Posts by Amanda Marcotte

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon. She is the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.

Maureen Dowd Interviews Tina Fey, Attacks Feminism
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on December 2, 2008 at 9:54 AM.

This Vanity Fair profile of Tina Fey is both intriguing and unbelievably irritating, because Maureen Dowd wrote it.  Dowd is more than a little obsessed with Fey's looks (though it's depressing but interesting that Fey had to lose 30 pounds and learn to ape the sexy librarian look before she got to be on TV -- it's the sort of thing that makes even the most ardent feminist stick to salad if she wants to get anywhere in this world), and it even seems like Dowd really can't comprehend a woman who has a big but not ugly scar on her face who might not really care that much about it.  She quotes "30 Rock" against Fey, her friends, and her husband's relative indifference to the scar, as if it reveals the real truth.

I wonder how the scar affected Fey in high school. "She wasn't Rocky Dennis developing a sense of humor because of her looks, like in Mask," says Damian Holbrook, laughing. Liz Lemon's blustery Republican boss, Jack Donaghy, played with comic genius by Alec Baldwin, tells Lemon, "I don't know what happened in your life that caused you to develop a sense of humor as a coping mechanism. Maybe it was some sort of brace or corrective boot you wore during childhood, but in any case I'm glad you're on my team."

Ooooh burn.  Except not.  I wonder if Dowd realizes that other writers can in fact write without projecting all their issues out into the world. 

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Anti-Choice Stereotypes Get Slammed
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, RH Reality Check on October 15, 2008 at 12:47 PM.

Does life begin at fertilization? Implantation? These may seem like theoretical questions to most Americans but Coloradans will be voting on precisely when they think life begins come November. And if they agree with the ballot initiative being presented, they'll vote to confer full human rights onto fertilized eggs.

Check out other videos from Reality Check.

The Subtle Ways in Which Conservatives Play the Race, Gender Cards
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on August 5, 2008 at 4:42 AM.

I almost missed this, but thankfully I saw it at Digby’s blog---Rick Perlstein has reprinted a piece he wrote in 2007 about the role of the unconscious in right wing politics.  It really sheds light on the way that conservatives manage to get out their racist, sexist, and homophobic messages without coming out and saying it, which makes it maddening to push back because there’s the plausible deniability factor.  Like the McCain ad, linking Obama to images of white women that are most famous for being icons of people’s worst fears of female sexuality, which invokes an ugly racist stereotype without coming right out and saying it, so when liberals raise a fuss, conservatives can shrug and pretend they don’t see it. 

One way that liberals push back against the stereotyping is to point out the obvious contradictions in right wing tropes.  For instance, the “Obama=Muslim” trope obviously conflicts with the “Obama’s Christian church is out of control” trope.  But maybe pointing out the contradictions is less effective than we would have hoped, as Rick says.

Doesn't this contradict another Limbaugh slur--that Obama is "Halfrican" (the implication being that he was only pretending to be black, sneaking in the affirmative action back door)? It's another tricky facet of writing about FNB politics: In a discourse that plays on half-conscious archetypes, opposites can cohabit comfortably--as in dreams. John Dower, for example, in his brilliant War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, shows the simultaneous stereotypes of Japanese as pathetically weak midgets and indomitable giant monsters. Surrogates need only throw various archetypes "out there," as they say; the dungeon that is the human subconscious can be counted on to do the rest.

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Limbaugh: China May be Full of Commies, But at Least They Love Their SUVs
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on July 31, 2008 at 11:58 AM.

This quote from Rush Limbaugh encapsulates why wingnuts are having a hard time reconciling their love of overconsumption with their responsibilities towards their children they insist are a requirement of proper "family values."

