Cassie at Jezebel has a post up about Helen Fraser, the chief executive of the UK's Girls' Day School Trust, arguing that schools should have lessons in husband-hunting for girls. But it's not as bad as it sounds! The idea is to teach girls how to find a partner who respects them and their life goals and isn't, as Michael Lewis put in a kind of self-deprecating I'm-a-pig-but-an-honest-one article, looking for an intelligent, ambitious wife they can then put out of business. My initial response was knee-jerk: "Ugh, compulsory heterosexuality is still with us in the form of feminism." But then I thought, you know, a lot of women do want marriage and babies and don't know how to get those things without hooking up with a man that's quietly going to make it hard for her not to compromise her career goals, often while claiming all the way he's a big ol' feminist. And this also opens the door to a real sex education curriculum that looks at not just how contraception works, but how to maintain your autonomy within relationships. So I was mildly leaning towards it and then got to this:

But even if all girls were trained in the art of marrying well and having it all, there's still the other side of the equation—i.e. where are they going to find all of these super supportive men?

Yes, good guys do exist, but as anyone who has ever been out in the dating world can attest, they're not easy to find—no matter how well trained you are at sniffing them out.

And all of a sudden I realized why this made me uneasy. Once again, we're putting the entire responsibility  of fixing sexism on the shoulders of women. And even in a case where men are often the direct cause of the problem, because when things get stressful (such as when babies are born), they start to take the easy route of letting their wives make all the sacrifices. In many cases, they do this because they don't really have a model of how not to do that, even if they have good intentions. Cassie is even more optimistic than I am on this front. Since most mainstream feminism focuses on "empowering women" and not challenging male privilege---mostly for the understandable reason that challenging male privilege creates a much more negative reaction than empowering women---we've created a generation or two where the number of women who feel empowered way outstrips the number of men who are truly ready to relinquish privilege. That's why the dating market is hard.

More importantly, that's why women often make compromises and accept little inequalities from male partners. It's not that they're ignorant. That's why I suspect creating a class that starts with the assumption that women date men who won't relinquish privilege because we don't know any better is barking up the wrong tree. This strategy reminds me of focusing all sexual consent efforts on teaching girls to say no loudly and clearly, while offering no counter-programming to boys telling them to seek affirmative consent before proceeding. We do this because attempts to address the ways that men directly contribute to the oppression of women is immediately met with a chorus of deafening screams of "MAN-HATER". For the same reason, there's a tendency not to talk publicly about the disparity that many women are experiencing between their entirely reasonable expectations of an egalitarian relationship and what's actually available. There's a fear that if we tell women about this problem, they'll reject feminism, even though it's not like lowering your expectations makes you any happier with guys who expect that women put more into relationships than we get out of them. But privately, I hear it and see it all the time, both women who are holding out for equality and feeling like they're not really getting anywhere, and women who decide that the chance of getting that egalitarian relationship in this lifetime isn't possible. Not that there's anything wrong with that; they're often with guys who are pretty great, and don't exploit their privilege to the max. Often they're liberal guys who don't even realize how many more decisions they get to make in the relationship and how much domestic labor they get out of. That dynamic is often easy enough to balance with a career until babies come, and then it all falls apart. 

I don't see how teaching a class to girls about this solves that problem. I think the kind of women I'm talking about already know everything they need to know. But while I push back against the sexist message that women should "settle", all relationships are a compromise at some point. A guy who you love who is reliably liberal and does 50% more than most men around the house but still pulls rank on you, often subconsciously, isn't really a bad thing to settle for when you have reason to believe the dating market isn't producing many of the totally feminist guys. (Many of whom, in my experience, aren't really into having kids anyway, which makes it a lot easier for them not to lean on their privilege.) I'm sick of putting women in a situation where we're expected to defeat sexism by giving up on other important goals, such as finding love and partnership, or enjoying sexual game-playing, or having families, though that's not my thing. I just don't really see a way out of this dilemma, except by putting more pressure on men to relinquish privilege. 

So Michigan is gearing up to pass a ridiculous anti-choice mega-bill, complete with an anti-coercion item that's defined so broadly it's feared it could be used to prosecute anyone who speaks of abortion in non-shaming terms. It passed Michigan's House with huge numbers and only 20 minutes of debate. That didn't leave much time for pro-choice legislators to get their arguments in, so they were basically reduced to cracking jokes. Which hey, I like jokes, so good for them.

While passage was widely expected, the vote was preceded by an hour of heated debate, which included Democratic Rep. Lisa Brown uttering the words, "I'm flattered that you're all so concerned about my vagina. But no means no."

This is a good joke and it makes a salient point: These kind of restrictions on reproductive rights are an attempt to control a woman's sexuality without her consent. God knows that anti-choice legislators generally come off as the kind of guys that, if they tried to talk to you at a party, you'd immediately signal a friend to rescue you. Their extreme interest in taking charge of a woman's vagina without her consent only makes that impression worse. Abortion and contraception restrictions have a lot in common with rape apologies, especiallly when it comes back to the notion that a woman who voluntarily had sex with a man thereby loses her right forever to say no to what others would do with her body, including forced penetration and forced childbirth. Pointing this out in the super-serious way I just did often causes people to recoil---we're all aware how getting people to accept female autonomy is like pulling teeth---but a joke can drive home the point.

Flattery will get you nowhere with Democrat Rashida Tlaib, who suggested that women stop having sex with their partners until the legislation was stopped. She said, "We're launching a war on women. Stop having sex with us, gentlemen, and I ask women to boycott men until they stop moving this through the House."

This joke, alas, draws my disapproval. I appreciate Rep. Tlaib's point, I really do. Anti-choicers are surprisingly consistent hypocrites, especially the men, who feel utterly entitled to have sex with women even as they make ick faces and run around trying to craft more laws to punish women for having sex with men. The double standard is the beating heart of the anti-choice movement, which is why pretty much every anti-choicer who opposes birth control funding is quick to defend funding for Viagra. Unfortunately, jokes like this obscure two other salient points in the debate over Ladies Who Fuck (aka, the vast majority of ladies). Sex strikes, or even jokes about them, tend to reinforce the false narrative that sex is a service women perform for men in exchange for compensation. You go on strike because the working conditions aren't up to par, and in this case, I suppose you're equating abortion access with worker's compensation. But that model of sexuality is why we have so much interest in restricting women's sexual rights in the first place, because it's assumed that Ladies Who Fuck And Like It are subversive perverts who need to be stopped for the good of society. Starting from the presumption that women have sex for fun, like men, and that there's nothing wrong with it is the only place where you can make a consistent pro-choice argument. 

