Talking Points Memo says

MSNBC announces Ed Schultz's "triumphant return" to the airwaves after all that 'slut' unfortunateness.

Source: Talking Points Memo

Wouldn't it be interesting if progressive and human-potential activists (feminist and otherwise) spent a tenth of the time slamming MSNBC's decision to "triumphantly" reinstate Schultz, who used the word "slut" in it's usual sense, than they've spent slamming the founders and imitators of SlutWalk Toronto, who organized their protests because they deplore use of the word "slut?"

Because Great Sticks of Butter there's a lot of heated opposition to SlutWalk.  And meanwhile, of all things, MSNBC executives have been more publicly demonstrative against Schultz!

And by that I don't mean that MSNBC execs have been all that great shakes.  Just that too many of the people* who might otherwise have sent testy letters to the network have been otherwise distracted.

I mean, not everyone's been thrilled with the name (I'm not thrilled with it) but you know what?  A lot of people have been thrilled by its spontaneous, non-organized emergence from a single online protest into a very wide-spread, frustration-fueled cluster of independent public actions.

For instance via Jill Filipovic, Jessica Valenti has written

[T]he success of SlutWalks does herald a new day in feminist organizing. One when women’s anger begins online but takes to the street, when a local step makes global waves and when one feminist action can spark debate, controversy and activism that will have lasting effects on the movement.

Source: The Washington Post

Yeah, this is definitely important for a lot of reasons.  Almost none of which have anything to do with the name itself.

Could the organizers in Toronto have come up with a title that was less offensive to collar buttoners of left and right? Sure, if they’d formed a committee and made an org chart and focus-grouped it and recruited Significant Board Members from Around the World and waited for the same brigade of professional-left activists and assholes to show up offering logistical support in exchange for including speakers for their laundry list of unrelated outrages that have diluted every other attempted march and demonstration for the last 20 years. And if they’d known or cared their rump outburst of irritation at a specific word uttered by a specific cop in a specific city in Canada was going to spread to 75 cities and counting then they might have done so.

But they didn’t because, um, they were too busy taking direct action against a direct insult by someone who was so “well-intentioned” but wrong he didn’t even know he had his head up his ass.

And dear sweet mother of pearl, that something like that should take off spontaneously? That it should have bypassed a bunch of amen choir members who’s “activism” consists mainly of leaving gotchas in other bloggers comments? Horrors!

I’m not a huge fan of “reclaim the word X” initiatives (almost 40 years after appreciating a friend’s “That’s Mister Faggot to you” button the word “fag” has lost only a little bit of its sting) I appreciate SlutWalk not just because their intention is more about deploring then word than celebrating it. Because, yeah, it’s pretty much always been a slur and in this instance the Toronto cop’s intention was pure unadulterated anticipatory victim-blaming.  But because they're actually doing something!

It's not that it's the first it’s the first spontaneous mass feminist demonstration ever (heh, um, no.)   Instead it’s the first in North America to originate and translate from the internet to civic action.

I mean yes, yes, the 1970s were a wonderful time for women’s marches! I remember hitch-hiking along with friends to rallies between in Boston and D.C. And goodness knows the sacrifices and successes women made 150 years ago, and 100 years ago, and 50 years ago.

But in the last 20 years though? Well, there was the million-women march (ooh, wonderful giant puppets and always good to see those Free Tibet signs!) And there have been some excellent hyper-local Take Back the Night events.  But otherwise? Not so much. Which is why, at least to me, this is so promising. Because, yeah, we really, really do need to see more activism that's not managed, and not arranged by professionals, and not so routine that the press already knows where to setup their cameras.

But as my dad used to say “you can’t steer a parked car.” I think instead of trying to put the brakes on Slutwalk it might be cool to start crowd-sourcing new points for real-world activism. I mean, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to get a rally going before the mainstreamers, t-shirt vendors, and the YSA “volunteers” and PETA demonstrators sign-waivers could set up for the cameras and otherwise get in the way? I say yes. Too many other people are saying no way… because a handful of non-professional organizers were too focused to pick the “right” name.