Folks, I don't know what the price of gasoline is in China and I don't know to what extent, if any, it is subsidized -- okay, it is subsidized. See, the ChiComs need their economy growing. They need people driving around, moving around. They need people to be able to afford fuel, so they're subsidizing fuel. They're not bailing people out of stupid home mortgage messes. They're buying their gasoline for them, because they need an economy. Know what energy means to this, the whole subject of economic growth. So meanwhile, the ChiComs, a country certainly growing, certainly on the rise, but it ain't the United States of America. How does it make you feel that Zhang Linsen has a big Hummer with nine speakers blaring as he pulls out into a four-lane road with so much smog he basically can't see the car in front of him, and you are trading in all of your cars and trying to go out and find basically a lawn mower.

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The Anti-Choice Movement Is also Very Anti-Rubbers
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on July 29, 2008 at 1:19 PM.

Antigone has done us all a service and compiled some data about where "pro-life" organizations fall politically outside of their anti-abortion stance. As can be expected, they're routinely conservative, religious, misogynist, etc. But it's a good time to reiterate what's most telling about their "pro-life" stance.

Antigone was actually pretty generous with her ratings for groups that have no official stance, because most of the time, they do so with big, fat hints that they're very sympathetic towards the anti-contraception stance. The anti-choice movement opposes contraception, the number one way the vast majority of fertility-age American women avoid abortion. They're not really "pro-life" or strictly "anti-abortion" so much as they're pro making your life a living hell for the high crime of being female. I'm not even going to qualify that with a "sexually active", because the choices offered women are sexual frustration or continuous pregnancy. Lesbianism is an alternative if that's your inclination, but believe me, they're not really cool with that being legal, either.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

The New York Times' Latest Trend Article isn't Fluff, It's Offensive
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on July 25, 2008 at 8:56 AM.

Shoot me now. The NY Times has a trend piece about how the new thing, when you're getting married, is to get Botox treatments for all your bridesmaids. Because god forbid anyone actually smile for the pictures.

The unsubtle implication is that women, by putting off their weddings from the proper bridal age of 19 to the wretchedly old early 30s, have to go to great measures to conceal what wretched old hags they and their friends are. The other implication, standard to these pieces, is that no matter how accomplished or intelligent a woman is, she's not validated as a woman until some random dude decides he'd like to see her doing his dishes. And that if you're marrying in your 30s, you've been waiting so long for admission to the human race that you completely lose your mind with excitement, micromanaging every detail down to the color of your bridesmaids' pubic hair.

Everything has to match, you know.

That they find enough women that actually think this way to write a trend piece about it shows the power these very same trend pieces have to brainwash at least a segment of the population.

Does Time Magazine Believe Women's Bodies Should be Owned by Men?
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on July 22, 2008 at 10:27 AM.

I'm quite possibly the last person who cares in the blogosphere to write about this appalling Time magazine celebration of purity balls, but I have to say that I'm not as surprised as I should be. Time has decided to embrace a retrograde patriarchal agenda, and not of the soft patriarchal sense of assuming that women just name themselves after their husbands and hand-wringing articles about the horror of women who draw their own income, as bad as those things are. No, we're talking the patriarchy of the anti-choice movement, the adulteress-stoning kind. The kind that treats the literal male ownership of women's bodies as a cute, sentimental way to organize society. That's far to the right of even mainstream sexist society. That's to the right of guys who like to go to Hooters, and assholes who argue that women get paid less because they don't work hard enough, what with the babies and all. This is the third example in very recent memory of Time shilling for the idea that women should be treated like male property and severely punished if they stray from patriarchal sexual norms, which is enough to start getting past "sloppy journalism" into the "open agenda" territory.

Egregious bullshit quotes that indicate not just sloppiness, but agenda:

The Abstinence Clearinghouse estimates there were more than 4,000 purity events across the country last year, with programs aimed at boys now growing even faster.

What they fail to tell you is that in the fundie world, boys don't have "purity", which is a word that describes an object that becomes ill-suited for use because of contamination. Water and food are pure, and Ivory soap is pure. Similarly, women are "pure" or "sullied", i.e. not humans but fuckholes whose usability is determined by whether or not someone has already used the property. For boys, they honor their agency by having integrity balls, where boys are chastened not to fuck someone else's fuckhole in the same way you don't wipe your ass with a hand towel and put it back.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Catholic League President Believes Atheists Should Have No Rights
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on July 14, 2008 at 10:04 AM.

