$5 says this means she once said "Eat me."

According to the cover story in the latest Newsweek, even if Sarah Palin never runs for office again, she can single-handedly change the face of politics by instructing her loyal army of "conservative feminist" mama bears how to vote. Shudder.

Writes Lisa Miller, "[H]er pro-woman rallying cry, articulated in the evangelical vernacular, together with the potent pro-life example of her own family, puts Palin in a position to reshape and reinvigorate the religious right, one of the most powerful forces in American politics. The Christian right is now poised to become a women's movement-and Sarah Palin is its earthy Jerry Falwell... With her new faith-based message, Palin gathers up the Christian women that traditional feminism has left behind."

Hoo boy. That's a lot to take in, first thing in the morning.

I already covered what I think of "Sarah Palin Feminism," but once more with feeling: Feminism did not leave conservative Christian women behind. Conservative Christian women rejected feminism. This is not a trivial distinction.

Here's a story. My late dog, Lucille, hated bananas. But more than that, she hated my dad's late dog, Guinness, getting anything edible that could be hers. So one day, my dad drops a banana chunk on the kitchen floor, and we both watch Lucille pick it up in her mouth, make a face, then drop it again. Guinness swoops in for the banana chunk, at which point Lucille immediately picks it up again — only to remember it grosses her out and drop it. But then Guinness moves in once more, so she growls and picks it up. Except... still gross. Drop. Swoop. Grab. Ew! Repeat. Comedy gold, as long as you had nothing invested in that banana chunk.

This is what I think of whenever I hear people talk about conservative Christian women "reclaiming" feminism, or blaming those mean and nasty "traditional" (read: "actual") feminists for keeping them out. You don't even want the fucking banana. But you'd rather turn it into a lump of mush that nobody wants than let anyone else have it.

It doesn't help when people say things like, "You hate to say it, but mainstream feminism has had an antireligious bias for a really long time" — which R. Marie Griffith, author of God's Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission, does to Miller. That is precisely the opposite of the point, which is that many organized religions — and evangelical Christianity is certainly among them — have an anti-woman bias. So historically, folks have found it difficult to believe simultaneously in full gender equality and a god who dictates that, say, wives must submit to their husbands, no matter what. Go figure!

But Sarah Palin and her loyal fans are changing all that, by crafting a "feminism" that says we CAN have it all: Gender equality and obedience to men! Writes Miller, "These Christians seek a power that allows them to formally acquiesce to male authority and conservative theology, even as they assume increasingly visible roles in their families, their churches, their communities, and the world. Palin shows them a path through this thicket of contradictions." So basically, they're doing what women have been doing to get by forever — working outside the home as necessary, fiercely defending their children's interests (if not their own), quietly exercising whatever power they can behind the scenes, acting dumb and making their men look good in public — and calling it The New Feminism instead of The Old Coping Mechanisms.

The patron saint of this movement, evidently, is Queen Esther of the Hebrew Bible, who exercised great power by using her beauty and charm to persuade her husband to do the right the thing (save the Jewish population, of which she secretly was one). As David Gibson wrote at Politics Daily last year, questionable Esther analogies are a big thing in the evangelical Christian community — everyone from Palin to Katherine Harris to Carrie Prejean has been compared to her — and her name now seems to stand for what Griffith calls, "an image that blends this kind of submissive, pretty, aw-shucks demeanor with a fiery power, a spiritual warfare."

As Gibson notes, Esther is an ideal role model for people who feel like a persecuted religious minority, and who, in the words of Anne Lapidus Lerner, director of the Program in Jewish Women's Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, "are interested in seeing women as subservient but not totally powerless, and to see their beauty as something that carries them to whatever modicum of power they achieve."

"Traditional" feminists, on the other hand — those of us who feel like "not totally powerless" is a bit of a lackluster goal for women — are probably more likely to identify with Esther's predecessor, Vashti, who was deposed (and maybe banished or killed) because she refused her husband's demand that she show off her fine body for all the guests at a feast. (Esther won a beauty contest to replace the stubborn bitch.) Lerner points out that "Vashti is the only woman in the Bible who when issued a direct order by a male didn't take it." If you're wondering why feminists and conservative religious folks haven't been BFF over the years, you might start right there.

Oh, but it's so much more fun to blame the dirty liberals."Palin has her faults, but the left is partially to blame for her ascent," writes Miller. "Its native mistrust of religion, of conservative believers in particular, left the gap that Palin now fills." Oh, horseshit. The left has no "native mistrust of religion"; we have a learned, reasoned mistrust of people who would like to make America a theocracy. There is a big freakin' difference between people who just want to practice their religion in peace and people who object to the separation of church and state. (And when the religion in question is hostile to women, feminists get especially upset about the latter.) Creating space between progressive values and the specter of theocracy is not unwisely or accidentally "leaving a gap"; it's a drawing a reasonable boundary.

And this idea that the Christian right has gained so much ground because liberals and feminists are out of touch with the "real America" is fiction, one of the lies they tell to carve a path through their thicket of contradictions. It's actually because charismatic people like Sarah Palin go out there and tell people whatever they want to hear without being bound by logic or facts. If they can inspire pure faith and loyalty, they can get people excited about the idea of a theocracy with liberty and justice for all, and a pro-woman patriarchy, and a unicorn in every pot. That doesn't make any of it real. It doesn't make Sarah Palin a feminist. And it doesn't make the left exclusive and intolerant and out of touch. It just makes people like Sarah Palin powerful enough to tell lies and have a substantial number of people believe them.

Saint Sarah [Newsweek]

Related: Another Winner On Tuesday: The Palin Endorsement [Time]
Queen Esther's Legacy: From Hebrew Heroine to Miss California [Politics Daily]
Sarah Palin's Grab For Feminism [Salon]

Earlier: 5 Ways of Looking at "Sarah Palin Feminism"

By now you've heard that Sarah Palin's making noise about a "new, conservative feminist movement," a tent big enough to include"Tea Party feminism", "pro-life feminism" and "real feminism" as embodied by the likes of Liz Cheney and Michelle Malkin.

All this would hardly merit more than a quick Inigo Montoya impression, if not for the fact that people won't quit trying to make the idea of Sarah Palin Feminism happen. And if the fringe right has taught us anything over the last few years, it's that the more the media takes your horseshit seriously, the more people start to forget that you're completely disingenuous and/or out of your friggin' mind.

So fine, let's take an old, liberal feminist look at this concept before it gets too much more traction. Five looks, in fact.

Look 1: You've got to be fucking kidding me

In a series that begins with "anti-choice feminism," "Tea Party feminism," and "Sarah Palin feminism," what comes next? "Phyllis Schlafly feminism?" "Patriarchal feminism?" "He-Man Woman Hater Feminism?" I mean, how long until the Washington Post publishes a "feminist" argument for repealing the 19th Amendment (there's no truly pro-woman party anyway, don't you know?), or widening the pay gap (so more men can be sole breadwinners again and more women can freely choose to stay home) or, I don't know, reclaiming the word "chattel"?

As it is, these "conservative feminists" are erecting so many straw feminists to define themselves against, all of America should be protected from crows who are insecure about their masculinity for generations to come. To hear these women tell it, those of us who were using the word before it was cool (see Look 5) are not only anti-men, anti-motherhood, and obsessed with abortion, we are now also anti-woman. "In fact," writes Lori Ziganto at Hot Air, "they are diametrically opposed to feminism, by it's very definition, because their entire agenda is actually harmful to women." (Did you know there was one handy link to the entire feminist agenda? I did not!) "This is why I now call them Femogynists and I'm taking the term feminist back."

So, supporters of the old-fashioned, liberal feminist agenda should now be called… pro-woman in two languages? OK, I'll take it. We might want to hang onto "femogynists," even, just in case people like Ziganto do manage to "take back" a word they never wanted anything to do with before. And as a preemptive strike, perhaps we on the left should coin a neologism to describe self-identified feminists who oppose a Femogynist Agenda that promotes women's right to bodily autonomy; that supports comprehensive, truthful sex education and access to affordable, reliable contraception; that seeks full equality for women of color, poor women, gay women, transwomen, disabled women, immigrant women, childfree women and atheist women (not to mention hairy women, angry women, women who just can't find a man and women who favor comfortable walking shoes) just as much as white, conservative, Christian mothers; and that expects a government that's ostensibly of the people, for the people and by the people to, you know, act like it. There really should be a word for people who find such an agenda abhorrent — something like "misfeminist," maybe?

No, wait, I've got it! "Misogynist." That makes much more sense. Make sure you credit me when you use that one.

Look 2: Who gets to define feminism, anyway?

"Now, there are a lot of ways in which this [conservative feminist] logic is contorted, not least of all the suggestion that supporting the right to choose represents a no-confidence vote for the idea of mothers leading fulfilling professional and personal lives," writes Meghan Daum in the L.A. Times. "But putting that aside, I feel a duty (a feminist duty, in fact) to say this about Palin's declaration: If she has the guts to call herself a feminist, then she's entitled to be accepted as one."

Daum's got a point, sort of. There is no governing body that awards official feminist credentials or the right to use the term. And since the word "feminist" was invented, there have been people claiming it for themselves who disagree with each other, often vehemently and on numerous points. It's an anti-feminist myth, in fact, that feminists are in lockstep on every issue and anyone who self-identifies as such somehow condones every word ever written by Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin, Mary Daly, Valerie Solanas, Margaret Sanger, Germaine Greer and Jessica Valenti, all at the same time. Of course, if that were true, then feminists would need an even higher tolerance for logical inconsistency than Biblical literalists. (OOH, DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE HOW THEY HATE CHRISTIANS?) In reality, most of us just agree to disagree, and/or have better things to do than spend a lot of time monitoring who's using the word on any given day. And as Daum points out, given the number of liberal women who believe in gender equality but eschew the word "feminist," there's an argument to be made for applauding anyone who's willing to "drop the F-bomb."

So, can't I just agree to disagree with Sarah Palin – or at least to ignore her use of the term and continue to go about my business? Well, evidently not, or I wouldn't be writing this. The problem is, words mean things. I could start calling myself a red meat conservative, or campaign for those of us who are against the death penalty to "reclaim" the term "pro-life," but at some point, the relationship between your beliefs and your choice of words either passes the sniff test or it doesn't. And someone who actively seeks to restrict women's freedom calling herself a feminist is, not to put too fine a point on it, a liar. There's a difference between a big tent and no boundaries whatsoever; if Palin's "entitled to be accepted" as a feminist just because she says she's one, then the word is completely meaningless — as opposed to merely vague and controversial. And I might just start calling myself a "right-winger" because I'm right-handed, or a "fundamentalist" because I believe everyone deserves a solid primary education, or a "birther" because I once hosted a baby shower.

Look 3: Depending on whom you ask, a bunch of privileged white women looking out for their own is perfectly consistent with the history of feminism

Of course, my take on Look 2 is contingent upon the fact that I'm still basically fond of the word "feminism" and willing to align myself with a movement that's been exclusive and problematic from the get-go. And that has a lot to do with my being white, financially comfortable and straight – traits shared not only by most of the dominant voices in the traditional feminist movement, but the "new conservative" one. As Renee Martin wrote in the Guardian last month, feminism has a well-documented history of excluding women who don't share them, and plenty of progressives have long since given up on the term and the movement as the domain of a few privileged women who are at least complicit in the oppression of others, if not consciously working for it.

