Hello, world. The illustrious Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown and I were all ready to administer another of our weekly smackdowns on a very important topic like pulling out, bitchy musicians, or Megan Fox’s fake boobies. But theeeeen, we both got the vapors in anticipation of the New Moon premiere!!!!! busy. So rest easy, people likely to piss us off—we’re calling a truce today. The cat-fighting will resume next week.

Photo by ansik, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Megan Fox, everyone’s least-favorite super-hot chick, gets the New York Times Magazine treatment this week. We all know Megan Fox as that hot sassy vixen who claims to be female-empowered (“I would eat Robert Pattinson”) as she poses in wet bikinis for men’s magazines. And we know that that combination, uh, usually doesn’t go over so well among feminists. But here’s where things get trippy, you guys: Like, is it all an act? And what does it all mean?

Take one of Fox’s most well-publicized stunts: Publicly comparing Transformers director (and noted wet bikini enthusiast) Michael Bay to Hitler. Could there by a lesson hidden beneath the headline? I’ll bite: Why do feminists spend our time hating on the Megan Foxes of this world instead of focusing their efforts on the Michael Bays? Is dancing in a bikini under a waterfall for Bad Boys II empowering? It was pretty empowering for 15-year-old Megan Fox ($), and it was really empowering for Michael Bay ($$$$$). But it’s probably not so empowering to women. Is projecting all of our hatred of entertainment-industry sexism onto one 23-year-old starlet empowering to other women? Nope, but it is empowering to snarky celebrity bloggers, who squeeze out their own ($) in mean-spirited Fox-based blog posts. Me? I like to empower myself by putting the word “boobies” in the titles of all of my snarky Megan Fox posts ($$$)!

So! On that note, join Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown and myself as we embark upon another Sexist Beatdown. This time: What the fuck do we do with Megan Fox, then? Pray that she crashes, burns, and ends up managing a Hooters in Tennessee, even if she’ll never bring Michael Bay down with her? Hope she has the strength to uglify herself just long enough to win an Oscar? Start a campaign to get that girl into some dry bikinis for once? We decide, after the jump!

SADY: megan fox has ARRIVED! PRAISE THE LORD!

AMANDA: and she has fake “boobies”!

SADY: I feel that I am not meant to like Megan Fox, based on this NYTM piece, which is all about how she is clearly (and candidly!) a market-tested persona product in the midst of rebranding. But (a) how many celebrities are not, and (b) how many public PEOPLE are not, and (c) the fact that she talks about the fact that she IS makes her weirdly seem to be less of one than, let’s say, Zac Efron, and (d) BOOBIES! SHE TALKS ABOUT HER FAKE BOOBIES IN FRONT OF THE INTERVIEWER! SHE DEBATES WHETHER OR NOT TO INSERT THEM IN HER BRA! CAPSLOCK! I like this!

AMANDA: i like this, too. but i’m left wondering what the point of this piece is. half of it seems like a disingenuous way to get around the low-brow celebrity scoop on megan fox while still cashing in on that scoop. NYT isn’t going all Us weekly and making the headline “MEGAN FOX USES FAKE BOOBIES,” [Editor's note: But hey, I'm not above it!] but i’m not sure this form of pseudo-intellectual celebrity gawking is really that different from the tabloid version.

SADY: fair enough: the article does seem to hold her at a weird distance. like, it is supposedly about The Spectacle Of Megan Fox, and how she’s got all this weird projection-based hate and love and whatever around her, but also invites us to take part in that and deplore her for her fake booby usage or frequent anti-”middle-america” statementing.

AMANDA: and her affinity for Hitler jokes.

SADY: she is fond of a hitler joke every now and again! it’s true! but i also thought, after reading stuff like the Rolling Stone cover piece a while back, that it was kind of refreshing to read an interview that was not just asking her whether she drinks human blood during sex or which celebrity penis she’d prefer to keep company with.

AMANDA: yes. i agree, and i don’t think this piece is bad. i just think it’s barely there in terms of transcending the tabloid thing. but one thing i found really interesting in this piece was the idea of Fox manufacturing a persona of “female empowerment” for men’s magazines. it’s an old trick to give an interview to a men’s magazine next to photos in your undies that talks about how you want to eat Robert Pattison, and how you’re an empowered woman, and how using your body in Hollywood and being frank about it is better than the alternative, but it’s interesting to see her quote at the end that, actually, she doesn’t like men looking at her body.

SADY: well, i am kind of unclear on megan fox’s personal philosophy of female empowerment. like, it seems to be not that well-defined! projecting myself into the head of megan fox, which i know only through interviews, and in which (as you note) she is always only saying what she has chosen to convey to the world at large, i THINK she thinks that being all sexy boy-eatery is not in and of itself the empowerment? that using that image to your own benefit and being a canny manipulator of that image is the empowerment? BUT, as you say, she does seem pretty sick of it and is maybe kind of trapped by that image to a greater extent than she once expected to be. in the Golden Years! when she put her underage self in a bikini and did a waterfall dance for Michael Bay’s cinematic vision and got a whole FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS in extra pay for so doing!

AMANDA: yeah, and more than that, she fucking loved it! she felt that she belonged dancing in the waterfall.

SADY: like a bikini-clad nymph dancing in the fountain of Underage Youth.

AMANDA: but, since you are perhaps a more studied Fox scholar: is Fox’s version of female empowerment any different from Joanna Krupa’s statement that posing for Playboy is feminist? That, because this activity makes one super hot woman super rich, that means it’s empowering?

SADY: well, that’s the thing, right? that’s the reason we get all pissy about this? because this is actually the divide that I most frequently fall into and die a thousand intrablogular deaths. there’s one school of thought that is like, “no, it is not actually empowering,” and another school of thought that is like, “no, it is not empowering, and also any woman who participates in it is BRINGING FEMINISM DOWN and must immediately run straight to the consoling zombie arms of andrea dworkin and claim that she was brainwashed into doing it whether or not this was actually the case.” and i am of the “no, it is not empowering” school myself. i think the only people who think it is empowering are people who don’t get structure, and are kind of libertariany and weird.

AMANDA: yeah. “i do something, and i am a woman, so that thing is empowering for women” doesn’t really make sense

SADY: but i also don’t think yelling at the actual women who participate in it is kind of weird, because: as a person without a steady paycheck, I get that you do what you have to do in order to get by. and one of the options open, if you look even vaguely Fox-like, is to do the Hot Girl thing.

AMANDA: and on the other hand, “i wear bikinis and hang out around cars” is not empowering to women, but “i wear bikinis and hang out around cars and point out what a skeevy hack michael bay is, and how weird it is that this is my job” is better, i think. and that’s something Joanna Krup totally fails to recognize.

SADY: yeah, exactly. i mean, fuck the michael bays of the world. who come in many forms and at many pay levels. i’ve known girls whose main source of employment was dressing up in kind of sexy outfits and going to bars and convincing dudes there that this one specific kind of beer was superior to all others. the michael bays of marketing! but, yeah, obviously, part of our fantasy around those women is that they’re totally thrilled and turned on by jobs that are about selling their sexuality – compliance is the biggest part of the fantasy, like that policy at hooters that you have to engage in “friendly banter” that is most likely about your titular Hooters – and so when girls complain, you know, they’re subversive. and subject to the typical blowback. even if they’re only doing what everyone else in the world does, which is bitching about the uncomfortable aspects of their jobs. sorry, SPEECHIFYING.

AMANDA: THATS OK. so, moving on to the virgin-whore aspect to all of this … i think it’s really interesting that Fox has been able to be in more control of her tabloid stories because of the fact that she dates boring Brian Austin Green and they’ve been boringly dating for five years. all the tabloid stories are like, “megan fox SAID THIS,” not “megan fox fucked some dude.”

SADY: yeah. BRIAN AUSTIN GREEN. a compellingly boring choice! because if she were out actually having actual sex, she’d be portrayed as a train-wreck.

AMANDA: it’s really sad.

SADY: yeah, but it’s another part of the narrative about Hot Girls: that they’re out behaving like trollops and possibly crazy and messed-up and lost and blah blah whatever. like, female sexuality can’t exist without us feeling the need to punish it, or see it punished. and i don’t think women feel that need to the same extent that a lot of men do, or in the same ways, but i think it’s disingenuous to say that a lot of us don’t feel it. basically, I am using the word “lot” a lot, in an attempt to parse this. but Fox can always fall back on the old, “I have a BOYFRIEND! My sexy sexiness is merely an ACT” thing. which brings us to this whole Meta Fox level where admitting that something is an act may in fact be part of another, overarching act.

AMANDA: METAFOX. well, it’s interesting, because we all know that the Jennifer Aniston Act about her being a hopeless spinster who can’t find love is created by the tabloids. and we know that the Jessica Simpson Is A Stupid Bitch act is created by the tabloids. But whether or not those narratives are based in truth, those celebrities will not be able to escape it, no matter what, so it doesn’t matter. with Megan Fox setting herself up from the get-go as being entirely fake, it may give her some more power to control that fakeness later on.

SADY: yeah. i mean, i think that coming from someone who was basically hired as a cinematic boner dispenser before she was even old enough to vote, and who really hasn’t been hired for jobs outside of that context, she seems remarkably in-control.

AMANDA: well-said

SADY: but i do question how in-control anyone hired to be a cinematic boner dispenser actually is, in the long run. i mean, the weight of The Patriarchy and all of its various Deep-Rooted And Contradictory Sex Issues does not rest lightly on one’s shoulders.

AMANDA: that’s certainly true, but at the same time—and i really don’t mean to insult megan fox here, because i don’t know what she’s capable of—what is she going to do, become a senator? be a mid-level manager? write? she has always wanted to be an actress, she says, and she’s noted that the only reason she can do that is because she’s hot. Fox isn’t going to be getting many Oscar-bait roles (although Jennifer’s Body was an improvement), but does she have to do that kind of acting in order for her to be acceptable?

SADY: uh, probably? i mean, i’m trying to think of someone else who’s made this kind of transition. and, weirdly, the only people i can think of who have made the transition from Object of Desire to Serious Actor are men. like: johnny depp! he was once a mere hot dude! or brad pitt! he was that also! or george clooney! those dudes all started out being valued primarily for their hotness, and then later we were like, “oh, ACTING!” marilyn monroe tried it, but it didn’t really happen. angelina jolie, maybe? oh, hey, here’s an option for megan fox: retire at the age of thirty-four, and spend your entire life rolling around on a bed of cash money.

AMANDA: right. marry someone more successful than brian austin green. is it mean that i keep making fun of brian austin green?

SADY: uh, NO. fox needs someone with an eye for investments, and fewer anecdotes about that time he was on “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.” it got CANCELLED! it was AWESOME!

AMANDA: it sounds awesome. but some women do do that. Halle Berry did that, and then she just kind of receded back into the boobie rolls. there’s a short window of opportunity for Hot Girls to be Oscar-Worthy Hot Girls, and then they must retreat to the Elder Hot Girl Processing Area. I know what it is! Megan Fox hasn’t gotten to her “purposefully ugly” stage yet. then she can really be an Actress

SADY: right? she needs to talk to Mariah Carey’s people! they can de-Glitter her! i just used the phrase “talk to [X]’s people.” without shame. that is a sad thing i did. i think i must leave now, and contemplate my sins.

AMANDA: haha. well i need to go put on my knee-pad leggings myself. dont tell the blogs about that one

Hey, ladies. It’s time for another edition of Sexist Beatdown. Up for discussion this morning are girls who hate on other girls when a man gets in the way, and then write pop songs about it. As always, your hosts are that bitchy, popular ho Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown, and the adorably geeky woman of your dreams—me! Join us: We promise to pretend to be your friends while we try to fuck your boyfriend and ridicule your skanky dye job.

Sady has already done the groundwork on the “girl-on-girl sexism” phenomenon. In this special genre of pop music, the protagonist ridicules another woman who is either a) involved with “her man,” or b) involved with a man the singer wishes were “her man.” The protagonist typically cites purely aesthetic arguments—But she’s a cheerleader! But she has bleached hair! But she just sucks!—for hating that other bitch and attempting to convince the “man” that he belongs with her. Sady notes that this trend most recently surfaced in Taylor Swift’s beloved hit single, “You Belong With Me”:

It put my hair thoroughly on end, with Taylor pleading over and over again for a boy to just go ahead and dump a girl (who apparently has goals in life outside of obsessively working to please this one dude), in favor of Taylor (who doesn’t). I mean, I know we’re supposed to be rooting for Taylor, because GLASSES, but this whole thing whereby girls who do not conceive of themselves as traditionally attractive deal with this by hating on girls who they think are prettier is just really repulsive to me, and I can’t stand it, especially when it’s framed as “empowering” rather than just insecure and gross. You have a problem with how limiting the mainstream beauty standard is? Fine. TALK ABOUT THAT. I will agree with you. But slamming “ugly” girls and slamming “pretty” girls both amount to slamming girls. So, you know. Less of that, please.