Also, this kind of joke tends to make this a men vs. women thing. From a legislative standpoint, that narrative makes a lot more sense, because you often have mostly male legislators passing these bills and the opposition leaders tend to be mostly female. The gendered nature of the public fight over this might even make you believe that it's a men vs. women thing. But if you actually look around at ordinary people, it turns out that there's no meaningful gap between men and women on this issue. Acknowledging and dealing with female misogyny is an important part of the pro-choice strategy, and really, trying to explain why women can be so fiercely angry at other women for being sexual shouldn't be that hard. We're all well-acquainted with images like the Church Lady or the Evil Stepmother, and their real life analogues like Jill Stanek. We also know the women who bash other women in order to score accolades from male misogynists. On the flip side, a lot of men really don't have a problem with female sexual autonomy, and of course, they are capable of seeing that more sex for women means more sex for men. The double standard violates a lot of men's basic sense of fairness, and just sheer logic has to intervene at some point, as well.

I have to admit, I'm boggled at Kevin Drum's reaction to the news that nearly half of Americans are young Earth creationists, with the God-guides-evolution people being the second largest group, and the people who actually accept evolutionary theory only making up 15% of the population.* He completely misreads the situation and frankly does so in a way that I personally felt thrown under the bus. 

The fact is that belief in evolution has virtually no real-life impact on anything. That's why 46% of the country can safely choose not to believe it: their lack of belief has precisely zero effect on their lives. Sure, it's a handy way of saying that they're God-fearing Christians — a "cultural signifier," as Andrew puts it — but our lives are jam-packed with cultural signifiers. This is just one of thousands, one whose importance probably barely cracks America's top 100 list.

And the reason it doesn't is that even creationists don't take their own views seriously. How do I know this? Well, creationists like to fight over whether we should teach evolution in high school, but they never go much beyond that. Nobody wants to remove it from university biology departments. Nobody wants to shut down actual medical research that depends on the workings of evolution. In short, almost nobody wants to fight evolution except at the purely symbolic level of high school curricula, the one place where it barely matters in the first place. The dirty truth is that a 10th grade knowledge of evolution adds only slightly to a 10th grade understanding of biology.

Kevin takes it as a given that fights over what's taught in high school are strictly about symbolism and have no real importance. I suspect that's a much easier view to take if you're the beneficiary  of a good public school in a blue area or lucky enough to have gone through or been able to put your own kids through private school. For someone who went to a rural high school in Texas, the notion that high school doesn't matter strikes me as ridiculous in the extreme. 

The reason conservatives target high schools (and junior high schools and elementary schools) isn't because they're playing peanuts. On the contrary, conservatives understand something liberals don't, which is that if you get people while they're young, you usually have them for life. This is also, incidentally, why conservatives pay more attention to pop culture than liberals. Liberals are great people---I'm one of them!---but we have a tendency towards preening individualism and therefore discount the importance of things like what's in the classroom and what's on TV because we personally feel we're iconoclasts who aren't affected by it. Which can, as in this case, cause us to neglect to remember that in fact this is the air most people breathe, and the quality of that air matters. Kevin takes the "it doesn't matter to me, so it doesn't matter" mentality to a rather startling extreme:

But you know what? I could spend an entire day arguing politics and economics and culture with a conservative and never so much as mention evolution. It's just not that important, and it doesn't tell us much of anything about our widening political polarization.

Well, most people spend about as much time thinking about politics and economics as Kevin does biology. What Kevin Drum spends his time on isn't really a good measure for what's important to teach in schools.

I think what Kevin has forgotten here is that public schools teach more than the C students. They also teach the A students. And if a student who is college-bound doesn't have access to a real biology education in high school, that's going to impact her entire educational career. PZ Myers has more:

The evolution statistic does have epic significance. If kids were graduating from high school unable to read or do basic arithmetic, we’d see that as a serious indictment of our educational system…and we’d be right to worry about our future as a technological society.....

One is that it’s nice to be able to American biology departments and medical research and say they’re doing fine, and it’s true that we have excellent opportunities for advanced research, but it’s our public schools that fill the pipeline leading to those places. Look in our research labs, and what will you see? Swarms of Chinese students. I have no objection to that, but think long term: most of those students will go home to build careers there, not here. Students who do not get the basics of science are handicapped when it comes to progressing up the academic ladder, so sure, let’s knee-cap our student base by telling them all that the most minimal, trivial understanding of an entire large discipline isn’t actually all that important. Where are our future American biologists going to come from, then?

Well, if creationism is unimportant, then I guess they're all coming from private schools and a handful of wealthy public schools in blue areas populated with already privileged parents. 

PZ adds that we need even people who don't have careers in science to understand science, which is increasingly important to being a basic citizen. I agree with that, but I also think it's critically important to remember that public schools are about more than creating basic literacy across a population. They're also---or should be, anyway---about giving students who have merit but not means the opportunity to better themselves. When conservatives pillage the science courses at a high school, they're essentially killing off the potential careers in science of every student who might have talent in that school, or nearly all of them anyway. (Sure, there's always an outlier genius who manages anyway, but that isn't something to build a society on.) This is why conservatives are attacking high schools, by the way. The end goal is to make schools outside of the bubble of privilege so ineffective that the dream of class mobility is ended. 

Look at the courses they are most interested in attacking: science, history, and health education. A good science education or a good history education is exactly the sort of thing that can inspire a kid to go into the sciences or the humanities when they go to college, because their imagination  has been turned on by learning that there's more to this world than what they immediately see. I can speak from experience; my high school biology course didn't teach evolution. Without evolution, biology actually doesn't make sense, and instead it's just an anatomy class. Dissecting cats and labeling pictures of flowers is passing the time, and not really education. I had no idea how fascinating biology actually was until I was an adult, and long past any chance of starting on that as a career path. Not that I think I would, but you can easily see someone like me making that choice as a young woman, but not really being able to because I was never offered that option in a realistic sense to begin with. That's the hope of these kinds of educational attacks, to keep the high school curriculum in most public schools dull and meaningless, so that students aren't inspired and end up staying home instead of pursuing bigger dreams. 