Who knows?  Maybe Ed Schultz will to a segment knocking SlutWalk.  To make "amends."

$%!#@y

* By which I mean people on the left: since Schultz used the word to label a conservative wingnut the right-wing noise machine was on it instantly.  Which is probably why MSNBC suspended him at all.

So... sometime last night Holly said of non-traditional, non-PIV, but deeply connected sex with her male partner (emphasis hers)

Having mechanically perfect sex with your bodies in perfect unison is overrated. Knowing how to have good sex anyway, how to create an experience that's sexy and sweet even when someone has a limp dick or dry pussy or trick hip, is tragically underrated.

Source: The Pervocracy

And this morning Ozymandias coincidentally picked up a similar thread after learning a little about her partner's mild high-school-era anime-driven dress-like-animals kink.

In the course of these researches, I have discovered two things. One, next time I meet a person who is all "men are just naturally attracted to Sports Illustrated swimsuit models! And women are just naturally attracted to dominant men!", I will yell FURRIES at them. FURRIES FURRIES FURRIES FURRIES, and until you explain the people with an attraction to anthropomorphic animals, your theory is invalid. FURRIES!

...

I think one of the biggest misconceptions about kink is that it is remotely glamorous in any way. I think a lot of vanilla people think of kink as this depraved, decadent thing full of skinny ladies in black leather, and while it might be an evil tool of the patriarchy/abuse/degradation it's also really cool, the way all evil things are, on a certain level, really cool? But it's not. It's the Ren Faire of sexuality, and actually has most of the same people in it. It's about being silly and ridiculous and having fun and, yes, intense orgasms, but a lot of it-- no, nearly all of it -- is just as ridiculous as pretending to have a foxhunt.

Source: Ozymandias's Crushing and Venting Engine of Doom

Yup. In both cases this is the part that "porn culture," also "romance culture" and "advertising culture" and, oh let's just fess up and say "culture" leaves out: for the most part (there's bound to be an exception for everything) sex isn't about the enjoyment of hypothetical onlookers. Which is a good thing because sex is nice even if you and your partner(s) aren't perfectly coiffed Olympic athletes coupling sensuously on the rooftops of extraordinarily expensive townhouses. Or whatever setting Abercrombie and Fitch or Calvin Klein photographers are using for their fashion spreads in Vogue.

Instead it's pretty much all people who look pretty much like you and your partner either look like now or will look like or have looked like at some point in our roughly 60-70 years of adulthood.

And even if we don't wear fur suits (aside: fur suiters are not at all the same thing as furries) and in fact even if we actually do look like olympic athletes, we'll almost always look, sound, act, and seem fascinated by are objectively waaaaay sillier-looking that our subjective experiences of sex would lead us to believe.

And thank goodness! Otherwise 99.9999% of us would never get to or want to have sex at all!

My Facebook profile image.

You know that saying “‘well-behaved’ women never make history?” I’ve been realizing lately that most of my gender-questioning posts involve women behaving outside allotted traditional gender boundaries. And it just occurred to me that for every story about powerful women's tendency towards affairs you'll pretty much won't ever see a corresponding story about a quietly monogamous homemaker husband who isn't powerful and doesn't have affairs. Unless it occurs to someone else to wonder and to then follow it up with a story. This is because sort of by definition men who are “well-behaved” the way tradition has dictated women should be… pretty much never make history either.

That’s not so much a problem as an observation that they rarely show up in articles and blog posts. For instance if I didn’t have a blog I’d only a be stay-at-home dad and would thus be invisible… as in fact I almost completely am when I Google my real name.

There are some posts from right after I got out of college. And there are references on a family website and I'm mentioned in the context of volunteering for my children's school. In other words I "exist" for my public role the same way my mother and grandmothers, and their mothers, and their mothers did. I.e. as names on birth certificates, obituary notices, and as one-liners on family trees. Again, that's not particularly bad or wrong, especially if that's what one chooses. But it does mean there aren't going to be a lot of grist for stories about those of us who break out of the roles tradition defines for men.  Any more than there will be for women who fail to break free of the confines tradition defines for them.

