is not just for students anymore: Salon had a hilarious article a few weeks back on how "adults" manage to mortify themselves by not understanding how un-private Facebook actually is.)

So I told my students that I joined Facebook to see what they're doing on it. No, I'm not a voyeur. I wasn't particularly focused on individuals' behavior. But I did want to learn about how they were collectively using what was then a pretty new medium, back in spring 2007. I was curious about what it meant for gender, identities, and human interactions.

Ironically, that made me an "early adopter" of Facebook, at least among my old-fart friends. (My students, of course, were already all on it.) I think the last time I was an early adopter of anything was in the mid-1980s, when I helped my sister buy a 128k Macintosh (the original model) and then a 512k "enhanced" Mac for myself.

Anyway, what I learned just by browsing groups (not by searching for specific students) was pretty illuminating. A few of my young female students were part of a group dedicated to chatting about anal sex. While I (obviously) have no problem with that, it's also not information I'd suggest sharing with future employers. Then there was the quiet young gentleman who sat in the front row of my Intro to Women's Studies class, got good grades, and belonged to a group called something like "We f*ck bitches without a condom." (I couldn't find the group anymore when I searched for it just now, more's the pity.)

But that was back when Facebook was the playground of university students and employees. Now it's opened up to the world. As the all other oldsters sign up, I've enjoyed reconnecting (however superficially) with people I remember very fondly from my distant past. I could have hundreds of friends if I weren't so lackadaisical about it, as my college and grad friends are signing on in droves.

And so are the creepers. The real ones, not the fake ones like me. I got my very first one last week when this message arrived in my Facebook inbox:

Hi Pretty,how are You doing Over there..i am very Impressed with your Profile and your personalilty of being Goofy is very Attractive to me, I will like to know You More better and Lets see where Things is Going to lead,Because I believe that there is a Reason why we are Both on this Dating site...If You don't Mind my IM is [creep-o-rama] at yahoo, you can add me into Your yahoo list so that we can know ourself better......nice pics and over ur profile...see u soon...

Now, I really was creeped out by this, because my privacy settings are pretty tight. Only "friends" can see my profile, which lists me - twice! - as married. So I assume my creeper has some way of spamming people's mailboxes en masse. In retribution, I was very very tempted to include the link to his page; anyone who wants it can email me, but I'm not that mean. Also I don't want a trail leading back to me, even under my Sungold nom de blog.

My creeper still got me to check out my own profile to see if I'd described myself as having a "goofy" personality. It's not out of the question that I'd write that. Also, "Pretty" is close enough to one variation of my real-life name that I did a serious double-take.

On the other hand, I sort of like the capitalization of "You," as if I were a goddess. I'm sure a lot of gals will dig his writing style. It reminds me of the "Hot Russian Lady Looking for True Love" school of spam, except tailored toward us poor lonely women who've been sadly underserved by spammers - until now.

The dude claims to have gotten a grad degree from Stanford. Ya think?

In all seriousness, it's probably good that this little wake-up call got me to doublecheck my privacy settings. If you've barred everyone except friends and family from peeking at your stuff, it's unlikely that a creeper is after you, personally. That's why I'm not worried about this douche, in the end. But it's probably also good to be reminded that everything we do online can and will come back to bite us - even if we're not looking for a job in the Obama Administration.

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.

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?

Bloggers: The Adjunct Professors of the Media?

The founder of Shakesville, Melissa McEwan, reappeared earlier this week after contemplating an end to her blogging career. I can't say I blame her. She does a daunting amount of work for no pay whatsoever. Melissa's long post explaining her absence and return is touching and illuminating. It sounds like she's experiencing the post-election fatigue that has struck many of us, combined with burnout from long hours for only intermittent recognition. And she's been working for free. Now, many of her loyal readers are pledging to support Shakesville with a regular stream of donations.

I'm glad Melissa has a supportive community. I think it's lovely that she's getting lots of donation offers. But she'll need an awful lot of small donors - or a few exceedingly generous ones - to even make minimum wage for her efforts. This still doesn't add up to an income!

Melissa's quandary makes me wonder how sustainable independent, progressive blogging will prove to be. It's precisely these truly independent progressive blogs that are creating a meaningful public sphere - a cradle of civil society - in a country that desperately needs reasonable, critical discourse. Yes, progressive bloggers do say "fuck" a lot, but they're civil on a far deeper level. They've placed relentless pressure on Democratic candidates to respond to our concerns. They've given voice to those who've been silenced. They've pushed a host of issues onto the agenda of the corporate media. In short, they're playing a leading role in transforming American politics. I seriously wonder if Obama could have won without them.

And most independent lefty bloggers do this work without any compensation. With loads of luck, their blogging might catapult them into the limelight long enough to snag a book contract or some freelance writing for established media. Needless to say, even those folks aren't getting rich from their writing.

What to do? Donations can only be a temporary, patchwork solution. In fact, the whole language of "donations" and "tip jars" has been troubling me all day. Other people who work their asses off to do a job don't expect to live from donations! They're paid wages or salaries. The language reminds us that they've earned their pay. Don't bloggers do the same? Or will people persist in seeing major projects like Shakesville as basically a hobby?

Here's where I have some hard-earned empathy for Melissa and others in her boat - less from my experience as a small-potatoes blogger than as a long-term adjunct professor.

