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.

The Seeds of the Culture War Sprout Here
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on May 5, 2008 at 5:04 PM.

Tired of the movies, where women barely exist onscreen at all, and when they do, they’re treated like imbeciles or cardboard cutouts? The assumption in the movie industry is that men make the vast majority of the movie-seeing decisions, and that women are therefore a niche market that only needs a couple of intelligence-insulting bones thrown for a twice-annual girl’s night out.* But TV is another story. For whatever reason, it’s beginning to be understood that shows with fully realized female characters that have more going on than being fuckable and having babies do quite well on the small screen, thank you very much. And TV meets a variety of entertainment gaps that weren’t being filled. You have your fantasies of female empowerment that still aren’t realized in the everyday world—like on “Battlestar Galactica” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, and you have shows that address women’s lives in an honest way, patriarchal warts and all, like on the comedy “Ugly Betty” and the drama “Mad Men”, which is a show that we power-chugged last week, watching most of the first season flying to and from New York.

The first season of “Mad Men” is set in 1960, which means it’s an exceedingly relevant program for modern times, because it’s this turning point in time that all culture war madness turns off of. When conservatives talk bitterly about the 60s, it’s because they romanticize the 50s as the ultimate moment of the American patriarchy, and to varying degrees, also the last gasp of blatant white supremacy, a utopia of white male dominance that was cruelly snatched away and needs to be restored through government intervention.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Panty-Sniffing Gets 21st Century
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on April 24, 2008 at 4:23 AM.

Holy mother of Disco Ball, is this just wrong. It's a semen detection kit that is marketed for catching cheating spouses and teenagers who have unruly amounts of autonomy. Naturally, they are trying to suggest that it's for catching both men and women, but of course, we know that's just some ass-covering and defies all common sense that tells us that since men shoot the semen away from their bodies, clean-up to the point of avoiding detection would be simple enough. Also, as blogger Slut Machine notes, this would be really good at catching male masturbators (i.e., all men), if not cheaters. I'm sure some woman out there will try it, and much sorrow will be had as she discovers that her husband is a man and thus has trace amounts of semen in his underwear all the time, but on the whole, I see this being marketed towards men who are looking for novel ways to control wives and daughters now that the law is less cooperative than it used to be.

My main concern here is that the abstinence-only nuts are going to find out about this. (Probably shouldn't blog about it, since many of them read this blog to get their daily titillation thinking about women who have sex without apologizing for it.) You think the metal detectors at school doors are ridiculous? Or think about all the annual dust-ups with over-zealous, perverted school officials start doing underwear checks on high school students. This could make the situation a thousand times worse, with school officials getting the brilliant idea of having panty drills, like fire drills except everyone has to submit to panty-testing to make sure that they're not having Teh Sex. Sure, various civil liberties organizations would sue them into the ground, but don't think the idea isn't attractive. Though I suppose it would encourage young women to use condoms.

Anyway, it's a rip-off. If you want to find out that there's biological material in people's underwear, you can just assume that there is. And if you're skeptical, I recommend the black light as a cost effective alternative to satisfy your doubts.

Abortion Art Shows Us All For Fools
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, RH Reality Check on April 23, 2008 at 4:12 AM.

Some people are under the misconception that performance art is a new thing, invented in the mid-twentieth century by people with no discernible talents for painting, acting, or music, but some hare-brained ideas, a willingness to be naked in public, and a talent for getting government grants. While it can't be categorically denied that this was a factor in the development of performance art, it's worth noting that another sort of performance art -- the hoax -- has been around since time immemorial. A good hoax should be funny, make people look like asses, and say something about the larger society beyond, "People are dupes." Which is why I tip my hat to Aliza Shvarts of Yale, whose art-hoax managed to set off alarms all over Wingnut Nation.