Back in April Echidne said of the incontrovertible biological "fact" that women's interest in men is exclusively related to men's wealth, status, or power

As long as women are, on average, poorer than men we are going to observe more female hypergamy than male hypergamy.

Source: Echidne of the Snakes

That's even empirically true. But guess what else is true? For some mad, zany, bogus Rules of Desire-defying reason, the vast, vast majority of women still want relationships with men.  Why you'd think it might have something to do with... something besides "golddigging."  Maybe it even has something to do with, you know, heterosexual desire.  Just like, you know, heterosexual men!

And guess what?

Crazy I know but there you have it.

But! In the face of that "fact" of female "hypergamy" have you ever wondered women are inclined to behave when they themselves achieve personal wealth, status, and/or power?

Turns out a Dutch sociologist, Joris Lammers of Tilburg University, has spent a lot of time researching the effects of personal power on individuals' morality, legitimacy, hypocrisy, depersonalization. And it turns out he's just applied the question of how personal power affects women's relationships to fidelity and adultery in a survey of business women with 1,500 respondents.

The upshot? I'm not crazy about the source publication (the Daily Mail) but while their prose and photography is heavily larded with lurid stereotypical examples the gist seems consistent with the sort of things Lammers has said in prior articles. (His current paper is not yet available on line.)

[H]igh-earning, successful women are every bit as willing as men to use their power to attract younger lovers for quick flings.

...

However, a new academic study suggests women are inherently no more virtuous than men. It’s just that, in the past, they have lacked the confidence or opportunity to stray.

...

Like men, women are finding that power is a potent aphrodisiac. And just like men, they are giving in to the thrill of illicit lunchtime assignations and the sheer excitement that accompanies their transgression.

Nor do they feel any more guilty or ashamed about it than a man would — if anything, less so.

Source: The Daily Mail

That tends to bear out Echidne's point. Much of what we "know" about women's "nature" comes from history and tradition. And for most of history, and by near-universal tradition, women have had doodly-squat personal power, status, or wealth. And when one is in a dependent situation one makes other trade-offs in exchange. And when it comes to sexual relationships, especially possibly reproductive ones, the tradeoff evidently is less sexual fulfillment and self-expression in favor of maintaining the trust and interest of the person one depends on.

But!

That means many of the qualities tradition and history assigns to women are artifacts of power, status, and wealth imbalances rather "natural" ones. In other words the behavior we're used to is a product of socially-constructed gender not innate biological sex.

And incidentally I'd just add that whereas one might be tempted to say that power, status, or wealth makes women behave "just like men" that that too is gender construction. For that matter it's also class construction. Because to say "women of independent means are as likely as independent men to be unfaithful" isn't to say that if all women of means aren't unfaithful then the assertion falls apart. And that would be because the assertion also means that non-dependent men are no more likely to commit adultery than comparable women. And in fact, over all, men and women are approximately as inclined to fidelity and monogamy as they're inclined towards adultery and polyfidelity.

There are observed differences but the Daily Mail's reporter, Ruth Sunderland (who unlike many of her colleagues, must not have been drunk or horny), interviewed a Financial Times columnist and novelist, Lucy Kellaway and came away with a likely reason that's also far more social than "natural."

‘There is a double standard,’ she says. ‘A man having an affair might be seen as a bit of a lad, whereas a woman like Stella in my book is likely to be seen as pathetic, or a bitch and a slapper.

‘Because there are so few women executives, the ones that do succeed are put on a pedestal — and they have a lot farther to fall. The message of my book is that affairs end badly for everyone.’

And, while the figures demonstrate very clearly that increasing numbers of successful women are being tempted to stray, can women really divorce sex from commitment in the same way as a man?

Well, no, not if you put it that way. But the reason isn't that women are different from men, it's that society judges women differently from men.