Meanwhile, Notes on Popular Culture has already provided the counterpoint for Team Taylor: “Sady calls the comparison between the two girls ‘girl-on-girl sexism.’ What Sady forgets is that this is what people do. That is what girls do, that is what teenage girls do, this is what girls do when another girl has they guy they like. It’s tame, and pretty damn fair.”

Or is it?

SADY:: let’s talk about ladies who don’t like other ladies! through the universal language of SONG! (the ladies who hate other ladies. not me, or, i would imagine you. let us conduct this discussion instead through the universal language of Gchat.)

AMANDA: agreed!

SADY: first of all, i think we need to separate the lady-disliking-lady song from the you-cheated-on-me-song (as sung by a lady). because both are venerable pop conventions. but one is pretty specifically about disliking a lady, and the other is more about being upset with somebody who cheated on you and referring to the co-cheater as a “tramp” or whatever.

AMANDA: so, you’re saying there is a difference between your unnecessary “I Hate That Bitch” song and your Jolene rip-off?

SADY: i would argue, yes! although… maybe not? (BEHOLD, as i introduce and then disagree with my own points!) because, like, in “before he cheats,” by carrie underwood, she mentions that there is “probably” a “bleached-blond tramp” in this dude’s life before introducing some truly epic automotive destruction on the possible-tramp-liker.

AMANDA: oh … “probably.” see, this is where it gets interesting. because doesn’t carrie underwood appear to have bleached blond hair?

SADY: haha, and the hypothetical tramp sings “fake Shania karaoke” at one point. PROJECTION!

Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats”
Woman: bleach-blond, wavy-haired Carrie Underwood
Other Woman: bleach-blond, straight-haired Carrie Underwood look-alike

AMANDA: and isn’t it innocent-glasses TAYLOR SWIFT HERSELF, ladies and gentleman of the jury, and not bitchy-brunette Taylor Swift, that is the “other woman” in “You Belong With Me”?

SADY: RIGHT! or in “girlfriend,” by avril lavigne, which is basically the same song: “hey hey you you i don’t like your girlfriend hey hey you you i could be your girlfriend why can’t you see you belong with me?” they sort of blur together into an identical message point in my head. also that “don’t you wish your girlfriend were the pussycat dolls” song. there are a LOT of these songs!

Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend”
Woman: Redhead glasses-wearing Avril Lavigne, who is “like, so whatever.”
Other Woman: Brunette punk-rocker Avril Lavigne, who is a “mother-fuckin’ princess”

AMANDA: practically the same song, except avril subs in “punky arm-warmers” for glasses. But let’s go back to Jolene for a moment, shall we?

SADY: let’s!

AMANDA: so, instead of trashy bleached-blond hair (or trashy brunette-died hair, depending on the version), jolene has got a smile like a breath of spring, or whatever.

SADY: right. there’s a lot of lavishly detailed jolene-sexiness, which makes the song weirdly kind of ladyrotic, all about the power of another woman’s sexuality.
AMANDA: right … and it raises an interesting point about how these “other women” are romanticized and demonized in song. the “other woman” song is an interesting thing to talk about from a feminist perspective I think. for example, when Dolly Parton is begging Jolene not to take “her man,” she exerts ownership over another human being and even attempts to control another human (jolene) in order to keep that ownership. instead of being like, “fuck it,” which maybe would not have made for a very compelling song, i guess. and so, perhaps you could give a feminist reading to “Girlfriend” and “You Belong With Me” in that these are women reminding other humans that they aren’t property.

Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”
Woman: Can’t compete.
Other Woman: Flaming locks of auburn hair, ivory skin, eyes of emerald green, smile like breath of spring, voice soft like summer rain.

SADY: welllllll… possibly? i think both are actually ABOUT competition over territory (territory = actual human dude). in one case you are trying to lure a dude away, and in another, you are trying to keep hold of him. but, weirdly, i don’t think that is so feminist? because what a lot of these songs do is sort of make the dudes not responsible for who they cheat on you with / who they date, in order to transfer all of the animus onto another woman. women are always sort of the villains, even if it’s a dude who is making the choices you disagree with. compare this to one of my favorite dude-finds-out-his-lady-cheated songs, “take a letter, maria,” in which a dude rolls into the office, tells his secretary his wife’s been sleeping with another dude. then, asks her to draft a divorce letter. then, tells her she’s his girlfriend now. like, the dude just kind of keeps rolling on. the lady is STILL the villain, even in songs about cheating ladies sung from dudes’ perspectives. not the guy his wife slept with.

AMANDA: so … does any dude actually choose his girlfriend based on who writes the best song about why he should be their girlfriend?

SADY: i kind of wish they did!

AMANDA: i dont! i such at that shit!

SADY: well, i think the vast majority of dudes would get a case of The Creeps if we were all under their windows performing dance-offs about them. which DOES kind of make the whole “you belong to me” genre weirdly feminist: it’s women being suitors, not desired objects. granted, it’s in some kind of wacky “i could totally fulfill all your needs better than she can” way, but WHATEVS.

AMANDA: right, and weirdly enough, the guys are hardly humanized.

SADY: exactly. like, it’s not about how dreamy they are or whatever. they’re not singing the dude’s praises. they’re just like, “WANT DUDE! DUDE MINE!”

AMANDA: it’s possible that these “empowering” other-woman songs are just co-opting the worst aspects of traditional male courting behavior. one of the things that irks me about both You Belong with Me and Girlfriend is the assumption that, well, the guy belongs with them.

SADY: yeah! exactly! like, Dude can’t choose who he wants to date? MAYBE THE FACT THAT YOU ARE ALWAYS IN THE WINDOW MAKING MOONEYES AT HIM HAS CREEPED HIM OUT, Taylor Glasses!

AMANDA: it’s the same old shit where a dude feels entitled to harass a woman because that’s what is supposed to happen when you like a girl, no matter what she says about you—like, “no thanks,” or “just friends”

Pussycat Dolls, “Dontcha”
Woman: Not hot like her.
Other Woman: Hot.

SADY: yeah, exactly. like, the whole “Nice Guy (TM)” bit of jargon we’ve coined to describe dudes who whine about how they’re so awesome and girls STILL won’t go out with them and the fact is that they’re just kind of chasing the wrong girls around? that seems, weirdly, to be present in some gender-flipped form in “You Belong With Me.” Taylor Swift is a Nice Girl (TM) and it is freaking me out a little.

AMANDA: or pretending to be friends when they’re really trying to get a boner. full disclosure, I find that song catchy and I listen to it whenever it’s on the radio, which is all the time, which is why I know enough about this song to have this weird reservation about one of the lyrics. you pointed this out, as well, but when Swift says that evil bitchy girlfriend “doesn’t get his humor” and freaks out when he says certain things, it always seems obvious to me that the guy is saying something so monumentally douchey, and Taylor Swift is just lining up to be like, “I won’t call you out on being a douche.”

SADY: yeah, exactly. like, i have seen girls do this. the whole “i get boys” thing, that in practice always seems to be about siding with boys when girls call them out on being sexist and/or douches. and i don’t know what it is – being known as a “guy’s girl” can give you some power, or an illusion of power, in certain circles – but to me I always get post-traumatic Tucker Max flashbacks to when he’s like, “but some of my FRIENDS are women! some of my FANS!” and, yeah, but maybe those girls are just biting the bullet and/or deluded enough to think that your douchiness will never affect them unless they laugh along. basically, i think “You Belong With Me” is a song about how Taylor Swift wants to date Seth McFarlane. that is what i think it is. i will never apologize.

AMANDA: maybe they would be cute!

SADY: he could talk to her in the voice of a mean-spirited british baby and/or laconic dog.

AMANDA: that other bitch just doesn’t GET that like she does.

SADY: EXACTLY. you know, though, i have been forced to come to the conclusion that everyone in the whole entire world likes taylor swift a little bit more than i do. like, my over-the-top dislike of taylor swift may in fact be wrongheaded and the result of being hit in the head with a skipper doll as a small child or something. people in general don’t dislike taylor swift as much as i do, so there is maybe something wrong with me. and i would like to apologize to taylor swift, for whatever i have written about her in the past, using a girl-hating-(i think?)-another-girl-song lyric. from destiny’s child. it reads: “you know i’m not gonna diss you on the internet / cause my mama told me better than that.”

AMANDA: i heard that song on the radio the other day. taylor swift has, essentially, said the opposite about her career: she’s said that all her songs are about dissing people who have wronged her in some way.

SADY: OH GOD. SHOULD I BE WORRIED?

AMANDA: (Yes). But i can’t help but thinking that—with all her deliberate high-school-band-geek-goofy-glasses image—taylor swift maybe has underestimated how much people were going to Totally Fall In Love With Her. she’s the most successful artist right now, and smoking hot, and she’s writing a bunch of diss songs, which probably won’t play for very long. just a bit of career advice. because i know a lot about the music business. so … you’re doing her a favor, is what i’m saying, and i can’t wait to see what wig taylor swift wears in order to play you in her upcoming single, “I Didn’t Know He Had A Nazi Shirt On, You Bitch.”

Earlier this week, we looked at the popular fear of date rape drugs, and how that fear helps distract us from acquaintance rapes that involve willingly ingested substances, like beer. Beer, you say? In this edition of Sexist Beatdown, Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown and I talk booze—the most common date-rape drug, the cause of a shit ton of other problems, and a pretty fun thing to drink, in moderation. After the jump: we bemoan the double standard of passing out, yearn for a consentalizer test, and check in on how our femininity is holding up—it’s tipsy, thanks for asking!

SADY: hello! good evening! it is time to discuss date rape drugging, or so i hear!

AMANDA: it is that allotted time!

SADY: first of all, i have to say that your take on the whole scenario was (AS USUAL!) highly impressive and nuanced.

AMANDA: well—some issues were perhaps underrepresented there. there are A LOT OF ISSUES. with this ISSUE.

SADY: well, this whole report – that date rapes involving date rape drugs are less rare than date rapes involving date drinking—is kind of set to be a highly polarizing thing. like, some people have been like, “see? the floozies are just out getting drunk! and making up accounts of druggedness!” and others are like, “there are, too, date rape drugs!” and what impressed me about your take was that you didn’t (a) minimize assault, or (b) discount that date rape drugs might in fact be less common than acquaintance rape without that factor involved.

AMANDA: I saw that Broadsheet had already written a pretty thought out post that discussed why some women might report being drugged when that was not necessarily the case—and obviously, i read the Daily Mail’s amazingly stupid take on it which suggested that women are big drunk liars—so i thought i’d focus on the media’s focus on date rape drugs. which is so interesting, because even calling them “date rape drugs” is misleading—the narrative really suggests that when this does happen, it’s mostly strangers swooping in with these drugs, and not “dates” per se.

SADY: yeah, exactly. and this is a terminology flaw which i myself have fallen victim to: using “date rape” to mean “rape that was not the stranger-jumps-from-bushes-with-gun” sort of rape, rather than “rape by one’s date,” which is what it should (and does) mean. i mean: i have to tell you. i don’t doubt that date rape drugs are used. a friend of mine just told me a story about how she suspects she may have been drugged, and although she was not assaulted, all the details line up.

AMANDA: oh yes! that is a point that i realized after i wrote my piece! it’s possible that druggings are more common than they appear in these studies, but they do not lead to assaults. and that can skew the data, and getting drugged is still an awful thing to have happen to you, even if it doesn’t end in assault. [Note: Marcella Chester has since counted the ways that the data on drink-spiking can go awry. Read it!].

SADY: right, it’s still a violation.

AMANDA: but the whole issue of rape is an issue of skewed data, because reports are so infrequent. but i would THINK—and i dont know this—that reports of drug-assisted rapes are higher than those that don’t involve drugs. because the media is pretty clear about reviling dudes who drug women, and less clear about reviling men who rape women who are drunk.

SADY: yeah. exactly. like, if you’re drunk, it just means you’re a big old mess and/or tramp anyway, and probably you were just drunk enough to “have sex” and “regret it” and etc.

AMANDA: and i think that “reporting” difference is true anecdotally as well—they may not even tell their friends or their boyfriends or what have you, or they will tell them and they’ll be discounted. Etc.

SADY: whereas if you were DRUGGED, you can clearly point to an outside agency in getting you to the point where you could not give informed consent.

AMANDA: right. there’s a degree of “proof” that society accepts with those rapes.