Both bloggers and adjuncts repeatedly get the message that they should feel lucky to have a creative outlet for their talents. Both are too often looked down upon by colleagues who ought to be their allies: tenured professors and conventional journalists. Both earn a pittance or nothing at all. (In America, adjuncts usually get paid something, but in Germany unpaid gigs are quite common.)

And yet both bloggers and adjuncts serve an essential function in society. We educate. We inspire. We provoke. We contribute an outsider's perspective. We fill needs neglected by those in more comfy positions.

Universities, at least, have resources that can potentially be used to improve the lot of adjuncts. This just requires the will to recommit to teaching, as opposed to administration and capital projects. (My chair and dean have done that for me, and I'm now on an annual contract - bless them!)

The solution is less obvious for blogs, where many of the readers are themselves unpaid bloggers. As I've already suggested, the donations model is not sustainable on a large scale or in the long run. Melissa rightly argues that ads are no solution, either, especially for feminist blogs where key terms generate bizarrely counterproductive ads. Just one example: Last spring, Feministing was plagued by a Playboy ad, as my friend Sugarmag pointed out (I'd link to this if her blog were still up).

I don't have any realistic solutions. I do have a few fantasy ones. Maybe George Soros would establish a foundation for lefty bloggers? Better yet, how about a foundation supported by a surtax on Rupert Murdoch and other major media conglomerates? I think that'd be perfectly just, considering the yawning gap that they've created in media coverage - and that bloggers are bridging.

I just know one thing for sure: we'll be totally blinkered in seeking solutions until we reframe politically engaged blogging as something far more important and serious than a hobby. We need to ditch the talk of donations and tip jars. Especially on the scale of Shakesville, blogging is a public service and a crucial, vibrant part of civil society. Those who provide this service should be able to earn a decent living from it.

And before I get way too sanctimonious, one final thought: I hope that Melissa really will use some of her earnings to buy some first-rate catnip and paint her house sparkly purple, as some of her commenters suggested. That is what we do with real income. We spend it on both projects both noble and silly without having to be accountable to "donors." If Grey Kitty, patron cat of Kittywampus, were still here today, she'd remind us that there's nothing nobler than good 'nip, even if it did make her drool.

Lady in Red

Here's how to become invisible to men: Turn 35 and have a baby or two. (Never mind the MILF stereotype; an actual real live baby is not generally a major attractant to random men.)

Here's how to become visible to men again: Clothe yourself in red.

Or so say scientists at the University of Rochester who've found evidence that men are more attracted to women who are either clad in or surrounded by the color red.

To quantify the red effect, the study looked at men's responses to photographs of women under a variety of color presentations. In one experiment, test subjects looked at a woman's photo framed by a border of either red or white and answered a series of questions, such as: "How pretty do you think this person is?" Other experiments contrasted red with gray, green, or blue.

When using chromatic colors like green and blue, the colors were precisely equated in saturation and brightness levels, explained [researcher Daniela] Niesta. "That way the test results could not be attributed to differences other than hue."

In the final study, the shirt of the woman in the photograph, instead of the background, was digitally colored red or blue. In this experiment, men were queried not only about their attraction to the woman, but their intentions regarding dating. One question asked: "Imagine that you are going on a date with this person and have $100 in your wallet. How much money would you be willing to spend on your date?"

Under all of the conditions, the women shown framed by or wearing red were rated significantly more attractive and sexually desirable by men than the exact same women shown with other colors. When wearing red, the woman was also more likely to score an invitation to the prom and to be treated to a more expensive outing.

The red effect extends only to males and only to perceptions of attractiveness. Red did not increase attractiveness ratings for females rating other females and red did not change how men rated the women in the photographs in terms of likability, intelligence or kindness.

(See the whole press release here.)

So I'll go out on a limb here and say yes, independent Kittywampus research confirms this. Of course, our scientific standards are low - one data point will do ya - as befits the walnut-sized feline brain.

When I was on my way to the Berkshire Conference last summer, I experienced something that hadn't happened to me since my kids were born. I had a middle seat on the airplane. On either side of me were attractive men in their early to mid fifties. Both seemed interested in flirting with me. Not that I was looking for it - and mind you, I was on my way to a conference with 99% female attendees, so even if I'd been single, I doubt I would have been in that mode. But it was interesting and, okay, gratifying to not be invisible.

It's funny; when you're young, unwanted male attention ranges from annoying to threatening, but when it disappears altogether, that too is a harsh insult.

So maybe it's just that I'm a veritable man magnet (ha!) and my superpowers were unleashed as soon as I didn't have my two kids in tow.

Or maybe it's that I was wearing red. This combination, to be precise, which includes some of those nice yellows that attract garden pests (and that the researchers apparently didn't test).


(Bear in mind, I wasn't doing my fake ballerina pose on the plane.)

For what it's worth, my two young sons love this red and gold combination too, so maybe the red preference starts really early, in that stage of childhood innocence where they just know they love bright colors, and they love their old mama, and the two things together are irresistible.

So I'm on board with the University of Rochester scientists' findings. But I really balked at how they were reported in the media. The report I initially read - from WTAE in Pittsburgh - said this, again echoing the press release:

"Our research demonstrates a parallel in the way that human and nonhuman male primates respond to red," they wrote. "In doing so, our findings confirm what many women have long suspected and claimed: that men act like animals in the sexual realm. As much as men might like to think that they respond to women in a thoughtful, sophisticated manner, it appears that at least to some degree, their preferences and predilections are, in a word, primitive."

