I have a confession to make: I love Dude Comedies. Any film where Two to Five Douchey Guys Shirk Their Societal Obligations to Embark on a Night They’ll Never Forget can probably coax ten bucks out of me. I’ll even watch the Dude Comedies where all female characters are relegated to the Fun-Hating-Wife or Slutty-Sex-Object category, as long as it allows for maximum high jinks. Superbad: Loved it! Old School: Great! 40 Year Old Virgin: Totally convinced me to overlook the whole chastity message! Talladega Nights: Watched it!

I understand these movies are literred with sexism and homophobia and penises; I am simply immune to it. My condition has become so severe that this is looking pretty good to me, honestly.

But no Dude Comedy can draw me in as douchily as the Judd Apatow Dude Comedy. I am powerless to it. I have a theory: Paul Rudd is often one of the dudes. But even a Clueless pedigree can’t justify my apparent obsession with man-children, marijuana-fueled Lord of the Rings fantasies, and underlying date-rape themes.

Help me.

In this week’s Sexist Beatdown, Sady of Tiger Beatdown tries. We laughed, we cried, we had a shmashmortion.

Read More “Sexist Beatdown: Ladies Love Dude Comedies Edition” »

DoubleX is collecting memories of women who received abortions from Dr. George Tiller, who was murdered in his Witchita, Kan. church on Sunday morning. The stories provide a good deal of insight into why women receive late-term abortions, and why Tiller’s work was so important. Tiller’s clinic was one of only three to provide late-term abortions in the United States.

One woman recalls her post-20 week abortion:

The baby had contracted a virus and you could see on the MRI that its organs were all messed up. It looked like there were bubbles in them, instead of solid masses like they were supposed to be. Then they figured out that the baby had been exposed to Fifth disease. All sorts of researchers contacted us, because they wanted to study it.

Read More “Memories of Late-Term Abortions” »

“The Belly Project” has been hailed as “sad, beautiful, empowering, overwhelming.” I’ll add another: problematic.

The product of sex educator Karen Rayne and midwife Christy Tashjian, the blog records user-submitted photos of women’s disembodied bellies, accompanied by the belly’s age and reproductive history. The point of the blog, the creators write, is to “put our bellies in perspective,” as bellies are “intimately related our sexuality and to our reproductive lives. It’s a complicated interaction, that confluence of sex and babies.”

A typical submission looks something like this:

It is complicated, that “confluence of sex and babies.” My midsection’s ability to create proto-humans is something I have to fight against every fucking day. Getting a birth control prescription. Paying for it. Taking it every day. Wondering if I’m pregnant. Buying pregnancy tests. Defending why I don’t want children. Swallowing painkillers for my ovaries. Bleeding out of my vagina. Dealing with CVS while bleeding out of my vagina.

Being able to make babies sucks. But I do a lot of other things with my belly, too. I fill it with tacos. I lay on it. I put beer in it. I do the odd sit-up. I bend it over when I bike to work. Most of the time, though, it just sits above my legs and under my boobs as I type on the computer all day, and I never think about the thing.

This is not a perspective on the belly supported by the Belly Project:

Read More “My Body Is Not Defined By Pregnancy” »

In preparation for President Obama’s controversial commencement address at the University of Notre Dame, where he will no doubt speak at length about the virtues of killing newborns, anti-abortion protesters have converged on the University of Notre Dame campus. Some of them are simply rolling around vacant strollers (representing the never-born) or crafting signs reading “I Regret My Abortion”—bush league.

Only one dude is shaming our abortionist president the right way: with a small plane that tows “a banner depicting the remains of an aborted fetus and the words ‘10 Week Abortion.’”

Pwned.

Catholic Universities: respecting the lives of women since probably never.

Photo by Fated to Pretend

For this edition of “Sexist Beatdown,” Sady (of Tiger Beatdown) and myself (of the Sexist) would like to extend a warm invitation to all men, children, good mothers, and bad mothers (abortionists will be tolerated, but the childless will be ignored).

