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 …

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.