Michael Kinsley, writing at Slate.com makes a couple of wonderful points, plus really gets an elbow in, while placing attention on McCain’s vice-presidential pick where it belongs: on John McCain and the party he now (nominally) leads. (Emphasis mine.)

In a famous example of ideological flexibility, the American Communist Party changed its mind completely about Adolf Hitler in 1939, when he signed a deal with Stalin. Previously, they hadn’t cared for him much. Suddenly, he looked pretty good. Then two years later, when Hitler ratted on the deal and invaded the Soviet Union, the Communists changed their minds again. Both times, it took only days.

But now, thanks to the Internet, the same kind of conversion can take place in hours or even minutes. And although it’s hard to find many Communists around these days, we happen to have just the party for the job.

It seems like just yesterday that the Republican Party was complaining about Barack Obama’s lack of foreign-policy “experience.” As a matter of fact, as I write (on Friday, Aug. 29) it actually was just yesterday.

...

...the important point about Palin’s lack of experience isn’t about Palin. It’s about McCain. And the question is not how his choice of Palin might complicate his ability to use the “experience” issue, or whether he will have to drop experience as an issue. It’s not even about the proper role of experience as an issue. In fact, it’s not about experience at all. It’s about honesty. The question should be whether McCain—and all the other Republicans who have been going on for months about Obama’s dangerous lack of foreign policy experience—ever meant a word of it. And the answer is apparently not. Many conservative pundits woke up this very morning fully prepared to harp on Obama’s alleged lack of experience for months more. Now they face the choice of either executing a Communist-style U-turn (“Experience? Feh! Who needs it?”) or trying to keep a straight face while touting the importance of having been mayor of a town of 9,000 if you later find yourself president of a nation of 300 million.

He said it here.

That’s the way you do it. That’s where you want to go. In this race as in virtually every other since roughly 1805 it’s not about the choice, it’s about who made the choice. That and what that choice says about the chooser’s personal integrity, control over their party or even place in it, judgment, seriousness, or committment to the nation. Going anywhere else, no matter how virtuous or vice-ridden the person chosen, distracts from the real question: do you trust someone who makes such choices to run the show?

Ahmed Hassan of Pakistan’s English-language DAWN briefly summarizes why “post-feminism” is a bit premature.

Burying of women alive defended in [Pakistan’s —fl] Senate

ISLAMABAD, Aug 29: Balochistan Senator Sardar Israrullah Zehri stunned the upper house on Friday when he defended the recent incident of burying alive three teenage girls and two women in his province, saying it was part of “our tribal custom.”

Senator Bibi Yasmin Shah of the PML-Q raised the issue citing a newspaper report that the girls, three of them aged between 16 and 18 years, had been buried alive a month ago for wishing to marry of their own will.

...

Ms Shah said that the hapless girls and the women were first shot in the name of honour and then buried while they were alive. She also said that no criminal had been arrested so far.

Read about it here.

First of all, which ever part of the story you pick, what a monstrous fucking crime!!!

The good news is that most members of the upper house were stunned. The bad news (as Twisty Faster puts it) “calling into question the tribal customariness of this practice is all well and good, but in so doing the senate seems to be intimating that a pre-existing woman-burying custom might, under some circumstance, be regarded as a mitigating factor.” She also makes a plea, in the strongest and most humane terms, that people talk about this as eagerly as we talk about first-lady fashions or Senator McCain’s motivation for selecting Governor Palin. (And she said that here.)

Much has been made of the problems feminism faces in non-western, non-white, non-middle-class cultures. Well fine. It’s true. Much has also been made of arguments for greater respect for “cultural relativity” and “tribal customs.” Also fine. Also true.

So what to do about that little cognitive connundrum? Besides throwing up your hands and twitting about bikini waxes and wide stances?

