Confession time

I was just cooking dinner and shaking my head at Margaret Cho's weak defense of her sexist denouncement of Sarah Palin, using some pretty not-progressive terms in my head. Believe me, I'd get kicked out of feminism if the Feminism Arbiter were in the car with me this summer when the elusive PUMA was interviewed on the radio.

Hillary's lyin' eyes

CNN has an article examining the body language during her speech at the convention last night. I don't know if I've seen a more egregious example of directing people to look at a professional, powerful woman's body in preference to listening to what she says. She says x, but she acts like she means ____.

What did Hillary Clinton's body language give away at the Democratic National Convention?

Dan Hill, a body language expert and author of "Face Time," told CNN that even while the words Clinton delivered offered an unequivocal endorsement of Barack Obama, her body language was much less affirmative.

It's entirely possible -- I think probable -- that Clinton isn't as gung-ho about Obama's candidacy as her speech says. I've long been an Obama supporter talking back to angry Clinton supporters I hear on the radio, but this "She's crying on the inside" story strikes me as intended to rub salt in Democratic Party wounds, especially Clinton supporters' wounds. Having gotten quite sick of the Clinton campaign months ago, I still think this is really uncool.

I don't think I've ever read an article that tries to triangulate a male politician's real feelings about a subject over which he must have conflicting emotions.

I'm reminded of a time when at work someone had posted a list of things women/men say vs. what they mean. I took it down, thinking propaganda encouraging the idea that women and men are so drastically different that they can't - or won't - use the same language to communicate is not very productive at all. Humorless feminist me, getting sick of the kind of sexist humor that people like to think is harmless, even as it buttresses sexism. In a workplace that includes both men and women who need to negotiate the power differential that they bring from the outside world into their jobs, this is quite counterproductive - encouraging people to think they are so clever they know what their coworker of the opposite sex is really saying, without needing to explicitly communicate their understanding of what's been said. According to jokes like these, you don't need to actually say what you mean, as long as everyone's got the decoder ring.

Huh. You know what I think is manipulative?

Blaming a person's suicide on their partner. A partner blaming their partner is quite manipulative, of course..

A gold star to Caitlin Flanagan

I'd like to congratulate Caitlin Flanagan for making the astute observation that women get pregnant and men do not.  Rather than deriding the unfair stigma and disproportionate economic and emotional burden that girls are asked to bear for unplanned pregnancies, she argues that women should just be scared of sex, and be happy they're not raising a brood of bastards in a grimy cave on a diet of lichen and shame.

But if, as Flanagan says, "biology is destiny," it might be a lot easier for a society to ease off the stigmatization and maybe lend a hand or two to a teenager that's following the path biology has made for her. 

In a nutshell

Via Jezebel, Diablo Cody expressed very nicely how a woman is damned if she does, and damned if she doesn't.

"...This is a real paradox for me: My entire life I've been told I wasn't pretty enough. My entire life I was told by people that I was ugly, that I was too tall, that I was flat-chested, that I was this, that I was that. When I was a stripper I was never quite pretty enough. I was never one of the beautiful girls. I was never one of the top earners. Suddenly I achieve something in my life that is purely intellectual and purely creative, and I'm being told that it's because I'm pretty. To me that is the weirdest, most ironic thing ever. Like all of a sudden I'm attractive when it suits people's purposes. But in the past when I needed to be attractive I was ugly. So let's pick. Which is it?" -- Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody [Minneapolis City Pages]

Don't we all know: it's neither. It's that a woman can't be successful on her own merits, so she's got to be cheating somehow.

Cross-posted at Cogitamus.

Why do you think I stuck with the username "yellownumber5" for so long?

Amen, xkcd.

Would we have to call her a "Justicette?"

Idaho today became one of two states in the Union to have a Supreme Court with zero women on the bench. It's a dubious distinction that's displeased more than a few Idahoans. From the Idaho Statesman:

Peg Dougherty, the vice president of the Idaho Women Lawyers organization, said Otter's decision to appoint a man to Trout's seat "puts the state at a disadvantage when it comes to attracting smart women lawyers to the state."

"Idaho Women Lawyers is extremely disappointed that the governor did not take advantage of this opportunity to show leadership and place a woman on the Idaho Supreme Court," she said.