Editor's note: for background, see Christian Lunatics Issue Death Threats Over a Cracker

That’s what I’ve come to believe.  It’s obvious that he thinks that “religious freedom” means “the right to demand a) the right to completely define an entire religion for yourself and eject anyone who has different views than yours and b) the right never, ever to be mocked, criticized, or looked at funny”.  But even when a number of atheists online were insisting that I was targeted by the Catholic League for harassment and economic hardship-distribution because I’m an outspoken atheist, I was skeptical.  Nah, a believer could have totally made the jokes I did and get abused, I thought.  I have no idea of Melissa McEwan believes in some kind of god, and she got it, too. 

But watching this whole thing with PZ Myers go down (sorry I’m late to the party; been too busy to follow stuff, you know), I’m inclined increasingly to think that while the Catholic League will go after anyone---and that they do love to spank actual Catholics for diverging from Donohue-defined doctrine, which is far to the right of even what the pope will have you believe---they’re on the move against atheists now that atheism is getting a new heyday/publishing bonanza.  Quoth Lindsay: 

The Catholic League claims to be a civil rights organization. Yet it consistently targets high-profile atheists like Amanda Marcotte and PZ Myers and attempts to get them fired.  Draw your own conclusions.

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Parsing the Drunken Jezebel Trainwreck
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on July 9, 2008 at 9:35 AM.

Because I’ve been doing D.C. stuff all day and thus have only had time to follow this blow-up.  I’ll admit; when I first read the quotes Lizz put up at HuffPo, I was appalled at Moe and Tracie.  But then I actually got some decent wi-fi speed and watched the videos and felt, okay, they were trying to be outrageous and funny.  And considering the fact that alcohol was flowing freely, it’s hard for me to get upset that they weren’t dazzling wits and instead going for shock value.  Tracie affirms as much.  I can’t even get upset that they failed to be sober on a TV show, which strikes me as a bare minimum thing to do, because the show is about drinking.  The jokes about pulling out especially didn’t deserve the moralistic shaming, because when you watch the videos, it’s clear that they’re jokes that only work because it’s so wrong. 

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Patriotism Without Nationalism
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on July 7, 2008 at 10:22 AM.

Fun on the internets: Matt suggests that there’s something juvenile and narcissistic about conservative American patriotism, which extends beyond normal, human levels of sentimentality about home, and fierce defensiveness about it.  Conservatives really have convinced themselves, he says, that America really is objectively special, and not just special to Americans.  We all know sports fans who feel this way about their home team, and it’s annoying.  But it’s worse when it’s patriotism, because then it drifts into nationalism and is especially scary.  And, of course, childish.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Canadian Abortion Rights Pioneer Awarded Nation's Highest Civilian Honor
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on July 2, 2008 at 11:29 AM.

This is neat---Dr. Henry Morgentaler, a Canadian abortion rights activist, is getting the Order of Canada. Naturally, anti-choicers are wailing. The shamelessness of people will never cease to amaze me. The man is a hero to humanity who has helped save lives both in the physical sense (the lives of women who might have resorted to dangerous methods) and in the more philosophical sense (the way that your life is saved if it’s made more worth living because you are genuinely free). Anyway, Sirowski sent me the link and I’m sharing it with y’all, because people like Dr. Morgentaler are living reminders that there is good in the world.

Pregnancy Pact Myth Refuses to Die
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on July 1, 2008 at 9:49 AM.

One of the worst problems in American politics is that once a wingnut myth takes off, it never dies, no matter how much evidence you can marshal against it.  There are people who will go to their graves believing that there was a good reason to think that Saddam Hussein was hiding WMDs as part of his plot to re-blow-up the World Trade Center after he personally crashed a plane into it the first time.  Or, as a less hyperbolic but still baffling example, my dentist told me a couple of weeks ago that she still, in the year 2008, has to talk down patients who are in a full blown panic about fluoridated drinking water. 