As luck would have it Kimberle Crenshaw, in a 1991 essay called Beyond Racism and Misogyny that I found collected in Strode and Wood’s The Hip Hop Reader from Pearson Longman press, outlined a pretty good approach in the aftermath of a racially questionable obscenity prosecution of the rap band band 2 Life Crew for the album As Nasty As They Wanna Be.

While rejecting the prosecution’s (and ‘winger columnist George Will’s) uncharacteristic concern for the way the album objectified black women (she makes a good case that “Black women were appropriated and deployed in the broader attack against 2 Live Crew.”) Crenshaw was also unimpressed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.‘s assertions that the intensely misogynistic lyrics merely made fun of Black sexual stereotypes.

The problem being that

[such defenses] call on Black women to accept misogyny and its attendant disrespect in service of some broader group objective. While one version argues that accepting misogyny is necessary to anti-racist politics, the other argues that it is necessary to maintaining the cultural integrity of the community.

In other words, Crenshaw points out, one can not consistently insist that…

...Black women are expected to be vehicles for notions of “liberation” that function to preserve their own subordination.

Same deal with Pakistan’s Baloch culture, or any other culture (white, western, 21st-century, affluent ones no less than any other) that claims it should be privileged in order to preserve its tradition of de-privileging of some of its members. And not because “we” somehow “know better.” Because, instead, their very claim to moral legitimacy collapses under its own contradictions.

So. Do me a favor. With a clear conscience and a love of humanity, spread the word of what happened to the five young Baloch women, and pass along a reminder that Senator Sardar Israrullah Zehri’s toleration of judicial horror as punishment for the exercise basic human rights jeopardizes his culture rather than defending it. Fucking monsters.

On the one hand, Monica of the sex-worker activist $pread Blog points to breathless media reports…

Eight million articles on how the sex industry will “spike” during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions….as based on the evidence from craigslist ads. News media, I tip my cap to you. You actually made a graph of craigslist ads.
Read the quote in context here.

Meanwhile Mark Schmitt of The American Prospect blog TAPPED says of his experience at the Democrat’s convention

Across the street from the hotel where TAP staff stayed this week was a strip club called Shotgun Willie’s. All week the sign out front said,

“WELCOME, DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION.”

As I left this afternoon, it had been changed to,

“THANKS FOR NOTHING, DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION.”

Read the quote in context here.

Schmitt’s titled his post “Better Luck to Your Minneapolis Branch.” And while I’m sure Democrats were approximately just as likely to frequent sex workers in Colorado as Republicans will be in Minnesota, and while it could just be the one strip club owner that went disappointed, the optics certainly follow a classic Blue-state/Red-state pattern of advocating for liberties one doesn’t exercise vs. opposing those liberties while covertly indulging in them.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville issues a (disappointingly necessary) reminder

For the record, there is plenty about which to criticize Palin that has absolutely fuck-all to do with her sex. She’s anti-choice, against marriage equality, pro-death penalty, pro-guns, and loves Big Business. (In other words, she’s a Republican.) There’s no goddamned reason to criticize her for anything but her policies. She said it here.

Remember the Twit Principle: superficial criticism (about age, orientation, gender, or who did or didn’t have what kind of sex) displaces substantive criticism.

Conservatives would love, love, love to spend the next two months defending Sarah Palin from sexist attacks because every minute they spend defending her looks, or gender, or experience is a minute they don’t have to spend defending their indefensible record on… everything single other thing about her, her history, positions and policies, John McCain and his history, position and policies, and their party and it’s history, position, and policies.

Here’s an interesting problem with Wikipedia, websites, and reliability. Near as I can tell, sometime back in January someone added a John McCain quote to the Wikipedia entry on former Vice President Dan Quayle (emphasis mine.)