Our esteemed governor, not to mention the new justice himself, don't see what the big fuss is about, however.

Otter said he didn't fill the seat with an eye for gender. Instead, he looked for balance on the court and considered the applicants' ratings by the Idaho Judicial Commission, which vetted all hopefuls first, and comments from attorneys around the state.

"I didn't see this as a gender seat. What I looked for was the best candidate," Otter said.

And from the nominee himself:

Horton, however, said he didn't think gender would be an issue in the high court's rulings.

"My flip answer is that as a male, I wouldn't know," Horton joked.

Me, I don't find his answer all that funny, because it's a fantastic demonstration of the kind of sexism that's being displayed by both men here; the male is the standard, while the female is something different, something extra, that isn't required of a body that's supposed to exhibit a balance of understanding that make for a more robust interpretation of law. Otter doesn't "see this as a gender seat," because when he hears "gender" he thinks "not-male person." But clearly, Horton is working a gender identity (male), one that comes with the privilege that allows he and his superiors to pretend to completely ignore it.

How do we know that it's pretending to be gender-blind that's led to an all-male bench, and not true gender blindness? Because the chances of a court's members coming out to be 100% male in an age where a large proportion of successful attorneys are female are very slim. Looking at the numbers, it becomes clear that something is biasing the appointments towards men.

Get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich...but don't make it too good.

In honor of Jessica's upcoming book about the greatest hits of sexist double-standards, I wanted to bring up this doozy of an article comparing female and male chefs that I found on Slashfood. The short story: don't pay attention to the fussy ladies and eat real man food.

Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith have come under fire for writing cookery instructions that are too difficult to follow.

Female celebrity chefs, it seems, are harder to understand in print than their male counterparts, peppering their books with complex language.

...

It found that 5.2million adults in the UK would be unable to follow Nigella's cooking methods as she uses longer sentences and tends to write in a "chatty" style, mixing in personal observations with her instructions.

Delia Smith's culinary teaching was also criticised for having too many stages and using measurements confusing for anyone with poor numeracy skills.

She also sprinkles too many adjectives into her recipes

This pronouncement from a survey of the cookbooks from five different chefs - three male and two female. The dynamics around power and gender in the kitchen are widely-understood enough to be featured in a Disney movie, and work out to be one of the stupider double-standards I've seen. Cooking is a woman's job, and a woman's place is in the kitchen, nurturing and feeding her family - but if you want to actually be paid to practice your craft, and encouraged in expressing yourself creatively with food, you'd damn well better be a man. But if you're a real man, you don't want fancy schmancy food you get in a fancy schmancy restaurant - you want cholesterol-laden, factory-produced bean lard mulch.

I haven't read any of these books (I've flipped through Lawson's books in stores, but that's as far as I've gotten), but given the by-the-book stereotyping this article engages in, I don't know that the reviewer would have to either. The women are "chatty" and embellish too much, while the men are direct and more efficient in their communication. Of course, they could have said that Lawson's more casual style is easier to approach for non-chefs or people bored by plain recipes, but since being "chatty" is associated with female, it has to be a drawback. It makes me think of how Rachael Ray on her 30 Minute Meals show always refers self-deprecatingly to herself as a "Chatty Cathy," and excuses herself for talking so much - even though she's the only one on-camera for a half hour. Are we expected to watch her cook in silence for a half hour? Given Ray's phenomenal media success, she's not doing herself any harm in talking through hours of television every day. But by playing up the feminine stereotypes expected of her, she can get people to watch her without feeling threatened, and then get flack for it, just like Lawson.

As it turns out, some of my favorite cookbooks are more casually written, and though it's sometimes the lack of specifics that makes people's recipes go bad, I've found that people shy away from cooking for lots of reasons - not just that they would rather learn to cook from a Real Man.

8:20 AM, first sexist news story spotted

A screencap from CNN.com this morning:

ARGH! I love how something that empowers a woman to take care of herself is pitched as only being useful to attract men. Because that's the motivation behind whatever women do, right?

The face says it all

Via The Rotund, this is a capture from a YouTube video wherein two male journalists (and the folks behind the scene in charge of video footage) successfully bully this reporter out of reporting real news ahead of Paris Hilton. Watch the video for the full effect, but this face just about sums it up. I don't have two asshats trying to humiliate me on national television for doing my job better than they do, and even I make this face when I read about Paris Hilton. Uck.