Shvarts claimed to have impregnated herself many times over the course of nine months, then self-aborted with herbs, and collected the uterine offal for her project. The project played up to every right wing stereotype imaginable about feminists, and even into the hands of white supremacist groups, who were eager to dismiss Shvarts with the blood libel, suggesting that she is a "murdering Jewess" who kills babies for fun. Some feminist bloggers (including me) immediately saw the problem with this story, which is that it's not possible. If abortion was a matter of just sucking down some oregano and waiting in the bathtub, it wouldn't be a political struggle, because it would be hidden from prying eyes, anti-choice protesters, and government authority. The coat hanger is the symbol of the abortion rights movement because self-abortion is a dirty, dangerous task that requires shoving sharp objects into your uterus. Even medication abortion, RU-486, is a long, painful process. If you kept going back to the doctor to get it, red flags would fly.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Support For Obama Driven By Sexism?
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on April 18, 2008 at 8:27 AM.

There were some grumblings in the comments about the blogular silence greeting this Rebecca Traister piece about how a lot of male Obama supporters are relishing this opportunity to indulge their sexist side, but I can say in all honesty, I hadn't blogged it yet because I hadn't seen it. But now that I have, I highly recommend it. Rebecca, of course, is a remarkably good writer, and she articulates beautifully why privileged Democratic men might harbor hostility towards Clinton, hostility white middle class liberals wouldn't show Obama.

In today's United States, racism continues to have more damaging economic and social structural implications for African-Americans than sexism has for women. Especially white and well-educated women, who are catching up to their male counterparts, if not in terms of equal pay or domestic expectations or secure reproductive options, at least in their ability to pursue the education and vocation they desire. And that makes them a more threatening group to the population of white men who have enjoyed unchallenged power -- in the White House and other workplaces -- since the birth of the nation. Those who feel the army of tough ladies breathing down their necks, competing for jobs and salaries and refusing to drop out of the race, are the population of privileged white men from which the elite portion of the Democratic Party is built.

It's not just competing for jobs that fuels this. Middle class liberal straight men benefit in a number of ways from the oppression of women. They get their homes cleaned, their laundry done, their children cared for, their egos fluffed, and birthday cards sent to their mothers, or they have the expectation of these things. (To varying degrees, of course. Some liberal men are much more feminist than others, and how much housework gets done by what pair of hands varies from household to household.) If they're single, they get to take advantage of a dating market where it's still understood that women are selling and men are buying. Now, obviously the investment from man to man varies on this front---there are a number of good guys who would gladly trade it all for an opportunity to date a woman who hasn't been crippled with insecurity from all the sexist mandates put on her (i.e., never again glares at her fat ass in a mirror and berates herself)---but there's plenty enough sexism with liberal dudes, and we all know it. I believe this story, because it just rings true in my experience and from stories I hear from other women about liberal sexism.

But I have to confess---I have not experienced the liberal male hostility to Clinton that has these sexist undertones. Maybe I'm oblivious, but I certainly haven't had any experiences like the ones described in the story.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Why "The Vagina Monologues" Matters
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on April 17, 2008 at 10:22 AM.

Rebecca Traister has a great article about the 10th anniversary of "The Vagina Monologues" in New Orleans, and ends up having the same reaction that a lot of what you might call advanced patriarchy-blamers have when seeing this play: a reluctant appreciation for how fun it is to see it, after a period of intense irritation at the hoopla around it. I'm definitely in the rationalist category of feminism, as it were, and have little to no patience with the Earth Mother feminism that tries to make a big deal out of the feminine essence. It's true that we are awash in a culture where anxious men have a submissive relationship to The Phallus, but seriously, the way to correct that is not to make a great emblem out of vulvic energy or whatever you want to call it. There are some men who have a healthy relationship with the penis---they like it, but see it as a tool that belongs to them. I think that route out of shame over having ladyparts is to take that pathway. But, as Traister notes, Ensler surrounds the play itself with this Earth Mother goddess stuff that makes me squirmy.

In Ensler's megalomaniacal V-universe, everything from voter registration to the Iraq war is seen through the speculum, er, spectrum, of the vagina, and moist metaphor and love for Eve (and beav) rule the day. It often seems, in fact, that Ensler has taken her laudable grass-roots success and turned it into a celebrity-centric, glitzy franchise -- one that has, in its unrelenting and patronizing focus on women-as-cootches, often felt as reductive and objectifying as the language Ensler originally set out to fight.

