Sun, 2009-12-13 16:50
- Good answer from Las Vegas Courtesan: “I get asked this question quite a bit by nervous guys who feel like they are somehow inadequate to women and figure who better to ask than a girl who sees a lot of penises? I can see their reasoning’s why I might be a good person to ask…”
- Comic: “People who shouldn’t have children: frat boys” via Tumbler
Yikes! Good call. Caveat though: people generally rise only to the level they’re expected to — though it’s wonderfully dark humor you want to be careful not to endorse low expectations. - Methodical evisceration of last year’s “Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature” by Lillie Yifu of 2nd Sex
Incidently, Yifu describes 2nd Sex as “A blog on sex and virtual worlds by a virtual escort.” Her unconventional calling gives here a genuinely unique perspective on conventional thinking about sex, gender, power, fads, and relationships. Also, oddly and/or disappointingly, while her critique is clearly well-informed by feminism she seems to confuse radfem with all feminism with the result that she seems pretty down on it. That semantic quirk aside, though, she writes eye-opening stuff.
- Sen. Barbara Boxer, dead on, on the kind of targeted healthcare restrictions Rep. Supak, Sen. Nelson, and their backers have been lusting after “The men who have brought us this don’t single out a procedure that’s used by a man, or a drug that is used by a man, that involves his reproductive health care and say they have to get a special rider. There’s nothing in this amendment that says if a man some days wants to buy Viagra, for example, that his pharmaceutical coverage cannot cover it, that he has to buy a rider. I wouldn’t support that. And they shouldn’t support going after a woman using her own private funds for her reproductive health care. Is it fair to say to a man you’re going to have to buy a rider to buy Viagra and this will be public information that could be accessed? No, I don’t support that. I support a man’s privacy, just as I support a woman’s privacy.” Exactly! (Thanks for the tip goes to @colorlessblue via Twitter.)
- Somewhat disappointing discussion at Em & Lo about straight men’s persistent aversion to touch their own wive’s or partners purses. Lest, despite the fact it’s their hetero partner’s purse, they be perceived as gay. Or, which somehow amounts to the same thing in popular imagination, emasculated. And boy is that meme persistent!The article begins with a proposition that women “innocently” hand men their purses as some kind of relationship “test.” (Not sure what it is about men and women who think in terms of “testing” their partners but it’s a crap way to conduct a relationship.)
- Jill of Savage Death Island (formerly I Blame the Patriarchy), tears into the pseudonymous male author of the book Little White Whys: A Woman’s Guide through the Lies Men Tell and Why. The author claims to be just “helping ladies out” by instructing them about relationships. This oily condescension naturally infuriates Jill, but the quotes she pulls demonstrate my point that whereas feminists are often exasperated, frustrated, or wary of men if you’re looking for pure, unadulterated man-hating you need look no further than the nearest anti-feminist. And yet MRAs and other anti-feminists slurp down that crap like it was gravy.
- I’m still loving reading the archives of Vagina Dentata, by Naomi Mc who’s writing still makes me feel like we could be cousins. Only (like a lot of my cousins, actually) she’s smarter, more focused, better educations, and has better grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
- I thought I’d already added K’s Feminists with FDS to my blogroll. Fixed
- Finally, I’ve been sort of sitting on mentioning the religious sexuality site Christian Nymphos. In part it was because I couldn’t tell if they were serious. I ran across their post on dealing with miscarriage and found it way more sensitive than most. I started taking a closer look at the site and they seem to be pretty much exactly what the claim: women of deep, fairly conservative faith dealing with sexual desire that’s greater than that of their husbands. That’s a tremendously difficult position to be in even in ideal circumstances, and doubly hard in a tradition that tends to very strongly equate “womanly virtue” with “absence of or indifference to women’s sexual agency.” Understanding that also resolved my concern that the site had an overly “Cosmo” emphasis on women generating sexual attention from their partners. The difference being that Cosmo’s focus seems to be entirely on sacrificially using sex to get or keep a partner while the writers at Christian Nymphos seem interested in (very, and understandably) using sex for the entirely non-sacrifical reason that they, you know, desire sex!
I saw a link to Sen. Boxer’s
Submitted by colorlessblue (not verified) on Sun, 2009-12-13 20:49.I saw a link to Sen. Boxer’s speech in a forum, in a site with a majority of teen members. I thought the person was trying to say “look how dumb baby killers are” (mostly because it was a catholic someone who was arguing with me against same sex marriages in a different thread), so I was trying to find commentary about the speech, from progressive sources. I didn’t find any, but I think I explained the opposite position well enough for the potential readers to take their own decisions.
I argued that it wasn’t a comparison directly about abortion and viagra, but about women’s health services in general and men’s services, that services used only by women were not included in basic coverage (though many got in as an afterthought on the amendment on Senate), that being a man was seen as default and women were Other.
I argued against the idea that not using tax money to pay for murd-Abortions, I mean ;) is a freedom of religion issue with quotes from evangelicals applauding Roe v. Wade (before they changed their minds), showing that not all religions agreed with the issue and so the others had the right to decide; and questioned how she refused to pay taxes to fund abortion but didn’t object to funding war.
And I pointed out those measures that they work against, that would actually help prevent abortions, if they cared (contraception, social programs, you know the drill).
The epiphany I had while debating was how Stupak-Pitts’ effects on making insurance companies stop offering coverage for abortions even with the individual’s own money are comparable to privatizations in Brazil where the companies stopped offering services in rural communities where there wasn’t enough population to make it profitable. I suspect that’s being done on purpose on the anti-choice side, to make the market rules do the service fighting on court couldn’t do.