If the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Coalition Affairs to Defense Secretary Robert Gates tells a room full of visiting Coalition-of-the-Willing dignitaries “I hate all Iranians“ does it really matter what that person looks like?
And of all the 10,000 possible things that should or could be said about someone with that job saying something that inflammatory (if it was deliberate) or ill-considered (if not), “this nazi gasbag looks like Perry Farrell, dresses like Michael Jackson and talks like Josef Goebbels whereas Janet Reno was merely homely” is probably not it. Nor is “There is just no excuse for a drag queen to be that ugly.”
It doesn’t matter if you would or wouldn’t “do” John Bolton after he said something similar, nobody cares if you’d “do” John McCain said something like that, nobody wants to know your opinion of Ann Coulter’s sex appeal even though she says stuff like that, and — unless perhaps her profile shows up as a match for you on PlentyOfFish.com — it’s totally fucking irrelevant whether you would or would not “do” Debra Cagan.
Repeat: If in the next couple of years your body comes home in a casket after you’ve been drafted and then blown up by an IED on the streets of Terhan, Iran, and you wound up there because some moron Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense with short hair and a red jacket shot her mouth off, it really won’t matter if this week you were distracted, however briefly, by whether she was “hot or not.” M’kay?
Via Ann Bartow at Feminist Law Professors. See also this now especially timely XKCD comic from this weekend.
XKCD comics are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
Submitted by 1648 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-10-02 09:55.
Men asking women for naked pics what i thought LOL
[Hard to imagine, I know! Thanks Anna Louise. --fl]
Submitted by 1648 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-10-02 13:05.
Exactly. Who gives a flying f--- what she looks like? An idiot is an idiot, fancy package or no.
[Thank you, Bunny. --fl]
Submitted by 1648 (not verified) on Tue, 2007-10-02 08:06.
This is where people need to learn a lesson from gamers. My husband plays xbox 360 online quite a bit and usually other players are fair game. Somebody accidentally shoots you and you're out of the game? Oops, too bad. But if a female joins? You do not, under any circumstances, say or do anything that may cause her to leave the game. In the game or over the headsets.
I'm not entirely certain that it's respect so much as it is just excitement over the fact that there are girls present, but at least they're playing nice.
[Interesting. I agree it's not clear that it's from respect or not, or even if its respectful to *not* treat women like anyone else. But it sure as hell beats lolcats-style "ur u got t1ts" chatter that evidently inspired xkcd's comic. Thanks, Norby. --fl]
Submitted by 1648 (not verified) on Sat, 2008-02-23 08:36.
Why does the male 'good guy' do all the talking? Why does Joanna not have agency herself?
It's still true though. I often wonder if the comical image of male geeks glued to their PCs 24 hours a day avoiding sunlight, terrified of women but obsessed with porn is actually more than a stereotype, it's real.
[Hi Virago. I'd be generous and say it's as the one with the EMP gun her role is to play the silent heavy behind the talkative "good cop." By the way, I think there really is a *huge* hot-house impact of what's actually highly social behavior conducted in highly physically isolated environments. The precedents from pre-media days when correspondence was the biggest way news and opinion was spread, but the speed we have now has introduced qualitative changes as well. (He said, slouched back in his dining room, wearing a flannel bathrobe, typing this replay while negotiating on the side with his 8-year-old who wants to make Annie's mac-n'-cheese for breakfast.) --fl]