SADY: yeah, and, i mean, i have to tell you: i like to drink. i’m having a drink as we speak! and i am a lady who’s pretty smart about listening to my body, drinks-wise, and not having more than i can handle. but there have been occasions – whether i didn’t have enough sleep the night before, or forgot to eat lunch, or whatever – where A Normal Number of Drinks magically became, for that night, One Too Many Drinks, and i ended up in a messy state. and I was always surrounded by people who cared enough for me to point out that i was a mess, and call me a taxi, and whatever. but HOW SHITTY WOULD IT HAVE BEEN, STILL for someone to assault me in that state? i mean, why the fuck are Drinks considered an extra culpability on your part?

AMANDA: i too love drinking! and perhaps that should be disclosed whenever i defend ladies who like to drink against charges of flooziness! so, FULL DISCLOSURE, drinking! but so: the researchers note that drinking can be sometimes unpredictable, and if your diet or sleep or mood is different it can affect how alcohol affects you. so when, a couple weeks ago, my boyfriend told me he “felt like he had been drugged” because his level of hangover way outstripped the number of drinks he had, i thought it was kind of interesting. but i didn’t actually think he HAD BEEN DRUGGED. though i suppose that’s possible. but i feel like, perhaps, when women are unexpectedly slammed with alcohol—and particularly if they are assaulted while in this state—they may be told over and over again that these experiences are a result of being drugged. i’m not sure if that actually ever happens. but i DO know that if a woman was ever considered unreliable because she reported she was drugged and raped, and it turned out she wasn’t actually drugged, then that would be very sad.

SADY: yeah, exactly. and that’s the thing: while saying you were drugged can be pointed to as an example of how you didn’t exercise agency in the matter (which is important for rape survivors, because as we all know making Bad Decisions means you totally shouldn’t have the right to pursue a criminal sentence for someone who had sex with you against your will) it is also a wedge that can be used to destroy your credibility. which is why women i’ve known who came to the conclusion that there must have been some drugging involved in their assaults have been hesitant to come forward, because they’re afraid that would be used against them. which, in that case, what was your crime? having too many drinks? FALLING ASLEEP????? not to be a big old spoiler, but dudes get to have too many drinks and fall asleep all the time! i mean, a gentleman of my personal acquaintance had too many drinks and was wandering around and got – apparently – randomly beaten up by some dudes in his neighborhood, and as far as i know the police did not tsk-tsk him for wandering around all drunk and beatable.

AMANDA: i know. dudes get to have SO MUCH PASSING OUT without the consequences! and young dudes still binge drink a lot more than women do, not that you would realize that given the media attention given to the matter. male drinking tends to be a bit invisible, i think—it’s just something men do, so there’s no excessive fear about it. even though men are more likely to be victims of violent crime than women are. i mean, there are fears about men drinking, but they are fears about literally drinking too much and dying from drinking too much. not fears about drinking too much and getting raped, or even drinking too much and raping another person.

SADY: which maybe SHOULD be a fear. i think this is an important point: these studies which say women who have been raped frequently have also been drinking? they maybe miss the point that women have been drinking while in an environment where everyone – dudes included – is also drinking. and i genuinely think that, if ladies have these regimens over watching their ladyfriends’ drink consumption and making sure they are safe, dudes should also have people watching them to make sure that they don’t get to the point where they are legitimately too drunk to even get what consent MEANS.

AMANDA: yeah. and, i mean, it would help if kids knew what consent means before they knew what “body shots” means. i think it should be on the driving test, personally.

SADY: yeah. that’s a worrisome statement i just made, because it seems to remove some culpability from the rapist. but i suspect that (a) assholes who drink become bigger assholes, and (b) since we all recognize that a drunk asshole is liable to get in a bar fight or whatever, we should also recognize that a drunk asshole might be an asshole who is even more inclined to rape than he was previously.

AMANDA: yeah. it seems that while society’s prescriptions for female drinking include “drinking correctly”—covering your glass, going with friends—male drinking is just defined by “drinking more.” which—again—i like drinking. and if my drinking becomes a personal problem, that will be bad for me. but if my drinking becomes a problem for other people—like i end up raping women or hitting my kids when i’m drunk—then that’s something that REALLY needs to be addressed by society.

SADY: yeah, precisely. and the reason i think this relates to date rape drugs (ha, remember those? HI, date rape drugs!) is that, you know, they exist. and even if they exist less than rapes which occur while the rapist and/or the victim were drinking, that’s still a problem. one incident of someone drugging a person in order to rape them is too many, i would estimate. but the fact that rape occurs more often in proximity to alcohol – well: first of all, i can recall being pressured to drink A Bit Too Much by certain dates, so i think it’s reasonable to state that alcohol can also be an agent of coercion. and, (b) people drink. Specifically young people who want to socialize. As an extremely shy person who is far less shy after drinking, I get the reasons for this. And the fact is that if alcohol coincides with rape, this DOES NOT MAGICALLY REMOVE THE FACT THAT RAPE IS BAD from the equation!

AMANDA: exactly. and i think a lot of it comes down to ladies drinking, because drinking is a dude thing, and when ladies drink it means they’re, horror of horrors, ACTING LIKE MEN, or taking away dude-time, or revealing that drinking does not actually make you more masculine and / or awesome. but sorry, dudes, i’m not going to stop drinking!

SADY: yeah! i mean: i think the Horror of Drinking is the Horror of Unladylikeness, presented in vaguely medical terms. fact is: yep, when ladies drink a bit, they let down their various guards and DO NOT always behave in the manner in which society has accustomed us to expect from ladies. they get loud. they get a bit rude or wacky, at times. they EVEN make out with people that they would otherwise be constrained from making out with! (and oh, how I know that feeling.) BUT, with all the loud and wacky and unladylike behavior they are engaging in, GUESS WHAT? you still don’t get to assault them! because we are not in Ye Medieval Tymes any more, and rape is not just something that happens to Virtuous Women of Goode Renowne. it can happen to ladies who are acting up, too. and, miraculously, it is still a crime. just like you don’t get to rob somebody because you think he is a jerk.

AMANDA: yeah. ok, do you wanna break? i think i’m going to go buy some beer

SADY: do it, lady! ENJOY YOUR BEERS. YOUR BEERS OF FREEDOM.

Photo by jbcurio, Creative Commons Attribution License

Say, ladies. A couple of economists—Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics—have unearthed a most satisfying and lucrative career option for us all: Prostitution! There’s only one problem: even though our two Steves are really brilliant economists, they just can’t figure out why most of us women don’t want to have sex for tons and tons of money. Why aren’t more women successful prostitutes?, Levitt and Dubner ask. Is it because:

a) They don’t like sex;
b) They hate men;
c) They’re kind of dumb;
d) All of the above.

If you guessed D, you are probably either Steven Levitt or Stephen Dubner. (Thanks for reading, guys!) Yes: according to Levitt and Dubner, the main obstacle standing between a woman and loads of sexy cash is her dislike of sex, her disinclination to make men happy, and her failure to understand simple economic principles. So while the world’s enthusiastic, man-loving, smarty-pants sex workers are rolling in millions from the comfort of their own homes, the world’s poorest street prostitutes get the short end of the sex-work stick—only because they hate men, hate sex, and are—from the way the Steves tell it—kinda dumb.

Now, I’m no economist, but I’m betting that the overworked, underpaid sex worker who turns tricks on the street has got deeper systemic problems to deal with than not enjoying the work enough. But I digress: Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown has already laid the groundwork on this shitstorm in her excellent piece on the Guardian. Take it away, Sady:

Levitt and Dubner build their piece around a comparison of two prostitutes: Allie, who works from her bedroom and makes between $350 and $500 an hour, depending on the client, and LaSheena, who works on the streets and probably makes about $350 a week, based on statistics. . . . LaSheena and Allie are the Goofus and Gallant of sex work, at least in the warped little scenario laid forth in the Superfreakonomics excerpt. Arising, as Levitt and Dubner seem to assume they do, from absolutely no context whatsoever (the fact that Allie is probably white, and that LaSheena is probably not, is never once addressed, for example; neither is the personal history of LaSheena explored in any detail, though we hear about Allie at excruciating length) they are not actual women so much as they are flattened-out, hollow caricatures of Success and Failure. Allie is a good prostitute; she has succeeded. LaSheena is a bad prostitute; she has failed.

What has LaSheena done wrong, you ask? Simple: She doesn’t like being a prostitute. “I don’t really like men,” she is quoted as saying. This is an interesting statement, which the authors fail to follow up. Why doesn’t LaSheena like men? Has she been beaten? Has she been raped? Is there a man taking a cut of her money? Was she forced into this job as a child by a man, by a boyfriend she loved, by sheer poverty? And has she seen the ugly side of men too often in this job to trust any? . . . We’ll never know, however, because Dubner and Levitt don’t ask. They don’t care to humanise her. She’s the Goofus in the scenario. Her poverty—which is assumed to be entirely her fault—is only there to provide a counterpoint to Allie’s shining example.

Boy, oh, boy, does Allie ever love being a prostitute!

Anyway: I highly suggest you read the whole thing. But enough dilly-dallying. Let’s dive right in to every woman’s second favorite pastime, after prostituting—chatting!

SADY: yo lady.

AMANDA: hello! wait … shouldn’t you be out, earning money for sex?

SADY: i know! i thought about it! but then i realized: i am probably not chipper enough for it. as per superfreakonomics, my disinclination to put your favorite song on the stereo and mix your favorite drink and smile gleefully about how awesome you are for paying someone to help you cheat on your wife would hurt me, probably, in the long run. PROFIT-WISE, that is!

AMANDA: right. which is why us curmudgeons have chosen a life of blogging, instead of the more obvious choice.

SADY: exactly. it’s a wonder more women aren’t out sexing for cash instead of blogging for dollars! oh, except that there are various disincentives to do that, actually? like, i am pretty sure there are women that choose to do sex work and like it, but what with the social marginalization, lack of protection by the law, health risks, etc. it is actually NOT a wonder that more women do not choose it.

AMANDA: there are so many things wrong with the treatment here, i can’t even begin. you did a lot of the work in your piece, but i wanted to start off with this one sentence from the freakonomics excerpt: “There is one labour market women have always dominated: prostitution.” hmm. really? i mean, i get that perhaps this is meant to be some sort of play on words, but given the amount of money men have made off of pimping out or trafficking prostitutes, i am not exaaaactly sure this is the case.

SADY: right? i mean, to frame the sex industry—not just prostitution, but other varieties of sex work in general—as “female-dominated” is just absurdly wrong. it’s like calling starbucks “cashier-dominated.” there are more women on the front lines, but management is by no means primarily or exclusively female. and given the exploitative relationship management has traditionally had with the service employees, that’s something to worry about. not that there aren’t exploitative female madams, etc. but you get where i am going, i hope. i think the entire article is so infuriating largely because it aims to present an “economic” analysis of prostitution by… talking to one sex worker, basically? and reading the work of one other dude? this stuff is insanely complex, and people have been fighting about it and studying it forever, and it DRIVES ME INSANE that people are going to read this fluff and confuse it with an actual analysis.

AMANDA: yeah. here’s another little pet peeve of mine: pretending that “prostitution” is the same as “sex.” I understand that prostitution is a lot different than it was 100 years ago, and a lot of that has to do with changes in attitudes toward sex. but when these researchers say that prostitutes now see competition from “any woman who is willing to have sex with a man for free,” they’re implying that tons of women are actually performing the work of a prostitute on a daily basis, which is absolutely not the case. the reality is that many prostitutes are not being paid to “have sex.” they are being paid—as the researches note with the high-class prostitute—to have the kinds of sex that men can’t get on a daily basis. and in reality, that doesn’t mean “interesting sex” or “anal sex” or “enthusiastic sex” that these dudes just can’t get out of their wives. it also means degradation. prostitutes are popular, to some men, because they can do whatever they want to them, and the appeal isn’t in a particular sex act that they can’t get at home, but rather in the experience of paying someone to be their sex partner. when these researches say you “have to like sex” enough to be a prostitute, that’s bullshit. plenty of women like sex. you have to like PROSTITUTION enough. or … be poor! and according to them, poor prostitutes are kind of fucking idiots.

SADY: well, this was somewhere i was heading in the piece i wrote for CiF, but there just wasn’t room to talk about it there; even if we don’t assume that all men are hiring prostitutes specifically to “degrade” them—and i don’t know what goes on in all circumstances, i do assume that a lot of guys want to degrade women because they get off on the power imbalance and others do it for other reasons, from all the first-hand testimony I’ve heard—the nature of the transaction is fundamentally different than the nature of the transaction that is casual sex. at the risk of oversimplifying: in prostitution, a woman does what you want her to do, for money. in sex—even casual sex—a woman does some of what you want her to do, or maybe even all of it, but only in exchange for you doing what she wants as well. in casual sex, there is (unless you are a huge asshole) the expectation that you will be dealing with the desires and needs of the other party. female desire enters the picture. and i think THAT, we can say, is probably a big part of the “sex” vs. “prostitution” thing. even if the guys don’t want to HURT the prostitutes, they’re paying them to have sex that has nothing to do with their desires and everything to do with the desires of their clients. the only way you can miss that is if you don’t acknowledge that women have desire.