And in case the dulling of their minds doesn't work, forced pregnancy will, which is why conservatives are intent on getting anti-contraception propaganda into the schools. Get 'em knocked up and married by 19, and they won't be going anywhere. Teach 'em in high school that the North started the Civil War and at least you have the white portion of the working class as Republicans voting their racial resentments. Until you put the obsession with creationism into the larger picture, I can see that maybe it doesn't seem to matter all that much. But in reality, creationism in schools is about inequality, and specifically targeting rural schools for education programs that keep the students uneducated and stuck in their lives. So whether or not evolution comes up in one's routine Twitter debates with conservatives is interesting and all, but not really the point here. 

*Worth pointing out that's roughly the same percentage of people who identify as non-religious in this country. I wonder how complete the overlap is; it would have to be pretty strong, wouldn't it?

Because you guys rule so much, here is a video from the 60s that made my day. Perhaps Peggy Olson saw it before she asked Don for a raise:

In today's utter and total horseshit news, Jeb Bush is making headlines by claiming that the Republicans would have found his father (noticeably not mentioned; his brother) and Reagan too moderate to nominate now. This is the sort of thing that more liberal-leaning media loves to highlight for its neener-neener quality, which I don't have a problem with per se. It is relevant to note that even many Republicans are alarmed at the right wing bent of their party. But one needs to be careful to look at these stories critically, especially when considering ludicrous arguments like suggesting that Reagan was anything but a right wing radical who laid the groundwork for decades of racism-tinged fighting over what should be non-controversial social safety net programs. Also, Bush's only real intention here is to blame Obama:

"His first year could have been a year of enormous accomplishment had he focused on things where there was more common ground," he said, arguing that Obama had made a "purely political calculation" to run a sharply partisan administration.

The problem with that comment is it's a pure, unadulterated lie. Obama didn't run a sharply partisan administration, but instead spent his first years in office dicking around trying to get Republican votes on various bills, working under the false assumption that Republicans give a flying fuck about this country and can be coaxed into supporting bills that prevent its destruction. It's only really been the last year that the administration gave up running to the press with the reach-across-the-aisle rhetoric to admit what anyone paying attention has seen since day one, which is that Republicans will fight Obama on anything, but especially on any idea that they believe would do the country good. They want to burn the country to the ground so they can blame him for it, full stop. No other motivations are in play. That's why, when Obama takes an idea Republicans came up with that actually seemed mildly pro-save-America, they fought him on those, too. 

Bush is just pulling the same old victim-blaming trick of claiming that reactionary extremism is the fault of progressives for having the nerve to ask for things, much less get them, no matter how mild. He should be paid no mind, and certainly not rewarded from this left for this nonsense. 

Last night's episode was classic Mad Men, in that I initially thought it was a little slow, but thinking it over, there was so much to unpack. It actually reminds me of the season finale of the first season, which had the jolt of Peggy giving birth, but is actually more memorable for the quiet contrast between Don's speech about nostalgia and his arriving home to an empty house. I think this really comes across in the video, because we talk about so much: Sylvia Plath, LSD, Don's problems, the horror show that is Beth's marriage, and various other phantoms. 

One complaint I've seen a lot from people about this episode is that it didn't address what are the most emotionally compelling stories for most of us: Joan and Peggy's. That, I realized, isn't right at all. The script on the page may not seem to do much with these characters, except advance their stories, but both of their stories were wrapped up (for now) in a compelling way through very straightforward visual rhetoric. The implications for feminist viewers of the show are really interesting, too. 

Starting with Joan: In "The Other Woman", Joan reminds her creepy john that the Trojan War and the Arabian Nights are different stories. And, if I recall correctly, they really are, if you look at it from the woman's perspective. Helen of Troy's is a tragic tale; while she survives the war, her chosen husband is murdered and she is returned---basically raped---to the the husband and people she rejected, knowing that she's going down in their history as a villain. Scheherazade comes to a much better end; her use of her feminine charms to manipulate her situation results in her life being saved and her gaining real power as a woman. The implication of the mix-up in that scene in "The Other Woman" is that there's no way to know which story is Joan's. Is she Helen? Or is she Scheherazade? It was the topic of fierce debate online. Some people felt that Joan's victory would always be tainted, which means it's not a victory at all. Some of us---myself included---took what we felt was a more pragmatic view. We believed all the more noble routes to power were shut off for Joan, and while her colleagues won't be thrilled with having a female partner, they're also going to have to accept her power. 

Interestingly, this debate reflects the internal struggles of second wave feminism, especially around the issue of "selling out". Radical feminists then saw themselves as collectivists and because of this, there was a fierce response to any feminist who started to stand out from the crowd a little because of her talents. You were expected to be a humble member of the masses and not display ambition, because that was perceived as a way of saying you're better than everyone else. Equality for women, it was felt, couldn't be achieved by playing by the patriarchal rules of having leaders and spokespeople, or by presenting your message in a watered-down pop culture form, etc. Unfortunately, I think what happened was it became clear that an utter rejection of the rules of society means that you're always marginalized. Demanding that women shun things like ambition, work that engages capitalism, or pop culture in order to be good feminists put a limit on their abilities to grow the power of women. Eventually, the whole purity thing basically collapsed and it was understood that simply creating an alternative culture isn't enough, but that you have to deal with the world as it is---with all the ugliness that implies---in order to change it. 