This week, up for discussion is Ayelet Waldman: wife to Michael Chabon, mother to four, author of “Bad Mother,” in that order! Waldman made women hate her in 2005 after announcing, in the New York Times, that she values her husband over her children. We don’t really give a shit about that. What we want to know is: Does Waldman value husbands over children over good mothers over bad mothers over abortionists over the childless?

Let’s sort of find out!

SADY: hello! are you ready to talk about how some lady HATES and/or does not maniacally worship her children?

AMANDA: I can barely begin to think about it because i HATE this woman so much!
Read More “Sexist Beatdown: Bad Mother > Abortionist > Childless Edition” »

If only! Ann Coulter voices her support of an investigator’s right to choose to waterboard.

I think I’m arriving at some sort of unified theory of Coulterism:

abortion IS WORSE THAN terrorism IS WORSE THAN waterboarding

terrorists DESERVE TO BE waterboarded

abortionists DESERVE TO BE terrorized

Joy Behar DESERVES TO BE aborted

This one’s a two-fer, in response to my post on the omnipresent anti-abortion Metro ads, “Metro Swathed in Anti-Abortion Shame.”

Craig Howell writes:

Um, there’s a First Amendment issue here, folks. As a government agency, Metro cannot indulge in viewpoint discrimination. This matter was settled 30 years ago when the courts told Metro it could not refuse to run bus ads sponsored by the Gay Activists Alliance. I have been a member of what is now the Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance since 1973, and this victory remains one of our signature achievements.

Lisa responds:

Read More “Sexist Comment of the Week” »

In the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker writes on the Notre Dame Barack Obama abortionist love-fest speaker scandal:

Abortion, after all, is settled law, and Obama is the duly elected president. Clearly, the American people have moved on.

Or have they? And should we? Is there really ever a time when we should be comfortable with the ratification of abortion? It has always seemed to me that the truest form of feminism, as in the earliest days of suffrage, would be to hold abhorrent the state-sanctioned destruction of women’s unique life-bearing gifts. Out of material expedience, we’ve somehow managed to convince ourselves that life is a mistake. [Emphasis all mine].

Oh yeah, the “truest form of feminism” must be wherever feminism was ONE HUNDRED FUCKING YEARS AGO. Now that women have the vote, what more do they want—the capacity to murder babies at will?

I, too, wish we could go back to the good ‘ol days of feminism, when women were forced to provide their “unique life-bearing gifts” on demand instead of, you know, if and when they chose to give the fucking gift. I WANT ALL GIFTS ALL THE TIME! MORE GIFTS! MORE MORE MORE!

[via Pukeimmediately].

Over at Beliefnet, Steven Waldman is arguing for the abortion debate to drop its central moral question—”Does life begin at conception?”—and begin to address the fact that “Most Americans believe there are gradations of life.”

Waldman cites a 2007 Third Way study which found that “69 percent of Americans believe abortion is the ‘taking of a human life,’ but 72 percent believe it should be legal.” Waldman attributes the statistic to the idea that most people believe that “some living things are more alive than others, and so the later in the pregnancy it gets, the more uncomfortable people become with the idea of ending it. . . . they believe both that a life stirs very early on and that a one-week-old embryo is more ‘killable’ than a nine-month-old fetus.”

Read More “Hot Trend: Pro-Choicers Who Believe Abortion Is Murder” »

That’s what Ruth Marcus claims in today’s Washington Post, quoting Sarah Palin’s remarks from a—what else—a pro-life fundraiser. At the dinner, Palin discussed her “choice” to have a child with Down syndrome  at the age of 44—a choice that, as Marcus points out, Palin wants to deny other women. Marcus is miffed that right-to-lifers like Palin routinely justify their anti-choice positions by describing their own “correct” “decisions” to have children. This isn’t the fist time Palin has used choice to explain why women shouldn’t chose—who could forget Palin’s election-season classic, “We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby”?

Palin’s pro-”choice” comments—where she describes twice considering abortion before deciding to carry her pregnancy to term—after the jump.

Read More “Sarah Palin Makes Case For Abortion” »