All that is true, but at the end of the day, the "Monologues" continue to draw huge audiences because the play itself is so good. You don't have to love Ensler's approach to love the play, because what makes the play awesome is that the monologues are all built from the direct words of a bunch of ordinary women. The factors that were in play 10 years ago when the play made its debut---shame about sexuality, the belief that women are inferior and that control of the ladyparts belongs to men, because women can't be trusted with it---are only more pronounced now than they were then, and have been enshrined into the law. I think women flock to the play, because it's refreshing to hear other women talk about their vaginas.....much in the way that men with healthy masculine identities see their penises. It's mine, but it does not own me. Ensler may skirt the edge of "women as cootches", but the play itself sends home the all-too-uncommon message that women own their cootches. And because of its emphasis on personal narrative, it does this without being preachy or driven by ideology, and it's really funny and entertaining.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

"Boy" Is An Insult In The South
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on April 16, 2008 at 12:54 PM.

Apparently, some people are asserting that calling someone "boy" (as Rep. Davis from Kentucky controversially did to Obama) is just friendly, buddy-buddy stuff in the South. I see no reason to concede that point. Now, I'm from Texas, which is not the Deep South, but we have our fair share of inbred rednecks spouting Southernisms (I'm like 40% redneck myself, and prone to saying things like "fixing to" and "all y'all"), and I have never heard any redneck ever call someone a "boy" without meaning it to demean that person. Every single time. Even when you call a bona fide boy "boy", it's about asserting your superiority over him. Even if it's used in a genial manner, it's still an insult. Like you see someone taking a piss outside and you're like, "Boy, what are you doing?"

There's the watered-down version, as well, which is "young man" or "young woman". It's still asserting authority over the person addressed as such, but unlike "boy" or "girl", it implies that the person addressed has some cognitive faculties, though minor and in need of correction. Like a kid who stayed out past curfew might get addressed as "young man/lady" while receiving a dressing down.

Then again, I'm far from Kentucky, so I asked a friend from a bordering state, and he said it's used in exactly the same manner in Kentucky as it is in Texas. Pam maybe could ring in and let us know how East Coast Southerners use the term, though I suspect it's in the exact same way. Which means quibbling over whether or not it's racist is ridiculous. Of course it is.

You Can't Ban No-Fault Divorce
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on April 16, 2008 at 4:35 AM.

Kathryn Joyce has a great piece up about the continuing agitating of anti-divorce nuts, who are trying to perform the social equivalent of putting toothpaste back into the tube. What's really great about this dude from Marriage Savers, though, is that he openly argues that marriage should be a legal trap.

Basing its implied equation of liberal divorce laws with unjust war, McManus justifies the term “Unilateral Divorce” because “in four out of five cases, one spouse did not want the divorce, but had no choice.” In a press release announcing the new Reform Divorce website, McManus argued that one spouse’s freedom to divorce the other without permission was the reason behind America’s high divorce rate.

Unfortunately for them, these are reforms that will only pass Republican muster if you only reverse a woman's right to sue for divorce. After all, the John McCains and Newt Gingriches of the world would have been fucked if their first wives (or second) were able to prevent them from trading them in for younger models. But I suspect that these Marriage Savers would be perfectly happy to accept a compromise that allowed men to sue for divorce and not women. Though I suppose even an equal divorce law that prevented men from divorcing as well as women would fuck women over more than men, because men that aren't politicians would do what they always did before, and just leave without bothering with the divorce. Women are the ones who more often need the protections of divorce.

In case there's any doubt that this is more about women's freedom than men's (though, to be fair, the anti-divorce nuts also get off on thinking about men being trapped in unhappy marriages as a sacrifice to the patriarchy), check out this article.

Divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing cost U.S. taxpayers more than $112 billion a year, according to a study commissioned by four groups advocating more government action to bolster marriages.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Imprisoning Victims Of Domestic Violence
Posted by Amanda Marcotte on April 15, 2008 at 7:30 AM.