Do you have any asprin? My uterus hurts.

Via Jezebel, the NYT has found the most humorless, immature man on the face of the Earth. Some menopausal women at his workplace had noticed his office was unusually cool, and passed the word on to anyone who might find themself in need of relief from a hot flash. It was such a hit with the women that they even put up a sign, designating it the "Hot Flash Room." The office's occupant was not amused:

"I didn't have a clue the women were using the room to cool off," said Peter Caton, 34, the library's network administrator who works out of the room. "I only found out it was the 'Hot Flash Room' after they put up the poster. I was shocked and kind of offended. It's my office. If I was an older man and I put an erectile dysfunction ad on your cubicle, how would you feel?"

If I saw that in my cubicle I would feel harassed and demeaned, because the only two possible implications would be that I was either the cause of or solution to erectile dysfunction: clearly inappropriate. These women have not expressed anything remotely sexual with their sign, but they have committed the grave sin of acknowledging that they are women in the workplace. Next thing you know, women will be asking for complimentary tampons in the restrooms and generally asking the world to stop and accomodate their bodily functions.

Never mind that no one questions that toilet paper is provided for free in men's rooms. Never mind that the number of urinals and toilets in a men's bathroom often outnumbers the number of toilets in the women's bathroom. These are standard accomodations.

Why? Because men are the standard, and women are the freaks. The NYT article about growing public awareness of menopause is a perfect example of the way we treat something that every single woman goes through like some private, unique, secret shame. I realize that Americans are unncessarily squicked out about public talk of bodily functions - I'm one of those Americans - but if I'm able to reference universal bodily complications like the stomach flu, there's no reason I should feel like I have to tailor my reason for needing aspirin to the gender of the person from whom I'm requesting it.

Silly, it's male fantasies that define female characters

Not actual females!

Listen, douche, for most feminists comic book orthodoxy does not trump treating women with respect. If the statue's sexism is more honest to the comic than the movie, it turns out that the comic is actually more sexist than the movie. Think whatever you want of that, but don't pretend that people are going to give it a pass because it came from a comic book.

Ladies don't have opinions

I've been seeing a lot of this kind of thing ever since the PBA ban was upheld, and it drives me nuts. Having an opinion about female bodily autonomy, female sexuality, and the nature of life, death and humanity isn't crazy or nit-picking. It would be fantastic to believe that we were all getting upset over nothing, but it turns out we're not. It turns out that these are important issues, even if they primarily affect women, and the dismissive image of the foaming-at-the-mouth pro-life or pro-choice activist is not only sexist, but it takes the work that people actually do and hides it behind a charicature.

Dave Olveria at Huckleberries online pointed to this article as "the best column on abortion you'll read from either side." But the article wasn't about abortion - it sidestepped the issue entirely and focused on the utility of preventing unplanned pregnancies. And that's a useful thing to do - it's something that pro-choice advocates work for as it goes hand-in-hand with making decisions about one's reproductive health. But Pia Hansen, the author, talks about as though she's the first one to ever consider it (and she's not alone in making this mistake). As though Plannned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-choice America hadn't been working to provide contraception to women for years.

Characterizing Planned Parenthood and NARAL as a bunch of abortion nuts who care about nothing but that single issue (kos, I'm looking in your direction) marginalizes the real and useful work that these organizations do.

I'm happy if people want to discuss the common ground between pro-life and pro-choice activists - there's a lot of it. In fact, I don't even care if someone other than PP gets "credit" for the idea of preventing unwanted pregnancies, if the end result is that we realize greater control over our reproductive health. But I can't see that happening when people's opinions about "women's issues" are belittled and ignored.

UPDATE: I'd like to add that I find this phenomenon to be just as annoying when applied to people on the other side of the issue as me. I don't think that pro-life activists are crazy; I appreciate that people have reasons for their opinions, even if I often think their reasons are based in lies or false premises or are otherwise shaky. It's not crazy to believe that abortion is wrong, just like it's not crazy to believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth - it's still wrong, though, and I'm happy to explain why I think it is.