(From the report at WTAE Pittsburgh.)

Ha! We knew it! Men are just beasts!

(Sigh. Deep, exasperated, frustrated sigh.)

Look. I'm plenty willing to believe that men are animals. I'm just not willing to believe that women are somehow higher. Put women up on a pedestal, and we're guaranteed to fall down.

I was all ready to blame the scientists for signing on to these assumptions when I decided to track down the original study, which appears in the latest Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (full text available for a fee here; I used my library access). Their article shows that the university's public relations people and the media share the blame for catering to stereotypes, while the scientists appear to have been scrupulously evenhanded:

As much as men might like to think that they respond to women in a thoughtful, sophisticated manner, it appears that at least to some degree, their preferences and predilections are, in a word, primitive. Women, however, may have little room for phylogenetic pride, as it is possible that they respond to male red in a manner similar to that of nonhuman female primates. In several species of primate, red is displayed most prominently in dominant males (Setchell & Dixson, 2001), and females appear to be particularly attracted to male conspecifics showing red (Darwin, 1874; Waitt et al., 2003). Interestingly, women find dominant men highly attractive (Rainville & Gallagher, 1990; Sadalla, Kenrick, & Vershure, 1987), especially during ovulation (Gangestad, Simpson, Cousins, Garver-Apgar, & Christensen, 2004), and it may be that women perceive red on men as a dominance cue with amorous implications. We have recently begun to examine the question of women’s response to a “gentleman in red” (which, it is important to reiterate, is independent of the question of men’s response to a “lady in red”) and have acquired preliminary evidence that a display of red on a man indeed increases his attractiveness to women. Thus, at least with regard to red and sex, it seems that neither men nor women will be able to rightfully claim the evolutionary high road.

(Andrew J. Elliot and Daniela Niesta, "Romantic Red: Red Enhances Men’s Attraction to Women," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2008, Vol. 95, No. 5, 1150–1164; quotation from p. 1161)

In other words, we're all animals. I'm cool with that.

In fact, I'd love to see the researchers take a closer look at women's affinity for pink and purple. Sure, those are classic sparkle pony and Barbie colors. But in us hairless mammals at the top of the food chain, aren't pink and purple also sex colors par excellance?

Just coincidentally, my husband is wearing a red fleece jacket this evening. Yum ...

The Math of Distraction

While burning some grilled cheese sandwiches for tonight's dinner, I heard an NPR report on the presidential candidates' day. The reports on Obama and McCain were roughly equal in length. They had quite a few sound bites from Obama. At least half of them addressed the "lipstick on a pig" non-issue.**

Virtually the entire report on McCain foregrounded Republican outrage over the "lipstick on a pig" comment.

So: One-half of Obama's report was devoted to this distraction, as was all of McCain's, or

(1/2 x 1/2) + (1 x 1/2) = 3/4.

This is how Rove and his minions get three-quarters of the news coverage to focus on utter crap!

This kind of politics doesn't add up to democracy.

Nor does this kind of media. Especially when the supposedly liberal reporters at NPR frame the day's event as Obama being put "on the defensive" in their lead-in comments.


** Here's Obama's remarks in context, as reported by the L.A. Times:

Obama compared the policies of McCain to those of President Bush.

"John McCain says he is about change too, and so I guess his whole angle is: 'Watch out George Bush, except for economic policy, healthcare policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics, we're really going to shake things up in Washington.' That's not change. That's just calling the same thing something different.

"You can put lipstick on a pig," Obama said. "It's still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still going to stink after eight years."

Obama's Thesis and He-Said, She-Said "Journalism"

Last week when I was nosing around for reaction's to Obama's Berlin speech, I came across this gem at MSNBC:

Conservative provocateurs have been hunting for it. Investigative journalists have been on the prowl, too. Even a former professor has been searching through old boxes for his copy of it. But today Barack Obama made it official: He doesn’t have and can’t release any copies of the thesis-length paper he wrote 25 years ago while a senior at Columbia University. “We do not have a copy of the course paper you requested and neither does Columbia University,” Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt told NBC News.

Oh dear. I have copies of student final exams going back a few years. The reason for this is not that I'm obliged to keep them; they can be thrown out after a year. No, it's that my students are generally unmotivated to pick them up once the new term starts, and I'm lazy about cleaning my office. I suppose I'll toss them when I move in my new office at the end of August.

As for actual papers? They go back to my students, with copious but often illegible comments. I make a copy if I suspect plagiarism. Otherwise, I don't keep them on file.

Any professor who'd keep a paper - and that's what this is, a lengthy paper, not a master's or doctoral thesis - for 25 years would need a much bigger office than mine.

But here's how MSNBC reports it. The story begins reasonably enough, telling of a "right-wing hit-man," David Bossie, who's been trying to dig up the thesis. Here's the ad he's been running in newspapers:

Image via MSNBC, reproduced here under fair use provisions of U.S. copyright law.

MSNBC then quotes Obama's former professor from the honors seminar he took on U.S. foreign policy, Michael Baron, who remembers Obama as a stellar student. Remarkably, Baron thinks he actually kept a copy of the thesis paper until eight years ago - but he then trashed it while moving house.