Which is why the second I heard the words “pregnancy pact” on the TV, I realized two things at once: a) there was no fucking way and b) no matter how much evidence you marshaled to prove that there was no fucking way, wingnuts would believe that gangs of teenage girls are roaming the countryside, sucking up sperm from hapless men with their succubi cunts of doom in order to get their hands on that diamond-jewelry-buying welfare cash.  The fact that the movie “Juno” was blamed was just an added bonus, and evidence that teaching women such as screenwriter Diablo Cody to read and write was the first step on the road to teenage sluttitude hell. 

Well, here’s the no fucking way part: Turns out the principal, in his desperation to prove the nay-sayers that suggest that making contraception available to teenagers might help them contracept, made up the pregnancy pact.  His main source was, contrary to his initial claims, not the school nurses’ office, but the gossip in the school hallways, which as we all recall has an accuracy rate nearing utter perfection. 

Okay, so school gossip isn’t accurate, but my grasp on what legends will never die seems to be hitting it out of the park---after recovering slightly from being proven fools once again, the Wingnutteria is coming back with, “So what if the pregnancy pact wasn’t true?  Let’s believe it is anyway, because it’s politically useful for denying girls access to contraception.” “Fuck reality, we’ll believe what we want to!” has been working for a long time with wingnuts, on everything from the War on Terra to global warming, so there’s no reason for them not to resort to that tactic here. 

Moloney starts off by breathlessly recounting stories of succubi teenagers, before hastily admitting and then dismissing the fact that the entire premise of his outraged article (the pregnancy pact) is bullshit. 

Local news reports have questioned Time’s characterization of the situation, but nobody is denying that these girls knew how to avoid getting pregnant and instead chose otherwise. To young girls who see teenage pregnancy as something desirable, making a pact like this is not unimaginable.

Er.  Yeah. “There wasn’t a pact exactly, but there might as well have been, and come on, it sounds right so let’s believe it anyway.”

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Texas Supreme Court: Beat a Teen for Jesus
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on June 30, 2008 at 6:16 AM.

From PZ, a story that’s horrifying both on its own and for its implications for the rights of all people, but especially women, whose bodies that the churches claim spiritual ownership over in the name of god.  A bit of background: A number of fundamentalist churches believe that sin is caused by literal demons that are invisible but that cling to your body, and need to be expunged by regular exorcisms that are satisfying dramatic to suit their own beliefs that they’re waging war.  Unsurprisingly, this tradition drifts over to sadism towards the sinners themselves, especially if the sinners are the young women that absorb so much of fundamentalism’s fascinated hostility.  Which has, in one case at least, caused what sounds like a version of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Laura Schubert testified in 2002 that she was cut and bruised and later experienced hallucinations after the church members’ actions in 1996, when she was 17. Schubert said she was pinned to the floor for hours and received carpet burns during the exorcism, the Austin American-Statesman reported. She also said the incident led her to mutilate herself and attempt suicide. She eventually sought psychiatric help.

But leave it to the Texas Supreme Court to decide that physical assault, kidnapping, and generally traumatizing young women is a-okay if you say Jesus told you to do it.

Justice David Medina wrote that finding the church liable “would have an unconstitutional ‘chilling effect’ by compelling the church to abandon core principles of its religious beliefs.”

This sort of logic chills me.  I quickly can see the implications for women’s rights outside of just the basic right not to be assaulted during a bout of make-believe over demons that people have convinced themselves is real.  Most of these churches are anti-choice---what if they argue that their religious freedom gives them the right to kidnap and contain women that they suspect of being sexual active or of seeking abortion or contraception?  Is there a time limit on how long a church can restrain a woman because they believe their god gives them ownership over her body? 

I joked the other day about Romanian churches that think they have some legal rights over the bodies of random girls and women in Romania.  Maybe they should set up shop in Texas, where the reactionary court will give them license to abuse citizens.