Joan's dilemma reflects this problem. Do you work in the system---one that treats women like objects---if that seems like the only way to achieve your goals? Or do you embrace a separatist view where you feel you're always living your values, but you basically are shut out of any opportunity to better things for yourself and everyone else? I think the show made it clear whose side they were on in this eternal debate with this image:

We know that it's not going to be easy for Joan. She will still have to face a lot of stereotypes and abuse from her colleagues, as we saw. But she's also getting shit done, as evidenced by this new office and her centralized spot in it. And you know what? There's never going to be another all-male meeting at SCDP where they talk about pimping out their female employees. Getting a spot at the table isn't everything, but it's an important first step. There's no shame in sex work except that generated by sexists who want to keep prostitutes marginalized. At a certain point, if you let the opinion of sexists keep you from grabbing for the ring---the fear that they'll judge you---you're always going to be kept from reaching.*

What's interesting is how much the audience contrasted Joan and Peggy in this, saying Peggy did it the "right" way. I don't think that's so clear-cut on the show that this is true. After all, Peggy's leftist friends and boyfriend judge her for being a straight-up capitalist. It was clear from those discussions and others between Megan and Don that we're meant to hear the criticism that advertising is crass and people who do it are---wait for it---whoring out their assets. We already can tell Peggy is going to sell out feminism to sell cigarettes (watch the video for more on this). Peggy's at the hotel and looks out the window and sees this:

Mostly I think doing that was a way to convey that Peggy is alone (like everyone else in the montage) and to be funny. But it's also a great symbol for the battle over art and commerce, one which we discuss in-depth in the video. Activists and artists are routinely portrayed on the show as people who sneer at the crass commercialism of advertising and imagine their own work transcendent. The image of dogs fucking unsettles people because it undermines these kinds of distinctions. Dogs are gross creatures that we imagine we're so much better than, but watching them fuck reminds us that for all the love poetry we have written, at the end of the day, we're more like them than we like to think. What's critical here is that Peggy is confronted with a symbol of the baseness of her creative outlet, and she sits down on the bed and smiles a big ol' charming smile. Yes, she's saying, my work is crass commercialism, but at the end of they day, she can't be motivated to give a shit. She gets to do what she likes and make money at it, and you can call it selling out all day, but she's done apologizing for it. And now she's going to write an ad campaign that managed both to piss off self-identified feminists and, at the same time, use a little sex and charm to sell the idea to middle America that hip young women know about their feminist ancestors and they are grateful to them for all the work they've done. Which is nothing to sniff at, as impure as it was. 

*You see this double bind in a lot of more mundane ways, such as the way women are often shoved out of conversations unless they interrupt a man who's speaking, which causes people to think they're bitchy. No way to win, so you might as well get your voice heard. 

Thanks to Jill Filipovic, my already-marvelous day is so much better:

I am thrilled and want to see sequels. I particularly think a song about concern trolls and the butthurt---my current favorite, as you can imagine my last post is inspiring quite a bit of it.

Still at Netroots, but wanted to take a moment before going to see Elizabeth Warren speak to address this:

Apparently, this is just the most famous of a trend of young men writing signs extolling the joys of "natural" beauty and taking photos of themselves with these signs, complete with wounded expressions conveying the pain they feel because the women of the world get dressed in the morning without thinking first of the preferences of these guys' specific cocks. It's just the latest manifestation of a multi-decade long trend of men, who are invariably self-satisfied to an alarming degree, holding forth on why they hate make-up and think women should choose a "natural" beauty path instead. This sort of thing tends to be polarizing amongst women. The weak-minded amongst us buy it hook, liner, and sinker, swooning over these guys for their supposedly feminist-ish ways. The rest of us fly into a sputtering rage, because we know that this is just some more bullshit oppression dressed up as liberation.

It's not just because it's these guys don't get that the problem is that they embrace the paradigm that holds that a man---any random man---has the social permission to appoint himself The Judge of All Women. It's also because these guys are committed to an even more stringent and oppressive beauty standard than the one they're denouncing. We know that when these guys imagine that women imagine the natural beauty of women, they aren't actually saying they think your frizzy hair, pit pubes and zits inspire them. In their fantasy, the "natural" beauty rolls out of bed, fluffs her hair and walks out the door with every hair in place, exuding a natural dewiness that accentuates her naturally bold features and naturally smooth skin and naturally hairless body. In other words, they want you to be a woman who doesn't exist.

Even for those women who are the rare ones genetically blessed with hair that's manageable without cutting it super-short and perfect skin and giant eyes and perfect lips, this "natural" look takes work. You have to shave, if nothing else. And god knows every gym-goer is acquainted with the depressing picture of yuppie housewives who throw themselves grimly into their workout as if it were their job, because projecting the image of "natural" unadorned and youthful beauty to keep your husband's eye from straying kind of is their job. But most women aren't even genetically blessed in this way, and so the "natural" look requires hair appliances, skin creams and masks, and.....wait for it....make-up. The kind of artful make-up that hides itself, which takes a lot more work than the more fun make-up that you can tell someone is wearing. If you're with someone who is one of those guys who grouses about women spending time on their beauty, and prides himself on loving "natural" beauty, you have to take the additional step of hiding how much work you put into the illusion of natural beauty. It's way less oppressive to be with a guy who accepts the existence of your make-up kit and hair dryer. Needless to say, the oppressive image of the natural J. Crew beauty has largely excluded women of color, though I do think that's changing slightly, creating its own new wrinkles in this problem. 

Men who say shit like they hate make-up don't actually hate make-up. They're just too up their own asses to notice that Zooey Deschanel refuses to be photographed without false eyelashes. And she's exactly the sort of woman that guys who rant about the evils of make-up are thinking of when they think of their fantasy woman who they imagine rolls out of bed looking that way. Dude, false eyelashes are no joke; those motherfuckers take work. I'm not willing to go that far to be a natural beauty. I'll stick to my eyeliner and mascara instead, even if it draws the scorn of men who are hoodwinked by the more artful deceptions. 

The worst part is that this image of the so-called natural beauty isn't just implication-free, either. The image of the dewy natural beauty is associated in our culture with virginity, innocence, youthfulness, naivete, etc. When you encounter a guy who's insistent on it, you usually find out quickly that he's a little afraid of bolder women, and he takes that out on women who wear bolder make-up. You get the feeling when guys rant about hating make-up that they're kind of calling you a slut for wearing it. And you know how I feel about that.

When looking for feminist wisdom on this subject, I instead prefer Dolly Parton playing Truvy in Steel Magnolias: "There is no such thing as natural beauty." I think accepting that what we think of as women's beauty is an artifice is much more liberating, and it allows for the possibility of accepting---god forbid---that maybe, just maybe, it's okay if women aren't expected to be beautiful all of the time to be accepted members of society. 