So on one level, the MSNBC report appears to be debunking wingnut rumors. But it's playing an ugly double game. Consider this header:

The dog ate my homework?

And then there's the article's ending, which gives Bossie the final word:

Case closed?

So is that it? Is the Case of the Missing “Thesis” over?

Not so fast, Sherlock.

“If Obama says he doesn't have a copy, I would have to call him a liar,” declared David Bossie, the conservative activist. “Obama has it or knows where it is but no one has pressed him seriously for it,” Bossie said.

In other words, for some, the search continues.

There's a convention in American journalism which requires only that "both sides" of a story be told. This passes as objectivity, no matter how bat-shit loony one side may be. At best, MSNBC is engaging in this he-said, she-said type of journalistic "ethics." (Jon Swift took the piss out of this better than anyone else so far.)

At worst, MSNBC is throwing its weight behind Bossie, becoming complicit with the right-wing hit-men. The fact that the article ends with his words gives some credence to this intepretation.

Either way, this is horseshit, not real journalism. What I learned from this article can be easily summed up:

1. Obama was a more diligent college student than I (who refused to write an honors thesis because it would have required sustained effort).
2. Obama nurtured an interest in the Soviet Union and arms control (not a bad thing in a future president).
3. Obama's former prof sounds like a super-nice guy.
4. Bossie sounds like a world-class Arschloch. (Some of the translations behind the link are rather loose, but all of them apply.)
   
5. MSNBC is no better than Faux News.

Sex for Gas: Selective Perception

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

Salon’s Broadsheet reports:

Now you can tell your grandchildren you lived through a time when oil prices were so high that some women resorted to trading their virtue for gas.

According to the Smoking Gun, a Kentucky woman is currently facing prostitution charges for doing just that, providing sex to a gas station customer in exchange for $100 paid on his Speedway card, or about 25 gallons' worth of gasoline.

Well, okay. I’m not disputing that this actually happened - not at all. But I'm not at all convinced that this story is a real shocker.

In the course of history, women have exchanged sex for just about anything and everything. And while I don’t have proof - statistics on the sex for gas racket are hard to come by - I'm pretty certain this isn't the first time women have swapped favors for gas (or a ride, or a meal, or protection, or jewelry, or ...)

So the only reason the media is even registering this story is selective perception. At the subsistence level of prostitution, there are tens and hundreds of thousands of women who are this desperate every day. Their desperation isn't new.

The only reason this poor woman's arrest made news is that gas is over $4 a gallon. I don't want to be too curmudgeonly, but it seems to me that high gas prices outrank low-paid prostitutes just about any day in America.

Jon Stewart on Baracknophobia

Via the Huffington Post, Jon Stewart does a funny takedown of the media's rumor mill and its love affair with "the audacity of fear":



The "lady parts October surprise" would deserve a post of its own, but I've got no time for it. I'm in a hotel room at the National Women's Studies Association meeting and I need to get to my session.

Media Misogyny, One More Time

As Hillary Clinton's campaign winds down (or so I hope), there's a video circulating on YouTube that serves as an ugly reminder of how the media trafficked in sexism over the past few months. It's worth watching unless you have poorly controlled blood pressure:



(Via Alternet.)

My favorite moments in this video feature Chris Matthews embarrassing himself yet again. He knows full well that he's being a sexist asshole. He just can't stop himself. At one point he even tells a guest on his show, "I get in trouble for this but you’re great looking obviously ..." which would be fine if he were asking her out. But again, she's a guest on his show, presumably invited to talk about politics, not to flirt. (Though to be honest, even in a social setting, I can't imagine Matthews would have the shadow of a chance with her.)

And then there's poor little Tucker Carlson, whose manhood is so fragile that he confesses to having to cross his legs whenever he sees Hillary Clinton.

This ugly media sexism wasn't enough to make me rally behind Clinton; it didn't cancel out her bellicosity. It does enrage me. And it again points out that while racism and sexism are both virulent, they often operate in different registers. While people won't 'fess up to their racism quite so publicly, they sure carry it with them into the polling booth.

But we didn't see open racism from the pundits in the same way that we saw blatant sexism. Imagine the casually stupid comment on women's hormonal moodiness (toward the end of the clip) transposed into racial pseudo-science. You'd have to go back to nineteenth-century phrenology and the toxic notion that people of African descent are closer to apes than to humans. Pinheaded comments about women PMSing have about as much place in the media as does discredited racial anthropology.

If Narcissus Had a Blog

Narcissicats from I Can Has Cheezburger?

The confession is an old, old literary genre, going back at least to Augustine and his Confessions (which he wrote after he'd committed enough fun sins to be worth confessing, of course). Narcissism is probably even older. At least, it was a big enough deal for the ancient Greeks that they gave it a name and its very own myth.

But the Internet has taken these ancient impulses and not just modernized but amplified them. Most blogs - apart from the big political blogs - have a confessional element. Even the large feminist blogs (Feministing, Pandagon, Shakesville) give us glimpses of the writers' lives, whether it's their pets or relationships or just non-blogging activities.

In moderation, these dollops of the personal make blogging way more fun than conventional journalism for readers and writers alike. And sharing some well-chosen personal details is only rarely narcissistic. Even outright navel-gazing isn't necessarily narcissistic. But blogging crosses that line when the writer exposes other people's personal lives.