That's not the same thing at all, at all: "held to a different, double-standard" simply isn't a heritable biological trait.

Via Emily Tan and Em and Lo.

Comic by XKCD/Randall Munroe. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Click for full-size image at XKCD.

Considering the alternatives, and the statistical probability of you getting there, you should probably consider being comfortable admitting it.

Also, considering the skyrocketing rates of STI rates among seniors it's pretty clear that they need to start getting comfortable admitting it!

You're probably familiar by now with the Toronto family that's somewhat smugly declining to disclose the sex of their 4-month-old infant, Storm. And you're probably also aware that their decision to do so has been completely unhinging otherwise perfectly sensible people.

Using a nice science-fiction metaphor Kyle Munkittrick offers the best explanation why this bothers even some people who really ought to know better, not to mention all the people who don't: (emphasis mine)

The discomfort around not knowing Storm’s gender arises in part because gender is how we humanize someone.  In Star Trek: The Next Generation, those who view Data as a mere robot refer to him as “it” until they have an epiphany and recognize Data as a person, at which point Data becomes a “he.” Gendering Data is the way he is acknowledged a subject instead of an object. We do this to babies as well. What’s the first thing we say when a person is born? “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy!” I love how that sentence is one of the only ones in the English language in which it is ok to refer to a human being as an “it.” Saying “It’s a boy” or “It’s a girl” metaphorically transforms the generic baby in the womb into a specific, individual human in the outside world. Gendering is also the way we include the new human baby as “one of us.” Beyond the exception of newborns, to refer to a person as an “it” carries the connotation of that person being inhuman or alien thing. So when we can’t refer to a baby as he or she, we get anxious.

Source: Discover Blogs

I'm with Munkittrick on this. Storm absolutely has a biological sex. And when he or she is older he or she will definitely develop a sexual identity, a sexual orientation, some degree of interest in expressing it, and so on. And however that shakes out it'll be completely unambiguous both to Storm and his or her prospective partners. In other words Storm is just like everybody else.

And I absolutely agree with Munkittrick point that in English and a lot of other languages assigning sexed pronouns is how we humanize people. In fact I think that's a really brilliant point and one that really, really helps explain the incredible resistance otherwise sensible people are feeling about the parents decision not to disclose it.

What's tough is all the baggage we happen to overload on the assignment of sex. For instance the first five words of an article about Storm's parents decision are "Bruising boy or blushing girl?" Which kind of gets to the heart of the problem of gender as opposed to sex. A 4-month old is unlikely to either bruise someone else or to blush. Unfortunately just by knowing which gender a child is encourages onlookers to decide whether it's ok for Storm to be bruised (if he's a boy) or ok for Storm to blush (if she's a girl.)

And what sucks about that is that in fact girls and boys are perfectly capable of both blushing and bruising in roughly equal measure. And so when we go assigning "blushing" to one or "bruising" to another we're basically demanding that they restrict perfectly natural qualities they're born with in order to further meet our expectations of how gender "ought" to be.

That's not to say that the sexes are either biologically indistinguishable or socially irrelevant. It just means that in addition to the natural differences of sex it's stupid that the processes we believe make someone "more of a man" involves subtracting from them to a point where they're scared literally out of their senses that someone will mistake them for "gay." Same with women who are constantly admonished to be "more lady-like," which almost always involves subtracting thoroughly natural and often enjoyable behaviors associated with "masculinity."

Anyway, while I agree the parents are milking the attention they're getting they by no means are responsible for generating that attention. Even the best parents make the occasional stupid self-serving mistake with their children every now and then and less prepared parents do it every day. But they don't wind up in nearly every newspaper in the world with an English language edition. That's not the baby's fault, and it's not the parent's fault either.

The baby will be fine. As soon as it's important to the boy or girl to let people know he or she will do so. And it's not very likely the parents will do anything to prevent it. But until then this is just a great natural experiment in the way language actually does structure the way people think. To a point where we have the equivalent of a "phantom limb" or lexical gender dysphoria when we don't know which pronoun to use.