Posting is going to continue to be light because of Netroots Nation, but that doesn't mean we're content-free. Today I had the honor of being the first guest in an interview series Think Progress is doing with Google. Alyssa Rosenberg and I chatted about pop culture, and because it's the source of the most fascinating pop culture going on these days, that means we talked about TV.

We don't wear the Ray-Bans throughout the whole thing, but you know, wearing them for some of it had to be done. 

Sorry about lack of blogging. I'm traveling to Providence today to go to Netroots Nation. I'll be on two panels.

And then the one I submitted:

Last year, there was a lot of drama because the annual evidence that right wingers are that childish and immature, which is a conference called Right Online conservatives always try to schedule nearby, happened to be in the same hotel where most of the Netroots-goers were. That's how I managed my brief and strange meeting with Andrew Breitbart in the street, and that's how one belligerent wingnut got arrested for trying to pick a fight with Netroots attendees. One of the advantages of having it in Providence is that Providence apparently isn't big enough for two conferences, so the "me too" wingnut conference is going to be far away in Las Vegas. But that doesn't mean that there won't be interesting stuff to blog, I'm sure. It is, after all, an election year. I'll also be tweeting, so if you're interested, follow me there. 

Who's going this year?

At RH Reality Check yesterday, I wrote, "One of the more frustrating aspects of dealing with anti-choices is their tendency to lean on arguments that are so shoddy that they’d be laughed out of a junior high school debate tournament." And, as if the universe was trying to prove me right, I've discovered this Tumblr called---wait for it---Checkmate, Pro-Choicers! This site is where the bloggers store what they believe are their best arguments. Not the argument that convinced them, mind you. The argument that convinced them is, "Female sexuality is evil and a system of forced pregnancy and jail time for unauthorized fucking is the only appropriate response." The blogmistress Rebecca admits that's what convinced her in the About ME! (yes, that's how it's titled) section:

Please keep all submissions, comments, and reblogs kind and Christ-like. Even though many girls who have abortions may be sluts, this blog is not about calling them sluts.

In other words, we all hate those slutty sluts, but since this stupid Satanic country isn't ready to throw them in jail for fornication, we have to promote disingenuous arguments about ensoulment of embryos. Like Jesus Christ said, it's important to throw stones at the sluts, but when called out on it, deny that's why you did it, because we don't have the polling numbers yet to ban sex outright. 

Personally, I think they should lead with the "slut" argument. It's what convinced them! I always try to lead with the argument that convinced me. It's not only the only honest-thing to do---Christ-like, even!---but also a proven method of winning people over. The slut argument got you, right?

Enough preliminaries! Let's look at what this blogger feels are the strongest, best arguments the anti-choice movement has to offer, besides the "gross, sluts" one, i.e. the one that actually convinced the blogger and her fellow antis.

In a sense, you almost feel sorry for the blogger, who has never seen a biology textbook and, while a legal adult, appears to believe that pregnancy is a process where Jesus tells you that you don't have any periods for nine months and then, at the end of this period---a period where you have no weight gain, no pain, no stretch marks, no rise in blood pressure, and certainly no labor and delivery---the stork drops a baby off at the door. Of course, even if that were the case, I'd still support abortion rights, because I reserve the right to refuse any package delivered to my house without my permission, and that especially includes one containing another person I have to clothe, house, and feed.

All through this Tumblr---and through anti-choice rhetoric generally---is this assumption that we have no real world experience with what abortion bans look like. In fact, you start to get the impression that they think abortion was only invented in 1973, by those noted doctors on the high court. So antis feel free to just assume that all an abortion ban means is that the concept of "abortion" is wiped away, and women never, ever think about hitting the eject button if they have an unwanted pregnancy. 

Of course, in reality, we have tons of evidence that what in fact happens when you ban abortion is that women---who aren't waiting for the day that this blogger believe will come, and Jesus comes down to settle the question of whether or not embryos have souls for eternity---continue to know damn well that they aren't carrying a fucking baby around anymore than having an egg and some flour on hand means you've got a cake. And those women go on the black market for abortions. If they're of means, that means they find discreet professionals who offer the service because they, like all people with common sense, know that acorns aren't trees. But if they're poor, they go to people who often have no idea what they're doing. 

This isn't speculation. The rate of abortion is actually higher in countries where it's banned, suggesting that if you're "pro-life", the last thing you want is an abortion ban. The black markets that are handling those abortions are---duh---unsafe. There's no "if" here, no future date when all this is suddenly resolved. We actually know right now what each side's policy gets. If we get our way, abortion rates are lower and exponentially fewer women die or are disfigured by abortions. (In fact, if done properly, it's one of the safest surgical procedures that exists, and far safer than childbirth.) If antis get their way, the abortion rate goes up, as does the rate of women dying or being injured by unsafe abortion. No ifs. No judge making a final proclaimation in the future. We already know the score, and we know it now.

Yeah, well, because they had a choice. 

Okay, not to be too glib, but the notion that once a woman has a child, she realizes it's the best thing ever and will want nothing more but to have one baby after another is easy enough to disprove. It's not just that women tend to use contraception after giving birth, either. 61% of women getting abortions have children already. Anti-choicers tend to see forced childbirth as a way to turn childless "sluts" into obedient women who will never question patriarchal authority again. In reality, a lot of women who have children know even more how much work it is, and are even more determined to keep their family at a size they can afford and manage. The notion of "regret" is psychologically unstable, of course. Do we know if women regret having children, when there is no safe space for women to express such an emotion? No, of course not. But we do know that woemn can assess the evidence on hand and make choices for themselves, and we have plenty of evidence that even women who've experienced motherhood aren't always eager to have another baby.

Anything that's human and alive is "human life". That's just tautological. Which means that it's also meaningless. People are "human life", and embryos are "human life". But all cells in your body are human and alive. The most obvious example is sperm, which is human and alive and survives outside of the body, unlike embryos. So it actually has more claim to "people" status than an embryo, since it's got one more trait in common with people than embryos. Which means that if you think abortion is murder on these grounds, you think that ejaculation is genocide. None of the antis I talk to seem to agree, suggesting that they don't believe this argument about "human life" at all, but simply are trying to avoid talking about the argument that actually convinced them, which is that female sexuality is evil and should be subject to criminal penalties.