AMANDA: right. so these economists are stumped—stumped, i tell you!—as to why more women don’t spend their entire lives pleasing men and receiving no pleasure in return. they can’t understand why this is, because outside of prostitution, women are lining up in droves to have sex! but instead of working through their obvious miscalculations here, they decide to tell imply that women are probably just kind of dumb. the kicker is when, at the end of the piece, this is how the researchers leave Allie, the “high-class” prostitute who ended up becoming an economist: “Several students said this was the best lecture they had in all their years at the university, which is both a firm testament to Allie’s insights and a brutal indictment of Levitt and the other professors.” As if it’s some kind of joke! when, in reality, these guys actually don’t understand wtf they’re talking about, and they’re actually seemingly amused that a prostitute could not be a dumbass. so: why didn’t she write this?

SADY: RIGHT! and that’s the thing; i don’t want to discount her insights or experiences—or those of LaSheena, the less privileged sex worker they interviewed for five seconds and then apparently forgot about because she wasn’t smart enough to be a billionare sextrepreneur—but I think Levitt and Dubner kind of effectively discounted her already, by using her as a subject even though she IS GETTING A DEGREE IN ECONOMICS and simplifying her story, which has GOT to be more complex than the one we’re reading, into this wacky quirky Happy Hooker stereotype.

AMANDA: yeah. and thank god she is getting an economics degree, because this is Exhibit A as to why more women need to be represented in the sciences. I’m sure that these guys are brilliant economists, but when you’re attempting to form a theory as to why HALF OF HUMANS choose not to be prostitutes for a living, perhaps your own experience will be insufficient.

SADY: right. oh, and the lazy dumb hooker is getting a DEGREE IN ECONOMICS now! wacky twist! did you catch the part where they said she became a prostitute because she “just didn’t like working all that hard?”

AMANDA: oh yeah. i caught that part. the weird thing is that the premise of their investigation is: why don’t women prostitute themselves out for cash, when the pay is so good? and they entirely fail to even begin to answer that question. they don’t come up with one reason why she wouldn’t! oh, they come up with one reason: maybe she’s married. but i don’t see another one!

SADY: i can’t think of a single one! there’s, like, one line where they acknowledge that it’s ILLEGAL (being harassed, jailed, and potentially raped by cops: A DISINCENTIVE???) but that’s only in the service of pointing out that its illegal status allows Allie to charge high fees.

AMANDA: haha right. now, i dont’ know if Levitt and Dubner are heterosexual males, but let’s assume they are.

SADY: assumed!

AMANDA: the only appropriate response to the ridiculous question posed in the article would be, “I don’t know, why don’t you suck cock for a living?” Why don’t you suck cock, out of your fancy house, instead of being a famous economist? I’m sure that will be the pertinent question in “SuperDuperFreakonomics: The Freakiestonomics Yet”

SADY: yes, at some point. WHY AREN’T LEVITT AND DUBNER JOINTLY FELLATING YOU RIGHT NOW: A FREAKONOMIC ANALYSIS.

AMANDA: probably because they don’t like sex?

SADY: i mean, jesus. sex work is complicated. i’m so sure—and i have to keep reiterating this, because i feel bad for assuming that allie’s “i just happened to go on an online dating service and tell people i was an escort because, tee-hee, i just love sex” narrative is a Pile O’ Poopy—that there are women who are very fulfilled in their sex work, or at least prefer it to the other jobs they could have. i’m SURE of this. but asking THAT ONE LADY to tell you what prostitution is like—hell, even what the MONEY side of prostitution is like—is massively misguided.

AMANDA: i mean honestly. LaSheena straight-up tells them that she “doesn’t like men.” And somehow, because Allie says that she LOVES men, this sample size of 2 indicates that women who like men make tons of money doin’ what they love, and women who don’t like men are poor street hookers. so really, women don’t cash in on the obvious benefits of prostitution because they’re … bitches?

SADY: that’s what irked me so much – they’re so invested in this Ayn Rand fantasy of the fulfilled sex-liking happy safe rich sex worker that pretty much everyone else is left out of the picture, or else shamed as inadequate. Allie is like the John Galt of professional sex, in this equation.

AMANDA: hahaha

SADY: i also liked the fact that their response to LaSheena’s statement of “I don’t like men” was… what if there was more money in it for you? and she’s like, “yeah! sure! what’s that you say? I can get my degree from home in my spare time? And it includes a course in Air Conditioner Repair?” it turns into this weird sales pitch for sex workers.

AMANDA: right. it’s like, why do you think she is doing this? because she DOESN’T want money?

SADY: yes. and even though we know pretty much everything about Allie up to and including what she ate for breakfast this morning and whether there is corn in her poo, we know nothing about LaSheena. none of the factors that have led to her having four more or less illegal, low-paying jobs, at least one of which she hates, all of which are dangerous. and am i wrong for thinking her story might be the more interesting of the two? then again, maybe she just didn’t want to talk to the Freakonomics guys. can’t say I blame her!

AMANDA: i’m pretty sure that she didn’t want to talk to the fucking Freakonomics guys. They admit that they had to pay her in order for her to talk to them, which they think says a lot about how desperate for money she is. but i think it just shows how unpleasant it is to be recast in the lens of the Freakonomics guys.

Photo by otisarchive3

Last week, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner fired Emmy-winning writer Kater Gordon. The week before that, Late Night comedian David Letterman admitted to having sexual affairs with women on his staff. The week before that, film director Roman Polanski was finally detained after raping the 13-year-old model he had hired for a Vogue shoot. What do these incidents have in common? If you said “probably nothing,” you would be wrong!

Apparently, when three famous Hollywood men make news within a one-month period—whether the news concern rape, sex, or normal managerial decisions—those men are doomed to be nonsensically linked in the public consciousness forevermore! To wit: Linda Hirshman titled her Double X post on the Letterman scandal “Bad Sex: Letterman, Polanski, Ensign, and Edwards.” (Sorry, Linda: one of the above ain’t sex!) In a post on the Gordon firing, Kate Harding wrote for Broadsheet,”In the wake of the Letterman scandal, [the] question lurks.” (The question: Sexy times??) And Gawker’s speculation on the Gordon-Weiner dust-up lists a “strictly unprofessional relationship” as its first firing “theory.” (Nevermind that that makes absolutely no sense!)

By the Hollywood gossip transitive property, that means that Matthew Weiner probably fired Kater Gordon because . . . child rape, somehow! And because this is Mad Men we’re talking about, Gordon’s firing MUST be eerily reminiscent of the booze-soaked hyper-sexual office story-line of at least ONE of the television show’s beloved characters!

In this week’s edition of Sexist Beatdown, Sady of Tiger Beatdown and I implore you to join us as we take a trip down the sexual speculation rabbithole, only to find that: (a) real life ain’t Mad Men, and (b) once again, with feeling: RAPE ISN’T SEX.

—

AMANDA: So, Kater Gordon and Matthew Weiner. Hittin’ it?

SADY: um, probably! because she worked for him! and got promoted! and then didn’t work for him any longer! those are all solid proofs of Hittin’ It, right? i could use them in Hittin’ It Court if I wanted to.

AMANDA: Personally, I think that the number one indication that they are Probably Hittin’ It is that David letterman had sex with some lady!

SADY: i know, right? IN THE WORKPLACE! I think we must therefore assume that everyone in the workplace is hittin’ it, all the time. i feel bad about not caring that much about the letterman thing. i mean: i get that there was a BIG-ASS power difference between letterman and his assistant. there is a big-ass power difference between david letterman and a lot of people. but until we know that there was not sexual harassment or quid pro quo stuff going on there, it’s just another story about somebody cheating on somebody to me. and i am familiar with the fact that people cheat on each other. and not that scandalized by it. i do watch “mad men!”

AMANDA: I agree. I don’t care about that or Jimmy Kimmel or whatever that is. Whenever those stories come up, everyone scrambles to “ask the questions” about whether the boss abused their power, whether the employee benefited from the relationship, whether there was coercion etc. But I think REALLY people just want to hear more about the details of their romance. ad in the case of Kater Gordon, their imagined made-up romance

SADY: yeah, exactly. you know my favorite thing about all this? is the parallels drawn between letterman and polanski. like: WOW, there are a lot of “SEX” “SCANDALS” going on, what with these two getting up to their morally equivalent no-goodery! but the kater gordon thing is just fundamentally wrong because we have no evidence of it. no evidence of coercion, and no evidence of a talentless young harlot being promoted due to her relationship with The Boss.

AMANDA: Right? I read one comment when the Letterman thing broke that was like, “Roman Polanski should send David Letterman flowers.” And I thought, how awkward would you feel being David Letterman receiving flowers from a child rapist because you had consensual sex with a grown woman?

SADY: haha, yeah. and, i mean, i don’t know whether the kater gordon/weiner Imaginary Romance and the jimmy kimmel Actual Romance are getting so much play because people are just wanting to hitch onto that sweet “sex” scandal gravy train or what.

AMANDA: people seem almost embarrassed to bring it up. all the critiques i’ve read have used passive language like, “parallels between weiner and letterman have been raised” in order to raise the issue themselves

SADY: right. but the parallels between weiner and letterman which ACTUALLY EXIST is that two young women worked for them, and were promoted to high-profile positions. and, you know. whatever the lady on Letterman had going for her, talentwise, is a debatable question. but Gordon would seem to be legitimately deserving of promotion.

AMANDA: yeah, and it’s extremely insulting to both the boss and the employee when commenters say, “why would anyone promote a woman? fucking, maybe?”

SADY: right, especially when her skill is so demonstrable. “oh, we know you got that emmy for that episode we all liked WITH SEX! and then the episode magically became good and forced us all to write positive reviews of it BECAUSE OF YOUR SEXINESS!” it’s refusing to give her any credit at all for her work.

AMANDA: except for that dream sequence in The Fog. Not so great. But my favorite comparison here is when people draw parallels between Weiner and Gordon and plotlines on Mad Men. Like, what if Gordon IS PEGGY OLSON? OR, what if Gordon was Freddy Rumsen, and was fired for pissing herself? ORRRRR what if Gordon was Sal, and was fired for not having gay sex? Spoiler.

SADY: what if she were that dude who got his foot run over with a lawnmower, and was fired because she couldn’t play golf any more? DO WE KNOW KATER GORDON HAS FEET? has anyone seen her golfing lately?

AMANDA: hahaha. yeah. the take-away from that is that people just really love the show so much they want it to be REAL. but that’s kind of fucked up, considering the source material.

SADY: yeah, exactly. the thought is that since it’s about a workplace where people are always cheatin’ and drinkin’ and smokin’ there must ACTUALLY be some chicanery going on, because otherwise the beautiful dream of a sexist, racist office that smells like cigarettes and freddy rumsen’s pee will seem all too unattainable.

AMANDA: yeah. i mean, maybe she had sex with the actor who plays Duck. it’s possible!

SADY: yeah… but does this mean that the people who wrote “star trek” did it all on a spaceship, too? but, i mean. honestly. the Mysteries of Her Dismissal are one thing… and i get mad when talented women are fired from shows, even when i don’t like them, as with the SNL Lady Quota. but i can’t help but feel that the people who are weighing in to be all “PROBABLY BECAUSE SHE AND MATTHEW WEINER HAD NAKED TIMES HUH” are, um, not helping. that’s the saddest part of this: that, for some reason, we still can’t think of women as just part of the workplace. even though the whole point of “mad men” is that we’re So Beyond That Now. i still feel bad for not feeling bad about the letterman thing, though!

AMANDA: i personally feel a little bit uncomfortable about my disinterest in that also, because if i were working for a company where my coworkers were fucking my boss, that would be a problem for me. although, maybe you don’t know until some crazy dude extorts your boss for 2 million!

SADY: ha, yeah. i mean, i don’t think i’d ever feel comfortable fucking someone in a position to fire me. i would not feel like i was that person’s equal. and i don’t think that it’s possible to separate your sexual relationship from your professional relationship to the degree that some people might hope, and that can result in unfair treatment. BUT, there’s no reason to think that boss/employee relationships are ALWAYS uncomfortable for the employee involved, or that they’re always predatory.

AMANDA: right. it’s also probably nobody else’s business except for the people involved, which is the main thing.

SADY: exactly. it’s not like this is someone in a position of public office, who holds accountability to All of Us. at worst, we might not want to hang out with David Letterman any more. which: good news! David Letterman doesn’t want to hang out with any of us anyway! neither does Matthew Weiner! PROBLEM SOLVED.

AMANDA: and that’s fine, because DESPITE SUGGESTIONS TO THE CONTRARY, he does not seem half as charming as Don Draper.