Lately, narcissistic confessionalism seems to be mounting a takeover of print journalism, too. This is troubling insofar as it represents further degradation of journalistic standards. It's also compelling in ways much like a full pint of Ben and Jerry's. You can't help opening it; you can't stop yourself from taking just one more spoonful. And when you hit the bottom of the carton, you realize you're feeling just mildly queasy.

Case in point #1: Emily Gould's piece in this weekend's New York Times Magazine, in which she confesses to previous sins of "oversharing" through an 8000-word exercise in, well, oversharing. Gould used to work for Gawker, which I've never really followed since it's such a New York insider thing, but that hardly matters; oversharing has a universal fascination. And this is oversharing on a grand, epic scale.

Within the first dozen paragraphs, we already know why Gould's ex-boyfriend Henry will have to break up with her:

As Henry and I fought, I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted. I don’t think I understood then that I could be right about being free to express myself but wrong about my right to make that self-expression public in a permanent way. I described my feelings in the language of empowerment: I was being creative, and Henry wanted to shut me up.

That's Gould "reflecting" now on how she disrespected Henry's privacy on her personal blog. But see, even as Gould pillories her own past behavior - even as she seems to be confessing to her own prior lack of judgment and discretion - she doesn't acknowledge that she's dragging poor, private Henry into the public arena once again, this time not in a small-potatoes personal blog but in The New York Times Magazine! Even though Gould does seem to be assuming most of the blame for their break-up, millions of people now know that Henry would "sulk" about her blogging. That line between personal oversharing and encroachment on others' privacy? Guess what - you just crossed it again.

We learn, too, about Henry's successor, Josh Stein, and the courtship he and Gould conducted mostly via IM while sitting next to each other at the office. We hear about how they finally became a couple while on a weekend retreat:

Josh and I sat together on the couch, and I put my head on his shoulder in a completely friendly, professional way. The next day, I let him apply sunscreen to the spot in the middle of my back that I couldn’t reach. As a joke, we walked down the wood-plank paths that crisscross the island holding hands. I also remember joking, via I.M. as we worked, about us wanting to cross the hallway that separated our bedrooms and crawl into bed with each other at night when we couldn’t sleep. On our last day, I congratulated myself on having made it through the trip without letting these jokes turn into real betrayal. And then, 20 minutes outside the city on the Long Island Railroad on the way home, Josh kissed me.

We hear about how Gould chronicled their relationship on her blog, Heartbreak Soup, and how when things unraveled between the lovebirds, Gould blogged about those details as well:

A few weeks later, I arrived home in the early morning hours after abruptly extricating myself from Josh’s bed — he had suddenly revealed plans for a European vacation with another girl — and immediately sat down at my computer to write a post about what had happened. On Heartbreak Soup, I wrote a long rant about the day’s events, including a recipe for the chicken soup I made the previous afternoon and the sex that I’d been somehow suckered into even after finding out about how serious things were with the other girl.

Gould lets one of her best girlfriends pronounce the verdict on Stein after he cools it with her: "Emily, he’s so evil." Of course, this is as good a way as any to let all of us, too, know that he's evil, without Gould taking any ownership of the word.

But maybe she's right. Stein actually launched the first volley in their mass-media post-breakup oversharing contest, publishing a long piece of his own called "The Dangers of Blogger Love" in Page Six magazine. (You can read it here, along with Alex Carnevale's sarcastic take-down of it.) Stein tells us that he learned from Gould's blog that she was in love with him; that she used her blog to slam his former girlfriend's taste in magazines; that she routinely read his email.

Eew. If you have any Ben and Jerry's in the freezer, you should haul it out now, at the very latest, if you're clicking on any of these links.

Reading both Stein's and Gould's pieces - and heaven help me, I read every word - it's hard not to wonder if maybe they're both a little bit evil. Or at least deeply amoral, creepy, and, well, narcissistic.

Case in point #2: Narcissism just oozes from Philip Weiss's essay in last week's New York Magazine. Entitled - and I mean entitled! - "The Affairs of Men," Weiss's piece purports to examine the reasons men cheat on their wives. Mostly, though, he gives us an embarrassing yet irresistible glimpse into his own wretched psyche. Picture Philip Roth - minus much of the literary talent and masturbation - but plus TMI on his own marriage.

Weiss lets us know why he's so frantically tempted to sleep with women who aren't his wife. And it's not just that they're younger, tattooed waitresses whom he imagines - delusionally! - might be interested in his man-meat. No, he makes abundantly clear how he views his own wife: as a sexless middle-aged secretary-cum-organizer who mocks him and refuses to grant him the freedom that any French wife would give her husband.

I ... suggested [to my friend] that we could change sexual norms to, say, encourage New York waitresses to look on being mistresses as a cool option. “That’s fringe,” my friend said dismissively. Wives weren’t going to allow it, and we men grant them a lot of power; they’re all as dominant as Yoko Ono. “Look, we’re the weaker animal,” he said. “They commandeer the situation.” He and I love our wives and depend on them. In each of our cases, they make our homes, manage our social calendar, bind up our wounds and finish our thoughts, and are stitched into our extended families more intimately than we are. They seem emotionally better equipped than we are. If my marriage broke up, my wife could easily move in with a sister. I’d be as lost as plankton.