If you believe that anything human and alive is the equivalent of a person, and you believe that "human life" is so precious that bodily autonomy doesn't trump it, then this argument presented here means that you're a murder if you pop a zit, cut yourself and bleed, or even comb your hair. All those actions kill human life, as they all destroy cells that are are alive and human, and therefore people. And of course, definitely ejacuation. Under this proposed philsophy, all men absolutely have to be in jail for life for all that killing.

There's some entries on here that are boring, mostly because they're lies. The usual ones: that abortion causes breast cancer, that childbirth is painless, that a 4-week embryo can feel pain, that abortion bans mean no one gets abortions, and that Susan B. Anthony was "pro-life", which wasn't really a thing in the 19th century. (Also, there's no evidence that she weighed in on the abortion debate that was happening at the time either way, but it's important to understand that abortion was a really different thing back then. Imposing our struggles over medical procedures over a time when germ theory was still controversial is just bad history.) But this might be my favorite bad history:

I love the "your Queen" stuff. Conservatives are so wed to the idea of blind allegiance to authority that they can't understand liberals relationship to certain historical figures conservatives hate, like Margaret Sanger, who they hate because she basically invented the concept of birth control. (She was in fact largely anti-abortion, so really, the only reason they can hate her is her role in the creation of contraception, in case you forgot for a moment that the anti-choice movement is as opposed to preventing pregnancy as they are to terminating it.) You see this with creationists, who assume biology is a "religion" and that the writings of Darwin should be regarded as the revealed texts of an opposing faith, as opposed to scientific writings. So they think if they can poke holes in Darwin's argument, evolutionary theory will collapse. Of course, that's not how science works. And that's not how thoughtful people understand history.

This is the logical fallacy known as "argument from authority", though a sort of weird conservative version of it, where liberals are assigned authorities and then called out if we don't slavishly agree with everything they say. 

Sanger's opposition to abortion makes more sense if viewed through her utter devotion to the cause of birth control. She was, thankfully in most regards, absolutely fanatical about the idea that pregnancy prevention would liberate women, and she was willing to cling to every argument that got her political leverage for this purpose. Any negative thing that birth control prevents was something she clung to, including abortion. Indeed, many women---myself included---use contraception primarily to prevent abortion, because childbirth is simply not an option. In the nascent days of the birth control movement, therefore, positioning abortion and birth control against each other made a certain amount of political sense. It's important to remember that abortion was illegal, and Sanger's experience with it was as a dirty, dangerous back-alley thing. Sanger's colleagues came around on the abortion issue as the political conversation shifted, and as the understanding grew that we'd never achieve Sanger's utopian vision of a society that had no unintended pregnancy. 

Anyway, I almost feel bad shooting down these arguments, because they're so self-evidently silly. But this Tumblr is, by its name, an attempt to round up the best arguments for an abortion ban. It's tragic that such shoddy, illogical, childish, evidence-free thinking gets taken seriously at all. When you really look at the anti-choice movement, it becomes clear that argument-wise, they're no different than Birthers or 9/11 Truthers or any other weirdly obsessive conspiracy theory cult that wouldn't know a good argument if it bit them on the ass. 

Discussion question: What are the odds this is a parody Tumblr, established by a pro-choicer trying to put all these arguments into one place so you can see how paper-thin they are? I'm guessing 20% odds. The blogger speaks fluent Christianese, after all. Plus, I think a pro-choicer wouldn't slip in ones like the "no period" one, which are just too silly to be believed. Either way, the important thing to remember is that these really are their best arguments. I've never seen better ones proposed, honestly. 

I suspect the trend among recaps today is going to be to contrast Don and Lane's approach, because Don is (like Joan) a survivor, and obviously, someone who commits suicide by definition can't be.* But as you'll see in the video, Marc and I saw Don and Lane as the characters paralleled to each other, with Sally's journey being the counter-narrative. Don is in love with the drastic solution, destroying everything before to create a blank slate. Well, nothing destroys everything before quite like a suicide. Lane's suicide was the ultimate expression of wiping the slate completely clean, which is why his resignation letter was boilerplate. Don falls in love with the idea of killing yourself symbolically for rebirth---he's killed off Dick Whitman, killed off Don the creative guy who works for someone else, Don the married suburbanite---but as he cuts Lane down from the wall, the possibility that running out of options for surviving a killing off of one's self looms.

One of the most common gripes I see about Mad Men is that it's not critical enough of capitalism. Personally, I've never cared; the ambivalence the show embraces on the subject has always been a strength as far as I'm concerned. It echoes how people actually feel about things like advertising, which is a mix of concern, indifference, and fascination, depending on the moment. But this episode was practically a diatribe about the unsustainability of the grow-at-any-cost mentality that drives capitalism. Capitalism discourages the "rich enough" mentality. That's why Don is outraged at Dow's people saying that 50% of market share was enough. Why not go for 100%? What Don fails to realize as soon as he says this is that once you hit 100%, there's no where else to go. But if your whole model is based on continued growth, hitting 100% might as well be hitting 0%. Don thinks that's sustainable; wipe the slate clean and start over. Lane's death, however, shocks him into thinking perhap he was overconfident about that.

As the episode makes clear, one problem with the always-growing mentality is that it encourages borrowing endlessly against the future. People convince themselves that they don't have to limit the credit extensions, because since all those investments will pay off in the long run, you're just spending money that might as well already be yours. But eventually the whole scam reaches a breaking point. On the individual level, it's like Lane's; he's discovered, and it's all over. On a macro level, you have market bubbles that burst. The latest economic crash is the most blunt demonstration of this. Just as Lane created the illusion of prosperity for the firm by borrowing $50K, banks created the illusion of national prosperity completely on borrowed money that created a real estate bubble. Just like the banks, Lane got a bailout to cover the inevitable hole that's created. I don't think we're meant to see the plugging of that hole as a bad thing in and of itself. The bank bailout kept our economy from a complete crash, and we're meant to assume---with Don's remarks to Megan---that his willingness to write a check to cover up for Lane's discrepancy is helping keep the whole thing afloat as well. 