So why is the idea of "Sarah Palin, feminist," any worse than the umpteen bona fide prominent feminists who have promoted racism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ableism and the ongoing dominance of only a certain type of women's voices over the years? Arguably, it's not. Arguably, it's the logical endpoint of a movement long shaped by women who are but one –ism away from the top of the heap in the first place, and perhaps more interested in taking that one step up than in ending oppression all the way down. If the feminist movement primarily serves women who are already tantalizingly close to full kyriarchal approval, we probably shouldn't be surprised when a group of women who are even closer – basically just like the old feminists, except they don't expect the government to help anyone and aren't fussed about bodily autonomy! – decide they're yet more qualified to run it.

And if you find that thought as horrifying as I do, a good, long look in the mirror is probably in order.

Look 4: There's something to be said for visibility, maybe?

Generally speaking, feminists are in favor of seeing more women in positions of power. And as Hanna Rosin writes in Slate, certain members of the Tea Party are currently angling to make that happen, like some Bizarro World Emily's List. The problem is, they support the kind of female candidates who make us old-fashioned feminists root for men. Or yellow dogs. Or benevolent alien leaders.

But if I can argue – and I have — that Taylor Swift's career can be counted as a win for women, even while her lyrics reinforce sexist bullshit, I should probably be able to muster an argument that getting more women, any women, into the game is a good thing. And that the natural consequence of increasing women's access to power is increasing the access of women whose politics turn my stomach. Like, if I want to see the day when female candidates are just considered plain old candidates, and there are so many of them the novelty has disappeared entirely, I need to to suck it up and take the Palin with the good.

I should be able to construct that argument, probably. I'd just really rather not.

Look 5: If everybody's clamoring to use the word "feminist" these days, then feminists must have done something right, right?

Speaking of Bizarro World, one curious thing about this "new conservative feminism" is that all these women suddenly want to be known as feminists. Like it's a good thing! A desirable thing! A fashionable thing! When did this happen?

You know that saying about social justice movements that's usually (but almost certainly falsely) attributed to Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win"? Well, the person who is almost certainly not Gandhi left out a step that comes between the fighting and the winning: "Then they co-opt your rhetoric." We're already used to hearing conservatives talk about choice and equal opportunity and fiscal responsibility and privacy and all sorts of other shit they think sounds good, even though they don't actually vote for any of it. And they think it sounds good because they recognize that reasonable people tend to be in favor of such things, and you still – if only just – need some reasonable people on your side to win elections.

Well, damn if that's not what they're doing with feminism now – which suggests they've finally noticed that women's equality is something reasonable people believe in. They still won't actually work for it or vote for it or put forth candidates who sincerely believe in it, natch. But feminism is apparently enough of a mainstream value that right-wing whackjobs want to appropriate it to sound like they're actually interested in the good of the people! How do you like that?

Tea Party activist Betty Jean Kling told Rosin, "Each woman has her reasons for joining [the party], but I would like to believe that deep down she has a degree of pride in knowing that when she is voting out the incumbents she may be voting in a new woman with new ideas who will be really amenable to women's rights." Now, I'd prefer, of course, for members of a party that isn't completely antithetical to my values to talk about female candidates and new ideas and women's rights like that. I'd prefer to see candidates who are actually amenable to women's rights, including the right to control our own bodies, the right to marry whomever we love, the right to health care and child care and politicians who care about the people they represent. But if they're stealing our language to broaden their appeal, then we must have done something right along the way. That makes me one proud femogynist.

Is The Tea Party a Feminist Movement? [Slate]
Sarah Palin, Feminist [L.A. Times]
You Might NOT Be a Feminist If... [Feminists for Choice]
Pro-Life Feminism Is the Future [Washington Post]
Taking Feminism Back: Sarah Palin Endorses Nikki Haley for SC Governor [Hot Air]
I'm Not a Feminist (And There Is No But) [Guardian]
K-Lo Will Not Rest Until The Scourge of Feminine Joy Is Wiped out Completely [Pandagon]

If there's been a bright side for Sandra Bullock during this bizarrely long spell of public interest in her dickwad husband, it's that her own reputation has mostly been spared. But can it survive the Nazi picture?

And more to the point, should it?

Don't get me wrong: I am in no way suggesting that a wife is responsible for her husband's behavior. I'm not even saying Bullock must have known; just as it's possible for women not to realize their husbands are cheating or married to other people or, say, responsible for multiple murders, it's surely possible to miss the signs that your partner is, if not an active neo-Nazi, the kind of twisted asswipe who finds humor in taking photos that suggest he is. But at some point, don't you have to wonder?

Of course, Bullock's not answering questions at the moment, so all anyone can do is speculate. And many wise people will tell you that speculating about someone's personal relationships and proclivities when you have no solid information is a profoundly bad idea. It's just, those wise people don't usually work for tabloids and gossip blogs. So I'm a little baffled as to why, as more and more indicators that Jesse James is a beyond-the-pale douche surface every day, the narrative of Sandra as his hapless, naïve victim remains largely unchanged.

Part of it, I suppose, is that all of the information we have comes from questionable sources. Is it true that, in addition to posing for the instantly infamous photo, James kept Nazi memorabilia in his home office — where one presumes his wife might have noticed it? Is it true that he used his pet pit bulls for fighting – and Bullock knew about it? Are they really getting divorced now, or is she still considering staying with him? When most of the reports are coming from the likes of The National Enquirer, Perez Hilton, Radar and TMZ, who knows for sure? One doesn't want to jump to conclusions.

But you know what else one doesn't want, at least if one is a halfway decent person? A neo-Nazi husband. I'm all for giving celebrities their privacy amid salacious gossip and personal turmoil, but since Bullock surely knows all about that photo and the other accusations now, I can't figure out why we haven't heard from her yet. This is not the kind of thing you let slide, even if all you want to do, quite understandably, is hide out and lick your wounds. Perhaps she's just taking her time crafting a blistering statement denouncing James' apparent anti-Semitism, avowing her unfortunate but total ignorance of it and announcing the imminent divorce. But if that's not out by tomorrow? Something's seriously fucked up here. Remaining silent at this point is such an inexplicable career move — questions of human decency aside — I can't quite believe we haven't seen such a statement already. And I really can't believe there aren't more people making noise about it yet.

But then, I was reluctant to make any noise myself. I dragged my feet on accepting the opportunity to spout off on this subject for several reasons — yes, partly because so much information is coming from unreliable sources, because I quite frankly don't care about the state of most celebrity marriages, and because I have absolutely no idea what she knew and when she knew it, and no way of finding out. But also because I just don't want to believe she could have been aware that her spouse was into fucking Hitler memorabilia, for the simple reason that I like Sandra Bullock. I like that she's always seemed like the kind of chick you could hang out at a dive bar with, no matter how famous or rich or glammy she got. I like that in the last couple of years, she's single-handedly forced Hollywood to rethink what female leads in general, and women over 40 in particular, are capable of doing at the box office. I liked her gracious and funny Oscar speech, even if I was rooting for Gabby. And god help me, I even kind of liked "Miss Congeniality." Kind of. In a "can't quite turn it off when I run across it flipping channels" way. Shut up.

So I wonder if similar feelings are driving the trend toward demonizing James – quite deservedly, it seems – while letting Bullock off the hook for marrying what appears to be a world class asshole. I mean, world class. Jezzies, being the brilliant, skeptical and deliciously unmerciful bunch you are, have already been discussing the possibility that Bullock knew exactly who she married and somehow didn't think the Nazi thing was a dealbreaker. But so far, most folks are curiously silent on that topic. The dominant narrative over the last few weeks – save a bit of crapola about how powerful women drive their emasculated men to cheat – has been that Bullock is a victim who will and should come through this unfortunate episode with her dignity, career and tremendous likeability intact. Because unlike James, she did nothing wrong.

And you know, I like that narrative almost as much as I like Sandra Bullock, in theory; I like that for once, most people seem more inclined to call a douche a douche than speculate about what (beyond stupidity and hubris) would cause a man to step out on his beautiful, talented wife. And because I really like the idea of doing tequila shots and singing along to classic rock with Sandy B. at a dive bar somewhere — even though I will almost certainly never meet her, she couldn't really hang anonymously like that, and I can't stomach tequila — I'd really prefer not to consider another obvious angle on Jesse James' overwhelming jackholery in the context of his marriage: the whole "birds of a feather" thing. So I can certainly understand why people are reluctant to say, "Hey, is it just me, or have we reached the point where it's reasonable to wonder if Sandra Bullock kinda digs the Nazi scene herself?"

But, you know… is it just me, or have we reached that point?

I'm not saying we should be accusing Bullock, or assuming anything just yet. But I'm pretty sure it's fair to ask questions like, "Seriously, dude, what the HELL?" right about now. And it's fair, no matter how much we feel for her and respect her right to be alone, to expect an answer. I still hope the answer is that she is, in fact, the likeable, deeply unfortunate victim of a world class asshole who lived a very well-hidden double life. But all I know for sure is that I don't know the woman at all. And if I were her, I would not be waiting for this one to blow over.

Related: Why Do The Powerful Lead Double Lives? [CBS News]
"Bishop" Marries 8 Women, Goes To Jail For Bigamy [Lovefraud]
Serial Killers Can Easily Live Double Lives: Experts [Global BC]
Jesse James Exposed [National Enquirer]
Jesse James Is Cruel To Animals [Perez Hilton]
EXCLUSIVE: It's Over! Sandra Bullock Decides To Divorce [Radar]
Dispelling Sandra Bullock's "Oscar Curse" [Salon]

Earlier: We Got What We Needed From Jesse & Sandra

You know what really burns Jim Windolf's ass? All this cuteness everywhere! Kittehs! Puppehs! Bun-buns! Cupcakes! Smart Cars! Obama! (Don't ask.) If we don't put an end to it, we're going to become a nation of stinky girls children!

"Social misery and cuteness seem to be linked," writes Windolf for Vanity Fair, which is the kind of line that makes this article fascinating, even if one is not so frightened by the tyranny of cuteness as the author is. Windolf covers a lot of ground in his quest to uncover why people won't quit sending him YouTube videos of laughing babies. In addition to social science, there's regular old science (cuteness is physically addictive!), business (the evolution of the Geico gecko from more realistic reptile to big-eyed, bipedal moppet), psychology (helpless and needy things are cutest, creating a "rather sick power relationship between lovers of cuteness and the objects"), linguistics ("What is the antonym for 'cutegasm'? Because that's what I'm having right now"), and history (Japan started kicking the world's ass at cute after WWII, and now that so many Americans are co-opting Japanese pop culture, "It is strange, but possibly correct, to think that every time we gaze on a cute image these days we are seeing some weird aftereffect of World War II. The cuteness created by our bombs has come back to seduce us"). And then there's music, food, cars, and a bunch of questionable bullshit.

