It has been much noted in electoral politics that demographics in the U.S. are changing. Said notations have come with much rending of garments by "traditional" right-wing extremists. Who for some reason imagine an overwhelmingly majority-white population would give them the conservative/libertarian paradise they believe they'd be able to enjoy.

As South Carolina Republican Lindsay Graham complained to the Washington Post last month

We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.

Source: The Guardian

The issue, according to a bunch of those same angry white guys, is that all "those people" are reproducing at rates higher than rates higher than angry white guys.

They think that's a problem.

I'm...

Gonna have to agree.

I'd just state the problem a little differently than they would.

Because... well... ok, quick question: who wants to reproduce with an angry white guy?

Or even more pointedly: Who wants to reproduce with an angry white guy willingly?

Not to grind this in too deep but this is yet another area where feminism would actually improve matters for the angry white guys who feel most threatened by it.

Part of why they feel threatened is that if feminism wins then they will no longer be entitled to effectively coerce partners to reproduce with them.  If feminism wins, they fear, then women will be able to support themselves on their own incomes and consequently will not be obliged to couple with them in order to keep rooves over their heads and shoes on their and their children's feet.  If feminism wins, they fear, then women will be able to walk down the street or sleep in their own beds with no further need of angry white guys to protect them from "big, angry non-white men."  If feminism wins, they fear, women (as members of the sexually-indifferent "no-sex" class!) will have no interest sexual or even social intercourse with men.

In other words, they fear, if feminism wins then a) no one will want to reproduce with angry white men, and therefore angry white men are doomed to extinction.

 I dunno.

Seems to me that the issue is that sense of entitlement.  And a big source of the anger is over a sense of loss of that entitlement.

And yet...

I've noticed...

By and large hetero women (the vast, vast majority in other words) seem perfectly interested in forming relationships with non-angry, non-entitled men. Short-term relationships.  Long-term relationships.  One-night-stand relationships.  Even long-term let's have a family relationships!  No coercion, leverage, wheedling, required.  And defniitely no anger required.

Just something to think about.

It's bad enough when assholes in predictable, far-away-from-me places like Indiana, Missouri, and lifelong-government-beneficiary-and-Ayn-Rand-fan, but I always expect better from even the most conservative reaches of Washington State.  Silly me.  Evan McMorris-Santoro has the scoop.

John Koster, Republican nominee in Washington’s First Congressional District, was captured on tape over the weekend explaining why he is opposed to abortion in the case of incest and rape. Incest he said, was “so rare.” Then he turned to rape.

“On the rape thing, it’s like, how does putting more violence onto a woman’s body and taking the life of an innocent child that’s the consequence of this crime, how does that make it better?” Koster said. “You know what I mean?”

Source: TalkingPointsMemo

Koster's opponent, Democratic candidate Suzan DelBene, wasn't my first choice for the nearby Congressional District 1.  I supported and would have preferred Darcy Burner. 

But!

So a little while ago I donated to the DelBene's campaign.  If you feel the same way  you can donate to DelBene too.

To be fair, in the unlikely event it had been DelBene who'd said something so egregiously, viciously thuggish I'd have sent money to Koster.  But of course she didn't say anything nearly so ugly.  Instead he inexcusably did. 

Image via Facebook user 'A girl's guide to taking over the world.'

Amanda Marcott, writing at Tapped, gives a nice analysis of the annual excoriation of "sexy" Halloween costumes for women.  It's a good read (it starts like this.)

Every year, Halloween comes with its own predictable traditions: trick-or-treating, pumpkin recipes, costumes based on bad puns, and increasingly, the tradition of women wearing ever-skimpier Halloween costumes and feminists online decrying the trend through blogs and social networks. To quote the movie Mean Girls: “In Girl World, Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”

Mocking oversexed Halloween costumes is catnip to feminists. For one thing, it’s one of those arenas where the double standard is undeniable. Men’s costumes, at least those sold in Halloween stores, tend to be basic scary costume fare. Women’s costumes are so oversexed it gets silly. Sexy bacon? Sexy Finding Nemo? A sexy melon that is so sexy you can’t even tell what it’s supposed to be?

Source: The American Prospect

Further down in her post Amanda mentions that Dan Savage has weighed in on the matter. 

This season, Dan Savage criticized feminist bloggers on his podcast, Savage Lovecast, saying that some of the arguments he’s heard are sex negative, shaming women for exploring their sexuality. He celebrated Halloween for being a heterosexual version of a pride celebration—an opportunity to celebrate sexuality and have some fun—and said that sexy costumes are a natural an unobjectionable part of this. He acknowledged the double standard, agreeing that it’s unfair that women are the ones who strip down while men don’t, but pointed out that the culture at large expects women to be put on display, an expectation which carries over into Halloween traditions. All this negativity around sexy female Halloween costumes just comes across as prudish, he argues.

On Facebook I ran across this nifty image from RancidButter and it set me to thinking...

Image by Facebook User RancidButter.

What prompted me was the observation that, in addition to the actual victims Mourdock, Akin, and Co. would like to see sent to prison there's also the matter of what should become of, oh, say, the victim's parents, their sons or daughters, their girlfriends or boyfriends, or, of course, their husbands who help the victim free herself of the remainders of her assailant's tissue.

And that was the point it hit me.

Richard Mourdock probably isn't a rapist.

Sure, he might have fantasized about it from time to time.  As no doubt a lot of his sympathizers have.

But.

You know?

As any sex educator (or "bodice ripper" novelist) will tell you, sexual fantasy is soooooooo removed from reality.

And so Mourdock, like Paul Ryan (woo, especially Paul Ryan -- have you ever read Ayn Rand's "sex" scenes?!?!?) probably believe that rape is something that happens only to pretty, single, typically blonde or maybe exotically Asian or African American babes. Irresponsible ones.  Maybe "slutty" ones.  Definitely ones with no support. Who lives alone.  Who don't have family.  Definitely not ones that live with, let alone maybe support their family. Absolutely not someone who's married... one who already has children.  Who has a spouse who loves and cares for her.

And definitely not someone they know. 

And that's the whole problem!

They probably aren't rapists!

And so they can only imagine "what it would be like." 

And, I guess, they're imagining it wouldn't really be all that bad, you know?

And since they have no real... well... conception of what it's really like, or what a large cross section of the population the victims really fall into...

They just don't think it through.

Not the consequences of their other fantasies about "life."  Meaning, of course, "unborn" life but not, you know, actual adults with actual lives life.

Fantasies.

You know, sexual fantasies really aren't all that bad.  Even really bad ones.  Sex researchers and educators have pretty much demonstrated that as long as you're clear about the difference between fantasy and reality, and you're not acting them out even really, really bad erotic fantasies are... not a threat.

No, it's not so much the want-to-feel-good sexual fantasies that are the problem.

Instead the problem is regular old conservative want-to-feel-good-about-myself fantasies.

Especially ones you want to enact into, you know, actual law!

That?

That's a problem.

Fantasies belong between the ears, or maybe even in the bedroom.  But not in the law books, ok?

So Richard (DIck) Mourdock has a big sad ("it has been one of the toughest days of my life") about the very suggestion that just because (he believes, after he "struggled with it myself for a long time") God intends a rapist to get his victim pregnant that he therefore intends for the rapist to actually, you know, rape his victim.

Because, you know, he and his ilk also claim even if the father is a sinner God says his child is completely innocent and just as precious as any other life.

Oh really?

Let's see what his part of the Bible say about God's attitudes towards the offspring of guilty people:

(Exodus 34:6-7) - "Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, "The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in loving kindness and truth; who keeps loving kindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations."

Uh oh!

Not that we really expect Mourdock, Aiken, Ryan, or other nominally Christian extremists to be authentic, let alone consistent, about their respect for the Bible -- after all their entire political agenda involves the repeal of the Sermon on the Mount!  But if we take them at their word then they're stuck with only a few very ugly choices:

If God meant what he said in Exodus 34:6-7 (and elsewhere around the Old Testament) then He doesn't think a rapist's baby is all that innocent or worthy of protection after all.  In which case Mourock et. al are seriously misinterpreting what God wants, Or.

If God meant what he said but a rapist's baby doesn't fall under the Exodus 34:6-7 clause then God sort of necessarily really doesnt think a rapist is guilty of iniquity.  In which case Mourdock et. al are seriously misinterpreting what God wants.

If God really didn't mean what he said in Exodus 34:6-7, or, worse from their claimed position, he meant it but it's not that big a deal to ignore Him, then they're throwing open the Biblical-interpretation cafeteria door, in which case they need to explain... well... why we have to listen to them pulling the God card on any number of other issues... where, after all, they're generally far more at odds with the black and white text than are, oh, say, most liberals and progressives.

Personally I think there are plenty of other positive, uplifting, and non-getting-into-other-people's-business versions of Christian theology that don't require literal interpetations of every line of text.  Which considering Jesus' absolute and unambiguous condemnations of hypocrisy and empty piety ought to comfort Mourdock, Akin, Ryan, and their ilk enormously. 

But!

If they're going to keep insisting we adopt their spiteful, narrow, supersticious and suspiciously self-serving interpretations then... one way or another Mourdock is wrong that God both doesn't intend for a rapist to commit his crime but does intend him to impregnate his victim.

Seriously, gang.  If you're going to be a Christian in the first place you've got to see the Bible as more than a magic rattle you can shake any time you want to feel good about being a self-serving dick.

Note: I've been using the words "rape" and "rapist" in these last few posts because that's the language Mourdock, Akin, Ryan, and the rest insist on using.

Still referring to E.J. Graff's probe into Republican rape apologists' pulpy decay here. Graff quotes Jessica Valenti in The Nation

As Tennessee Senator Douglas Henry said in 2008, “Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman, against her will, by some party not her spouse.”

She also quotes Irin Carmon in Salon (emphasis mine.)

“Dear everyone asking what it is about Republican candidates and their clumsy talk about rape: This is a feature, not a bug.” Really. Mourdock, Akin, Walsh, Angle—all of them are simply saying straightforwardly what they and many other people around them believe. ... They believe that most of what you and I would call rape today is just some slut who got angry because the dude didn’t take her out to breakfast the next morning.

Ok, look. I know, I know, back between roughly the early 1700s and late 1900s social and especially economic forces made it extremely important for women to protect their "virtue."  A.k.a. their resale value in the male virginity-fetish market.  With the result that any hint of "lack of virtue" could result in very real risk of social, economic, and even physical harm.  And consequently one can imagine (and I do stress imagine here) that women might have felt some pressure to claim that any consensual sexual "lapse" was actually somehow the result of coercion by her male partner.

But...

But...

C'mon!  Look what we've seen just among right-wing extremist conservatives in America!  In 2008 the daughter of an arch-conservative Vice Presidential candidate has an out-of-wedlock daughter.  Consequences to either the daughter or the candidate?  Zero.  Compare that to, say, the 1972 Presidential race where a male VIce Presidential candidate was forced to step aside just because he had been treated for depression.  Depression!  See also the nude photos of arch-conservative radio shock-jock "Dr." Laura Schlessinger. Consequences?  Zero!  Allegations of an affair by South Carolina Gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley.  By a political ally no less.  Consequences?  Zero. 

Among less prominent women in the 21st Century the issue of the importance of "feminine virtue" gets more hazy rather than less.  Yes, Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch had to step down when it was revealed that she'd had inappropriate relations with a male employee.  But the actual uproar, and cause for her stepping down, had more to do with him being a subordinate than about Koch's actual sex life itself.

And about that male subordinate?  Interestingly, he's filed a wrongful termination suit against his former employers on the basis that female employees who'd had similar relationships with male legislators had not been fired.*  A.k.a. discriminated against for having willing or unwilling sexual relationships.

Does this mean everything everywhere in America is just hunky-dory for women who choose not to remain "untainted?"  No.  Duh.  Of course not.

But!

It does imply that Republican knuckledraggers who like to imagine that women have any image-protecting (or even job protecting!) reasons to "cry rape" are simply talking through their hats.  Where "their hats" is a euphemism for "their stupid, lazy, throwback asses." Because for the most part, and largely thanks to feminism, the incentives for "crying rape" here in the 21st Century "today is not like it was."

* This is SO not a whutaboutthemenz/reverse-discrimination ploy, at least not on my part. Here in the 21st Century NOBODY should be punished for being a victim either of workplace sexual harassment or sexual favoritism by a superior.

While reading E.J. Graff's exploration of Republican attempts to justify their gut conviction that rape is bad but rape pregnancy is very, very good the following knee-jerk right-wing syllogisms popped into my head.

1. Pregnancy from rape is very good.  So good that the government should force victims to remain pregnant through live birth.
2. Rape, on the other hand, is very bad.  So bad that rapists should be executed.  Even, presumably, rapists who impregnate their victims.
3. Single motherhood, on the other hand, is also very bad.  So bad that every child should have both a mother and father.
4. ???
5. Republican policy success!

Each of the first three steps, above so obvious to these guys.  So obvious you can just see their earnest enthusiasm bubbling over.  You can practically understand their confusion and frustration that what's so obvious to them should not seem obvious to others.

Obviously something is missing.

What, er, conceivable argument can you put in line D that will square their little hippie-dippy feeling-good-matters-most circles with honesty, integrity, consistency, responsibility, or any of the other attributes these same guys used to accuse 60's-era hippies of lacking?

So one of the hardest things for us modern Western people to wrap our brains around is the ancient pre-Christian idea that things like one's death is foreordained by fate and, thus, there's simply no escaping it.  For instance in the Illiad, Homer stresses over and over again that at their appointed time men could die courageously in battle, or as cowards in battle, or of disease back at the camp, or by choking on a chicken bone back at home.  But one way or another you were going to die so...

Well, in pre-Christian fatalist thinking if you had no choice the thinking went that you should go ahead and try and have as good a death as possible: the heroic-in-battle one.

This Richard Mourdock guy is taking pre-Christian fatalism to a new extreme.  As you've probably heard (about a million times already in just the few hours since he spewed it) he's Indiana Senate candidate (guess which party, natch) who said tonight that he opposes abortion in cases of rape because 

...even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.

Which would be fine, I guess.  If he was just a typical inconsiderate tea-bagger misogynist and rape apologist.  But he says he's not.  In fact after the debate where he made his first... interesting assertion he said this:

"Are you trying to suggest that somehow I think God ordained or pre-ordained rape? No, I don't think that anyone could suggest that. That's a sick, twisted - no, that's not even close to what I said," he told reporters, according to the Evansville Courier & Press.
But he reaffirmed his view that conception is determined by a higher power.

See?  That's where it gets complicated.

Because if Mourdock's saying that a) God intended the conception but did not indend the violent sexual assault that led to it then...

Well, it looks to me like Mourdock thinks that specific spermatazoa was fated to merge with that specific ovum.  And the manner by which it was immaterial.  It was going to happen anyway, at that moment under any number of possible circumstances ranging from the romantic to the clinical to the criminally brutal.  The conception was foreordained, by God (or maybe, what, The Gods?)  With neither the Mother or the Father (victim and assailant in this universe but drunken pickups, test-tube donors, or life partners in others?) or God(s) having any more say in the matter of how than an 8 ball has a say in where it will roll when struck by the cue ball.

Does that sound Christian to you?

No, it sounds more Homeric, or, to be generous, maybe Stoic.

As a Washington State progressive I wouldn't vote for Murdoch if I could (or indeed if he was the last man on earth!)  But If I fancied myself a conservative Illinois Christian, as many Illinois Republicans claim they do, I'd be hard pressed to vote for Richard Mourdock.  He doesn't sound very much like one of them. 

Just suggesting.

Photo by Flickr user Sharyn Morrow. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Jennifer P, a.k.a. Captain Awkward takes a crack at one of the giant double standards that, despite two decades of Sex and the City re-runs, plus maybe 50 years of Cosmopolitan magazine, continues to persist about young people and masturbation.  Particularly young women and masturbation. (See also Rule of Desire #1.)

The question was from a mom who asked her teenage daughter if she'd like a vibrator, expecting the daughter to say "eww, no." Instead the daughter said "heck yeah," at which point the mom started feeling a little "eww" about it. And asked Captain Awkward for advice. The advice, is, as usual, a masterful combination of diplomacy and non-common sense, and you should go read it yourself.

What I'd like to call out, though, is her quick summary of the whys and hows of that immediate squeamishness and surprise at the daughter's enthusiasm. (Hint: it also echos reasoning used by former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elder, Oprah, Heather Corinna, and others.) Check it out (emphasis mine.)

Teenage boys are FAMOUS for spending long periods of time alone in the bathroom or their bedrooms, and everyone knows what they’re doing and laughs it off as no big deal. It’s only fair that teenage girls get that same privacy and room to become their own first and best sex partners. I think that feeling that this makes you a bad parent is that old double standard you were raised with lurking in the back of your mind, the one that says that the sexuality of teen girls MUST BE CONTAINED or else SOCIETY CRUMBLES. I think that a teen girl who understands her own desires is going to be a better advocate for herself when she does start having sex. If you feel like people in your life would be judgy, invoke privacy. There is no reason that you have to share this decision with anyone other than your daughter or seek anyone’s approval.

Source: Captain Awkward

Quick aside: I gotta say that it's probably not ok that the theory, practice, and needs of teenage boys are left pretty much unspoken as well, leaving them in a lurch of their own when the time comes for them to have sex. Most notably, whereas society acts scandalized at the inconceivability that girls might masturbate, it acts disgusted that boys do. With the assumption that no "man" would masturbate if he could instead, including by hook or by crook, "get" sex from someone else. But I digress...

I can't find the link but there's a point in one of the CherryTV round-table discussions where one of the women says something like "growing up we thought masturbation was just a guy thing." So she ended up going much longer before trying it than she might have done. One doubts she was alone.

Anyway, I have it on very good authority that teenage boys spend a great deal of time in their rooms not masturbating (don't ask me how I know but even, um, 20 times a day leaves a young person quite a few hours in between for non-masturbatory pursuits.) And so it's a bit creepy that people laughingly assume that's what they're all doing just because gender stereotypes (not to mention the dominant paradigm of men as the obligatory "sex class") insist that's how it must be.

Meanwhile I have it on somewhat less-personal authority that some of the time teenage girls spend in their rooms sometimes does involve masturbation. And it's just as creepy that so many people primly assume they don't, wouldn't, maybe even couldn't just because gender stereotypes (not to mention the dominant paradigm of women as the disinterested, rather-knit-or-talk-about-their-feelings "no-sex class") insist that's how it must be.

Instead, left to our own devices (huh, huh, I said "devices") boys and girls probably would end up distributed across bell curves that largely overlap. Better to acknowledge it than pretend it ought to be some other way.

This post examines several sides of the collision of privacy and freedom to offend.  And comes to a conclusion that surprised me.

There's a lot of complex hand-wringing, celebration, and outrage making the rounds about the recent Gawker post that outed internet uber-troll Michael Brutsch, who for years has led an anonymous and wildly successful movement on Reddit and elsewhere to be as calculatingly cruel as possible to victims of previous crimes and other offences.

The hand wringers are pretty uniformly people who recognize Brutsch for the flaming fucking asshole he is... but who nevertheless feel conflicted about people's rights to a) post anonymously and b) retain a right to free speech.  Oh, and possibly c) a right to privacy.

There are others who feel that the mere nature of Brutsch's deplorability (and, seriously, the guy is utterly deplorable) deprives him of his rights to free speech and privacy.

And there are yet still others who feel that the very deplorability of Brutsch's "speech" (and again, seriously, his entire on-line presence revolved around creating, celebrating, and nurturing deplorability) somehow enshrines his rights to free speech and privacy.

Sorry, gang, there's no paradox, no cause for outrage, no cause for censorship, and definitely no cause for hand-wringing.

Instead it's a matter of standards.  Standards of decency.  Standards of deplorability too.

It is, of course, equally deplorable to either a) to offend sensibilities by encouraging others to jack off to photos of dead minor children as Michael Brutsch, operating under the pseduonym Violentacrez did, or b) to offend sensibilities by outing someone who posts anonymously on the internet, as Gawker Media did.

Sorry, on the hand-wringer-y side it's just true: if you're offended by one you should be offended by the other -- and thus people offended by outing Brutsch's "speech" must by definition be offended by Gawker outing him.

Similarly, sorry, on the censorship side it's just true: if you defend Brusch's right to post calculatingly deplorale "speech" on the internet then you by definition must defend Gawker Media for outing him.

And finally, sorry, on the free-speech side it's just true: if you agree that Brusch should have been outed for posting his deplorable speech then by definition you agree he should be able to post it.

If you think you can weasle out of it by picking one side or the other you're mistaken. (Well, while remaining a progressive anyway: conservatives do it with self-serving ease but that's why they disgust us.) If you think you need to wring your hands over it you're also mistaken.  (Well, while remaining progressive anyway: liberals do it with self-defeating ease but that's why so many of them disgust everyone else.)

Update: Other variations include

If you support censor Gawker for outing Brutsch you support censoring Brutsch

If you support taking revenge on Gawker for outing Brutsch you support taking revenge on Brutsch