But just because you can create stopgap measures to minimize the fiscal damage of capitalist overreach doesn't mean that everything is hunky-dory. The firm has to deal with Lane's dead body in his office. We have to deal with the high unemployment and teeming numbers of people who've lost their homes in the crisis. Just like a dead body in an office, there's nothing you can do that's going to make that go away. Fresh starts are an illusion.

Menstruation seems like a weird thing to introduce in the midst of all this, but as we say in the video, it's a counterpoint. The cyclical nature of a woman's body is seen as the exact opposite of the voracious capitalist model. We go into it in more detail in the video.

I do have to wonder how much Jaguar is paying for the product placement, since their cars are clearly becoming the symbol of the disposable economics of exponential growth capitalism. They're lemons---we're reminded of this again by Lane's inability to kill himself in one---and they exist to be all flash. The American cars that Don loves so much were still the representation of stability. If you bought a car from an American manufacturer back then, you had reason to believe it would last you decades if you took care of it. (Even when I was in college, there were a lot of people who still had, as their everyday cars, vehicles that were three decades old.)Is it any wonder, then, that Don and Glen's existential anxieties are actually soothed for a moment in an American car? For a moment, the possibility is raised that trying to build something that will last---gasp, a legacy!---might have more value than always looking for the next big payday. 

Thoughts? Feelings? I think it was obvious from a couple episodes ago that Lane was going to be the suicide, but do you feel it played out? I thought the strategy of seeing everyone's reactions before we saw the body helped fix some of the anti-climax issues that come with such a heavily foreshadowed death, but YMMV. 

*At least when suicide is a literary device. In real life, a suicide attempt can be just a very weak moment for an otherwise survival-oriented purpose, but if they get unlucky, it's the same result as someone who attempts a lot before finally succeeding. 

Life is basically returning to normal, putting me in the mood for a Panda Party. The weirdest part of minor outpatient surgery is that while I didn't really need antibiotics or any painkillers beyond aspirin, I was exhausted anyway for a day and a half. But by yesterday afternoon, I was back to my old self, and will be it total fighting form by Netroots Nation. So celebrate with me with a Panda Party!

Check out this insanely funky band from the 80s that I was listening to on Spotify last night:

I wouldn't be surprised to hear some of their grooves on the dance floor at the Netroots Nation Pro-Choice Pro-Party. If you'd coming to Netroots Nation, do not miss this. 

Marc and I've largely been on a 80s funk-dance kick, and so I wouldn't be surprised to hear this classic, either:

In the meantime, Panda Party!

My usual response to Cary Tennis's advice column at Salon is to read it, maybe chat with friends for a second about it, shaking our heads in disapproval all the way, and move on. But today, woof. I really feel the need to step in. Sometimes I think people write Tennis because they know they should be writing Prudie or Dan Savage, but they fear getting good advice, because they know in their hearts the right thing to do, and they're not there yet. And Tennis will happily keep steering them down the wrong path. 

Before I even start to quote today's letter, I want to point out that Tennis's answer is based on a completely incorrect assumption, that a man who retains sexual desire for other women after commiting monogamously to one can properly be considered mentally ill. He not only accepts at face value the concept of "porn addiction", but also everything else the letter writer rolls up into it, such as her belief that his "illness" causes him to look at other women and that masturbation itself is a manifestation of his "illness"---that if he was healthy, all of his sexual energy would be directed to her and her alone. Accepting that this is an illness is all kinds of messed up. What it is would be better labeled as "normal", "human", "healthy", and "get over it". The recently released DSM-V not only rejected attempts to get "sex addiction" or "porn addiction" listed, but in fact delisted the closest thing to it, "hypersexuality", putting it in the index. They should have dropped it completely, but I guess there's still enough Christianists in the therapy world with power to keep some kind of symblic nod to the idea that being horny makes you mentally ill. Instead of looking to what the scientific establishment has to say on this, Tennis instead directs this letter writer towards anti-porn hysteria, some of it emanating from our friend Naomi Wolf. He even suggests some sex-negative therapists. 

Now, as will become clear, I do think a lot of men look at too much porn and have all sorts of weird sexual issues. I don't, however, think they're mentally ill. I think they just grew up with a giant heaping of male privilege and its naughty little cousin, anxious masculinity, and they're drawn to porn not because they're horny so much as it soothes them to see women being put in their place, over and over again. This guy is probably one of them. But the answer is not to shut down porn use, masturbation, or sexual attraction outside of relationships. Sex isn't the problem. Male domination i s, and there are plenty of guys out there who can be horny and respectful of women at the same time. A little experience makes it easier to suss out who is who. 

Now, there's a lot of red flags in this letter that Tennis should have noticed. 

I am 20 and have been living with my boyfriend, who is much older than I am, for over two years.

Red flag #1: The letter writer was dating a much-older man when she was underage. This already should be sending up missiles of WTF, enough for you to start crafting a response that involves, "Dump him, and find someone your own age, instead of a grown man who trawls high schools looking for dates. 

Previous to being with me, he was single for five years and he watched porn daily. Soon after I moved in, I discovered he was into teenage porn. I asked him to stop watching it, and he promised he would. A few months later, I found he was still watching it daily. He told me later that he would sneak it while I was in the other room and masturbate to it. I explained to him that aside from it being creepy, I also considered it unfaithful.

Red flag #2: He was single for five years until he talked an underage girl with probably no experience dating prior to him into being his girlfriend. Red flag #3: His sexual fantasies center completely around girls that are below the legal age of consent, which his girlfriend likely was when they met.

I did not understand why my body wasn’t enough to satisfy him. I was willing to give him sex whenever he wanted, yet he chose to relieve himself to other girls.

Red flag #4: The low self-esteem, passivity, and submissiveness evident in talking about sex as a matter of a woman offering her body up to a man to "relieve"  him. It imagines sex as being similar to a man using a woman as a human toilet, instead of sex being a mutual exchange of pleasure. We can begin to see why this girl was perhaps easy pickings for the kind of creepy guy who treats the playground like it's Match.com.

Naturally, they go through all the bullshit ropes: Him pretending not to look, her spying, him pretending to go to therapy (or actually going, but not listening, because hey, sex addiction isn't a disease), her trying to clamp down harder. In fact, she gets completely out of control.