Hi, PEEKers! This is Amanda Marcotte, adding in one of my own posts from today and reminding you that I'll be your guest blogger for the next two weeks.

I've been thinking a lot about this case where the Toronto cops have detained a pregnant 19-year-old to force her to testify against the man who beats her, because she's doing what all too many victims do, and changing her mind about pressing charges and trying to return home so her abuser can beat her more. There's no telling, I guess, what causes women to do this. It varies from woman to woman, I suppose. Some probably think that he's going to stop the beating. Some probably know he's going to keep doing it, but have been convinced, possibly by the abuser and relatives, that they don't deserve any better and that if they lose this man, they'll never get another. Some might be foolishly holding it together for the children, having been convinced by social conservatives that fathers are absolutely critical, even fathers who beat their girlfriends. Some might fear the abuser's retribution.

But I'm going to go against my instincts here and try to be sympathetic to the position the police are in, while not excusing this final decision. Feminists have long, and for good reason, accused the cops of being sexist pigs who don't take domestic violence seriously. We have our list of reasons that they're in the wrong: They think it's a private matter. They agree with the abusers that some women need to be beaten down. They don't like taking a woman's side against a man. All these criticisms are true, but we'd be intellectually dishonest if we didn't admit that the fact that women will often file charges and then retract them pretty much immediately contributes to the situation. It's much, much easier to dismiss a victim as hysterical when she's behaving like this.

Let's say a police force decides that feminist criticisms of the way police handle DV should be taken seriously. No more dismissing cases, no more laughing it off, no more driving the abuser across town and letting him sleep it off. Let's start putting abusers behind bars. Let's try to prevent DV situations from escalating into murders. Let's show the feminist community that we do take their complaints seriously and wish to treat women as equally worthy of protection by law enforcement. In that case, what do you do when the victims themselves refuse to let you take DV seriously? It's not hyperbolic to say that refusing to prosecute cases where victims are still in the thrall of their abusers will lead to significantly lowered conviction rates, which feminist activists will then point to as evidence that the cops don't care. A real rock and a hard place.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Wealth Does Breed Nastiness
Posted by Amanda Marcotte on April 15, 2008 at 4:22 AM.

Originally at Pandagon

Thanks to Roy for paying attention to Lileks' continuing mental degradation. Roy wisely realizes that Lileks really is the true representation of the asshole who leans conservative, kind of hates himself for it because even he can tells he's something of an asshole, and then doubles up the grumping in an effort to drown out the voices inside telling him that it doesn't have to be this way. Or that's what I'm telling myself is his disfunction this week.

Anyway, there are few things worse than when Lileks thinks he's being clever, except of course that it's also slightly awesome because it gives you a glimpse into the mind of someone who devotes 75% of his waking hours to rationalization. This review of "There Will Be Blood" tells us much about the mindset of a conservative who has replaced grumping with actual thought.

It kept my attention, and I enjoyed watching it, even though I felt myself disengaging from it by degrees in the last hour. Let's just not tell ourselves that it's a mark of great artistic insight to have the character get more insular and nasty as he gets richer, shall we?

Oooooh, insightful. Next he'll be complaining that lovers in movies look starry-eyed, or that death causes the characters grief. Perhaps the rich in movies are portrayed as nasty and insular for a good reason? Hell, Lileks isn't even rich, but being comfortably middle class has turned him into a person that hunkers down in his home, fearful that post-modernists and hippies are going to kick in his door for an interracial love-in. There are a few rich people who are good and kind, of course, but movies talk either in characters or symbols, and since "There Will Be Blood" was a film heavy with symbolism, it would have been, what's the word?---moronic for the character that symbolized wealthy capitalists to be anything but power-hungry and crazy.

Look, mega-wealth is irrational, and yet it's the source of 95% of the political problems we have nowadays. It doesn't make sense that people who have enough money to live in the lap of luxury should want more all the time, and should do everything to cut taxes and cut corners and tweak the market to get rich quick and cut corners to the tune of something like the Enron scandal. And that's what they do. The logic of mega-wealth is the sort of thing that only springs from nastiness and insularity, a total lack of perspective.

