new yorker story about chastity, abstinence, abortion, marriage, and everything sex-related.

some of these differences in sexual behavior come down to class and education. Regnerus and Carbone and Cahn all see a new and distinct “middle-class morality” taking shape among economically and socially advantaged families who are not social conservatives. In Regnerus’s survey, the teen-agers who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it. Regnerus writes, “They are interested in remaining free from the burden of teenage pregnancy and the sorrows and embarrassments of sexually transmitted diseases. They perceive a bright future for themselves, one with college, advanced degrees, a career, and a family. Simply put, too much seems at stake. Sexual intercourse is not worth the risks.” These are the kids who tend to score high on measures of “strategic orientation”—how analytical, methodical, and fact-seeking they are when making decisions. Because these teen-agers see abstinence as unrealistic, they are not opposed in principle to sex before marriage—just careful about it. Accordingly, they might delay intercourse in favor of oral sex, not because they cherish the idea of remaining “technical virgins” but because they assess it as a safer option. “Solidly middle- or upper-middle-class adolescents have considerable socioeconomic and educational expectations, courtesy of their parents and their communities’ lifestyles,” Regnerus writes. “They are happy with their direction, generally not rebellious, tend to get along with their parents, and have few moral qualms about expressing their nascent sexuality.” They might have loved Ellen Page in “Juno,” but in real life they’d see having a baby at the wrong time as a tragic derailment of their life plans. For this group, Regnerus says, unprotected sex has become “a moral issue like smoking or driving a car without a seatbelt. It’s not just unwise anymore; it’s wrong.”

this pretty much sums up my existence.

what i like about this passage is that it implies that girls in this middle- to upper-class group have something to strive toward, which in turn gives you something more to lose, which is why they tend not to have sex. maybe i’m making a leap here, but i’d posit that the girls in the pregnancy pact demographic aren’t exactly planning for their M.D.s or six-figure paychecks.

i don’t know how you inculcate career goals in huge swaths of the nation, but that’s what i suppose the liberal feminist agenda is for.

my mind has been totally preoccupied with palinmania, and my feminist rant is lurking somewhere, but i can’t find it in the muddle of the palincopia of news. i do know one thing, i don’t want to hear about bristol palin’s uterus again. ok, yes abstinence-only doesn’t work, but let’s talk about all the other scary things about palin:

1. she hates polar bears. she sued the interior dept to get them off the endangered animals list. she also dislikes salmon, other bears, and caribou. (but where will i get my coffee?)
2. she wants to drill the bejesus out of alaska. but whatever, it’s her state.
3. she apparently has foreign policy experience b/c alaska is near russia, says cindy mccain. i lived 20 min from windsor. what does that make me?
4. she may or may not have been part of an alaskan separatist party. her husband was part of one until 2002. GO AMERICA.
5. she has at least contemplated banning books from the wasilla library. then, for not supporting her administration, she fired the librarian who thought all the little kiddies should be able to read the catcher in the rye. kind of sounds like stalin.
6. she attends a pentecostal church. i guess that doesn’t affect her VP abilities, but i think it’s kind of creepy. ever see jesus camp!!?!?!
7. she’s anti-abortion.

given all that, there are a couple things in the wikipedia page that make me like her a little. obviously she’s an aggressive and ambition woman, which i can appreciate. also when she was mayor of wasilla, she reduced the mayoral salary, and when she was governor, she made the legislature sell some jet they had. i think she legitimately thinks waste spending is bad … she and i just completely disagree on what “waste” even is.

lastly, this sentence on her wikipedia page AMAZED me:

In 2002, term limits prevented Palin from running for a third term as mayor. Her stepmother-in-law, Faye Palin, ran for the office but lost the election to Dianne Keller after Sarah Palin endorsed Keller, her cousin.

is everyone in wasilla related to palin? yeesh.

lots of feminists really hate how beach volleyball leagues have really unfair rules about what women wear vs. what men wear for tournaments. women must wear bikini bottoms no larger than 2.5 inches on the side, or something like that; men can wear shorts and tank tops.

i agree it is a little ridiculous that they’re forced to be scantily clad (apparently this is a problem for some conservative countries that want to compete), but i have to admit that the slightly gay part of me really enjoys the bikinis. the solution to this objectification problem is to force men to go topless. then everyone can be equally naked, and joy will be felt by all. hooray.

btw, the fact that crocs is an AVP sponsor kind of pisses me off. george bush wears black crocs w/ black socks, and that is just terrible.

this weekend i watched for the first time two episodes of bridezillas — the show on WEtv where women act absolutely batshit as their wedding approaches. by the end, i was feeling mentally icky.

this is the highest rated show on WEtv, so i asked out loud to my (female) viewing companions: why do women watch and enjoy a show where women absolutely embarrass themselves — a show that revels in the instability these women display and finds glee in ridiculing them. answer: because it makes the viewer feel better about not being that nuts.

this made me really sad.