It's just a shame that in order to grant infants humanity we have to demand they sacrifice an (almost) arbitrary half their potential to be human.

Jill Filipovic says

In the aftermath of the Anthony Weiner weiner-scandal, the Washington Post asks women what kind of sexts (as they kids say) they’d appreciate receiving. Women ™ say:

“I would like a photo of a made bed,” says Kathryn Roberts, who works at a law firm in Washington. “I would take rose petals, but I want them on top of a made bed.” And not that fake kind of made, either, where the comforter is smooth but the sheets are a jumbled mess.

“Or laundry,” adds her friend Andrea Neurohr.

“Folded laundry,” elaborates Roberts. “Maybe in a wicker basket.”

Get it? Cleaning is so important to women it’s basically pornography! Haha oh women, with their clean laundry and their distaste for sexual pleasure and the male body.

Source: Feministe

Back when I was posting a lot of nude and/or erotic self-photography I went ahead and tested the hypothesis that women would rather see men folding laundry or making beds.  The results were positive but most of my non-domestic photo series were considerably more popular.

At any rate, based on my past experience I think whether photos of men folding laundry or making beds can be sexy has a lot more to do with the men and a lot less to do with the laundry.*

See the "Half-Nekkid Thursday" version of this post, with less safe-for-work examples,here.

* Note: if you're going to put rose petals on a bed there's a good chance you're going to have to use bleach to get the stains out.  Or else, I guess, use rose-colored sheets.

Jill Filipovic says

In the aftermath of the Anthony Weiner weiner-scandal, the Washington Post asks women what kind of sexts (as they kids say) they’d appreciate receiving. Women ™ say:

“I would like a photo of a made bed,” says Kathryn Roberts, who works at a law firm in Washington. “I would take rose petals, but I want them on top of a made bed.” And not that fake kind of made, either, where the comforter is smooth but the sheets are a jumbled mess.

“Or laundry,” adds her friend Andrea Neurohr.

“Folded laundry,” elaborates Roberts. “Maybe in a wicker basket.”

Get it? Cleaning is so important to women it’s basically pornography! Haha oh women, with their clean laundry and their distaste for sexual pleasure and the male body.

Source: Feministe

Back when I was posting a lot of nude and/or erotic self-photography I went ahead and tested the hypothesis that women would rather see men folding laundry or making beds.  The results were positive but most of my non-domestic photo series were considerably more popular.

At any rate, based on my past experience I think whether photos of men folding laundry or making beds can be sexy has a lot more to do with the men and a lot less to do with the laundry.*

All photos by figleaf (hey that's me!) Posted with a Creative Commons license. .

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

* Note: if you're going to put rose petals on a bed there's a good chance you're going to have to use bleach to get the stains out.  Or else, I guess, use rose-colored sheets.

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

In an interesting comment to an extraordinarily dry post on the welfare economics of elevators that somehow concluded with the sentence "this explains the otherwise inexplicable glass elevators, and raises the puzzle of why we don’t see them in office buildings" someone named Tylerh said

Actually, glass elevators are nifty topic for a social welfare discussion.

Joel Garreau argued in Edge City that glass elevators where a direct response to women moving into sales & management positions in the 70s. These pioneer women felt safer from the Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s of the world in glass elevators then in an enclosed box, so business hotels quickly learned that glass elevators meant more women professionals (and there colleagues) as customers.

Source: Cheap Talk

It's a good point, I think, and a more compelling reason for glass elevators in office buildings that the original author's marginal rider vs. single-floor rider welfare-inconvenience-factor expostulations.

I remember my home state Senator Patty Murray saying she'd been advised never to get in an elevator alone with then-geriatric Senator Strom Thurmond or a number of other senators and congressmen because they'd been groping the shit out of women staffers for decades and hadn't been able to adjust to the possibility that some of their colleagues might now be women. I'm pretty sure similar... uh... social adjustments were common in other closed-space settings. (Note: I'm guessing security cameras have probably affected the glass-elevator argument in recent years.)