I also decided that keeping him away from triggers would help him not crave it as much (he agreed). Whenever we would rent movies for example, we would choose ones without nudity in them. I also went as far as refusing to go to the beach with him (because I knew that if we went he would be checking out young girls and may even have to masturbate to them later on).

By placing these limits on his behavior however, I am worried because I adversely made him hypersensitive to seemingly nonsexual things such as a girl wearing short shorts. Now that he is deprived of nudity he has admitted to becoming very aroused by things that were formerly not very arousing, since that is all he has access to.

Ugh, only 20 years old and already she's acting like the fun-free wife-as-mother whose job is to place "restrictions" on her naughty son-lover. I think I just made myself ill. Without intervention, this young woman is on a highway to an embittered middle-aged woman who writes screeching blog posts about how the evil feminists are ruining it for other women with their slutting it up, all to avoid admitting what the real problem is, which is that she has low self-esteem and hooked up with a creep because he was the first taker. 

Here is what's really going on: This young woman met her boyfriend, who is much older, when she was in high school. She was at least 17, and possibly younger. He is one of those creepy fucks who likes teenage girls, because he has power and control issues. Now that she's no longer a teenager and---gasp!---is approaching the decrepit old age where she can legally drink, she's beginning to worry, I'm guessing correctly, that he's losing interest. He's not into women, just girls, and ugh, the girl he used to be with is betraying him by becoming a woman. So he's masturbating more to barely legal porn, and checking out teenagers, most of whom are probably creeped out, which is just another ugly reminder of the kind of weirdo she hooked up with. But instead of seeing this for what it is, her self-esteem is so low that she instead is getting clingy and controlling herself. The porn is a red herring. If she was in a healthy relationship with a non-creep, she might see that.

Solution: DTMFA. And after you do that, find a therapist yourself to work out your self-esteem issues. Not one of the sex-negative ones suggested by Tennis, but one who can talk you through why sex isn't a weapon for the sexes to fight each other. Spend some time masturbating yourself, and really thinking of your body as an instrument for your pleasure, instead of an object for men to "relieve" themselves on. Monogamy is way more meaningful if it's about two people sharing their sexualities together, instead of being your man's one and only sperm bin. And don't blame yourself for spending the first few years of your dating life with a creeper. You got some ugly misogynist messages as a young woman that thwarted your basic anti-creep instincts, but you're young and you have plenty of time to right yourself and have genuinely fulfilling romantic adventures.

Thanks for all the well wishes, folks! Everything went well, and I'm mostly tired, but should be back to lifting heavy objects in no time. (Or 48 hours, according to the doctor.) Since lifting heavy objects is my favorite thing to do, this was welcome news. 

And thanks for all the recommendations! I love Netflix streaming, but the biggest problem with it is it's really hard to find the good stuff. I knew in my heart that there was a lot of worthwhile stuff lurking in its depths, but knowing where to start is rough. The algorithm that creates recommendations in not just Netflix but nearly all sites like it struggles to really come up with stuff you like, or maybe it's just me. Liking one sci-fi show doesn't mean I'll like the others, but it's hard to program je nais se quoi into a computer. I'm not mad about it, but just find it one of the more mundane, everyday problems that makes making computers think "like humans" so frustrating and likely impossible, at least in my lifetime.

As a thanks to you, I want to share this awesome article by Emily Nussbaum about "Community" and "Dr. Who" and the dialogue between mainstream and geek entertainments. For some reason, Nussbaum employs the euphemism "passionate fan" to describe people who are commonly known as geeks, perhaps because a lot of these passionate fans don't identify as geeks, both for their own reasons and because, frankly, the geek community isn't having it. But what she notes is that these two shows---"Community" and the reboot of "Dr. Who"---have in common is that they balance their geeky obsessions with more universal human concerns. 

What she doesn't go on to say, but I think is an interesting extrapolation, is that this is exactly why so much "geek" culture has gone mainstream. In fact, there's a long-running joke on the show "Party Down" about this. One of the characters is an aspiring screenwriter, but he constantly harangues everyone about how the only good sci-fi is "hard" sci-fi, i.e. sci-fi that minimizes relationship to maximize time spent on detailing out the imagined workings of the various sci-fi Macguffins that move the story ahead. (The comedy of this is heightened by dwelling on the least plausible kind of imaginary science that populates sci-fi.) The sci-fi and fantasy shows that make the leap into the mainstream are the ones that focus on human relationships, making them more "literary", and allowing people who aren't interested in the trappings of fantasy narratives themselves to get engaged. The best of these manage a nice balance, where they don't completely eliminate the geekier elements; fans who were unwilling to listen to light exposition about space travel and other geeky things wouldn't make it through "Battlestar Galactica", and fans whose eyes shut the second they start hearing about the pedigrees of various demons wouldn't get very far in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". But these shows had a good sense of how to rein that stuff in and make sure that the focus was always on relationships and emotional storytelling, anchoring the story in something we all understand, which is people. 

I'm definitely in the category of fans who have no interest in the "hard" geeky stuff, but eats up what I consider successfully mainstreamed stuff like these aforementioned shows, and stuff like "Game of Thrones". What I find interesting about all this is that, from my viewpoint that's basically outside of geekiness, I don't see a lot of antagonism from inside World O' Geeks towards the mainstreaming of their obsessions. Which is interesting, because most people who have drawn an identity from a subculture tend to get very defensive of that subculture, and suspicious of travelers who want to stop by, get something out of it, and then move along. Part of it probably has to do with a geek ethos of inclusion, but I also think it's because most geeks are seeing a material advantage from the mainstreaming of their obsessions. One of the big problems with old school stuff is that there wasn't much money being thrown at it. Mainstream geeky fare, however, can get a bigger audience, which means more money, which means more special effects, bigger name actors, better editing, and it means all the best talent can be recruited for a project in general. The expansion of San Diego Comic Con alone shows how much material benefit long-standing geeks get from the mainstreaming of their culture. 

Just a few thoughts before I retire to the couch to watch some of the stuff you guys recommended. I should be in full fighting form tomorrow. Meanwhile, thoughts on this? Is the mainstreaming of geeky stuff good or bad for geeks?