Yeah. Look, Mr. Weiss, if your wife is all that keeps you from reverting to the bottom of the food chain, your marriage has got bigger issues, starting with your own insecurity and incompetence and ending with your inability to view your wife as a sexual being. Feel free to expose your own pathetic douchebaggery. But none of this gives you the right to portray her - and all your friends' wives, too - as castrating scolds, especially when you seem to believe that what's sauce for the gander isn't sauce for the goose. When Weiss proclaims the beauty of non-monogamy to his wife, she gets "agitated," then says:

"Okay. Let’s have an open marriage. And I have to be out Wednesday night."

I said, No thanks.

So why should those of us lucky enough not to be Mrs. Weiss give a rat's ass about any of this foolishness? I mean, I didn't have to read past their first few lines of these essays, which give ample warning of the wreckage ahead.

Responding to Gould's essay, Jonathan V. at Galley Slaves observes:

... there is a difference between expression and exhibitionism. To the extent that blogs encourage the latter--even in thoughtful, professional writers--they are a pernicious force in the culture.

But as Gould's and Weiss's essays show, narcissism isn't just for blogs anymore. Print publications dangle pieces like theirs in front of the blogosphere, knowing they'll drive up traffic to their online incarnations. As we watch bloggy narcissism and exhibitionism bleed into the supposedly respectable press, we're going to see more "articles" like these. If this becomes a larger trend, it will become a race to the bottom. (And yep, I realize that I just did my part to encourage this by first reading this tripe and then linking to it.)

These essays also raise questions for the rest of us who might not want to emulate their oversharing. How much personal information is too much? I've been fairly frank in my own blog about a couple of recent medical experiences - my "deep throat" exam and my UTI-related caffeine deprivation - and at least one long-ago lousy sexual encounter. I've got academic/personal interests in medicine, sexuality, and embodied experience, and so - since these really were my stories to tell, as long as I preserved the anonymity of my partner in bad sex - I didn't see any reason to protect my own privacy. Even though all of these episodes could be construed as oversharing, I wanted to explore those larger issues through them.

The real danger of amoral narcissism lies in violating other people's privacy. I write a little bit about my family here, but when I talk about my kids, it's mostly either very innocuous (like yesterday's post about making more persons) or focused on my own experiences of parenting. I don't want them to be mortified by me later - at least, not above and beyond the normal baseline of adolescent embarrassment. You also won't learn much about my husband and my marriage. If I ever take part in, say, TMI Tuesday (which is often pretty amusing on other people's blogs), you can be sure I'll keep it focused on me.

I'm not condemning people who put a lot more of their lives online than I ever will. I do think, though, that if what they write impinges substantially on other people's private lives, they're ethically obligated to write pseudonymously. And they'd better be careful not to blow their cover.

Augustine famously wrote, "Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet." Were Augustine reborn today as a confessional journalist, he'd have to rephrase it: "Grant me discretion and empathy, but not yet." At least not until he'd bagged a major article deal in a national magazine.

The Pregnant Gaps in "Juno"

I'm probably one of the last people in the United States to see Juno. I clearly need to get out more. Last night I finally rented the DVD - under pain of embarrassment since tomorrow's class will discuss abortion. I enjoyed the snappy dialogue and the wiseass humor, especially from Juno's parents. And I really didn't read it as glorifying teenage pregnancy or demonizing abortion, as did many commentators who actually go see movies while they're still in the theater.

But two things bugged me about it enough to require venting - two holes in plot/motivation big enough that you could drive a truck through them (or at least walk through them sideways while nine months pregnant).

(If you're one of the remaining five people who haven't seen the movie, you might stop here, because the rest of this post is full of spoilers. Sorry.)

First, I didn't buy Juno's motivations for walking out of the abortion clinic with her pregnancy intact. I'm not suggesting she should've had the abortion. That would be a doctrinaire and anti-choice position. I just wasn't convinced that anyone changes their mind just because the clinic's receptionist is a goth version of a twit with boundary issues, or because the other people in the waiting room appear to be basket cases.

What if it'd been clearer that Juno chose as she did in order to buck the pressure to be a conformist high schooler - to hide the pregnancy and pretend it never happened? That would be in character for her since later in the movie, she reacts to the stares at school with a "fuck 'em if they can't take a big belly" attitude. As it is, her decision seems capricious, which doesn't fit with Juno's smarts and savvy.

Juno's decision also just doesn't make emotional sense more generally. I don't believe that abortion is always a hard and fraught decision. Even when a woman is sad about deciding to abort and grieves her loss afterward, the decision itself might be clear to her and not a struggle at all. The same can be true for deciding to carry on with the pregnancy. I don't think, though, that it often hinges on completely random factors, as Juno's choice apparently does.

The second thing that left me feeling perplexed and unconvinced is how easily Juno gives up her baby at the end. Given how important it was for her to get to know the potential adoptive parents, can we really believe that she just puts the whole experience behind her as soon as she's "squeezed the baby out of her vag," as she would say? She could easily have decided in favor of an open adoption, which would ring more emotionally true with her behavior while pregnant.

Again, I'm not saying that she should have appeared tormented about relinquishing her baby. Having carried two of them to term, though, I know that it would be really hard not to form some sort of bond with the developing fetus. Juno doesn't use the term "fetus," anyway; to her, it's a baby from early on. When she goes for an ultrasound, you see her eyes shine with the wonder of it. She's not immune to that natural bonding that occurs gradually as you live with this strange, bony, watery creature inside you and feel its movements. So it would be much more convincing if she'd not just shrug it all off in the end but instead show a flash of wistful what-ifs.

Lacking that, I got wistful on her behalf, imagining how hard - how impossible - I would find it to grow a baby, give birth, give it away, and then forget about it. Interestingly, this isn't just the reaction of a sentimental old mama. One of my young male students reacted the same way about the ending. I think a lot of pro-life people want to believe in that pat ending, though, and that's why they advocate adoption as a one-size-fits-all solution. If only it were that easy.

LOLkitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Eighteen Kids Make a Quiverfull

A woman in Arkansas, Michelle Duggar, is expecting her eighteenth child, according to an AP story that was reported today. And she's delighted about it. The tone of the press coverage is just as chirpy as the mother-to-be herself:

It's a happy Mother's Day for an Arkansas woman — she's pregnant with her 18th child. Michelle Duggar, 41, is due on New Year's Day, and the latest addition will join seven sisters and 10 brothers. There are two sets of twins.

"We've had three in January, three in December. Those two months are a busy time for us," she said, laughing.

The Duggars' oldest child, Josh, is 20, and the youngest, Jennifer, is nine months old.

The fast-growing family lives in Tontitown in northwest Arkansas in a 7,000-square-foot home. All the children — whose names start with the letter J — are home-schooled.

Duggar has been been pregnant for more than 11 years of her life, and the family is in the process of filming another series for Discovery Health.
(Source: AP via Yahoo)

I realize it may sound Grinch-like to grouse about another woman's pregnancy. I'm willing to take her joy at face value; I'm also willing to grant that reproductive rights has to include the right to make childbearing decisions that I personally find incomprehensible.

But there's a darker side to the Duggar megafamily, one that's not much covered in the media. The only trace of it in the AP article is a single sentence:

She and her husband, Jim Bob Duggar, said they'll keep having children as long as God wills it.

This is a phrase we've heard before. Remember the Andrea Yates case, where a Texas woman suffering from postpartum psychosis drowned all five of her children in the bathtub? She and her husband, too, transferred all of their moral agency to "God's will," even after previous pregnancies had obviously made Ms. Yates mentally ill.

I'm not suggesting that Ms. Duggar is going to snap under the strain - not at all. (In fact, with a highly regimented system for enlisting the children in household work, her life is immeasurably more organized than my own. Not that I'd want to trade.) But there's a huge element of coercion in these fundamentalist communities that insist women forego birth control and turn their bodies over to God (and their husbands).

This is how the Duggars themselves describe their decision to accept as many children as their God will give them:

Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar married July 21st, 1984. At that time, they chose to use the birth control pill. They thought, “We don’t want children right now. We can’t afford them. We want children in our timing, when we’re ready.” Four years later they decided to have their first child. Then, Michelle went back on the pill, but she conceived and had a miscarriage. At that point they talked with a Christian medical doctor and read the fine print in the contraceptives package. They found that while taking the pill you can get pregnant and then miscarry. They were grieved! They were Christians! They were pro-life! They realized that their selfish actions had taken the life of their child.

They teach their kids creationism in their homeschooling, so the weird science in this passage is no shocker. They're parroting the idea that the pill is an abortifacient, which is simply not supported by any real, non-wingnut science. It is, however, at the heart of the anti-abortion movement's campaign to make hormonal birth control inaccessible (by convincing pharmacists not to fill prescriptions) and ultimately illegal.

Here's the rest of the story that's not being told by the media: Religiously, the Duggars are fundamentalist Baptists who - according to Wikipedia - support the Quiverfull movement. As journalist Kathryn Joyce reported in The Nation in late 2006, the Quiverfull movement demands wives be subservient to their husbands and bear as many children as possible to be "arrows" in a holy war against liberalism. Their bodies, Joyce writes, are to be a "living sacrifice" to God. The goal is to out-reproduce those of us who don't share their beliefs in an attempt to promote God's kingdom on earth, or at least their version of it. (Read Joyce's article; it's wonderfully reported, albeit chilling.)

Why do women go along with this pseudo-theology? I don't believe fundamentalist women - even those involved in such obviously anti-feminist movements as Quiverfull - are mere dupes. Just because a wife pledges subservience doesn't mean she's powerless. Quiverfull women, like Michelle Duggar, homeschool their children. For me, that would be a quick ticket to the loony bin. For Quiverfull women, I suspect it can be a source of power and satisfaction. Similarly, these women can build an identity around being crucial to building an army for God. Quiverfull elevates the status of motherhood, making it not just "the most important job in the world" (as the tired cliché would have it) but a holy mission. If you're already drawn toward having a large family anyway, what quicker route to fulfillment and meaning?

Another clue to the power Quiverfull women (and fundamentalist wives more generally) wield in mothering comes from the Duggar family's own website. It refers to "training" children and a "desire to train up their children to follow God with their whole heart." This is not-exactly-veiled code for an authoritarian approach to discipline that some fundamentalist Christians embrace. Two of its main exponents, Michael and Debi Pearl, describe it as geared toward producing perfect obedience:

"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it (Prov. 22:6)." Train up, not beat up. Train up, not discipline up. Train up, not educate up. Train up, not "positive affirmation" up. Training is the most obvious missing element in child rearing. Training is not discipline. A child will need more than "obedience training," but without it everything else will be insufficient. ...

There is much satisfaction in training up a child. It is easy and challenging. When my children were able to crawl (in the case of one, roll) around the room, I set up training sessions.

Try it yourself. Place an appealing object where they can reach it, maybe in a "No-no" corner or on an apple juice table (That's where the coffee table once sat). When they spy it and make a dive for it, in a calm voice say, "No, don't touch it." They will already be familiar with the "No," so they will pause, look at you in wonder and then turn around and grab it. Switch their hand once and simultaneously say, "No." Remember, you are not disciplining, you are training. One spat with a little switch is enough. They will again pull back their hand and consider the relationship between the object, their desire, the command and the little reinforcing pain.
(From Michael and Debi Pearl, "To Train up a Child")

Imagine deliberately setting up situations where an infant will be hit with a switch. An infant who's just learned to crawl! My Bear started that at six months! Even that exemplar of Christian authoritarianism, James Dobson, says: "There is no excuse for spanking babies or children younger than 15 to 18 months of age."

You could say many things about the parent in this vignette - that she (or he) is an incredible control freak, that she is indulging in cruelty. The one thing you can't say is that the parent is powerless. And therein, too, must lie some of the appeal for women who voluntarily sign up for fundamentalist family life. (I'm not thinking here at all of sects like the FLDS, where women have very little choice.)

But do you hear about any of this in the media version of the Duggar's story? No! Instead, the coverage emphasizes the quaintness, or cuteness, or sheer unusualness of the Duggars having (almost) 18 children. The website for the Discovery Channel show has fun games like "Name that Duggar!" But you scarcely hear a peep about the Quiverfull movement, its goals, its call for female subservience, or its adherents' medieval approach to child rearing - I mean, training.

Update, 11:20 p.m., May 10: Please check out the first comment for a fascinating inside perspective from a Quiverfull mother who practices attachment parenting and rejects the notion of wifely subservience. I'm glad to know that the movement is not monolithic and that there are some strong and assertive women in it. Thank you, Betsy, for your remarks.

Not Shrinking Violets

One more time, the trolls and troglodytes are harassing women on the web. This time, sex columnist Violet Blue came in for a bunch of unwarranted crap. She fought back late last week with a column that's worth reading in its entirety (so go check it out). The proximate cause of it was this chivalrous comment in an online chat about sex scandals:

"Sorry, but being an unattractive skank is not enough to make you an expert. Watching Violet is like watching the female version of Bill Gates expound on sex — something you just don't want to see. Or hear (thank God we don't have smell-o-vision!)"

Eew. Thank God we don't have to see what this guy is insecure about! Does he look like the Geico caveman? Or is he just an ordinary guy who'd be lucky to get a date with a smart, witty, attractive woman like Violet Blue who knows way more about sex than he ever will?

See? I can play that game too. But mostly, when women attack men online, we go after the substance of what they've said. We do sometimes take aim at their personal qualities, especially when they've got a long track record of assholery and dipshittery. I'm speaking now mostly about liberal women, not wingnut women, who generally inhabit a different Internet than I do.

Women aren't angels. Online, plenty of women indulge in ad hominem attacks, launched at each other as well as at men. That's part of the general coarseness and incivility that online anonymity seems to breed in people. (For a particularly vile example of this, see this comment thread at Pandagon, which in general is one of my favorite-most blogs.)

But liberal women don't generally attack people's appearance as a first or even last resort, and I have yet to see a woman threaten another poster with physical and/or sexual violence. While men, too, can take the brunt of nasty and even bullying behavior online, I don't know of any case involving a man that went as far as the death threats that dogged Kathy Sierra and forced her to quit tech blogging.

Violet Blue's response to the targeting of women online was inspired - and inspiring:

I just write and talk about sex. But every woman on the Internet gets called slutty and ugly and fat (to put it lightly) no matter what; all we have to be is female. ...

The problem is, with so many women I talk to, the trolling is effective. The number of times I've talked down a crying girlfriend after she's been trolled in her comments about being fat, ugly, skanky, slutty or stupid is higher than I can count (no matter what she writes about). Trolls watch too much mainstream porn and TV, and believe stereotypes are real; they slap us with it and then we believe it, too. ...

In Margaret Cho's "Beautiful" tour, she talks about recently being on a radio show and having the host ask her point-blank, live, on the air, "What if you woke up one day, and you were beautiful?" When asked, he defined beautiful as blonde, thin, large-breasted, a porno stereotype. Cho says, "Just think of what life is like for this poor guy. There's beauty all around him in the world, and he can only see the most narrow definition of it."

So maybe if you're a woman, you're just going to be fat and ugly on the Internet no matter what you look like, say or do. Of course, I could swap out my SFGate bio photo for Jenna Jameson's. Then maybe we'd have some serious discourse about sex culture around here.

(I quoted at length because it's all spot-on, but do read the rest here.)

Right. It's a classic double bind. If you're sexy, you can't be smart and serious. If you're smart and serious, you'd better not reveal your sexy side or you won't be taken seriously. And yet, when women don't combine all those things at once, we fall short of what Anna Quindlen called "effortless perfection."

I'm not suggesting the guys need to shoot for perfection, too. But how about we all cut women a little slack, and let us be our imperfect, sexy, smart, silly, sassy selves - out loud, in public, without fearing attacks on our person or safety.

Photo by Flickr user Lady-bug, used under a Creative Commons license.