i cannot think of a male equivalent of this, where men watch other men act like idiots and feel good about not being an idiot themselves. there are shows where men do dumb shit (jackass, for one), but these guys aren’t derided; they’re objects of hero worship. people want to sleep w/ these men or hang out w/ them or get a beer. that is definitely not the case in bridezillas. (here, i recognize that idolizing men who hit themselves in the nuts is probably as twisted as finding joy in watching a bride-to-be throw her “cheap” platinum wedding band in the wine, but whatever.)

now a bit of disclosure: i already have a huge bias against this show since i’m coming from a stance of moral condescension. i do not enjoy watching bad things happen to people. i can’t stand america’s funniest home videos, and have never fully appreciated the office or seinfeld b/c they rely way too much on the utter humiliation of their characters for laughs. i realize most people find this sort of thing funny, but i think it takes a partially cruel mind to find it entertaining. i might be coldly rational, but i have no taste for schadenfreude.

and now that i’ve just insulted almost everyone, back to bridezillas.

this show is exactly the type of entertainment i’ve just derided, which is bad enough, but it takes it to a new, depressingly anti-feminist level. this isn’t a passive sort of “bad/awkward things happening to sort-of good people” (like the aforementioned sitcoms); bridezillas is about the active self-destruction of these women. and, just because it’s too obvious not to say, this “reality” show plays into the overemotional, highly volatile, irrational female stereotype — whose use would be more insulting if it didn’t have the ratings to back it up.

i’m not appalled that the women on these shows exist, but i am appalled that so many women watch it. i could probably go on for longer, but you get the gist.

and to end on a tangentially related but hilarious note: WEtv = wet v. entertainment for women (damn straight).

of hearing people talk about all these “angry white women” who are defecting to mccain. i’m not one to harp about “the media,” but the mass exodus of women from the democratic party to c-word-loving, women’s-rights-hating mccain is unlikely. and to keep talking about it is just insulting. from salon:

But in his excellent Sunday column, Frank Rich challenges the narrative, pointing out that Barack Obama actually has a huge lead among female voters. The whole column is worth a read, but here’s the clincher:

“The notion that all female Clinton supporters became ‘angry white women’ once their candidate lost — to the hysterical extreme where even lifelong Democrats would desert their own party en masse — is itself a sexist stereotype. That’s why some of the same talking heads and Republican operatives who gleefully insulted Mrs. Clinton are now peddling this fable on such flimsy anecdotal evidence.”

I’ve heard reports of Clinton followers who refuse to support Obama — and we will hear more from them, and about them, as the campaign wears on — but the vast majority of female Clinton supporters do. As Matthew Yglesias wrote over at the Atlantic.com, “The idea that Democratic women would defect en masse to the GOP in a fit of pique is a preposterous notion that seems to be founded on the underlying assumption that women can’t respond to their political choices as rationally as men can.”

i might be pissed, but i’m not stupid.
now leave me alone.

also known as a hillary clinton campaign obit. this puts slate to shame.

Woman in Charge, Women Who Charge

I am talking here not about the outcome of her candidacy … but rather about the climate in which her campaign was conducted. The zeitgeist in which Hillary floundered and “Sex” is now flourishing.

It’s a cultural moment that Andrew Stephen, writing with an outsider’s eye for the British magazine the New Statesman last month, characterized as a time of “gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind.” A moment in which things like the formation of a Hillary-bashing political action group, “Citizens United Not Timid,” a “South Park” episode featuring a nuclear weapon hidden in Clinton’s vagina, and Internet sales of a Hillary Clinton nutcracker with shark-like teeth between her legs, passed largely without mainstream media notice, largely, perhaps, because some of the key gatekeepers of mainstream opinion were so busy coming up with various iterations of the nutcracker theme themselves. (Tucker Carlson on Hillary: “When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.” For a good cry, watch this incredible montage from the Women’s Media Center.)
…
It’s nothing other than an expression of woman-hate — and the degree to which such expressions have flourished, in the mainstream media and in the loonier reaches of cyberspace this year, has added up to be a real national shame.

Which brings me back to “Sex and the City.”

How antithetical Hillary’s earnest, electric blue pants-suited whole being is to the frothy cheer of that film, which has women now turning out in droves, a song in their hearts, unified in popcorn-clutching sisterhood to a degree I haven’t seen since the ugly, angry days of Anita Hill and … the first incarnation of Hillary Clinton. How times have changed. How yucky, how baby boomerish, how frowningly pre-Botox were the early 1990s. How brilliantly does “Sex” – however atrocious it may be – surf our current zeitgeist, sugar-coating it all in Blahniks and Westwood, and yummy men and yummier real estate, and squeakingly desperate girl cheer.
…
“Sex and the City” is the perfect movie for our allegedly ever-so-promising post-feminist era, when “angry” is out and Restalyne is in, and virtually all our country’s most powerful women look younger now than they did 20 years ago.

Oh, lighten up, I can hear you say. Don’t get your knickers in a twist.

Earnestness is so unattractive (in a woman).