Let's focus on that last one. Among the things Windolf identifies as part of the "tsunami of cuteness" washing over our shores: Snuggies, candy bars, cuddle parties, the teenage hugging epidemic (there is one, evidently), and yes, President Obama. Note to Windolf: At least 95% of declarations that the president is "cute" are because saying the president is "hot" would be unseemly, especially when we all love his wife. Pictures of him playing with Bo or swinging his niece in the air are "cute" because puppies and babies are cute, and also because handsome, powerful men playing with puppies and babies are hot. And the rest of these things are not actually about cuteness, but about comfort and (arguably) a regression to childhood, which Windolf conflates with cuteness.

The simultaneous popularity of all of these things is probably no coincidence, and the idea that it's all at least partly a result of "social misery" — wars, a recession, etc., — seems sound. But still, "cuteness" does not equal "anything comforting." Chocolate and hugs and blankets with sleeves might make me feel better for a moment, in much the same way as visiting The Daily Puppy does, but they do not make me squeal involuntarily and want to own five hundred of them and name them and express my love for them with deliberately poor spelling and grammar. (Well, except for the dog-shaped Godiva truffles I saw recently, or certain blankets printed with puppehs and kittehs and bun-buns, or tiny children who give enthusiastic hugs... you get the picture.) Cute is its own thing.

So, to understand the power of cute — Windolf's ostensible goal — you have to start there: Cute is its own thing. And the internet-based cute phenomenon is its own thing again. Windolf only gets around to my very first thought about the meteoric rise of online cuteness as a "quick aside" toward the end: "maybe the cuteness has come for us because of the huge change we've gone through in the last decade in terms of our relationships with our machines." Yes! The machines on which we view the cuteness are indeed related to our ravenous appetite for it! Except, his theories about that are still kinda weak:

The cuteness craze may represent a nostalgia for a lost world. Or maybe we're trying, in some pathetic way, to animate our machines, to imbue them with sounds and images that strike at the deepest part of what it means to be human: our desire to take care of helpless creatures. We're like those office workers of the 1960s and 1970s who tried to beat back the alienation they felt as a result of being the first people to inhabit sterile-seeming cubicles eight hours a day by putting up that poster of the cute little kitten hanging from the tree.

First, it can't just be nostalgia for a lost world when a large percentage of cute-lovers are young enough that they haven't lost a damned thing; they grew up online. And second, those of us who are actively engaged in the sorts of internet communities that gave rise to the whole cuteness explosion are not interacting with "our machines" but with other human beings, via e-mail, instant messaging, social media, multi-user games, discussion boards, comments sections on blogs, etc. We are not sitting around with our soulless gadgets feeling lonely and wishing we had a kitty to pet; we are talking to other people all the time. And that's exactly why we need to look at pictures of cute things: to calm down from talking to other people, who can be real assholes. The universality of cuteness is exactly its appeal at that point: Even if you can't agree with a semi-anonymous stranger about politics, religion or television, you can agree that a sneezing baby panda is hilariously adorable, and everyone feels better about the world.

In fact, bringing enemies (or at least surprising friends) together is a thriving subcategory of Internet Cuteness. There is a reason why Cute Overload's "interspecies snorgling" tag is one of the most popular. I have yet to literally see a lion lie down with a lamb, but I've seen a Rhodesian Ridgeback lie down with a micropiglet, a bobcat with a fawn, and a tiger with a chimp. And said tiger/chimp combo is an example of an even cuter subcategory of interspecies snorgling: interspecies adoption. Seeing a chimp taking care of an orphaned tiger cub or a hound nursing an abandoned squirrel is the kind of thing that makes me think if I ever ran across a needy, stray Republican, I, too would be generous enough to overcome our natural aversion to each other and help out. That feels good.

But then, I'm a big old girl. And although he never explicitly says so, I can't help thinking that's part of Windolf's problem with all this dastardly cute shit: It's so feminine! And yet, regular people like it! The hell? In his discussion of how Japan came to lead the world in cute, he quotes Roland Kelts, author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. : "One theory, which has been proposed by a lot of Japanese artists and academics, is that, after the humiliation and emasculation of Japan in the postwar years, Japan developed this quasi-queer position of ‘little brother' or ‘little boy.' If you become ‘little brother' or ‘little boy,' the only way you can get big brother's or fat man's attention is by being so cute or puppy-like that he has to take care of you." There is absolutely no unpacking of the ideas that A) an entire country can be "emasculated"; B) this is necessarily a bad thing, synonymous with humiliation; C) the ultimate symbol of power, even to metaphorical dependent children, is a large man — not a mother; or that D) being childlike is "quasi-queer," which is offensive enough on its own, but also clearly implies "sissy," i.e., "girly." We're just supposed to automatically agree that this is a bad scene, and if we don't want America to become one big symbolic fag chick boy child, we all need to nut up and quit forwarding that goddamned laughing baby video.

Writes Windolf:

For generations, kids couldn't wait until they reached adulthood so they could smoke, drink, eat four-course meals, make money, drive cars, have sex, and, if they were the type to join the military, legally kill other human beings. Now we would rather log on and tune out, preferably in the womb-like comfort of a Snuggie, which is the perfect thing to wear as we gaze at photos of kittens while gnawing on delicious cupcakes.

Listen, except for legally killing other human beings, I not only looked forward to all those things eagerly as a child, but continue to be actively grateful that I'm finally allowed to do them at nearly 35. I do not romanticize childhood at all, much less wish I could return to a simpler time, when I had to ask permission to cross the street. And yet, I also enjoy kittens, cupcakes and Snuggies. There is plenty of room in the world for sex, drugs, rock and roll, war, greed, hatred, Cute Overload and Smart Cars, all at the same time. Not to mention blistering satire of cute culture, which Windolf mentions as a ray of hope, and which I also find delightful. (Not delightful? LOLcats and dogs delivering twee messages about pet adoption and military heroism. That is too much sap even for me, people.)

Windolf's still not optimistic, however. "I would not doubt the power of cuteness. It will bat its lashes and crinkle its nose, and it will smother its critics with its softness," he concludes. Um, dude? You know what one of the very best things about cute shit is? Unlike war, an economic downturn, or living without health insurance, for instance, it's not actually scary.

Image from White House Flickr Pool

Addicted to Cute [Vanity Fair]

Here is one possibility: I'm just too dumb to know what writer Joe Klein's real point is in this week's Time cover story about Hillary Clinton. Here is another possibility: He's not so sure himself. Could go either way.

According to Klein, Clinton is a bundle of contradictions. She messed up an opportunity to advance fruitful peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, except such talks are almost never fruitful. ("For the past 40 years, the awkward Middle East press conference has helped define the job of Secretary of State. You go to Jerusalem or Ramallah; you stand there 'guardedly optimistic' in public; in private, you try to move a comma, but the Israelis or Palestinians move a semicolon to block your comma. The result is almost always the same: gridlock.") Clinton's big mouth made the administration look bad — by reinforcing things Obama had already said. "The conventional wisdom," is that by installing Clinton as Secretary of State, Obama "succeeded in neutering her" (nice), but then, he also gave her the power to "become a torpedo aimed at the Oval Office." She's bungled diplomacy yet made enormous strides in improving America's image abroad. Her edgier tone has been evident from the start of the Administration" — in some cases irritating the White House — yet "her reticence during her first nine months on the job," did indeed bolster the impression that she was "neutered." (Dear Joe Klein and rest of world, Can we please find a better metaphor for being rendered ineffectual?) By all on-the-record accounts, her "relationship with Obama really - really - is strong," but anonymous "emanations," "burblings" and "Foggy Bottom body language" (say that 5 times fast) indicate otherwise, maybe, sort of.

"These tensions are well within the boundaries of normal, creative policymaking," writes Klein, but he seems determined to make something more of them nonetheless. An "essential rule of diplomacy," he says, is "boring is almost always better" — but obviously, an essential rule of journalism is the opposite. So I can sympathize with the need to jazz up a story that amounts to, "She seems to be doing a pretty OK job — not perfect, but whatever." But the way he does it is sort of dizzying. Is she fucking up or doing smart, new things? Is she too blunt or too retiring? Too powerful, or too [new metaphor]? Is she putting words in Obama's mouth or vice versa? Do they lurve each other or secretly plot against each other? The contradictory questions don't balance the portrait of a complex woman so much as they obscure it.

By far the most interesting and enlightening parts come in the middle, when Klein sits down and talks to Clinton, whom he's known for a bazillion years. They talk about her first trip to Pakistan in 1995 — he was there — and she gushes about the experience and admits what a Benazir Bhutto fangirl she was. In this section, Klein points out that "Ironically, the rise of Sunni extremist groups like al-Qaeda has brought Clinton's interests - microfinance, education and health care - to the center of national-security policy for the first time" — oh hey, she has interests! — and says Clinton's excellent relationship with military leaders at home has "helped make the relationship between State and the Pentagon less fraught than usual." She has "a palpable toughness" to her, and unlike a lot of journalists, Klein seems to mean that as a real compliment. He mentions repeatedly that she is intensely guarded and private, which undoubtedly explains a lot of his (and everyone's) difficulty in pinning her down, but still, this middle part is where we get a sense that he's talking about a real person with identifiable strengths, weaknesses, goals and accomplishments. That angle just couldn't sustain a whole feature, I guess.

Perhaps the big lesson to take from this profile, then, is that Hillary Clinton is nowhere near as predictable as we'd like her to be. For as long as she's been in the public eye (and under insane scrutiny to boot), it really seems like we ought to know her well enough to anticipate her next move — and fully understand her last. But it turns out we might not. Which makes it hard to analyze her but really interesting to watch her.

Hillary's Moment: Clinton Faces The World [Time]

House Democrats are pretty much ready to get started debating the monster healthcare reform bill, except for those conservatives who are trying to seize the opportunity to block more women's access to abortion.

Says The New York Times:

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, a supporter of abortion rights, has little choice but to heed the concerns of members of her caucus who oppose abortion. As many as 40 House Democrats, a potentially decisive bloc, have threatened to oppose the bill without tighter restrictions on abortion.

This is why we can't have nice things, people. Under the bill as written, "health plans are neither required nor forbidden to cover abortions" and federal funds cannot be used for abortion. But that's not good enough for the numerous anti-choice Democrats we've gone and elected, so, as Lynn Harris put it at Salon, "Long story short, there's the Stupak amendment, which hardcore abortion opponents love, and there's the Ellsworth-DeLauro 'compromise' amendment, which everybody hates."

Timothy Noah at Slateexplains the Stupak amendment, which he characterizes as "a crowbar to pry abortion coverage from private health insurance plans offered in the exchange":

The Stupak amendment stated, "No funds authorized under this Act … may be used to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan [italics mine] that includes coverage of abortion," with exceptions for rape, incest, or a threat to the mother's life. Stupak claims that all he was doing was repeating the language of the Hyde amendment, but the italicized language quoted above does not appear in the Hyde Amendment. (And besides, even if that were all Stupak was doing, his amendment eliminates the possibility that future repeal of the Hyde Amendment might liberate health reform from its prohibition.) "Stupak is basically saying you cannot even participate in the exchange unless your plan does not cover abortion," Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, told the Los Angeles Times.