Conservative Hypocrites Exposed
Posted by Amanda Marcotte on April 14, 2008 at 11:17 AM.

Hi, everyone! This is Amanda Marcotte, and I spend most of my time as the executive editor at Pandagon and as a columnist/podcaster for RH Reality Check. I'm also the author of the new book It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments. I'm going to be your PEEK blogger for two weeks, and I'm looking forward to the opportunity to share all the things that I'm reading but not usually taking the time to blog about at Pandagon. Here's a post grabbed from my own blog this morning.

Glenn Greenwald sent me a copy of his newest book Great American Hypocrites, and I have to say that I liked it even more than his last one. It's Glenn at his best---he never fails to muster the proper outrage at right wing behavior, even when lesser humans start to lose our ability to be outraged because it's just so common. And his sense of humor is on full display, causing me to laugh pretty hard throughout the book.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Anti-Choicers Are Communists!
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on April 11, 2008 at 5:24 AM.

Jill linked Ema's awesome post about why Leslee Unruh and her cadre of crazy anti-choicers are very Communist in their thinking. I'm reading Glenn Greenwald's newest book, and I have to say that this post really reminds me of his larger points about how right wingers all too often embody the very things they claim to hate. The official right wing reason to hate communism was that it was totalitarian, but the recent embrace of Soviet tactics demonstrates that it wasn't the totalitarianism that was an issue so much at the lefty economics, as you might suspect.

The bill that Unruh and company are trying to pass into law could potentially ban birth control along with abortion, and it redefines biology in a way that would bring a tear to the eye of Soviets who thought natural selection was politically incorrect and had to go. It gives the government panty-sniffing power that would make the Stasi jealous. It redefines women's bodies as property of the state in a way that the Chinese are taking notes.

But when red-baiting the anti-choicers, we mustn't forget to mention the anti-choice communist utopia: Romania.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Pseudo-science Blames Coming Depression on Boobs
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on April 9, 2008 at 6:25 AM.

Sometimes I think the "Science for Choads" section would be better called the "Science Reporting for Choads", but that would be too narrow to include all the people that make science-y sounding claims with absolutely no evidence to back it up. Via Echidne, the latest "science confirms all your gender prejudices" story is particularly nasty in terms of implication and timing.

WASHINGTON - A new brain-scan study may help explain what's going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles -- sex. When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported.

The arousing pictures lit up the same part of the brain that lights up when financial risks are taken.

"You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area," said Camelia Kuhnen, a Northwestern University finance professor who conducted the study with a Stanford University psychologist.

Remember: The capitalist patriarchy can do no wrong. That is the first rule. Everything that goes wrong is due to effeminate liberals or actual women.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

No Child Left at All? Report Shows Stunning U.S. Drop-Out Rate
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on April 7, 2008 at 10:27 AM.

I shouldn't be surprised to see that this story about the appallingly low graduation rates in the cities of America is being underreported. Reporting this story is facing up to the ugly underbelly of America, and the way that the conservative backlash against the great liberal reforms of the mid-20th century has quietly managed to recreate the America that Republicans dream of, with a huge gap between the rich and everyone else, and a large and growing undereducated underclass. The Women's Take post optimistically addresses attempts to reduce the dropout rate, but I'm going to point out that the numbers are so high that we have to accept that the high dropout rate in certain cities is a feature, not a bug, of the various educational "reforms" that have been touted over the years.

If you read the report by the EPE Research Center (PDF), you'll see what I mean. We don't have kids falling through the cracks. The crack is the point, and the kids who stay on the surface are the minority. Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and Indianapolis all have graduation rates under 35 percent. That's not dropout rates -- that’s graduation rates. And there are 17 major U.S. cities that have graduation rates below 50 percent. But even more sobering, and what shows what's really going on here, is the comparison of the graduation rates between cities and suburbs.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »