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First Gay Marriage, Now Sex With Ducks, Where Do We Draw the Line

Sun, 2009-05-31 05:47 — figleaf

The pro-same-sex-marriage video by Garfunkle and Oates has already made the rounds at Huffington Post and Alternet and the like, but Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors introduces it using an irresistable pun.

Will Gay Marriage Lead To Sex With Ducks?

Pat Robertson thinks so.

And these two “chicks” are pretty stoked about the idea:

Read the quote in context here.

Note #1: The Robertson video takes you to MediaMatters.com which unfortunately presents an annoying “want to register” popup.

Note #2: If you squint your eyes, ignore the lyrics, ignore the background scenes in the video, and just concentrated on how they criticize Pat Robertson and don’t smile you’ll realize that Garfunkle and Oates, like all their radical lesbian separatist female lesbian extremist radical radical socialist feminist ilk, have no sense of humor and probably don’t even pluck their legs.

Note #3: Comforting thought for right-wing straw-clutchers. “Garfunkle and Oates” are actually named Riki Lindhome and Kate Micucci. Which raises an important Pat-Robertson-comforting, institutional-women-erasing point. When gay marriage happens to lesbians they both have to give up their maiden names, right?

Note #4: And of course point #3 explains why homophobes seem to be so much less tolerant of gay men than gay women. Because when gay men get married they’re both men so there’s no way to resolve who’s last name to use which, like time travel anywhere except the Star Trek mulitverse, would cause irreconcilable paradoxes in the time-space continuum. Which is the real reason misunderstood advanced particle physicists like Pat Robertson differentially oppose gay marriage over lesbian marriage and not, despite that one unfortunate video clip where he’d obviously been into the cooking sherry and a stray mike was left on, because “girl-girl scenes in wedding dresses are HAWT.”

It's a Jungle Out There

Wed, 2008-04-09 18:45 — figleaf

Image from Amanda Marcotte’s “Book ad up.” post at Pandagon

Twisty Faster of I Blame The Patriarchy has the perfect book-jacket blurb for Amanda Marcotte’s It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.

Jungle is all jokes, but it isn’t all jokey. Contained therein is some primo patriarchy-blaming. She takes on PETA, Hollywood, abstinence-only “education,” the famous anti-Girl Scout backlash, and plenty more. No, it’s not a lesbian separatist revolutionary tract, but I pity the hardcore radfem who doesn’t get a bang out this book.

Read the quote in context here.

I read the book last week on vacation and haven’t had time to say nice things about it. I quite liked the book. Although there was this one personally embarrassing thing about it.

In format the book appears as a series of problems confronting women, with a brief intro, a bit of discussion, and then a list of things you can do. In other words it’s laid out like most standard text-oriented travel/survival guides. And it’s a great list of issues women, especially but not exclusively young academic or professional women, regularly find themselves confronting. In addition to the topics Twisty mentions there’s…

Your conservative relatives discover you’re a feminist? Check. Assumption that if you’re vegetarian it’s a feminist thing? Check. Men who like the “challenge” of dating feminists? Check. The office donut do-or-don’t-damnation conundrum? Check. Intelligent defense of the Girl Scouts? Check. “Asshole-bleaching?” Check, and handled with all the dignity the subject deserves. Dealing with Nice Guys™, MRAs, fundamentalists, anti-choicers, and wedding consultants? Check.

Embarrassing admission of utter cluelessness while reading? For maybe the first five or ten chapters I kept reading these fantastically incisive, classically-Marcott-ish zingers in the chapter intros and then totally wincing at the comparable level of snark in her proposed remedies. I mean, I kept saying WTF? (You could see them in my copy of the book, right there, in the margins, in pencil.) I kept thinking the same thing about the so-over-the-top-it-almost-stops-being-appalling 50s-era mainstream adventure-babe comics cover and chapter-break art.

So what was my problem? I didn’t notice the “politics/humor” classification. It reads like a snarky joke book because, incisive introductions aside it’s a snarky joke book! Doh! The illustrations are offensive because Marcotte was offended. The suggestions are acidly (and if you get it, humorously) sarcastic because sincerity has so often been ignored or misinterpreted these last 37 years — so might as well have fun while being misinterpreted.

Ok, so I might not give it to my eight year old right away, not till she’s read a few more straight-ahead and age-appropriate introductions**. But I’ll definitely give her a copy before she’s ready for high school. I think it’ll be perfect for her then, just like I think it’ll be perfect all kinds of people high-school age and up.

[** Bleg: Speaking of which, what are the age-appropriate (3rd-5th grade, 6th-8th grade, and high-school level) introductions to feminism for kids? Preferably suitable for both girls and boys. Let me know in comments if you’ve got ‘em. —fl]

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