The Ellsworth-DeLauro "compromise," on the other hand, says that "if the public plan decides to cover abortion, it would have to hire private contractors to handle money that might be used for that purpose," according to The Times. Laurie Rubiner, Planned Parenthood's vice president for public policy, says the amendment will "tip the balance away from women's access to reproductive health care," while Douglas D. Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, calls it "a phony compromise" and "a money-laundering scheme." Common ground in the abortion debate, ladies and gentleman: This amendment sucks.

Furthermore, it's "an exercise in sophistry" according to a memo written by Harvard professor Laurence H. Tribe and quoted in the Times. Once more with feeling:

Under the House bill, he said, abortion services could be financed 'only by special private premiums that are segregated' from other money. Thus, he concluded, the House bill, "as it currently stands, does not authorize governmental funding of abortion."

But the important thing now is making sure the same thing is spelled out in even more ways, ideally making access to a legal medical procedure even more difficult — not, you know, passing a desperately needed bill. If they just went ahead and passed it as is, it might seem like we have a Democratic majority in Congress whose priority is the health of all Americans or something. Nobody wants that.

Abortion Deal in Health Bill Sets Off Haggling in Congress [NY Times]
"Do-or-die moment" for abortion coverage [Salon]
Don't Be Stupak
[Slate]

Illinois's Medical Disciplinary Board has voted to start enforcing a law that requires doctors to give the parents or guardians of girls 17 or younger 48 hours' notice before providing them with abortions.

For a primer on why parental notification laws suck, check out this article at RH Reality Check. Some highlights:

While parental notification laws are intended to protect young women, they assume that all young women can safely involve their family in the decision to terminate a pregnancy. Ideally, young women would freely inform their parents or other trusted adults. And most do...

However, the government cannot mandate good family dynamics or strengthen a family's ability to engage in effective and positive communication. Interestingly enough, parental notification laws mandate family involvement only after a young woman already has become pregnant.

...[M]ore than half of young women who do not involve a parent in their decision to seek an abortion cite fear of abuse or eviction. The American Medical Association (AMA) reports that some young women will go to extreme and unhealthy lengths to keep pregnancies secret, including running away, obtaining illegal abortions, or self-inducing abortions.

The AMA and other medical organizations recommend against parental notification laws. Research in Texas, which has required parental notification since 2000, has shown that it increased the likelihood that a girl would undergo a second-term abortion, which carries greater health risks. So, to recap, the majority of pregnant girls voluntarily tell their parents before seeking abortion, and those who don't probably have a good reason for keeping quiet — like fearing abuse or being thrown out of the house. Girls will risk their lives with illegal abortions rather than risk telling their parents, which might suggest that they know something about their own family dynamics we don't. Major medical organizations think it's a bad idea. And so... Illinois is about to become the 35th state to go ahead with it. Of course.

If you haven't had your fill of depressing reproductive rights-related news from Illinois yet, take a gander at the story of Donna Quinn, a Dominican sister who's been volunteering as an escort at a Chicago-area clinic. Quinn, who's in favor of contraception and women's ordination as well as being pro-choice, has been caught in the Vatican's dragnet and is giving up her work as an advocate for women at the clinic. Although her order, the Sinsinawa Dominicans, have supported her in the past, the recent increased scrutiny of women religious in America seems to have led them to reprimand her and release a statement saying, "her actions are in violation of her profession" and expressing regret over the controversy. Nevertheless, Quinn maintains that stopping her work as an escort was her own decision, made in part to protect the patients. She told The Chicago Tribune:

As a peacekeeper, my goal is to enable women to enter a reproductive health clinic in dignity and without fear of being physically assaulted. ... I am very worried that the publicity around my presence will lead to violations of every woman's right to privacy and expose them to further violence.

Now, on the one hand, it's no secret that the Catholic Church is anti-choice and anti-contraception, so what did you expect? On the other hand, as someone who attended both a summer camp and a college run by the Sinsinawa Dominicans (and worked one summer at the former), I can tell you the scuttlebutt was always (at least in the '80s and '90s) that a lot of the old girls were only semi-secretly pro-choice. Some are openly in favor of gay rights and many are generally way more feminist than you'd expect. Quinn's been more vocal about her church-challenging views than most, but for a long time, the sisters have basically been left alone to do their thing, which includes community service and educating young people, primarily girls, with enough of a focus on both social justice and critical thinking that some of us inevitably grow up to be atheist, homo-loving, pro-choice feminist bloggers. And basically, that kind of thing is exactly why the Vatican is cracking down now, trying to force American women religious in line and out of public life. If people can see them out there in the community, doing actual good for actual human beings instead of just judging their sex lives — well, that gives entirely the wrong impression of the church's priorities!

If there's a silver lining in all this depressing news, I guess it's just that Donna Quinn exists. And she may be quitting her volunteer work, but she's not shutting up about the need for women to have unhindered access to reproductive health services. "I take this opportunity to urge those demonstrating against women who are patients at the Hinsdale Clinic, whom I have seen emotionally as well as physically threaten women, to cease those activities," she told the Tribune. "I would never have had to serve as a peacekeeper had not they created a war against women."

Vote clears way for Ill. abortion notification law [Chicago Tribune]
Parental Notification Law Will Only Harm Illinois' Young Women [RH Reality Check]
Nun decides to suspend activism for abortion rights after a rebuke by her order [Chicago Tribune]

Earlier: Vatican Attempts To Erase Images Of Modern Service To God

The clip above is provided mostly for the "Awwwww!" value, though it contains a bit of real information about what it took to persuade Michelle to sign on to a presidential campaign. First, watch as mom and daughters fight adorably over their game! Watch as Sasha adorably mugs for the camera! Watch as Malia adorably tells "Daddy" on the phone that she had to eat a lot of chocolate that day, then adorably hands the phone to her sister, who will go on to adorably hand it to Michelle with a gentle "Mommy," instead of the "MAAAAAAHM! PHONE!" any normal kid would have gone with. Then clean up the ovary shrapnel that just flew out of your abdomen and listen to what Michelle has to say about the campaign.

She had a lot of practical questions she wanted answered before she agreed to support her husband running for president, such as: How often would he be on the road? What would be expected of her? I'm almost paying attention now, until we cut to Michelle adorably but perhaps unwisely asking Malia to hold her ice cream cone, which Sasha adorably but unsuccessfully attempts to share, and... campaign, whaa? (Sasha, I feel your baby sister pain!) Oh wait, here's more: "How would we structure our time to make sure that our girls would not be pulled out of their lives? How much would it cost us, as a family?" She specifically refers to the loss of her own income being tough on the family, which I have to assume has not been a great concern for many previous potential first ladies, so that's pretty cool. But all those questions were eventually answered to her satisfaction, and the rest is history. Literally.

More adorable Sasha mugging! She wants to be an actress! There's adorable dancing! STOP IT, STUPID DOCUMENTARY! I have an anti-family, child-hating, godless-dirty-liberal-feminist reputation to protect!

Then Malia gets a little heartbreaky by mentioning that she'd like to see more of her dad, but you know, it's cool to go places and stuff — which sums up the fundamental Obama family dilemma right there: Gain access to pretty much everything and everywhere in the world, lose dad. And when you're 10, it's kind of a toss-up.

But after that bargain was made, Michelle apparently took to campaigning better than expected, as evidenced by the clip below, in which she lovingly mocks undecided voters at an Iowa veterans' home:

"Were you listening to me? Were you awake? Were you awake? You know you love me!" Hee! I wish the networks would just play that clip in response to every single baseless attack ever hurled at Obama. Because really, that's exactly what the wingnuts deserve.


Finally, in the clip below, soon-to-be-President Obama addresses both his wife's reservations about undertaking the campaign, and why she ultimately decided it was the right time: "We're still almost normal."
A few years ago, he says, they were still living in a too-small condo, paying off student loans and credit card debt, trying to figure out how to save both for Sasha and Malia's college educations and their own retirement. "The point is, we've gone through what people are going through right now, relatively recently. We don't forget it."

"We're still almost normal" is — as he says while crediting his wife with it — a great line. And there's a lot of truth in it. Perhaps the larger point, in fact, is that they were almost normal in the first place, as opposed to the endless line of politicians born white, wealthy and well-connected. But still, even if the Obamas have more "regular American" credibility than most, it's only saying so much. Paying off Harvard Law School loans is not quite like paying off chemo. Owning a somewhat cozy condo is not the same as worrying about whether you can make rent next month. Struggling to save is not struggling to live. This has always been my problem with Obama, and every other politician who tries to win votes by pretending he's just an average guy — i.e., all of them, but with Obama it's more of a dilemma, precisely because it's so tempting to believe him. And believing that he's just like us makes it tempting to become complacent and forget to think critically.

It's similar to all of the terrific, at least partially truthful lines about their marriage. As I said last week, there's a lot to admire and even envy about that marriage, but focusing on those elements, or even on Michelle's all-around awesomeness, distracts us from the fact that she sacrificed a lot to get him where he is, and that for much of his daughters' lives, she's been a constant presence while he's been a disembodied voice on the phone. What makes for the best story — the first family is just like us, the first couple is nauseatingly happy and in love — is rarely the whole story. And that's fine, as far as it goes. But as much as I want to take Malia and Sasha out for ice cream and have a cocktail or 4 with Michelle every time I see them on screen, I have to remind myself that that's exactly the response I'm supposed to have, that the first family is being packaged and sold to me just as surely as any other celebrities. And in the end, what matters is not how recently the president was dealing with debt, or how painfully adorable his daughters are, or how ass-kicking his wife is, but what he does in office, whether he keeps the promises he made to the American people. I love seeing images like these, but I'm a little scared by how forgiving they make me.

*I haven't watched the whole thing, on account of not having HBO, but I have been assured by those who did that if you obsessively followed the campaign watching David Axelrod yap about it some more was not especially enlightening. A schedule of upcoming screenings is here.

By The People: The Election Of Barack Obama [HBO]
By The People: The Election Of Barack Obama - Full Schedule [HBO]

Earlier: NYT Magazine: How Can A Marriage Be Equal When One Of You Is President?

Those of us who are fans of Emma Thompson but not fans of child rape were disappointed to learn the actress signed Bernard-Henri Lévy's petition to free Roman Polanski. But a Shakesville reader might just have changed Thompson's mind.

Last week, a reader named Caitlin e-mailed Shakesville blogmistress Melissa McEwan — who had written about being heartbroken by Thompson's decision to sign — with a proposal. Caitlin is a student at Exeter University, where Thompson was scheduled to speak last night, and knew she'd have the opportunity to meet the actor. In her e-mail, Caitlin wrote: "I have set up a petition online, in the hopes that I can hand her a list of names and comments next week from the online community (and my own university, hopefully) showing our dismay at her decision to sign the Roman Polanski petition."