On the gender-equivalence beat I'm curious whether senior (age-wise and/or power-wise) women ever grope men. It's something I don't think I've ever heard of outside of, possibly, geriatric-care facilities (where I think it's at least been made light of in comedies.) Intuition says it probably happens anywhere there are power imbalances. And Penelope Trunk's upwards-harassment hypotheses not withstanding I'm pretty confident that subordinate men would take groping no more willingly, and no further, than subordinate women would. Anyway, if you've heard of, experienced, been tempted to conduct, or (if you're willing to admit it) have conducted groping of subordinate men or boys feel free to let me know in comments. Same if you've got non-cliché theories for why it either never happens or why, if you think it does, we never hear about it.

Update: Although see also.

By far the most important thing about Jon Stewart's rebuttal of the Anthony Weiner "scandal" is not his elegantly "sweet spot of low comedy" observation that he's... well... observed Rep. Weiner's weiner. Although it really is kind of awesome to watch a pro hit a fat slow over-the-plater not only out of the park but right on out across the state line.

What's important is towards the end when they're running clips of Carl Rove protoge Andrew Breitbart making claims that Rep. Weiner mainly follows underage girls on Twitter.  The CNN talking head says, approximately, "goodness but those are serious allegations, we've asked Rep. Weiner's spokesperson for details but haven't heard back yet."  As if that was that.

Stewart to his enormous credit stands up, leans over his desk, and starts blowing spittle in order to make the point that... no, CNN does not in fact have to go to Rep. Weiner's PR department to get confirmation or denial of who the fuck Weiner's following on Twitter.

They could, oh, I don't know, see if there was some huge cable news network somewhere, with employees in it, some of whom are political reporters, and some of those might have been following Rep. Weiner on Twitter for... however long he's been Tweeting.  Weiner's Tweets are now "protected" (which raises some questions about which more in a moment) so I can't do that.  But he's already bound to have other followers who aren't minor girls (as Breitbart claims) and, being reporters and all, you'd think CNN could a) ask for an invitation themselves or b) ask someone they know who already has been invited to let a reporter look over their shoulder, or at least c) find someone who's been invited and ask them to look for them.

And then there's the question of when and why Weiner's tweets are protected.  Really?  When did that happen?  Does he have something to hide such that he's retroactively protected his account?  If so then why aren't Breitbart and Drudge all over that?  Conversely, if Weiner's tweets have always been protected then how the fuck can Breitbart say with such authority that "the Seattle woman in question is by no means the youngest woman Weiner follows?"

Anyway, point being that those are all questions I know for a fact any half-decent reporter could figure out very quickly.  As opposed to passively having to take Brietbart's "serious allegations" seriously while they haplessly wait for a talking head to flack something to them do their reporting for them.  And how do I know any half-decent reporter coudl do something like this?  Because I took a journalism class in the 7th grade.  And even though it was only a 7th grade journalism class, for what was then called a Jr. High school newspaper (mmm, mimeographs!), I still learned how to do literally elementary reporting.  Ok, not literally elementary -- that would have had to be a year earlier, when I was in 6th grade.  But I'm going to stand by my "hyperbole" and say that, yeah, if CNN employed any reporters or did any journalism then they could have either strongly corroborated Brietbart's story, or nailed his little lapel mike to his ass for lying to them.

So anyway, that's what I think is the best part of Jon Stewart's monologue on weiners in Washington, D.C.

Update: #2: Although see also Cannonfire: the photo was categorically forged and uploaded to Weiner's yFrog account via a 3rd-party simply emailing from a Blackberry; yFrog automatically inserts a tweet for every photo uploaded to an account via email regardless of the sender. (Via Neal Krawetz)

Update #1: Although see also Jon Chait: Weiner might still turn out to be immured in the culture of Congressional sexual harassment of interns (not clear if he was party to it or just guilt-by-associationed by sitting near other Congressmen.)