SADY: right. he seems like more of a bert cooper to me, in fact! maybe he fired kater gordon because she wouldn’t take her shoes off. PROBABLY, RIGHT?

AMANDA: prb. prbbbbbb! haha! i cannot type any longer!

SADY: that or her sterling-esque blackface routine, which i think we can all agree was inappropriate.

Photo by Carin Baer, via AMC.

MacKenzie Phillips, daughter of Mamas & the Papas scribe John Phillips, star of One Day at a Time, daughter of Alexandria, Va., appeared on Oprah this week to tell the world that her father raped her for a decade.

Let’s see how Wikipedia treats such a revelation, on MacKenzie Phillips’ page: “According to an article in People magazine, she alleges in the book that at the age of 19, on the night before her first wedding, she ‘woke up that night from a blackout to find [herself] having sex with [her] own father’; both reportedly were under the influence of drugs at the time. Afterwards an incestuous relationship developed, lasting ten years.”

And in John Phillips’ Wikipedia page: “In September 2009, John’s daughter Mackenzie Phillips alleged in a new memoir, High on Arrival, that she and her father had a consentual ten-year incestuous relationship. She stated that the relationship began when she was 19 years old in 1979, after Philips raped her while they were both under the influence of heavy narcotics on the eve of her first marriage.”

Woah woah woah! Did you see how they just dropped that “consensual” in there?

Whoever is editing MacKenzie’s page decided to leave consent issues out of it—the relationship “developed.” But editors of John Phillips’ Wikipedia page want to make sure that readers know the father-daughter incestuous relationship was totally mutual. The most recent contributor to the page decided to remove some scare quotes around the world “consensual.” Others have tried to scrub the whole incest thing out of his profile. One announced that they both “had planned to go burn in Hell together,” as blame should be distributed equally between a horrifically abusive father and his child. (Note: It’s not all rape apologists over at John’s page. Another contributor keeps editing Phillips’ “Occupation” to read “Musician, Rapist”).

So! Join me and Sady of Tiger Beatdown as we attempt to edit the Wikipedia pages of OUR MINDS to stop blaming the victim and start

SADY: oh, say, have you heard of any fairly famous stories of abuse and sexual assault that people are spinning in a totally alarmingly rape-culturey way lately? because I HAVE!

AMANDA: wait … you mean the consensual incest?

SADY: ha ha, YEAH. i played a little game, the day that story broke. it was called, How Many Headlines Are Not Totally Fucked Up?

AMANDA: how many!

SADY: here is your answer: i found two that were not! one was on MTV news and it read:  “Mackenzie Phillips Claims Her Father Raped, Drugged Her.” one was on E! and it read, “Mackenzie Phillips: I Was Raped By My Father.” now! you could find some problems with these headlines! BUT, every other source was like “Mackenzie Phillips Confesses Sex Affair With Dad.” leaving out the part where it became “consensual” after several rapes.[Note: Huffington Post has done pretty well on this too

AMANDA: and the part where it never becomes “consensual”! because it never can be! i was interested the differences in the media coverage of this incident and the Phillip Garrido incident. there’s a whole lot we don’t know about that situation, but whenever “sex” is mentioned between Garrido and his kidnapee, it’s usually at least referred to as rape. because you can’t kidnap a person and rape them and then raise them as your child/wife and have that slowly blossom into a consensual relationship. and this is the same thing, except—you can’t rate tragedies, but i’m gonna—worse? because he is the man with the responsibility to raise his child and he kidnapped her from her childhood and drugged her and raped her for decades.

SADY: yeah. i mean, here’s the thing. this reminded me a lot of anais nin, who started having “consensual” sex with her father as an adult. BUT: she also struggled to figure out whether these memories of him molesting her as a child were real or distorted or what (a PRETTY common thing for kids, who have trouble making sense of memories of molestation) and there’s no doubt that he was abusive to her in other ways. and, like, these are different cases. phillips’ started out, unambiguously, as sexual assault, and she named it as such. but then – here’s a thing i think is tricky to articulate so IF I FUCK UP TELL ME – it became “consensual,” to HER, but arose out of this context of abuse and drugs where she basically didn’t have the option of NOT being victimized in this way. like, i think that the whole “compliance is not consent” thing is important to articulate, because sometimes people tell themselves that what is happening is consensual just to deal with the fact that they don’t have an option of it NOT happening.

AMANDA: definitely. because even if you leave that relationship, that means severing one of the most important relationships in your life, your relationship with your father. and that’s not a real choice. especially when your father has been emotionally and physically—so many drugs!—prepping you to consent to this shit since age 10

SADY: right. exactly. it’s a thing a lot of people struggle with, whether it’s abusive family relationships or (HEY!) rape culture: when you’re receiving constant information to the effect that how you are treated is normal and OK and excusable, you – you, yourself! – may have trouble articulating that what was done to you was not OK.

AMANDA: i didn’t watch the oprah interview, but i was dismayed to hear how it went down. Oprah, as many know, was raped as a child as well. she’s interviewed a lot of victims of sexual assault on her show, and I think that’s great. but there’s still this very obvious manipulation of the interview for the general public – silently judging for Phillips continuing to GET RAPED after she turned 18, etc.

SADY: right. but her take can be sort of sensationalistic. and i have a problem with the Oprah Face – it’s something she does a lot in interviews, this thing of Making The Face You Imagine Your Audience To Be Making – so she looks “scandalized” when what is said is “scandalous” or etc.

AMANDA: yeah. and it’s so weird in a situation like this, because the news of this years-long abuse just hangs there. where do you go with it? it’s just objectively awful and terrible, but interviewers have tried to spice it up a little bit by judging which parts were most awful, and which parts were maybe her fault

SADY: actually, can i tell you my FAVORITE reactions? they were really special! and did not come from oprah!

AMANDA: sure!

SADY: my FAVORITE reactions have been those that are like, “this is so horrible! for my ENJOYMENT OF THE MUSIC OF JOHN PHILIPS!” which is closely tied to the Should She Have Said Anything At All? Maybe Not! debate, but that is fairly predictable and pedestrian silencing, whereas this – THIS! – demonstrates a bold and innovative approach to making the issues secondary to your own personal comfort.

AMANDA: i know. how is that even related? i’m reading a story about surviving rape, why the fuck do i care if someone does or does not like the mamas and the papas?

SADY: but that’s the thing! and this happens so often in cases of celebrity abuse. like, i believe that, when you and i discussed the chris brown and rihanna thing, you pointed out that a lot of people who covered it were just coming off a post where they drew jizz on a star’s face or whatever to express disapproval.

AMANDA: yeah.

SADY: when something like this is treated as a “celebrity story” (which it is, to some extent) rather than a story about sexual violence (which it is, to a larger extent, I would argue) there’s going to be lazy or uneducated or insensitive coverage. which isn’t to say that everyone in the whole wide world who writes about celebrities is lazy or uneducated or insensitive, because that’s blatantly untrue, but that people who don’t know shit are going to write their piece too.

AMANDA: and on that note: with this story in particular, i find the “Think of the Children” defense extremely bizarre. I mean, what kid is going to be reading and/or caring about news about John and Mackenzie Phillips? I barely knew who she was before I heard about this. If a parent had to explain incest or rape to a child because of this news (and ooooh, talking to your kid about abuse is such a baaad thing), they’re first going to have to explain who the fuck these people are, right?

SADY: yeah. totally true! but, i mean, speaking of talking about abuse… the reactions that have been like, “why did she tell us ewww” or “but what of my record collection?” have been rare(ish) and call-out-able.

AMANDA: Except from her own family! Bonus reaction of her step-mother, who was married to John at the time: “John was a good man who had the disease of alcoholism and drug addiction,” the statement read. “He was incapable, no matter how drunk or drugged he was, of having such a relationship with his own child.”

SADY: “Mackenzie has a lot of mental illness. She’s had a needle stuck up her arm for 35 years.”

AMANDA: I mean, the statement isn’t even like, “i had no awareness of this happening,” but rather, “he couldn’t have done this, he was too good!”

SADY: right! the drug abuse and mental health issues have NOTHING to do with potential trauma! she’s just a freakshow! also, john was cool!

AMANDA: yeah. SHE did a lot of drugs, so she can’t be trusted. HE did even more drugs, so he can’t be a rapist. it all makes sense!

SADY: i mean… on some level? because my heart is full of twinkly stars and daisies and unicorn dust? i want to see how this HUGE story, which is playing out in public and is right in front of everyone’s face, can actually illuminate for people how victim-blaming and misunderstandings of consent can work. like, with the family turning on her. and the accusations that she just wants attention. and the minimizing of the word “rape” and widespread use of the word “sex.” these things are so common in MUCH SMALLER STORIES and i want to believe that seeing them, and seeing a conversation around them, is going to show people how fucked-up they are.

AMANDA: i’ll believe it when i see it

SADY: yeah. i mean, what’s typically going to happen is that voices who call shit out are going to be called fringe and unreasonable and mean and blah de blee blah bloo. but, you know. people are talking about incest now. and what with how little we all seem to get about it, given how it’s been covered? i hope to God at least some of us are going to REALIZE how little we get it, and move in the getting-it direction.

AMANDA: i agree that that much will probably happen. i hope.

It’s a question every woman must ask herself when she comes in contact with a Sexist Douche: Will she endure his douchery, or will she conquer it? In this edition of Sexist Beatdown, Sady of Tiger Beatdown joins me to discuss various coping strategies in a world littered with sexist douches.

Categories of douche discussed: Douches Who Explain Things To You; Douches Who Steal Your Ideas; Douches Who Assume the Woman Who Claimed Her Husband Was Trying to Kill Her Was Just A Crazy Liar; Douches Who Stalk You When You Don’t Show Them Your Tits; Douches Who Build Careers On Cartoon Rape Jokes.

But first, a douche coping primer:

(a) HOW TO ENDURE DOUCHES. April 2008. Rebecca Solnit for the Los Angeles Times on what to do when old white dudes Sit You Down and Explain their superior understanding of a Recently Released and Very Important Book—a Book he doesn’t realize you Wrote.

(b) HOW TO CONQUER DOUCHES. Sept. 2009. Deborah Solomon of the New York Times interviews “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane, and asks him why he’s such a fucking douche.

Proceed.

SADY: why, good day, madam! allow me to EXPLAIN why we should talk about dudes who EXPLAIN things to the ladies. and other assorted douches!

AMANDA: YEAH!

SADY:: i have indeed read the article you recommend. which is delightful! and i have been thinking about douches all week long. seems to me they are a reoccuring problem in human life! specifically, douches of the SEXIST variety.

AMANDA: yes. first i’d like to say that we are all, at one point or another, douches. some douches, however, endure, and withstand the test of time.

SADY:: right. it’s when “douche” stops being an accidental, occasional thing and becomes a lifestyle that you really have to think about strategies.

AMANDA: for example: the douchey guy who was explaining to Rebecca Solnit about this book that she wrote and he didn’t read that he thought she didn’t understand. i, too, have thought i understood things that i didn’t understand. i was once a tween! but when you grow out of your tweens and begin lecturing historians about nonfiction books they’ve recently published, perhaps it’s time to consider WHY you think you know the things that you don’t know.

SADY:: right: or (same article!) the douche-by-default who told this DELIGHTFUL story about how a neighbor’s wife had run out of the house and started screaming that her husband was trying to kill her. ha! ha! a merry jest! unless, you know, her husband was trying to kill her. a possibility Mr. DBD apparently didn’t consider. it’s people assuming that they have the right to define what matters and what doesn’t, and defining that 100% in their favor at all times, that i think makes a true douche.

AMANDA: one of the things that Solnit talks about is how strong gender roles play into her reactions to these affronts to her intelligence. she’s really, really polite! (and then, of course, balls up her outrage into a really awesome LAT opinion piece, but she’s polite to their faces) EVEN when, as she says, it’s completely obvious to everyone that these Men Who Explain Things are shitting their douche all over the place.

SADY:: right. and i think that’s the issue. one of the things a Sexist Douche capitalizes on is that ladies are socialized, more or less from birth, not to express anger or outrage publicly. not to be confrontational AT ALL, in fact. and the double-bind there is that, if you don’t express anger or outrage, people get away with walking all over you, and they can say that you “deserved” it. but if you DO, you’re not acting like a REAL WOMAN, and you are therefore absurd! fodder for a delightful joke yourself!

AMANDA: yeah, and even I—and I do not give a shit about censoring myself when I write a piece—I experience this pretty frequently in person. I’ve attributed it to shyness, but I think there’s a gendering in the form of deference that it can take. case in point: a male friend was telling me a story about how he was at a bar, and this college student aged women was sitting alone at the bar. and an older drunk guy was sitting next to her, and he was grossly flirting with her, and the college aged woman was humoring him – politely laughing at his jokes, etc. and my friend relayed the story back to me, saying that he thought the woman’s behavior was ‘disgusting,’ and he didn’t understand why she would flirt with the guy.