The petition got 410 signatures and numerous comments, which Caitlin brought to her meeting with Thompson last night. In a follow-up e-mail to Shakesville, Caitlin writes:

Emma did not have much time between meetings, but she gave me all of the time that she had. I asked her why she had signed the petition, and she explained about how well she knows Polanski, how terrible his life has been, and how forgiving the survivor of the rape all those years ago now is. She said she thought the intentions of the judge were unclear, as were the intentions of those who arrested him recently. She told me that a lot of her friends had rung her up asking her to sign the petition, so there had been a certain amount of pressure. She said that she had already been thinking a lot about the petition, as others had expressed their dismay at her signing it.

I handed her our petition and the comments. She read them both through thoroughly, and came back to me. She said, while she supported Polanski as a friend, a crime is a crime. I don't know whether she had realised the extent of Polanski's crime, but she is now fully aware. She will remove her name from the petition – in fact, she said she would call today and sort it out. Even though, she stressed, Polanski has had some truly terrible experiences in his lifetime, experiences that we couldn't even imagine and which should not be taken out of the equation, she agreed that she could not put her name to a petition asking for his release.

Assuming that she will be true to her word, her name will be removed in the very near future. Hopefully the press will pick up on it.

She left me with this, to pass on to everyone who has signed the petition/raised awareness of this issue: "Know that I will remove my name because of you, and all of the good work that you have been doing. I have read your petition. I have heard you. And I will listen."

If she follows through, hooray for Thompson — and either way, hooray for Caitlin, who had the guts to use a brief meeting with a celebrity to do what many of us have wanted to over the last month: Ask what the fuck went through her head before she signed. And it sounds like the usual — he's suffered, he's charming, the victim wants it dropped, judicial shenanigans, all the cool kids are signing — minus any thought of what he actually did to the victim in 1977, before fleeing the country. Lévy conveniently left any mention about that out of his petition, but Caitlin did not. And that information is rather crucial to making a decision about whether to call for leaving poor old Polanski alone. I've been wondering the whole time how many of his supporters have taken a good look at it, and how many just got a phone call saying, "It's a witch hunt — sign this" and agreed.

Here's hoping not only that Thompson makes that call, but that her change of heart gets enough real media attention for other celebrity signatories of the Free Polanski petition to think twice about who and what, exactly, they agreed to stand up for.

Emma Update [Shakesville]

Related: Polanski Business: In Which Emma Thompson Breaks My Heart [Shakesville]
Dear Emma... [Shakesville]

Earlier: Letters From Hollywood: Roman Polanski's Rape Of Child No Big Thing

Last night, 53% of Maine voters won the right to dictate whom their fellow citizens can marry, voting to repeal a state law that would have allowed same-sex marriage.

Gay marriage opponents in Maine used the same strategist who got the job done in California, and the same bullshit. The Associated Press reports that the organization "Stand for Marriage based many of its campaign ads on claims - disputed by state officials - that the new law would mean 'homosexual marriage' would be taught in public schools." Apparently, not enough voters asked the obvious question: What the fuck does that even mean? They just heard "homosexual" and "schools" and decided it was worth showing up to take a stand against equality. Again.

National Organization for Marriage director Brian Brown "was elated by Tuesday's result, saying it shows that 'that even in a New England state, if the voters have a chance to have their say, they're going to protect and defend the commonsense definition of marriage.'" Which is exactly the problem. The states that have legalized gay marriage have done so "through legislation or court rulings, not by popular vote," while all 31 states that have put it to a popular vote have shot it down. Opponents of marriage equality see this as evidence that legislators are out of touch with the people and have no business telling folks what should and shouldn't be legal, conveniently forgetting that actually, that's what we elect them to do. Also, that when it comes to securing rights for an oppressed minority, if the majority would rather just keep on with the oppressing, our elected representatives and courts have a duty to stand up and protect more vulnerable citizens.

In The Daily Beast, Linda Hirshman lays out a persuasive argument for getting gay marriage off the ballots. Noting that the ostensibly liberal "Bow Out" movement opposing federal court involvement in gay marriage was founded by people who thought the Supreme Court overstepped its bounds when it insisted that public schools be racially integrated — and p.s., they've also got a big beef with Roe v. Wade — Hirshman underscores the absurdity of their position. "Painful as it is to them, as sincere supporters of abortion rights/gay marriage/your issue here, these wise ones think the federal courts should follow the election returns. Only when a majority of states have legalized something should the federal courts find that it was a fundamental constitutional right all along." If that seems even the tiniest bit logical to you, try this: "Imagine what the law would look like if the Brown court had waited until a majority of states were ready to pass the Civil Rights Acts."

The idea that we should just be patient until hateful bigots naturally come around to accepting the full equality of all citizens, and not rush into any crazy measures like writing that equality into law, is almost certainly not, despite the claims of said hateful bigots, what the founding fathers had in mind. On the output of legal scholars waving the Bow Out flag, Hirshman writes:

What these academic treatises ignore is the concern that Madison and others had that what they called the tyranny of the majority was legitimate. A majority, Madison predicted, often whipped up by demagogues, would oppress a helpless minority, a group so naturally small it could never hope to protect itself at the polls alone-using the government to deprive them of those aspects of life fundamental to a free society. No kidding.

According to the AP, "Richard Socarides, who was an adviser on gay-rights issues in the Clinton administration, said the loss in Maine should prompt gay-rights leaders to reconsider their state-by-state strategy on marriage and shift instead to lobbying for changes on the federal level that expand recognition of same-sex couples." At this point, it looks like he may be right. The fear, of course, is that it will backfire and leave the whole country farther behind, instead of just 31 states with a slight bigot majority. But given how successful demagogues have been at whipping those majorities up, and that — as Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, put it — "lies and fear can still win at the ballot box," waiting for reason and compassion to prevail among voters doesn't seem like the way to go.

Defeat In Maine A Harsh Blow To Gay-Marriage Drive [AP]
Get Gay Marriage Off The Ballot [Daily Beast]

Related: Washington Post Does Puff Profile Of NOM's Executive Director

Forks, WA, has seen such a tourism boom from the Twilight series it's now getting a vamp-themed restaurant. What's on the menu, Jezzies? Blood? Celery stalk(er)s? The "Holy Shit, This Is My Vacation" skillet? [Hollywood Reporter]

Colorado anti-choicers are redefining personhood yet again. Life no longer starts at fertilization, but at "the beginning of the biological development of a human being." If so, say goodbye to in-vitro fertilization, stem cell research, and bodily autonomy! [Colorado Independent]

Salon advice columnist Cary Tennis mostly gets blogosphere attention when his answers are WTF-laden, but today I'd like to praise him for getting it right, in response to a guy who's obsessed with his wife's rape. Well, mostly. Partly. Whatever.

Disclosure: I am on Salon's payroll, which doesn't influence my opinion much (you won't find me mincing words about Camille Paglia), but as a reader, I've long had a soft spot for Tennis's writing, which does. So I will respond to yesterday's column in the form of an open letter to him, lest I fall into the trap of giving advice without remembering that I am talking about a real human being — something he generally doesn't do, hence soft spot. Consider it my own little one-off advice column: "Not That You Asked."

Dear Cary (may I call you Cary?).

I've been reading your column for years, and in my opinion, your greatest strength and greatest weakness as an advice-giver are the same: You are relentlessly empathetic and give everyone the benefit of the doubt. This often makes your long, thoughtful responses quite moving. It also often leaves the reader wondering, "Why are you being so nice to this asshole? Did you not see the part where he said [complete asshole thing]? Call him out!"

Yesterday was one of those days, although in this case, "asshole" is probably too strong a word. Let's call him A Guy With Serious Issues That Are Above Your Pay Grade And Mine And Maybe Even A Licensed Therapist's. ("Guy," for short.) Guy tells you that 20 years ago, around the time he started dating his wife, she was raped. She has processed it and moved on with her life, and chooses not to talk about it now. Guy is not over it. Says Guy:

I can't let it go. I think about it daily, 20 years after the fact. I wonder about the details. I'm angry at the friend who let it happen. I blame (only to myself) current behaviors of my wife on the fact that she was raped then. I fantasize about causing harm to the man who committed the crime. But this was so long ago, and our lives are so different, and reasonably happy, now. Why my obsession?

Wisely, you don't really attempt to answer that question, because seriously, who knows? Also wisely, you encourage him to consult a licensed professional on the matter, even though he says, "I have had therapists but never felt able to talk to them about it." You spend a long time talking him through how that might go, the finally opening up to a therapist, which is probably something he needs. People do usually respond better to gentle guidance than no-holds-barred ass-kicking, I think.

But the problem with being an advice columnist (and I was one, briefly, albeit only for a blog with almost no readers) is that you're simultaneously writing back to the person who sought your advice and to a whole bunch of strangers. You are well aware of this, of course, if for no other reason than the vile pit of hatred that is (or sometimes can be, more charitably) your comments section. But I bring it up anyway because I think that sometimes your empathy for a person who has come to you with a problem, and is maybe even sincerely trying to change, leads you to forget that those other readers might need to hear something different.

Take that dude who didn't want to tell his new girlfriend he used to beat his wife. I know you've already heard a lot about that one, so I'll keep it brief. But Cary, as much as that guy may have been truly remorseful and really needed some support, your other readers — who almost certainly include domestic violence victims, abusers, and people who will some day become one or both of the above — need you, too. We need you to point out explicitly that beating your wife half a dozen times is six times too many, and not a youthful indiscretion that can be brushed away. We need you to say that, even if this particular guy really deserves the benefit of the doubt (who knows?), most abusers don't stop with one time, or one victim. In light of that, we need you to call him out on describing his ex as malicious for wanting to warn the new girlfriend about his past behavior. Come on! We need you to say that yes, people can change — you're living proof — but the reality remains that many people do not, and learning that your partner has a history of being abusive is a very good reason to leave him. That sort of thing, you know? Then you can get into walking him through the best-case scenario for him.

With Guy, it's not as clear-cut. He's got this problem, he knows it's fucked up, he's asking for help. Except — that part about him not being able to tell a therapist about it? That's a red flag for me. And the part about him blaming his wife's (unspecified) unpleasant behavior on a rape that happened 20 years ago, even if he doesn't say so out loud? That's another one. His anger at the friend who "let it happen," as though rape is anyone's fault but the rapist's? Number 3. And his fantasies about harming the guy? Common among men whose loved ones are raped, as I understand it, but daily, 20 years later? That's a red flag.

And when you put all those red flags together, it seems clear that this is not a letter you can take at face value. He's angry at all the wrong people, he's obsessed with an act of violence that happened to someone else two decades ago, and he thinks he needs help but won't tell a therapist about it? This guy seems to think his wife's rape happened to him, for Pete's sake. That is all shit your readers need you to address before you put the kid gloves back on and try to be helpful.

Having said all that, I promised to give you credit for getting something very right, which is this: You brought the concept of rape culture into your response, and encouraged Guy to take responsibility for helping to end it.

How do young men find the motive and the opportunity to commit such crimes? This was not a lone crazy stalker. This happened within a trusted social network. So there is something in our society that permits such things to occur. That is probably part of what outrages you so, and rightly. It confers upon you an obligation to speak out. When those to whom these things happen are silent, nothing is done to prevent further occurrences.

