via boing boing

So far, my score = -17. this is only the first page of a longer test, but i’d say the future looks bleak.

first, i’ll reiterate my love for perry bible fellowship.

but mostly, i want to pimp out some comics that i just recently discovered. i picked out some with a feminist theme.

toothpaste for dinner

cyanide and happiness

xkcd

every day that passes, my disdain for slate grows and grows. too contrarian, too pretentious, etc. but two articles have redeemed its standing for me, at least temporarily.

1. “Bigger Than Elvis: Why the haters are wrong about Mariah Carey.”

there isn’t anything terribly quotable in this point-by-point defense of mariah, but to sum up: she’s got skillz, she’s inspired the american idol generation (maybe not a plus for the world, but proof of her influence), she’s versatile, and she predicts the future. really!
the point: E=MC2 is — against all odds — a very good album. maybe great. maybe her best. if you have ever liked a mariah carey song in the history of mariah carey (always be my baby? all i want for christmas is you?), i don’t think it’s crazy for me to say that you’ll like some part of this new album. really. REALLY.

2. “How Dumb Are We?: How long will women shoulder the blame for the pay gap?”

on a less celebratory note, dahlia lithwick — one of the few shining beacons on the slate payroll — rips to shreds the supreme court’s infuriating ledbetter vs. goodyear decision and also mccain’s opinion on the whole gender pay discrimination bill/travesty that got denied in congress last week.
do you want to hear my angry voice? then PLEASE ask me to explain this case to you. and if you wonder where your friend alison went and how they replaced her with a crazy feminist, just read this article. if you aren’t really pissed off by the end of it, i’m not sure why we would ever talk.

a slightly rambling “explanation” of the dearth of women at the top of fortune 500 companies.

i agree with the assertion that the feminist movement is backsliding (in comparison to, say, the anti-racist movement, if there’s such a thing). actually i’ve been saying it all along, but whatever.

Key indicators such as pay, board seats, and corporate-officer posts all reflect a leveling off or drop in recent years. Although the gap between men’s and women’s pay narrowed significantly through the 1980s, gains since then have been partly erased by a drop every few years. In 2006, women over the age of 25 earned 78.7 cents for every dollar earned by men, according to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Labor Department. That’s a decline from 2005’s figure of 79.4 cents on the dollar and also represents only about a 5-cent increase since 1991.

feel free to read the 2 paragraphs after that one to get more depressed.

what’s going on here? the story offers a couple answers: plain ol sexism and sexual harassment, women’s rejection that there’s even a problem, and some point about the way women display their looks and sexuality (i’ll be honest, i didn’t really know what the author was trying to say–are we supposed to be hot or ugly? i need to find out b/c i’m picking my outfit for tomorrow).

but the most striking takeaway from the piece was that women–for a host of reasons–aren’t very interested in playing the cutthroat game involved in corporate management. they reject the idea, and consequently rarely rise to the top of it–explaining the pitiful lack of female leadership in fortune 500 companies.

“Women go into top jobs thinking that hierarchy is foolishness: Let’s clean this up. And we lose.”

i’m not sure i feel comfortable endorsing this (victim blaming?), but all the competitiveness supposedly necessary to succeed reminds me of middle school girls vying for power and status. if only women could apply those lessons to their careers, all our problems would be solved.

in “Postfeminism and Other Fairy Tales,” the new york times sort of agrees with me that this spitzer thing might be the aha! moment many women (and men) needed to wake up from their “sexism isn’t that big of a deal anymore” haze.

Weren’t we in what some people have long called a postfeminist era, when we thought the big battles were over, or at least that the combatants had reached some accommodation? And wasn’t the younger generation less hung up on the stereotypes and issues of the sort Mrs. Clinton taps into among older women?

Not so fast. No matter how historic the prospect of electing a woman or black man as president this year, if the rising volume of chatter in the news and entertainment media is any measure, women are doing a little re-tallying.
…
“Like lots of other twentysomething women, I’ve been an unswerving Obama girl from the get-go,” wrote Noreen Malone on The XX Factor, the Slate magazine blog written by women. “Oddly enough it’s taken Spitzergate — not Hillary’s tears, not her scolding — to make me less dismissive of the feminist ‘obligation’ to vote for a woman.”

speaking of the XX factor, does anyone else think it sort of sucks? i’m sure someone else has said this (in fact, it’s slate, so i’m sure they talked about it themselves in that narcissistic gen x meta thing they’re so good at), but the existence of a blog written by women seems condescending itself. is there something revealing about aggregating the mind vomit of slate’s female writers on political gender issues? is there something special about what they are saying because they are women? seems to pander to the dangerous “women and men are different, so we should treat them differently” argument that makes sexism so easy to accept.

but mostly, i dislike this blog b/c of asinine posts like “How Is Spitzer Different From Bill Clinton?” and “Spitzer: Pathos, Not Power.”

maybe if this blog actually contained smart commentary on gender issues (emphasis on “smart”), i’d complain a lot less. instead it’s a handful of great points mired in half-ass pseudo-intellectual dreck.

from the new york times:

Silda Wall Spitzer gave up a high-powered career as a corporate lawyer to raise three daughters and support her husband as he sought elective office, yet has always had deep reservations about his political career. Time and again, she has found herself in the particular bind of encouraging him during critical junctures in his public life while still holding on to some regret that he had chosen to put himself — and their family — there in the first place.

a cautionary tale? i’m putting a feminism tag on this, but i’m not sure if i mean it in that way. seems related though.

also related: people seem to think that this spitzer thing will hurt hillary clinton because it reminds us all of the whole WH intern thing. (remember that?) i actually don’t think this is the case at all, and speculate this might even help her, especially if spitzer’s wife continues to do the literal “stand by my man” bit as the scandal unfolds. can’t help but think that clinton is helped by the spillover sympathy vote, especially from women. maybe i’m overthinking this one, but i’m not so quick to conclude this is terrible for clinton.

also coming soon: i come out in defense of kwame kilpatrick. spitzer might be a freak, but kwame’s behavior is classic political corruption. epic, even.

a conservative pundit asks: What rape crisis?

everyone else goes: ARE YOU SERIOUS?
rebuttal: Wrong on rape
salon: Girls, stop rape through “sexual restraint”!
and many, many more

from salon:

She argues that the reality “behind the rape hype” is “that it’s the booze-fueled hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands.” In other words, hookup culture is responsible for the disagreement between how women label their experiences of rape and how researchers define them.

Beyond her butchering of the statistics — and denial of the library of supporting research — her philosophical position is unconscionable. She actually argues that “greater sexual restraint would prevent campus ‘rape.’” If only she hadn’t worn that skirt, walked down that dark alley, had something to drink, smiled his way, she wouldn’t have been “raped.”

It’s a pity Mac Donald went through all this trouble to explain why so many women are resistant to calling a forced, nonconsensual sex act “rape,” when researcher are not. She need only look at the prevalence of victim-blaming attitudes like her own.