At the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana, George H. W. Bush called on Quayle to be his running mate in the general election. Quayle was chosen to appeal to a younger generation of Americans and his good looks were praised by Senator John McCain, who said “I can’t believe a guy that handsome wouldn’t have some impact.“

Source: Wikipedia

There’s a citation for the quote that points to an MSNBC page that was updated last August 11th to include information about former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards’ recent alleged-paternity scandal. The great thing about Wikipedia is that you can track when a change was made. The tough thing about most other pages, however, is that you can’t. That’s not necessarily a bad think that MSNBC updated its page, and the timestamp on the page clearly predates any news of McCain’s vice-presidential picks. But I’d really love to find the original source for the McCain quote.

At any rate, if the quote pans out it would suggest that McCain had a superficial but straightforward and relatively non-gendered reason for picking the conventionally attractive Palin, a former Miss Alaska runner-up, over other, equally or more qualified Republican women.

Looks aren’t everything, so good luck with that selection criteria, McSame.

Update In comments Sungold of Kittywampus reports on the sources.

...the quote looks legit. It appears nearly verbatim in a story in the St. Petersburg Times, August 17, 1988 (“Bush surprises GOP, picks Quayle as running mate // Passes over big names for ‘unknown’”): “‘I can’t believe that a guy that handsome wouldn’t have an impact’ on women voters, said Sen. John McCain of Arizona.”

It also shows up, slightly modified, in an AP article from September 27, 1998, “Quayle’s Looks: Do Women Care?” by Jill Lawrence: “‘I can’t believe a guy that handsome wouldn’t be attractive in some respect’ to women, said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., at the GOP convention in August.”

She said it here.

I don’t have LexisNexis so it’s great that others do. Thanks, Sungold!

Photo by Flickr user Cryptonaut. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Hugo Schwyzer says of new conservative darling, mother of a four-month-old with trisomy 21, and McCain V.P. choice Sarah Palin:

What will the Phyllis Schlaflys of the world say about this? How will they ever be able to make the case that for the mothers of young children, the primary place to be is in the home?

He said it here.

That the Republicans would nominate a woman for V.P. is no surprise, even minus their idea of Hillary-Clinton-related “optics.” Seems like it was only two years ago January of 2007 last March last June I mentioned that they’ve had a pretty deep bench of qualified women and fewer qualms about considering them because for at least a generation they’ve been genuinely more interested in the hardness of a person’s heart than the color of his or her skin or the parts in her or his pants.

Considering that bench though I’m baffled that they passed over their bench of clearly qualified candidates (Kay Baley Hutchenson, say, or Conneticut Governor Jodi Rell or Condaleeza Rice, or Christine Todd Whitman, etc.) in favor of a farm-leaguer, no matter how promising. (And don’t get me wrong, as extremist right-wing, anti-choice, anti-environment, anti-government women goes she’s definitely got some serious promise.)

So yeah, I don’t get it. That bypass is going to alienate the mythical PUMA-aged women who really might have crossed over. It completely undermines the experience argument, which was their sharpest remaining stick against Obama. As Schwyzer says it undercuts what everyone from Phyllis Schlafly to Dan Quayle** fought for in terms of gender dynamics.

For now I’ll just echo Schwyzer and note the one wall Palin’s candidacy knocks down (even as she and her cohorts seek to build new ones.)

Photo by Flickr user lylamerle. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Mark Kleiman of The Reality-Based Community addresses the popular meme that Senator McCain is above criticism because he was a prisoner of war (POW.) While you’ll want to read the whole post here are some points relevant to topics we discuss here.

McCain was a former POW when he cheated on his wheelchair-bound wife and then dumped her for the younger, prettier, able-bodied heiress to a beer fortune.

...

McCain was a former POW when he said (as a “joke,” of course) “You know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly? Because Janet Reno’s her father.” And he was still a former POW when he apologized to Bill Clinton but not to Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, or Janet Reno.

McCain was a former POW when he screamed an obscenity at his wife in public.

...

McCain was a former POW both when he denounced the “agents of intolerance” and when he embraced them.