This rape that happened 20 years ago is not simply a private matter between you and your wife. It is a social problem today. Each of us bears some responsibility for embodying principles of respect and dignity that act as a social deterrent to the depersonalization that must occur in order for a man to commit rape. By supporting educational and law-enforcement programs that inform women, empower them and remove their attackers from the population, you can transform this crime into something positive.

That is 95% awesome, and incredibly refreshing to see in an advice column (or anywhere), so really, thank you for that. As for the other 5%, two quibbles: 1) As I just mentioned, the rape didn't actually happen to him, but to his wife, who apparently is choosing to be silent. There are lots of reasons why survivors might make that choice, primary among them that speaking out often brings judgment, derision and disbelief. (That's rape culture!) So, while it's absolutely true that decent people in general have an obligation to speak out against rape and rape culture, and that hearing the voices of victims has a powerful impact, let's not put too much pressure on "those to whom these things happen," okay? 2) Related to that, while the "educational and law-enforcement programs" you speak of are all important, you left out one crucial element, even though it's exactly what you're doing here (and well, and thank you again!): Educating men. Educating them first, not to rape — which you'd think would be a no-brainer, but the number of "nice guys" who "would never do a thing like that," and yet do do things like that, tells us otherwise — and second, not to support rape culture. Not to objectify women, or let it slide when others do; not to violate women's boundaries, even just to say hello; to call the police when they see a young woman being attacked instead of standing by or worse, joining in. That sort of thing. There's a lot men can do that doesn't necessarily involve law enforcement or teaching women to protect themselves. You just did some of it in this column, and it would be terrific if you encouraged guys like Guy to do even more of it among themselves.

But you know, I think I just put my finger on the thing that's really bothering me about your exchange with this writer, the thing that's really missing. (Like you, I often have to write my way into the real point, and it rarely happens quickly.) It's that fantasy about causing harm to the rapist. Like I said, it's common. I didn't tell my dad for months after I was raped, because I knew he'd respond exactly how he eventually did, with a bunch of talk about shotguns and "If I get my hands on him..." (And my dad is the type of guy who enjoys crossword puzzles, bird watching, and making goofy faces at babies a lot more than macho posturing. He's 5'8" on his tippy toes. His ideal Saturday afternoon involves sitting on a dock, waiting for a turtle to pop his head out of the water every 15 minutes, and exclaiming, "Oh! There he is!" whenever it does. You get the picture.) I didn't know at the time why that reaction bothered me so much — I've appreciated others' desire for vengeance on my behalf for much lesser cruelties — but now I do. It's because that, too, is part of rape culture.

When men focus on their urge to punish the rapist with their bare hands, instead of on the victim's needs — like, moving on after 20 years, for instance? — it reinforces a lot of nasty shit. Like the idea that women belong to their men, and a woman being raped takes something from those men. The idea that violence is best solved with more violence. The idea that making one rapist so sorry he'll never do it again — which, good luck with that — will do a damned thing to end rape. The idea that women need protection from and by big, tough guys more than we need a woman-friendly culture in which we're free to move autonomously and safely. The idea that once a rape has happened, there's anything anyone can do to fix it. A guy still laboring under any or all of those delusions needs to be disabused of them swiftly, as much as he may also need some gentle advice.

That's what I really didn't like about that letter. I liked a lot of things about your response, but if Guy had written to me, I'd have made sure to add all that, too. Not that you asked.

Fondly,
Kate

I Can't Get Over My Wife's Rape — 20 Years Ago [Salon]

Related: I'm A Former Abuser — Should I Tell My Girlfriend? [Salon]
Rape Culture 101 [Shakesville]
Guest Blogger Starling: Schrödinger's Rapist: Or A Guy's Guide To Approaching Strange Women Without Being Maced [Shapely Prose]

While riding a nearly-empty train in the evening, Marsha Coupe was attacked by another woman who kicked and punched her repeatedly, leaving her with 40 bruises and one eye swollen shut. The reason given? Coupe took up two seats.

"'You big fat pig' is all Marsha Coupe heard before she was kicked in the face." So begins a BBC article exploring why fat people are so frequently and openly abused — emotionally and, yes, physically. Although the piece is extremely (and somewhat shockingly) sympathetic to fat people, one thing that contributes to fat hatred can be found before it even begins: The traditional headless fatty photo. The BBC's is of a man's naked, hairy torso, spilling out over his jeans, and, as headless fatty photos usually are, it is sure to evoke disgust. Further down in the article, there's a picture of Martha Coupe's battered face, which is unsettling and a bit grainy, but a far more accurate depiction of the article's subject than a disembodied gut — with a tape measure around it, no less. One evokes sympathy for an abused person, and the marginalized group she belongs to. The other dehumanizes a fat person, quite literally reducing him to nothing but a big old gut, and — given the prevalence of anti-fat sentiment outlined in this very article — is likely to make people laugh at best and recoil at worst. People responsible for choosing the images that accompany articles like this (and producing B-roll for TV reports on obesity) really need to think about the messages they're sending — and recognize that they're bigoted shits if that actually is the message they mean to send. (Note: There are some more understandable reasons for choosing such photos, and the one I've chosen here — of longtime fat activist Marilyn Wann — isn't perfect, though I do love it. I'll elaborate on this in comments.)

With that out of my system, let's move on to the text. It's pretty fabulous overall, quoting people who actually know something about size acceptance and citing thoughtful explanations for anti-fat attitudes and abuse. They even get bonus points for not falling into the "it's the last acceptable prejudice!" trap (please see rule 11 if you were thinking of doing that in comments here), while making it clear that it very much is a widely acceptable prejudice, with real consequences for real people.

Some key points:

• "Often the assumption is that overweight people have lost their self-control." Says Fat Is a Feminist Issue author Susie Orbach, "Most people want to be slim, but this perceived physical perfection is difficult to hold on to and they fear losing control of it...They project that fear and unhappiness on to people who are bigger and that often translates into abuse and attacks. It's a way of people disassociating themselves from what they fear the most — getting fat."
• It's based on the simplistic and inaccurate assumption that fatness is always the result of laziness and greed. Psychologist Ros Taylor: "There is true aggression towards overweight people and it comes down to fear and a complete lack of understanding of the issue. People think 'I can control what I put in my mouth so why can't they'. But we're not all the same, we don't all start from the same point."
• The government and media (pick your government and your media; it's certainly as true here as it is in Britain) have created a full-fledged moral panic about fatness. Martha Coupe: "The government and the press have created an atmosphere where people think they have a legitimate right to go up to an overweight person and tell them how to live their lives. To them we are all the anonymous pictures of fat people they see in the papers and are the cause of all society's ills, as well as a drain on the NHS. We deserve what we get. We're not people with feelings." (See? She even told you why headless fatties are problematic!)
• People tend to have unconscious but powerful negative reactions to those they find unattractive. Weight specialist Dr. Ian Campbell: "It's innate in people to dislike what they see as a lack of attractiveness. It makes them think such people are worthy of derision. Very young kids have been shown to have a bias against their overweight peers."

That last point is fine, as far as it goes, but in addition to the fact that our big brains can override kneejerk negative reactions once we recognize that they're irrational (which the article does point out), what we find attractive is certainly dictated in large part by the culture, not just some sort of vaguely defined "innate" characteristics (which it does not). I've seen this slide into a bullshit evo-psych argument far too often. "We want people who look healthy! Fat people look unhealthy! IT'S HARD-WIRED CAN'T CHANGE IT PUT DOWN THE FORK IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT." Yeeeah, except for how any amount of fat equaling ill-health in the collective consciousness is a very recent development. Throughout history, being relatively famine-proof was more likely regarded as a big advantage. Women with pelvises bigger than their heads were almost certainly regarded as more likely to be fertile. And even in fairly recent history, what was widely considered attractive was a hell of a lot different than it is now. Noting that negative reactions to "unattractive people" are not completely within the average person's control — at least until she takes a moment to apply reason — is one thing. Implying that this means we all have an instinctive aversion to fatties is quite another. The idea that fat people are categorically, universally unattractive is a function of fat hatred, not a reasonable explanation for it.

Speaking of which, Elizabeth Bluemle has a terrific post over at Publishers Weekly about fat characters in children's literature, which further elucidates how subtle but unmistakable — and frequent — messages about fatness can turn an irrational prejudice into the prevailing wisdom.

While we have all become accustomed to popular culture's celebration of thin, what I didn't expect is that books - the refuge of the chubby kid, the place where people understand the value of what lies beneath the surface, a land of acceptance and tolerance for difference - would come around to betray their readers. But you can hardly open an [advanced reading copy] these days without coming across one of the following:

* snide comments about a character's weight or about fat in general when they have nothing to do with the plot or theme of the story;
* descriptions of fat used deliberately as shorthand to indicate a character's villainy, isolation, absurdity, and/or repulsiveness;
* books with assumptions about fat people carelessly tossed off as though they are truths rather than opinion.

Right on, Elizabeth Bluemle. It's been a while since I read any children's literature (although Lizzie Skurnick frequently tempts me to revisit old favorites), but I notice this shit in grown-up books all the time — throwaway bits of fat hate, often apparently meant to endear author to reader, because of course everyone finds fat people ridiculous/disgusting/other than fully human, amirite? Jane Fallon's novel Getting Rid of Matthew was completely ruined for me because of that shit. It's couple hundred pages of smart, funny writing that's almost perfectly suited to my taste, and only a couple of lines that felt like she'd slapped me in the face for no obvious reason beyond "hur hur, fatties!" But they did, in fact, feel that way, and that's really not what I'm looking for in a book.

Having read Martha Coupe's story, I guess I can be grateful that I've never actually been slapped, kicked or punched in the face for being fat. But she is far from the only one who has, and we can't pretend that such abuse is somehow separate from the moral panic over obesity, the fiction that looks-based hatred is hard-wired, the way our collective guilt about overconsumption is projected onto fat people, the automatic equation of fatness with laziness and greed, and a million little fat jokes that people "didn't really mean anything by." Of course, that's exactly what the BBC commenters try to do — I only read about a dozen, but most are along the lines of, "Look, it's shameful and illegal to beat someone up, but fat people are still a huge problem for society to solve!"

Be better than that, Jezzies. Be smarter than that. And above all, please be kinder than that. Fat people are not a blight on society; we're human beings. Acting like we're some abstract problem to be solved only contributes to the kind of hatred that left Martha Coupe with a bruised and bloodied face, just because she dared to take up as much space as she needs.

Why Are Fat People Abused? [BBC]
Fat, But [Publishers Weekly]

The less you spend on a car, the more you can spend on other things — "things" named Michelle, Tammy and Allison. [Vintage Ads]

A couple of weeks after the White House declared war on Fox News (with communications director Anita Dunn saying on CNN, "Let's not pretend they're a news network the way CNN is"), peace talks have begun.

Fox News senior vice president Michael Clemente reportedly met with White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on Wednesday. That's all we really know about that right now. But meanwhile, the debate carries on about whether it was an abuse of power for the White House to — as deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer put it to the New York Times — "stop abiding by the fiction, which is aided and abetted by the mainstream press, that Fox is a traditional news organization."