G.M. Closing 4 Plants in Shift From Trucks Toward Cars

Responding to a consumer shift to more fuel-efficient vehicles, General Motors said Tuesday that it would stop making pickup trucks and big S.U.V.s at four North American assembly plants and would consider selling its Hummer brand.

dear GM: did you think the price of gas was going to go down in the near future? what were you waiting for?

and with a tear in my eye:
Officials: Clinton will concede delegate race to Obama

is this all over yet? wake me up in november.

in other clinton news, this slate piece is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a good while.

Hillary and the City: Is Sex and the City our culture’s consolation prize to Hillary Clinton’s supporters?

Does the movie version of Sex and the City owe its success to the failure of Hillary Clinton’s campaign?
…
By weird coincidence, during the same weekend when Sex and the City demonstrated women’s unprecedented consumer clout at the multiplex, Hillary Clinton’s campaign developed its death rattle.
…
By this past weekend, however, it was becoming clear to all but the most delusional Hillary supporters that the game was up. Sisterhood was powerful, but in this case it wouldn’t prevail. That realization left a lot of white women all dolled up with nowhere to go. And so … they went to the movies.

what?! tim noah admits the causation argument is “somewhat glib” (somewhat?!), but basically proves by the end that THIS ARTICLE HAS NO POINT. unless it is to find some contrived reason to make fun of both clinton and sex and the city, all in one fell swoop. white women like hillary! white women like sex and the city! must find a connection beyond coincidental timing.

and slate’s relevance stock continues to fall …

i’m not really interested in debating the implications of obama calling a detroit (woot woot) television reporter “sweetie” (i think it’s a political nonstarter, except for maybe this), but dismissing the whole thing as media hysteria isn’t fair either. since i figured someone else has probably already better articulated my general feeling of “this ain’t right,” i scoured the interwebs for the best defense of “why the sweetie thing is sort of a big deal.”

susan ager from the detroit free press likens his sweetie “bad habit” (his words) to his now-defeated smoking addiction.

This guy can give up nicotine but not silly nicknames for women he doesn’t know? …
You’ve got to wonder where a 46-year-old Harvard-educated attorney picked up such a bad habit and why he has not yet set it aside.

rebecca traister from salon argues it best though. i basically copy/pasted the entire thing, but you should read it yourself anyway.

Surely many women have enjoyed being called sweetie by someone they care about, just as many women have enjoyed being called “honey” or “babe.”

But that does not mean that those same women would enjoy being called any of those things by a presidential candidate, especially one they’d not met before, especially in response to a question about the economic future of the autoworkers, and especially when the word is a fundamental part of a larger professional brushoff.

Yes, there are places in the country where “sweetie” is used to address strangers of both sexes; a waitress, for instance, might call both male and female customers “sweetie,” as a conversational address, rather than an indication of personal familiarity. But that’s pretty clearly not what was happening at the Chrysler plant, in part because the waitress doesn’t often have a power dynamic with her customers that resembles the relationship between a male presidential candidate and a female reporter.

Is it the be all end all? No. Is it the most sexist thing a man could say to a woman? Certainly not.

But one of the odd qualities about the questions applied to this story has been the focus on whether Obama’s intentions were premeditated, or stranger still, malevolent. Surely they were neither. As Goldberg said, the senator likely “meant … no disrespect.” Obama is an excellent candidate on women’s issues, and has won the often controversial support of feminists who might otherwise have fallen in behind Hillary Clinton. But having good intentions, and good policies, does not mean that anyone is incapable of offense, disrespect or condescension.

So it is troubling that ABC’s report was headlined “Obama’s Sweetie: Spontaneous or Sexist?” and “Good Morning America’s” “workplace contributor” Tory Johnson averred that anyone offended by someone’s use of “sweetie” should speak up but “not assume that their intentions are bad.” Johnson went on to warm of the dangers of “policing spontaneity … we should let people be themselves.”

These kinds of arguments suggest that words cannot be both spontaneous and sexist, as they often are. … Also troubling is the perception that “sexist” must equal “ill-willed” if it is to be deemed offensive. … But just because a word is not meant as an offense, does not mean that it isn’t diminishing, paternalistic and disrespectful.

traister also takes issue with the dismissive response that some people (and more frustratingly, women) have had to the whole thing.

As tempting as it is to project the cool-girl post-feminist attitude of not caring at all, it’s also important to note that just because a small exchange doesn’t mean everything, we don’t have to pretend that it doesn’t mean anything.

The point is not that Obama should have, or could have, known Agar’s name. It’s that had her name been Alan, Tom or John, he would not have called her “sweetie.” That is true. It may not be evil or intentional or even that big of a deal. But it is fundamental and true. And what it tells us, in a small way, is that even in the year in which Obama’s most serious competition has come from a woman running for what has historically been a man’s job, gender still matters.

the ending to traister’s argument was a little anticlimactic (nothing new), but it’s worth repeating because it’s one of those things that really gets me going.
and, if by some act of god, you haven’t seen the video yet …