McCain was a former POW when he denounced Swiftboating and attack ads, and remains a former POW as he embraces them.

...

McCain was a former POW when he reversed his positions on abortion, tax cuts for the rich, and immigration reform.

He said it here.

I’d add that it’s not John McCain’s post-POW responsibility that members the press prefer ride on the tire swing at one of his estates (the Sedona one I think) instead of taking him to task. That would be their responsibility.

Ugg! It seemed like a good idea at the time to finally get a single place where I could put all my books, including all the ones I’ve had in storage. Now imagine actually hauling all those books! Ok, worse things could happen, and I could use the exercise. One cool thing? I’ve been finding all these great old books I’d forgotten about.

Anyway, so there I am, struggling up the stairs with all these boxes and my pants fell down. Seriously! Ok, not when I had the camera, these photos were part of a “reenactment.” But seriously, I was wrangling all these boxes from the basement out to my new office and scootch… scootch… some seriously unwelcome (to me, not sure about you) migration. Luckily no one else saw and I somewhere to safely put the boxes down and my pants back up!

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

More like this here.

Twisty Faster of I Blame The Patriarchy, after listening to NPR the other day, relays a fairly important point

Billie Jean King is interviewed on Morning Edition; she is perplexed that whenever a woman achieves anything, it is perceived as having an effect only on women. Since of course women — and our little hobbies — are too insignificant to have any public influence on Dude Nation. King notes that people come up to her all the time to thank her for what she’s done for “women’s tennis,” rather than for tennis in general.

She said it here.

I think Billie Jean King asking whether an achievement is “good for women” or “good for humanity” is a good way out of the “empowerfulment” trap. I’m enough of a small-l libertarian to recognize that ever individual is not obliged to act on all of humanity’s behalf. But I’m also enough of an environmentalist to recognize that no global benefit accrues when one shifts one’s waste stream elsewhere rather than actually reducing it. And so I’m pretty sure it’s not enough to say “opting out” of a career to raise children and let one’s partner support one is empowering unless you can make the case that it authentically benefits everyone.

And not to put too fine a point on it but that “opting out” example is kind of perfect because to make the claim under King’s terms you’d have to be able to demonstrate how the arrangement benefits not just the opted-out partner but the partner who therefore assumes the entire financial burden at the expense of his or her family as well. And, while we’re at it, are any children one opts out to raise really better off with less contact with their work-away partner and more of the stay-at-home one? And all that comes up before you get anywhere near whether one’s own “opt-out” advances everyone.

And obviously “opt out” is only one example. And also obviously while King and Twisty Faster were talking about women the principle applies wherever kyirarchal modifiers are routinely appended to words like “candidate” or “athlete” or “filmmaker” or “student.”

And finally I don’t know how many of my readers were around when King was an active player but the world a year after she beat Bobby Riggs at tennis was measurably better than was the year before. And not just for women but for anybody who was previously doomed to the grievously narrow gender expectations of the era.

Amanda Brooks of After Hours and some of her fellow prostitutes and activists from Nevada have been experimenting with local brothels where their work is nominally legal. Brooks, who merely didn’t enjoy her first stint, passes along a link to a colleague, Mariko Passion of Educated Whore, Urban Geisha, that’s outright hellish.

New rules and regulations and a house meeting which lasted almost 2 hours. S was chastising the captive audience of 10 working girls and 2 staff like we were in 8th grade detention. It went on for almost 2 hours without any dialogue or debate. On and on she went about how ungrateful some girls were for complaining about the food, or the lack of customers or the lack of money that we made. On and on she went about how some of our rooms smelled like trucker asshole and how we never took out our garbages. She made comments about how if we were on the streets we would probably get arrested 7 or 8 times and we would probably get HIV. The fear factor was definitely a huge part of this lecture. Instilling the fear that there was no way that we could ever find any better working conditions than where we were right now, and if we dared to complain about it, we could pack our bags and try to find better. On and on she went about how drinking and smoking pot made us fat and lazy. On and on she went about how people need to keep their mouths shut about other people in the house. On and on and on… How we wanted to be in our rooms all the time and use this like a hotel. She had said that only one other house had more customers than this one, that was the Asian brothel, and all the girls there were from overseas and had to pay huge debt bonds. It was the most blatant example of how pimps and madams become trapped in that power position where they feel that talking down to, criticizing or literally beating up their workers is the only way that they are capable of listening.