Writing for Salon, Gene Lyons sums up the nature of the controversy: "Neither the Times nor most 'mainstream' pundits evaluated the claim on its merits. Most pretended not to grasp the White House's point, and then went straight to the aiding and abetting." Lyons and Mike Madden list several of the most egregious examples of Fox apologism in the mainstream press. Writes Madden:

"It makes the White House look childish and petty at best, and it has a distinct Nixonian — Agnewesque? — aroma at worst," Ruth Marcus wrote on a Washington Post blog. Her colleague Sally Quinn told Fox News the episode reminded her of Watergate. (Likewise, NPR's Ken Rudin initially compared the White House move to Nixon's enemies list, though he later apologized for the comparison.) ABC News' Jake Tapper pressed the White House on whether it was appropriate for officials to weigh in on what was or wasn't a legitimate news organization. On Time's Swampland blog, Joe Klein said the White House was better off ignoring Fox than trying to hit back.

Lyons reminds us just how overblown and borderline batshit the Nixon comparisons are: "Excuse me, but Nixon's enemies list was secret. Journalists and others got subjected to illegal FBI wiretaps, 'black bag' break-ins and IRS audits. White House officials even discussed murdering columnist Jack Anderson... Meanwhile, poor little Fox got criticized publicly. Oh, the horror!"

Perhaps the worst offender, though, was CNN's Campbell Brown, who asked Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett whether the White House considers MSNBC a biased network. Jarrett declined to answer, prompting Brown to remark that she, "seems loath to admit that MSNBC has a bias. And that is where I think the White House loses all credibility on this issue."

Really? Because that's where I think Campbell Brown loses all credibility on this issue. Even if MSNBC does have a liberal bias in its news reporting (as opposed to its opinion and analysis) — for our purposes here, I'll even stipulate that it does — it's still comparing apples and rotting, bug-infested oranges. The problem is not that Fox News leans a bit to the right (in my opinion, so does CNN and so does half the "liberal" opinion on MSNBC), but that they consistently violate principles of journalistic ethics as if that is, in fact, their primary goal and they're systematically working through a checklist. It's not that they editorialize; it's that they lie. It's not that they sympathize with right-wing whackjobs, it's that they sponsor them. You want to have a conversation about media bias on both sides, that's fine, but you cannot have an intellectually honest version of that discussion if you begin with the premise that Fox and MSNBC are equally outrageous in their departure from objectivity and distortion of the facts — or, you know, "the fiction that Fox News is a traditional news organization."

It's convenient for folks at CNN to pretend that the two are equivalent, since that makes them look like the one cable news outlet that gives a damn about balanced reporting. But such an assertion actually betrays both bias and bull on their part (even if the bias is chiefly toward their own profits). Fox News has consistently displayed such a flagrant lack of concern for facts, balance and integrity, any journalist with the slightest pretension to objectivity should be mortified by the mere thought of defending them. And yet.

Personally, I think it's time to "elevate the conversation," as Brown put it, not to a discussion of liberal vs. conservative bias in the media, but one about whether such a thing as "journalistic objectivity" really exists anymore (or ever did). For starters, everyone, including journalists, has opinions; that traditional journalists make some effort to mask their own while reporting doesn't change that fact. Even the most "objective" reports can be manipulated to reveal a slant in one direction or another; who gets the first word, who gets the last word, how quotes are edited, which facts are included and which omitted, which arguments from each side of a controversy are considered worthy of inclusion, all can — and often do — give the reader a peek behind that mask, without any acknowledgment that that's exactly what's happening.

And especially lately, establishing "balance" has meant giving an equal voice to people who live in the reality-based community and any crackpot with a theory and a publicist. Why the hell did the mainstream media take "birthers" seriously, for instance? Fact: Obama is an American citizen. Fact: He has the birth certificate to prove it. Fact: Several journalists have fondled that legal document with their own hands. That right there is the objective truth, and all that's worth reporting. Presenting those facts alongside a deranged rant by Orly Taitz, as if both deserve equal consideration, is not balanced reporting, but cynical ratings-mongering that inflames bullshit-based hysteria and very much clouds the truth. Getting "both sides of the story" isn't worth sweet fuck all, journalistic integrity-wise, when there are not actually two sides to that story.

Of course the White House speaking out against any media outlet demands a full consideration of whether they're trying to control the news in unconstitutional ways. But in this case, such a full consideration leads to the conclusion that they're not. They are, in fact, acknowledging an objective reality: Fox News is not a traditional news organization, and it is dangerous to continue pretending they are.

Fox News Channel, Obama Administration Talking [AP]
Why Is The Media Defending Fox And Attacking Obama? [Salon]
Don't Be Surprised The Media Elite Sided With Fox [Salon]
White House Declares War On Fox News [Salon]

Here's something refreshing: Learning about a politician's marriage before it's a complete trainwreck! For this week's New York Times magazine cover story, Jodi Kantor spoke to Barack and Michelle Obama about their relationship.

"I married you because you're cute and you're smart," Michelle told the President when he first announced that he intended to run for the Illinois State Senate. "But this is the dumbest thing you could have ever asked me to do." Fourteen years later, she might think differently about her husband's political career, but it took a while to get there. And you can't blame her for being irritated along the way when she mentions that "This is the first time in a long time in our marriage that we've lived seven days a week in the same household with the same schedule, with the same set of rituals. That's been more of a relief for me than I would have ever imagined." Prior to their moving into the White House, they hadn't lived together full-time since before Malia was born.

"Barack doesn't belong to you," a friend told Michelle around the time he was in Bali writing Dreams from My Father, and not long before he started going on the road constantly. The narrative here builds toward her acceptance of that fact — or at least, that he only belongs to her in certain ways. The rewards of her letting him go, of not insisting that he give up politics and find a job that brought him home for dinner every night, are obvious. But then, so are the sacrifices. She was essentially a single mom who also worked outside the home — not entirely by choice, when the girls were little — for much of his early political career, since his time-consuming work wasn't bringing in enough to support the family. She had to bring baby Sasha to her job interview at the University of Chicago Medical Center, because her sitter canceled at the last minute and Dad was somewhere else. Says the president, "Michelle would say, ‘Well, you're gone all the time and we're broke? How is that a good deal?'" He wrote about their frequent conflict over their long-distance marriage in The Audacity of Hope ("he may have been wise to raise the issue before anyone else," Kantor notes), but says, "There was no point where I was fearful for our marriage. There were points in time where I was fearful that Michelle just really didn't - that she would be unhappy." And, frankly, she was.

All those sacrifices she made leading up to his election as president make a great backstory, but Kantor is smart enough to recognize that the story's far from over. She asks the Obamas point blank "how any couple can have a truly equal partnership when one member is president." Said president hems and haws a bit before responding.

"My staff worries a lot more about what the first lady thinks than they worry about what I think," he finally said, to laughter around the room.

The question still unanswered, his wife stepped back in: "Clearly Barack's career decisions are leading us. They're not mine; that's obvious. I'm married to the president of the United States. I don't have another job, and it would be problematic in this role. So that - you can't even measure that."

Can I just tell you how much I love that Michelle doesn't let him get away with turning it all into a joke? (Especially a hoary old, "Oh, really, my wife's the one with all the power!" joke. For fuck's sake, you're the president of the United States. That joke is annoying when regular guys make it to avoid directly addressing the actual inequality in their marriages, and off-the-charts annoying when you do it.) Michelle's gotten heaps of praise for being an Ivy League-educated lawyer with a high-powered professional background, yet dutifully taking on the role of traditional First Lady, never overstepping her bounds — unlike certain other Ivy League-educated lawyer wives of youngish Democratic presidents in recent memory. But people are so eager to applaud her for knowing her place, they don't seem willing to consider how, you know, it kind of sucks that after all the support she's given her husband, the end result is that she can't even have a job of her own. Barack doesn't belong to her — but for the time being, she belongs to Barack. And the media. And the American People. And the world. Just not so much to herself.

Oh, and about that other ivy league-educated lawyer wife — not to mention her husband. Clinton comparisons abound here, for reasons I can't quite grasp. Sure, there are some superficial similarities, but also — as the comparisons inevitably demonstrate — so many differences, it's hard to see why Kantor doesn't compare them to Bushes or Kennedys or Roosevelts or Jolie-Pitts. In fact, it's not even clear who's who in the Clinton/Obama analogy.

As a first-time candidate, Barack could be stiff; friends remember him talking to voters with his arms folded, looking defensive. Michelle warmed everyone up, including her husband. "She is really Bill, and he is really Hillary," one friend recently put it. But like Hillary Clinton - and countless other political wives - Michelle sometimes took on the role of enforcer.

Which raises the obvious question: If Michelle has both Bill's charisma and Hillary's ovaries of steel, why the hell is she not our president?

That question occurred to me again while reading the passage where Kantor gets into Michelle's "vital role in heading off the most promising female [presidential] candidate in United States history."

It was essential for the Obama campaign to present some sort of accomplished female counterweight to Hillary Clinton, to convince Democratic women that they could vote for Barack Obama and a powerful female figure besides. Consciously or not, Michelle made herself into an appealing contrast to the front-runner. She was candid; Hillary was often guarded. Michelle represented the idea that a little black girl from the South Side of Chicago could grow up to be first lady of the United States; Hillary stood for the hold of the already-powerful on the political system. And Michelle seemed to have the kind of marriage many people might aspire to; Hillary did not.

This whole passage makes me sad. That's partly because I voted for Clinton in large part because I regarded her as long-overdue proof that a little girl from the Chicago suburbs could grow up to be president, and it still irritates me to see her held up primarily as a symbol of the establishment, rather than a swift kick in the establishment's shriveled white nuts. (I think she and Obama are both about 50/50 there.) But it's also because the false equivalence continues to go unquestioned, just as it did in the campaign — we're meant to accept that becoming First Lady is basically just as momentous for a woman as becoming president would be. Which... you remember that Hillary Clinton is one of the people in this equation, right? And seriously, every time I heard that shit about a little girl from the South Side growing up to be First Lady, all I could think was, "What little girl dreams of being married to the most powerful person on the planet?" I don't know, maybe some still do in the twenty-first century, but I certainly didn't in the late twentieth. I was heartbroken when I learned in elementary school that being born in Canada makes me ineligible for the presidency; it took many more years before it fully sunk in that my vagina does, too. And sadder still is the fact that little African-American girls are faced with even less evidence to suggest they could ever scale those heights. Michelle may have Bill's charisma, Hillary's toughness and Barack's brains, but with racism and sexism both working against her, she couldn't have made it as far as any of them if she'd wanted to.

Fortunately for her, if not for little girls in desperate need of role models in politics, Michelle doesn't seem to want to. And being the wife of a cute, smart president who clearly adores her is not such a bad gig, even if it means her personal ambitions have to wait another three to seven years. Despite my focus on the First Lady's sacrifices and the inequality of the marriage here (I am a humorless feminist, after all), Kantor's portrait of the Obama's marriage is really quite sweet, warts and all. They joke. They flirt. They go on dates and ignore the conservatives who flip out about our tax dollars going toward dinner and a show. That's just not the whole picture, and Michelle herself believes revealing the warts has a higher purpose.