SADY:: uh, yeah. because it’s not like ladies routinely do that to NOT be called a bitch!

AMANDA: yeah! and the guy is drunk, and you don’t want trouble, and you just want to drink your beer.

SADY:: right. and i think some guys, not having done that, don’t realize how shitty and scary it can get. like, once i was walking down the block past a cafe with an open-air porch. and two guys make some loud comment about how my tits are SPECTACULAR and do i want to sit with them? and i say “fuck off,” as you do. and these guys GOT IN THEIR VAN AND FOLLOWED ME AND SCREAMED AT ME FOR LIKE FIVE BLOCKS.

AMANDA: i mean, why were you being such a bitch? I think that Men who Explain Things are kind of like Drunk Guy At Bar or Drunk Guys Who Like Boobs, that you either have to say, ‘fuck off, dude’ and risk their wrath, or just ignore it and nod along. because—in this article!—even when you try to politely correct them, because you are a polite woman who happens to know something, they won’t even listen and/or believe you. and it is a pain! as someone who has basically grown up with the internet, everyone can call everyone else on their shit pretty easily, and i know i’ve been called out as much as i’ve called other people out. but it’s been surprising to me how many people have just not even listened to me over the course of time. just physically not even listened! people who are not Drunk Explainy Guy, but rather My Friends

SADY:: right. and, i mean, i think it’s a form of asserting authority. if you Explain Things, you’re attempting to create an environment in which you are the expert and the lady you’re talking to is dumber than you. but if somebody challenges you, and you react with either belligerence or out-of-hand dismissal, you are still asserting authority. i seriously wonder if guys realize what a sexist power play this is. creating an environment in which you are the authority and objecting to you or calling you out on your shit is either unsafe or looked-down-upon or both. i mean, i am typically fairly confrontational one-on-one. like, confrontational sometimes in unsafe ways that have resulted in me being followed down the block or punched in the face or whatever. but i often, when there are people around, find myself being kind of disappointingly meek and subtle and caring more about whether i seem like a “good sport” than whether i’m articulating my point as fully as possible.

AMANDA: totally. can i tell a college story?

SADY:: oh yes!

AMANDA: SO IN COLLEGE, I think everyone has a little bit of Explain Things in them. you’re in college and you know everything, whatever. and in my college, in my group of friends, the positions of authority were (a) people who were funny, and (b) people who could buy beer. and so the jokes could get kind of competitive in conversation, and there were so many times that my boyfriend, who was also funny, would STEAL MY JOKES.

SADY:: AUGH

AMANDA: and not like, i would tell him a joke one day and he would use it the next day, among friends. i would make a comment, and he would repeat the comment—not necessarily louder, but from him—and then people would laugh! oh my god! it was torture! and a friend of mine, who was also dating a guy in the same circle of friends, recently reported the exact same thing. I know people could hear me, because he STOLE MY JOKES, but for some reason they weren’t funny until he said them

SADY:: AHHHH! This happens ALL THE TIME! I too have experienced the hell of Point/Joke-Repeating Torture!

AMANDA: REALLY?

SADY:: for me, it’s not often jokes so much as serious points. like, people like my jokes just fine. but in, like, work meetings, or classes, or serious discussions, i’ll say something (or another woman will say something, or a person of color will say something: it works along MORE THAN ONE AXIS, i tell you) and it won’t even be heard. or people will just kind of be like, oh! Whatever! The lady said something! ON TO SERIOUS BUSINESS. and then a dude will say the VERY SAME THING and people will engage.

AMANDA: the worst thing about this is that, uh, it comes off looking like a bit of a conspiracy theory. like, I KNOW I SAID IT. but nobody else seems to recall it in the same way, and the LA Times piece talks about that too – competing memories of the same event, where two people remember different things being said and happening (mostly: the douche remembers the lady being crazy and/or irrelevant), and only one of those memories is valued. it’s enough to drive someone crazy, but i do think that all of these things have really significantly affected my personality. like, i feel like i’ve definitely become a lot more confident in my ideas and my positions, and better at articulating them, since i started writing about lady stuff. but it’s likely that i’ve become shyer in person—just because after i’ve put myself out there i know how absolutely intense and insane the reeactions from strangers can be. the’yre scary, and it’s a lot easier to ignore them if they’re online

SADY:: oh, yeah. can i tell you the best/worst side effect of lady blogging for me?

AMANDA: yes

SADY:: first, most of the people in my life read the ladyblog and have said kind things about it. so i am like, WELL! should i choose to weigh in on LADYBUSINESS, surely my opinion will be valued!

AMANDA: oh no…

SADY:: but then, since i have ALSO received so much feedback to the effect that i am an insane delusional preachy humorless feminazi, i also start worrying that everyone else thinks THAT of me, too.

AMANDA: yeah. YES. i TOO HAVE EXPERIENCED THIS. and honestly, part of it is a reflection of the fact that i just want to live my life like anyone and not bring my work home with me that if a dude i know makes a comment, i don’t necessarily step up to the bat. i choose my battles. but some people i think are afraid that i’m going to be a “bitch” to them!

SADY:: right! and the constant awareness of what people might think of you if they are huge sexists can actually make you the most incoherent person alive! “ha ha, well, I’M LAUGHING AT YOUR JOKE, but it’s really not funny, and I’M NOT INSANE, but i think that’s fucked up, BUT I WANT TO BE NICE ABOUT IT, but you are being an asshole!” this constant dance between feeling obliged to speak up and trying to do the insane performing-monkey Look You Can’t Stereotype Me Dance.

AMANDA: exactly. can we end by talking about someone who has managed to make a career out of conquering douchebags, Deborah Solomon?

SADY:: i believe we should do so!

AMANDA: i’m sure tons of people have called deborah solomon a bitch, but it doesn’t matter. at all.

SADY:: people are AAAAAAAANGRY about that NYT interview [with "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane], dude! i have seen a LOT of reaction to the effect of “how dare she” and “she came off SO MUCH WORSE than he did” and etc. etc. etc.

AMANDA: that was the greatest interview of all time! i want to make one point about it: after she hammers him over the rape jokes and the racist jokes, she totally razzes him on technical aspects. so any reader who was like, ’she’s some crazy feminazi’ gets very confused at that point … like, ’she’s some crazy feminazi who … has a deep understanding of the work of a colorist?’

SADY:: yeah. that was what i loved: the whole “but i am a douche in the name of art” defense was completely shut down by her very specific criticism of the art itself. like, “actually, no, you are not a crazy diamond who must therefore shine on. you’re a hack, and your material stinks.”

AMANDA: also, ‘are you straight?’ that question was just a bonus, i felt like. i can’t really justify exactly why that question was asked.

SADY:: yeah. some people thought it was mean-spirited, in that there’s been speculation about his sexuality before from (shall we say) Less Than Enlightened sources! BUT, it got him talking about the women in his life and why he apparently doesn’t have any. and the “why is that” follow-up just blew my mind.

AMANDA: to me, i thought it showed that she was completely in control of the interviewsomehow, she had just really accurately judged him, and she was going to ask all the questions necessary to reveal him to the world.

SADY:: yeah. it’s the control radiating throughout the interview that i really loved. there was no “let’s play nice” in it. she was not only a character in the interview, she was the chief character. she got him in the room, she sat him down, and she put him in a position to defend himself on specific terms rather than push it off on how Bitches Just Don’t Understand. which: maybe Bitches don’t! But when one of the Bitches is sitting across from you, recording your words for the NYT, you best have a good answer planned, dude.

Photo by flickr user mrbill, Creative Commons license 2.0.

“No means yes”: It’s not just for Yale frat guys, celebrity defense attorneys, and the citizens of opposite land. Nope, that line of reasoning is also a pretty common one among old, privileged ladies, and other groups you may expect to find sitting on the jury of your rape trial!

Last month, Dan Kahan of Yale University Law School released a study examining the cultural factors at play in popular reactions to rape cases. Kahan’s research question was straightforward: If a person voices “repeated verbal objections” to a sex act, is it rape?

In other words, who among us thinks that “no” really means “no,” and who thinks that “no” is just a handy excuse for loose women? As it turns out, knowing that “no” means “no” has little to do with your gender, and a lot to do with what you think about gender.

People Who Think “No” Means “No”: Men and women with an “egalitarian” worldview which “judges the character of men and women by a largely unitary measure, and treats female sexuality as a legitimate expression of individual autonomy.” Makes sense, right? Not to some:

People Who Think “No” Means “Maybe”: As it turns out, people who can’t tell the difference between “yes” and “no” are nevertheless very invested in maintaining differences between “men” and “women.” The people most likely to believe that a rape victim actually consented, even though she said “no”? Those with a “conservative, traditional, and hierarchical” worldview, marked by “highly differentiated and stratified gender roles.”

Among this group, older women were the most likely to pooh-pooh “no means no”: “Overall, women were no more or less likely to favor conviction than were men. However, women who subscribed to the hierarchical cultural style—particularly older women who did—were more inclined to form a pro-defendant view of the facts.” And Sady of the the brand-spankin’ Tiger Beatdown and I think that requires a Sexist Beatdown.

BUT FIRST, some background: Kahan based his study on the Ironically Fucked-Up Rape Case of the Century, Commonwealth v. Berkowitz. The case surrounded a college sophomore girl and a college sophomore boy who got to know each other—platonically—through a “sexual-assault awareness lecture” entitled, I’m not fucking kidding, “Does ‘No’ Sometimes Mean ‘Yes’?”

Only weeks later, the content of that lecture would be tested when the girl entered the boy’s dorm room, and they got to talking:

Before the victim could leave appellant’s room, however, appellant asked her to stay and “hang out for a while.” She complied because she “had time to kill” and because she didn’t really know appellant and wanted to give him “a fair chance.” Appellant asked her to give him a back rub but she declined, explaining that she did not “trust” him. Ap-pellant then asked her to have a seat on his bed. Instead, she found a seat on the floor, and conversed. . . . During this conversation she had explained she was having problems with her boyfriend. .

[After a few minutes, the defendant] moved off the bed and down on the floor, and “kind of pushed [the victim] back with his body. It wasn’t a shove, it was just kind of a leaning-type of thing.” Next appellant “straddled” and started kissing the victim. The victim responded by saying, “Look, I gotta go. I’m going to meet [my boyfriend].” Then ap-pellant lifted up her shirt and bra and began fondling her. The victim then said “no.”

After roughly thirty seconds of kissing and fondling, appellant “un-did his pants and he kind of moved his body up a little bit.” The victim was still saying “no” but “really couldn’t move because [appellant] was shifting at [her] body so he was over [her].” Appellant then tried to put his penis in her mouth. The victim did not physically resist, but rather continued to verbally protest, saying “No, I gotta go, let me go,” in a “scolding” manner.

Ten or fifteen more seconds passed before the two rose to their feet. Appellant disregarded the victim’s continual complaints that she “had to go,” and instead walked two feet away to the door and locked it so that no one from the outside could enter. . . . The victim testified that she realized at the time that the lock was not of a type that could lock people inside the room.

Then, in the victim’s words, “[appellant] put me down on the bed. It was kind of like—he didn’t throw me on the bed. It’s hard to explain. It was kind of like a push but no. . . .” She did not bounce off the bed. “It wasn’t slow like a romantic kind of thing, but it wasn’t a fast shove either. It was kind of in the middle.”

Once the victim was on the bed, appellant began “straddling” her again while he undid the knot in her sweatpants. He then removed her sweatpants and underwear from one of her legs. The victim did not physically resist in any way while on the bed because appellant was on top of her, and she “couldn’t like go anywhere.” She did not scream out at anytime because, “[i]t was like a dream was happening or some-thing.”

Appellant then used one of his hands to “guide” his penis into her vagina. At that point, after appellant was inside her, the victim began saying “no, no to him softly in a moaning kind of way … because it was just so scary.” After about thirty seconds, appellant pulled out his penis and ejaculated onto the victim’s stomach.

Immediately thereafter, appellant got off the victim and said, “Wow, I guess we just got carried away.” To this the victim retorted, “No, we didn’t get carried away, you got carried away.” The victim then quickly dressed, grabbed her school books and raced downstairs to her boy-friend who was by then waiting for her in the lounge.

Once there, the victim began crying. Her boyfriend and she went up to his dorm room where, after watching the victim clean off appellant’s semen from her stomach, he called the police.

The defendant testified in his own behalf. He admitted that he initiate[d] the first physical contact, but added that the victim warmly responded to his advances by passionately returning his kisses. He conceded that she was continually “whispering … no’s,” but claimed that she did so while “amorously . . . passionately” moaning. In effect, he took such protests to be thinly veiled acts of encouragement.