She said it here.

It’s a lovely example of why you can’t just staple the word “legalize” next to the word “prostitution” and call it a day. Although technically I have to say in Nevada prostitutes aren’t so much legal as brothels are. The laws governing the system a) totally benefit brothel owners, b) utterly assume the actual sex workers are common criminals, and therefore c) trickles very little of the proceeds to the actual workers and d) requires that they actually remain locked in the brothels for up to 10 days at a time! On the clock the whole time and expected to get up for “line-ups” at any hour of the day or night to the tune of a very loud buzzer or bell. And (sez Mariko at her main blog, Bound, Not Gagged) it’s no better in Australia.

According to conversations I’ve had with Rachel Whotton from Scarlet Alliance, the same is true for brothel owners in Australia. In Oz, they have become a political lobby and are speaking out against any non brothel sex worker, trying to convince parliament that if a girl were to not work in a brothel there would be no way that she could keep herself safe or clean. This is the overall belief from many people in the general public, and it is the legacy of male priviledge in all its ugliness.

She said that here.

The good news is that Mariko successfully bailed out of her experiment and has headed back to her home town and her former non-legal job. Pretty bleak, by the way, when sex workers feel safer, healthier, and more respected working as illegal out-call escorts than legal brothel prostitutes!

The point being, though, that systems like Nevada’s or Australia’s or countless others that merely institutionalize existing proprietary, punitive assumptions about sex workers will always be part of the problem. Yes, earlier this week in comments I mocked the idea of sex-work as empowering (any more than any other trade such as plumber, surgeon, or actuary can be.) But that’s because I think the real problem isn’t that sex-work makes anyone more powerful, it’s that the status quo is so flipping disempowering that almost any improvement looks like up.

And all I’m saying is that if legalization policy was merely going to institutionalize the status quo then anti-prostitution activists aren’t crazy for opposing legalization. Heck, if the only alternative to Nevada-style “legalization” was the Swedish model that decriminalizes sex-work but criminalizes customers then I’d probably support that model instead (even though it evidently only drive sex-workers back underground where their customers are forced to operate.) Instead if one was going to make prostitution legal at all then all the power, the benefits, the money, and the freedom to form associations needs to fall to the sex workers themselves rather than pimps, quasi-legal escort-service managers, illegal brothel owners, and customers (the status quo most places in America) or the legal brothel owner (the Nevada and Australia model) or the government.

(And since it’s a month with a vowel in it it’s time for me to repeat my caveat that while I feel pretty strongly that independent prostitutes should be able to work legally I’m not actually all that crazy about prostitution itself because of the way it institutionalizes the dynamics of constructed gender and a patriarchal ideology of heterosexual sexual scarcity. Barring the setbacks of a Nevada/Austrilia-style takeover, though, prostitution could be transformed just as easily if it’s legal as if it’s illegal. And if it happened to be legal then workers would have way more safe, legal access to law enforcement, legislative policy-makers, and the courts.)

Update: Afterthought: reading through both Brooks and Mariko’s posts I was struck by how much more humiliating, degrading, and dehumanizing the working conditions are compared to the actual work itself. This is not an assertion that sex work is cush, just that when one commits the evident heresy of looking at it as a form of labor instead of, say, evasion of the wages of sin where hanging’s too good for them adulteratin’ hoors, one almost immediately notices just how much it doesn’t have to be that way, and just how much our own complicities support keeping it that way.