"If my ups and downs, our ups and downs in our marriage can help young couples sort of realize that good marriages take work. . . ." Michelle Obama said a few minutes later in the interview. The image of a flawless relationship is "the last thing that we want to project," she said. "It's unfair to the institution of marriage, and it's unfair for young people who are trying to build something, to project this perfection that doesn't exist"

The First Marriage [NY Times]

Not so surprising: Most teen parents are not living in poverty or in single-parent homes. Surprising: 15% of women surveyed reported being teen parents, but only 5% of men did. Huh? [USA Today]

You know how Obama recently cut funding to abstinence-only education programs, and we all rejoiced? Yeah, well, don't get too comfortable.

Today is National Comprehensive Sex Education Call-In Day, an effort to inform Congress that we won't stand for $50 million' worth of abstinence-only funding being tucked into the all-important healthcare reform bill. Feministing has a list of talking points for a 5-minute call to your senator, but Newsweek has a more in-depth look at why we should be resisting any move to pour another pile of money into abstinence-only education, especially when it's been cynically tacked on to such an important bill.

The most obvious reason: They don't work. During the '90s and early '00s, government cash flowed freely into programs that told kids not having sex means nothing bad will happen, and having sex means trouble, end of story. "But as funding grew, so did a body of research showing that abstinence didn't change the sexual behaviors of students; pregnancy and STD rates did not go down, the age of initial sexual activity did not go up." Comprehensive programs that included education about contraception actually fared better in terms of reducing "frequency of sex or number of sexual partners," not just unwanted consequences of sex.

But just as importantly, "Two major reviews of abstinence curriculums-one in 2004 from the House of Representatives' Committee on Government Reform, another by the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund earlier this year-found unsourced and incorrect information about STDs, contraceptives, and the consequences of sexual activity." For example, one curriculum taught that condom use has "little to no benefit" and another declared, "a young person who becomes sexually active at or before age 14 will contract an STD before graduating from high school. This is no longer the exception, but the rule." Who needs nitpicky shit like science and data when you can get federal funding for lying through your teeth?

Additionally, several of the programs raised separation of church and state issues; "the American Civil Liberties Union mounted a number of lawsuits (some successful, some not) against abstinence-only curriculums in public schools and state-sponsored events that advanced a specific religious perspective." And ultimately, it's that religious perspective that keeps so many people in the business of abstinence-only education, despite all of the evidence that it doesn't work. Leslee Unruh, director of the Abstinence Clearinghouse — which "exists to bring families closer to each other and to our Creator" and bases its work "on a set of foundational Christian beliefs" — told Newsweek, "If the funding is for a different worldview, one that says you should give condoms to kids, that's not my belief system. I think it's very harmful." Scott Phelps, who directs A&M Partnership — which produces the Excel Christian Bible Study on Purity, among other things — says, "Our program indicates that sex is more than physical. It's emotional. There's a lot of different aspects. If I'm teaching all of that, and then I'm teaching contraception, what is contraception going to do for all those consequences? It would be sort of nonsensical."

Since Obama cut off abstinence-only funding in May, folks like Unruh and Phelps are now forced to raise private funds to support ineffective programs that advance a religious agenda — oh, the humanity! But other abstinence-only educators are accepting reality. Over the summer, the North Carolina State Legislature approved a compromise, which happens to reflect what studies show works best: Telling kids that abstinence is the most reliable method of pregnancy and STD prevention, but contraceptives are an option they should be fully informed about. Both Planned Parenthood and the NC Christian Action League are cool with it — now, how hard was that? The effectiveness of such a compromise only underscores how fringey and fundamentally unreasonable it is to insist that offering kids accurate information about contraceptives is somehow "harmful" — and how utterly nauseating it is that so much federal money has already gone into promoting that message.

Of course, there are still those fighting to restore federal funding for abstinence-only education, and there's no way of knowing if they'll ultimately be successful. But one thing is for sure: Trying to sneak that shit into the healthcare reform bill is unconscionable. Call your senators and tell them so.

The Future Of Abstinence [Newsweek]
Reminder: National Comprehensive Sex Education Call-In Day Is Today! [Feministing]

Michelle Obama is the first First Lady ever to land the cover of Glamour and is being honored with the magazine's Special Recognition award for mentoring young women. More importantly, I want that dress. [Glamour]

The World Economic Forum released its annual Gender Gap Index yesterday, and Iceland — that's Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir, not only a lady, but the world's first openly gay leader, at left — kicks everybody else's ass at gender equality.

Which is to say, Iceland's not perfect, but none of the other 133 countries studied (representing 93% of the world's population) did better. Let's have a look at how that happened:

Iceland's women are surpassing Iceland's men in college enrollment and in attaining professional and technical jobs, and have achieved near equal labor force participation. The country also ranked No. 1 in political empowerment. While women there hold 43% of parliament seats and 36% of ministerial positions, Iceland also named a new female prime minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir, this year. The combination of powerful female role models and progressive government policies, like three months of paid maternity leave, are working to close the gap even further.

The U.S., on the other hand?

The U.S. fell to No. 31, down from last year's No. 27 ranking and even farther from 2006's placement at No. 23. The U.S. has always done well on measures of education and economic participation, but has been held back by mediocre scores in women's health and political achievement. The U.S. gap in political empowerment is below the world's average, having closed only 14% of its gap. This year, small changes in economic opportunity—female labor force participation and wage equality fell slightly—pushed the U.S. down the list.

And of course, we've still got it pretty good, in the big picture. Although 67% of countries were found to be improving in terms of gender equality, 33% are getting worse — and even a marked improvement is not always saying much in a world where women are still at risk, as Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have recently been reminding us all, of "sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape," not to mention dying in childbirth, contracting HIV, and simply disappearing. But of course, as Anna North pointed out, the increased attention to these human rights abuses tends to revolve around the idea that finally addressing them might lead to greater economic prosperity — with the fact that it might lead to fewer sick, abused, maimed, dead and missing women being presented as something of a bonus. And as she said, "What happens if women decide to spend their newly earned money on alcohol instead of their children's education? What if they spend it on weapons? And what if, even though they spend it on all the 'right' things, their countries still fail to develop economically? Treating women as agents of social change risks leaving them out in the cold if they don't effect the change we want."

Or what happens if empowered women do help a country develop economically, only to be continually marginalized in less attention-grabbing ways? In response to the news that the U.S.'s ranking has dropped, ambassador-at-large for global women's issues Merlanne Verveer said, "We have our work cut out for us... We've been the model but also have a ways to travel." Unfortunately, I wonder if the U.S. isn't still a model of what actually happens when women are afforded basic human rights: A certain level of economic stability is achieved, and then people start complaining that women already have equality, and if they aren't making as much money or holding as many offices, it's probably their own fault.

"It remains a simple fact that no country could prosper if half its people are left behind," says Verveer, "Yet, women are still largely under-represented also in parliament and legislatures of nearly every country, and I might add so too in the boardrooms of corporations." But that's still painfully true in the U.S. and recession aside, we are still an obscenely wealthy nation. Which means this country did, in fact, prosper while half its people were left behind in numerous ways. If future economic success is the best motivation we've got for supporting gender equality, it only goes so far.

U.S. Slips In Global Gender Gap Index; Iceland Leads the Pack [Forbes]
Nordic Countries Top Gender Gap Index Again [MSNBC]

Earlier: Are Women The New "Deserving Poor"?

Long Beach, California's Club Bounce caters to fat people "who might have some trouble getting past the velvet ropes at other night spots because of their size." And where there are happy fat people, there's controversy!

The semi-reasonable controversy that attends any fat-specific gathering or event — nightclubs, yoga classes, pool parties, reality dating shows — is not even mentioned in the article, but I'll recap it here anyway. "But why should fat people be segregated?" it goes. "Isn't the point to be more inclusive, not to shove some people off to the side?" It's a well-meaning argument, but I'll tell you what, I rarely hear actual fat people making it. Because we know that while there may not be "No fatties" signs on many doors, there are velvet ropes and bouncers. And yoga instructors who have no clue how fat bodies work, and assholes who will sneer and snicker at the lardass who dares to wear spandex to the gym or a bathing suit to the pool (as if we don't even know how gross that is!), and Bachelors who would laugh the cutest, sweetest chubster right out of the mansion on the first round. And even though there are absolutely fantastic, size-friendly clubs and studios and gyms and pools and probably even reality show contestants all over this great nation, if they don't explicitly advertise themselves as such, fat people can only find them by trial and error. And by "error," I mean "public humiliation."

So hell yes, I would rather go to Club Bounce than someplace where the bouncer may or may not even let my fat, thirtysomething ass in the door, the bartenders may or may not acknowledge my existence, and the other patrons may or may not give me dirty looks or fail to stifle their laughter. (And all of this goes double for a lot of people fatter than me.) Full inclusion at establishments for "normal" people is certainly the long-term goal, but in the meantime, if somebody rolls out the fatty welcome mat, you can bet I'll be happy to spend my money there, just to remove the stress of not knowing if I'll be treated like a real human being.

But like I said, that's not even the controversy mentioned in the article. Instead, it's the same old argument used against making fashionable plus size clothing available, or increasing the visibility of fat people on TV, or granting us health coverage at all, let alone without penalties, or saying out loud that it is possible to find love while fat: But if we give them nice things, they won't have any motivation to lose weight! "The very nature of such venues," says the Associated Press, "has led some to question whether they are encouraging people to remain fat in a society where, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one-third of adults are already obese."

As in all of those other cases, the argument is fundamentally a load of bigoted horseshit. But in this case, it's also patently absurd. If we want to solve the obesity crisis, we can't let fat people dance! Why, that's a form of exercise, and if we want fat people to be healthier, we can't have them...

Wait, what? How does this make even the tiniest shred of sense? Answer: It doesn't, unless you believe that allowing fat people to get within a country mile of anything that smacks of self-esteem, happiness, or enjoying their bodies as they are is "encouraging obesity." Which, of course, is exactly what a lot of people do think, as demonstrated by all of the above arguments. If we just stopped letting fat people wear clothes and go to the doctor when they're sick and, you know, ever leave the house, they'd all either die or get thin! Obesity crisis solved!

So, naturally, a writer who thought that was a line of reasoning logical enough to acknowledge in the first place concludes that the good thing about clubs like Bounce is that they might motivate people to lose weight! "Although obesity remains a serious problem, with links to diabetes, heart disease and other health issues, says sociologist Karen Sternheimer, creating a place where people can feel good about themselves can build self-esteem, which in turn can prompt people to do something about their weight." Or, you know, it can prompt them to pursue health and happiness and love and the full human being treatment just as they are, instead of fighting a losing battle with their bodies (plug plug), but Sternheimer doesn't seem to care so much about that. Nevertheless, I agree with her on one point: "Anything that helps people feel better about themselves, there's something positive to that."

Nightclubs For The Plus-Size Start to Take Shape [Fox News]

Related: Living Large [Salon]
Fear Of Fat [Bitch]
Heavy Infant In Grand Junction Denied Health Insurance [Denver Post]
The Museum Of Fat Love [MoFL]