Kahan’s study presented an almost identical account to study participants, and asked them to judge whether the incident constituted rape or not. 58 percent of people surveyed said they would have found the boy “guilty of rape.” 42 percent would not have found him guilty.

AMANDA: Hey, would you like to chat now? Remember: In this chat, “no” means “maybe.”

SADY: as it should! i, personally, like to SAY “no” so that my chat partner will not believe i am enthusiastic about the chat that i totally actually want to be chatting.

AMANDA: I generally restrict using “no” and variations on it, such as “stop,” with undergraduate rapists whom I have never met before, in order to ensure that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court nows that I truly maybe wanted it.

SADY: right? so, this case. around which this study is based. is actually like some terrifying cartoon of sexist assumptions. girl goes into dude’s room. girl has been friendly with dude. dude proceeds to initiate sex, to which girl says no. sex continues on apace. which is rape, right? but instead there are all these discussions of whether she tried to unlock the door or whether he shoved her onto the bed HARD enough to constitute “force” (did she bounce?) and the “no,” although admitted to by both parties, actually DOES NOT COUNT AT ALL.

AMANDA: Did she bounce. That’s the really, really weird thing about this case: All the assumptions about what makes a “real” rape are totally fucking insane! and the one sane assumption—that if she says no, it means she doesn’t want to have sex—is discredited

SADY: right. and at one point, they mention that it was determined that the “no” meant lack of CONSENT, but did not thereby qualify the act as RAPE, since rape requires force and also that you not be married to your rape victim. so the question is, then: why isn’t “no” enough? why is “no means no” a problem, and for whom? and the answer is… um, older ladies, apparently.

AMANDA: yeah: the answer is older, privileged ladies that i imagine to be stroking gigantic white cats while informing rape victims that they actually wanted it . . . in order to hold on to their social privilege, and the diamond-encrusted tiaras that go along with it, or whatever. these older ladies are really interesting to me, and i was trying to figure out what exactly about their cultural circumstances made them want to decide this case this way?

SADY: right. like, one SAYS no to the gentleman, dear, that he might not think you a harlot. whilst you have the sex that you said “no” to because you wanted it. oh, and also, if you say no AND MEAN IT there’s no way for the dude to know that! because you SHOULD be saying no ALL THE TIME!

AMANDA: And also, implied, I think, is that if any women actually say NO and mean NO, then the women who say NO and mean YES will be considered sluttier than the rape victims. WHICH IS FUCKED UP.

SADY: UH HUH. and, like, if you want to play an incredibly hot erotic sexy game of saying “no” to sex every time you want sex, whatever. for me that is like playing a game of Let’s See How Close I Can Stick My Face To This Chainsaw every weekend. but what are the odds that a woman who says no and means yes is going to then up and take her case to a rape court? for funsies? like, that is pretty time-consuming and awful, actually! i doubt anyone is THAT invested in maintaining her reputation as a non-sex-liker! so why should it affect the construction of the law? AT ALL?

AMANDA: beats me. the really scary thing is the assumption that because these jurors will decide based on their cultural attitudes and NOT the law, it doesn’t matter WHAT the law says rape is

SADY: right, which is what the study seems to confirm.

AMANDA: however, in this particular case, the jury did decide to convict the dude of rape, and then the penn. supreme court decided 7-0 to reverse it … based on the law. or … based on their weird cultural assumptions? perhaps there were some hidden Privileged Older Ladies on the bench?

SADY: it really strikes me that the basic assumption here (in people who assume that “no means no” is a bad thing) is that dudes go around accidentally raping ladies ALL THE TIME and shouldn’t be punished for it.

AMANDA: yeah. oops!

SADY: like, the idea is that dudes can’t interpret the word “no” correctly, because they are less smart than your dog, and therefore should they accidentally rape someone who is saying “no” a lot you have to give them the benefit of the doubt. like, better luck next time, timmy!

AMANDA: even though, chillingly, the accused and the victim got to know each other in a sexual assault awareness lecture titled “Does ‘No’ Sometimes Mean ‘Yes’?” you really have to wonder how the lecture resolved that question

SADY: Oh, GOD. “in conclusion, no means no except when that is inconvenient for you personally! hope this helps!”

AMANDA: like, if the lecture concluded, “No, No Doesn’t Sometimes Mean Yes,” the attendees could have said, well yes, but what if No actually means Yes in your conclusion that No Doesn’t Mean Yes?

SADY: ah, the timeless “but I WANT ice cream” logical maneuver.

AMANDA: it’s terrible, because “no means yes” has always struck me as some sick dirty joke that people tell, but now i see that it has affected the actual reasoning of juries. the main point to take away from this is that jurors need to stop taking their jury duty vacation as an oppportunity to punish women that they think are sluts. if i were a lawyer, i would start asking that question in jury selection.

SADY: ray of light here, though? younger, more sexually active folks of both genders were more likely to grasp the meaning and validity of “no.” like, apparently if you get that women CAN consent to sex, you’re more likely to not have sex with them until they DO!

AMANDA: yeah. totally.

SADY: which, you know. the slut-punishing vigilante squad aside, makes me feel hope for this new generation, and their ability to understand words you learned when you were two years old.

AMANDA: this study was extremely depressing. i at least thought that the “she wanted it” defense would at least concede that admitting that she actually said “no” would be bad for their case. you’d assume the rapist wouldn’t admit that! but when he does, the Old Privileged Ladies seems almost more likely to believe him

SADY: well, you know. he’s a poor young man! led astray by that permissive harlot! and so on, and so forth.

AMANDA: no bouncing, so what can you do

SADY: right. NOT ENOUGH PREMARITAL FORCE-BOUNCING, that’s what was wrong with this case. so, here’s my advice to the world: however you feel about “no,” can we hope, maybe, that you are MORE excited to get a “yes?” Because that, I think, is what you should be aiming for. “Yes, I would like to have sex with you.” That, I would assume, is a statement that we can all agree is a positive.

AMANDA: . . . Maybe!

Photo by flickr user freeparking under Creative Commons

So … ejaculation. It turns out that where you do it can greatly affect a woman’s chances of becoming pregnant. Like: If you ejaculate straight up into her vagina, she’s more likely to become pregnant; if you ejaculate into a condom or anywhere else in the world, she’s less likely to conceive. Every 16-year-old boy knows this to be true, and now those 16-year-old boys have grown up to become the Guttmacher Institute’s Lead Pulling-Out Researcher, Rachel K. Jones. Jones published her findings in the June issue of Contraception magazine [via NYT]:

“If the male partner withdraws before ejaculation every time a couple has vaginal intercourse, about 4 percent of couples will become pregnant over the course of a year,” the authors write.

For condoms, used optimally, the rate is about 2 percent. But more significant, the authors say, are the rates for “typical use,” because people can’t be expected to use any contraception method perfectly every time. Typical use of withdrawal leads to pregnancy 18 percent of the time, they write; for typical use of condoms 17 percent of the time.

Hey, that’s information that helps us become better informed about our sex lives. Great, right? No. IT’S BAD, says the Daily Beast’s Tracy Quan, who calls the study’s results “folk wisdom” with a lack of “supporting evidence” and infers that the Guttmacher Institute is no longer “sane” for publishing this no good very bad information. Why? Because withdrawal is “caddish,” “insulting,” and it’s FOR BOYS, NOT GIRLS. And we all know we can’t trust boys to do anything. What else can’t we trust? Science, for one! And while we’re at it: We can’t trust grown women in mutually monogamous relationships to make this choice for themselves, either, even though it’s free, accessible, and feels better than a condom. THERE I SAID IT.

But enough about ejaculating outside of vaginas. Oh, wait, no: It’s time for Sady of Tiger Beatdown and I to discuss ejaculating outside of vaginas some more! Join us!

AMANDA: 9:23 a.m. is a great time to talk about the ups and downs of not ejaculating into vaginas.

SADY: yes. personally, when i heard that not ejaculating into vaginas was a “reliable” form of birth control, i had my suspicions! i was like: apparently all of the dudes i have argued with about birth control have become scientists! who knew?

AMANDA: published in the renowned peer-reviewed journal of medicine, Maxim.

SADY: right. it strikes me as some flawed science, is what i am saying! for, even if withdrawal is a semi-effective method of “birth control,” it strikes me as a highly ineffective method of Not Getting Various Diseases Such As The Herp Control. which i think is what Tracy Quan is saying, which is good common sense.

AMANDA: of course, but at the same time, real scientists who are not your ex-boyfriends have worked very hard to come up with dozens of methods of birth control that also don’t prevent STDs

SADY: fair enough! the scientists, they do these things! i suppose i am a person who likes a certain modicum of control over these situations. and withdrawal as birth control, TO ME, relies on your partner having (a) really good timing, and (b) a solid commitment to not getting distracted or losing track of whatever he is supposed to be doing, during a moment that (AS I UNDERSTAND IT) can be kind of distracting! (I AM REFERRING TO THE MALE ORGASM. In case my incredible tastefulness and subtlety are working against me.)

AMANDA: this is a point that Quan made as well, and I agree that for a lot of people withdraw would not be a good option for this reason. But all forms of birth control come with a degree of human error, or in some cases, shit ripping inside your vagina error. say you’re a couple who doesn’t want to use condoms. and the woman takes her birth control pills, but the man, like you, can’t trust her—for whatever reason—to take them at the same time every day. maybe she forgets sometimes!

SADY: fair enough!

AMANDA: he might not want to rely on her, either. and so if you forget a birth control pill, or a condom breaks, or you ejaculate into a vagina, you know, you can take emergency contraception as well. one of the interesting things to me about this study—and i’m just going to assume the study is accurate for argument, because i don’t know anything about methodology with these things. is that it placed withdrawl slightly below condoms, right? and still, most of the response has been, ‘there’s no way this could ever work, this is some frat dude conspiracy.’ and so perhaps what this study reveals isn’t that withdrawl is a very good option, but rather that we have a bit too much faith in condoms

SADY: a fascinating point! and i agree, some of this may have to do with the fact that, as long as i’ve been alive, anyway, Birth Control has been less important to the discussion than Safe Sex. and most of the sex ed i have ever received has been like, “USE CONDOMS, also there are other methods but seriously just USE CONDOMS.” and i’m still a fan of the condom, because it is cheap and does not require a prescription and has a lower failure rate and higher disease protection rate than other things! the withdrawal method, to me, requires what is (in many or most circumstances) a perhaps unrealistically high level of trust for one’s makeout partner. but maybe this just has to do with the fact that i have been culturally conditioned to trust other people less than i trust the Trojan corporation.

AMANDA: of course. and the method is really counter-intuitive, because pulling out is something that irresponsible 15 year old boys are supposed to do, when really it’s something that would be more appropriate for, say, mutually monogamous STD-free old people.

SADY: right. it is odd for me that something which is the centerpiece of much heterosexual porn is now a meaningful expression of committed monogamous trust. NEXT UP: how having sex on a bus can keep you from getting cancer!

AMANDA: hhahaha. yeah. i heard if you put a donut on it and then seductively bite it off it lowers the risk of kidney failure, or something

SADY: WOW. a doughnut, you say! i guess i’ve been doing it all wrong with the bagels.

AMANDA: i’m with the critics of Quan with this one, though – something that PEOPLE DO turning out to be less sexually risky than we thought is probably a good thing. she says a bit of anxiety is good, but i actually have a lot of that! and so reducing that is probably a good thing for a lot of people. maybe not for Quan, but it’s not like we’re getting rid of condoms! The Trojan lobby (sponsored by Tiger Beatdown) would never allow that.

SADY: true enough. i guess i am just concerned with the fact that there is already pressure on girls to be the “cool” ones who don’t “make” the dude use condoms. i do not know why i think that the sort of dudes who apply that pressure are all going to show up with scientific studies and go through a careful risk-benefit analysis! yet i do. in conclusion: withdrawal is totally fine, if you want to do that and are reasonable about it, and not fine if you do not. CONTROVERSY!

AMANDA: agreed. DON’T LET HIM NOT EJACULATE IN YOUR VAGINA IF YOU DON’T WANT HIM TO NOT DO THAT, KIDS.

SADY: there, problem solved. everybody does what they want to do. the real winner? the paper towel industry. hurrah!

Photo by amorphity

Some French videogame developer named Stéphane Aguie has created a videogame about killing homosexual rapists. The English version is called “Watch Out Behind You, Hunter,” and the goal is to “shoot gay men who pop out of the bushes before they ‘rape’ the player.” There are a couple of problems with this game: It is sickening, and it is also very, very boring.

QUICK QUIZ! This means that Stéphane Aguie is probably

(a) “edgy”
(b) “un-PC”
(c) Le 45-Year-Old-Boy residing in Chez Parents’ Basement
(d) lazy
(e) all of the above.

Find out in this edition of Sexist Beatdown—where Sady of Tiger Beatdown and I discuss the finer points of how to protest bullshit violent videogames without channeling Tipper Gore.

SADY: why hello my good woman! care to speak about the evils of video games?

AMANDA: corrupting our children!

SADY: i know! the youth today! once i would have been not-serious about this but now i am not so sure.

AMANDA: i know, i think i’m getting older :(

SADY: well, also: it turns out that videogames, if you research them, are terrifying! like: RAPELAY, the world’s leading rape-simulator for your home system. or this new game, in which the goal, i guess, is to run away from rape-minded gay men whilst shooting them in the face?

AMANDA: i played this game.

SADY: did you? did you really? how was your gaming experience?

AMANDA: well, the first thing to know about this game is that it debuted in french. and if you run the French title through some sophisticated language translators, you will find that the original name of the game was “Takes Guard Has Your Buttocks, Hunter!”

SADY: oh, MY.

AMANDA: the second, and most horrifying, relevant point about this game is that the gameplay is extremely boring. and so, we may conclude that the only possible draws of the game are a) shootin’ queers or b) briefly catching sight of tiny cartoon penises.

SADY: I’M SORRY I CAN’T HEAR YOU I’M PLAYING TAKES GUARD HAS YOUR BUTTOCKS. but not really. i am just looking at it, some more.

AMANDA: hahahah

SADY: yes, i think that the creators were adamant about it being “humor?”

AMANDA: yeah—there’s always this defense from Creators who are criticized over the content of their product. where they contest that the Game is something More than it Appears, when really it’s a very simple and boring flash game with no point, except to depict murder and rape as easily and speedily as possible

SADY: right, exactly. but, i mean, these are the perils of online media. this game has peen in it, and raping, and it allows one to pretend to shoot dudes in the face for wanting to fuck you, and in this manner, it appeals to douchebags and gets traffic. it also has peen, and raping, and allows people to pretend to shoot dudes for wanting to sex them, and in this manner, it draws outrage from people such as myself and gets traffic. either way, TAKES GUARD WINS.

AMANDA: and then i played the game! which allowed me to say, This game is not fun and games!

SADY: (i appear to be playing this game wrong, by the way, as no naked men have jumped from the bushes to assault me yet.)

AMANDA: you gotta walk past them!

SADY: (perhaps i have clicked on the new, “non-offensive” version of Takes Guard Has Your Buttocks, in which you just shoot at rocks.)

AMANDA: Takes Guard Has Not Your Buttocks, Carry On Hunter

SADY: ah, well. well: i mean: i think this kind of stuff is actually endemic to a lot of entertainment, particularly entertainments such as this, which are aimed specifically at young straight dudes and are meant to get word-of-mouth. i mean, ladies play video games too! yet most of the videogames i have played are like being hit in the face with a jockstrap, that is how lowest-common-denominator-sexist they have been.

AMANDA: yeah, and i hate to take a Think of the Children approach to this, but i think that many of The Children persuasion also wish they weren’t being so obviously pandered to. because anytime a filmmaker or gamemaker passes off gratuitous rape scenes or sexist jokes as “edgy” or “un-PC,” what they’re really saying is, “i’m lazy.”

SADY: exactly. they are like, “LOOK, what we are saying is that men who want to have sex with dudes are predatory and rapey and you should kill them. maybe the reason that you are offended is that you have NEVER HEARD HILARIOUS JOKES ALONG THESE LINES BEFORE.” like: no, dude, i have. i really really have. also, don’t quite think you understand the definition of the word “jokes.” and obviously, i follow a lot of ladies on the Twitter who talk about videogames and sexism and also love the crap out of videogames, so i don’t think this is a problem with the base (except for the lazy portion of the base) so much as it is a problem with creators. although the Shoot Dudes Before They Have Your Buttocks Game is a flash game, so, you know. dealing with a whole other subsection of the genre here, primarily there to get you to click on some advertisements for adult friends or whatever.

AMANDA: right. but i think you’ve touched on something interesting, which is that women are consuming things, but there are often a lot of real barriers to getting women making the things, too.

SADY: OR, they can participate, but only insofar as they are making what is deemed “marketable” within that genre.

AMANDA: although i think the only qualifications you need to make an internationally famous flash game is being 14 years old and having access to Babelfish. right – you’re lucky to be involved anyway, so don’t try making any changes, because making us accountable for the terrible sexist and homophobic shit we put out would be SO like a girl. in conclusion, when is sarah palin getting into video games?

SADY: um, i believe AERIAL WOLF HUNTER is already a videogame. if it’s not, it should be. the wolves fight back! with LASERS! but, you know. if you’ve solidly defined your audience as “14-year-old boys who are dumb,” maybe making stuff that appeals to other people seems like a risky business move. i can understand that! personally, i am designing a game right now where you take away the computers of the Buttocks guys and hit them over the head with their own laptops repeatedly. i think it will be a hit!

AMANDA: will there be blood?

SADY: there will be panicked calls to their moms to come down into the basement and save them. i think that’s its own reward.

Welcome back to Sexist Beatdown, the erotic weekly chat wherein Sady of Tiger Beatdown and I discuss our innermost desire to be raped, forcibly married, and impregnated by a handsome and affable doctor of our parent’s choosing.

Shit, no, no—that’s the subject of our $39.99 Pay-Per-View edition of Sexist Beatdown (check local listings). This Sexist Beatdown is actually about how a handsome and affable doctor who rapes, forcibly marries, and impregnates a young woman is a totally awful and fucked up hero to write into your romance novel!

Or is he?

Are rape fantasies—and the Romance Novelists who love them—any more disturbing than all the other strange sexual fantasies being parsed out there in pages upon pages of awkward prose? Before you answer that: You should know that some of these strange sexual fantasies involve sexy role-playing as “Friends” character Chandler Bing.

SADY: hi there! i’m glad we’re taking on something tasteful and uncontroversial this week. such as RAPE FANTASIES!

AMANDA: Yes, and furthermore, I believe that in order to fully haze Sotomayor this week, I think it’s time we create the New Litmus Test. The New Litmus Test is: Rape fantasies? Eh?

SADY: Well, I have to tell you that I really loved your take on the whole matter. And this is tied to a personal anecdote about the first romance novel I ever owned. May I tell you my personal anecdote?

AMANDA: please.

SADY: All right. So I had these two cousins, who were in their teens when I was about eleven. And they felt I needed to get a boyfriend, and gave me many romance novels in order to further my boyfriend-related education.

AMANDA: cool.

SADY: One of the romance novels they gave me had the following plot: a young woman is betrothed to a wealthy family friend, whom she has never met. She wanders around the city to process this, with a high fever, and stumbles into a BORDELLO, where she is given LAUDANUM. in this drugged state, a doctor comes, looking for a prostitute! he is sent into the drugged young lady’s room, due to an entirely understandable error, and they end up fucking like two wildcats, or, more accurately, one wildcat and one seriously drugged and basically unconscious young woman. then in the morning she wakes up, remembers none of it, and goes home to meet her fiance. can you guess who he is?

AMANDA: the doctor?

SADY: YES! AND THEY GET MARRIED!

AMANDA: but … she’s been sullied!

SADY: and she is like, “i don’t know who you are, Dr. Rapington, but for some reason I feel totally uncomfortable having sex with you.” but eventually she learns to love him and his prostitute-raping ways and also she gets pregnant and has his baby.

AMANDA: i see. and so, did you finally land a boyfriend?

SADY: um, i was never able to land enough laudanum, as a middle-schooler, to really make the scenario work. i had to try other methods, such as consensual makeouts.

AMANDA: do you remember, did a lady write that book?

SADY: well, yes, the name on the cover was a lady name.

AMANDA: sounds progressive then. So: i have a rape fantasy lit story as well!

SADY: hurrah!

AMANDA: in college, i worked for this “women’s fiction / erotica” literary agent. my job was to read the unsolicited manuscripts, which were not just any unsolicited manuscripts, but unsolicited manuscripts for erotic romance novels targeted at women.

SADY: oh, lord. you had the best job in the world, it appears!

AMANDA: i grew up fast that summer.

SADY: hahaha

AMANDA: anyway, a lot of the people who liked to target their erotic romance novels at women were dudes. i remember one dude’s fantasy, err, novel, in particular: aman and a woman meet at a Chinese restaurant. they’re acquainted in some way – maybe they work together. anyway, they eat some lo mein or whatever and one thing leads to another, and all of a sudden some old mystical Chinese woman is beckoning them into the back room, of course.

SADY: right, as you do

AMANDA: where they eat this magical Chinese herb, okay, and then the woman falls into some sexy trance.

SADY: this sounds totally realistic. i’m compelled to learn more!

AMANDA: so—paraphrasing here—he ends up with his penis inside her, and then his penis magically expands, until it’s this really long magical penis that goes through her vagina, up past her entire body and then pokes out of her mouth. thus raping her in two orifices, at once! and i thought, i wonder if this guy thought i would actually pass this on to a literary agent to consider it for publication? or did he just want the intern to read his bizarre one-dude double penetration rape fantasy? and i realized: it was probably both.

SADY: Yowza. I mean: leaving aside this dude’s one (RESTAURANT-SPECIFIC) rape fantasy, I get that people’s fantasies, in general, are weird. I knew a girl who worked at a phone sex operation and one guy would call her up, constantly, to discuss his fantasies about the cast of “Friends.” She would play Rachel, and sometimes maybe Phoebe; he would be Chandler.

AMANDA: wow. this guy fantasized about being chandler! chandler would make some hilarious ironic comment about this, were he here.

SADY: but, in your article about romance-novel rapings, you do touch on the fact that some women have rape fantasies. and they totally do! because people’s fantasies are weird! but what worries me is when the raping just (a) isn’t addressed as such, or (b) is in EVERY SINGLE ROMANCE NOVEL, which – it was a major part of the romance novels I read as a pre-teen, I’ll tell you that.

AMANDA: yeah, i think the world of the romance novel is an interesting space for discussion of the rape fantasy, because it’s a space that is a) largely written by and for women, and b) embracing (probably too much) of what is a very taboo fantasy for women to have. But at the same time, these novels are also c) EXTREMELY derivative and conformist, and one wonders what exactly they are conforming to.

SADY: right. like, at one point, i just did a study of romance novels, because they’re one of the only “acceptable” outlets (or were, for a while) of porn for ladies. and they follow a very recognizable script. like, the heroine is never “classically beautiful,” and she’s often though not always working-class, and they always have to hate each other at first, and etc. and when the rape thing crops up so often (along with all of the stuff about “taking” and “possessing” and etc.) it just seems like part of the script is that women aren’t sexual and men are and men have to “break them in,” as it were, so that they can enjoy sex. which is remarkably similar to many rationales of actual real-live rapists! what with the “she wanted it” and “she said no but didn’t mean it” business we all know and fear.

AMANDA: and yet … people, like, read these books. and supposedly identify with them. women-people.

SADY: yeah… that’s totally true. and i think we can talk about rape as a real-live thing that is unconscionably evil, and also own up to the fact that a rape FANTASY (which is pretty much within your control, seeing as it exists only in your head) is not the same thing.again: dude porn is almost always based on some kind of sense of transgression. so lady porn might be the same way, for similar reasons. maybe ladies enjoy this stuff because it’s one of the most extreme taboos in existence, if you are a lady-person.

AMANDA: yeah. ive always thought that “rape fantasy” was a bit of a misnomer, though i guess calling it “actively desiring someone to have sex with you while pretending as if you don’t actively desire it fantasy” takes some of the punch out of it

SADY: yeah, exactly. i mean, “rape fantasy” is such a contradiction in terms. but i think a lot of people’s sex fantasies are about (a) feeling that what you’re doing is “dirty” and (b) pushing past the feelings of “dirtiness.” and having a fantasy that is about losing control is a really easy way of just not feeling “dirty” or “guilty” in a way that inhibits your enjoyment.

AMANDA: and if the guilt extends all the way from your vagina, through your organs, and out your mouth: bonus.

SADY: well, you know: i suspect that dude is not someone you’d want to be trapped in an elevator with. i do give him credit, however, for not including matthew perry.

Photo via flickr user anoldent

Quick Quiz! Sex. What is it, exactly?

A. One step past whatever you were just caught doing with that woman who is not your wife.

B. Anything that two people do together in private when they love each other very much, not including whatever those queers are doing.

C. Whenever the one with a penis has an orgasm.

D. Given the obvious power disparity between men and women in the patriarchy, an implicitly non-consensual act—unless two girls are doing it, but only if two girls are doing it exclusively for their own pleasure and not to satisfy the male interest in two girls doing it.

E. Dancing.

Today, Sady of Tiger Beatdown and I will get to the bottom of this mysterious phenomenon, and figure out why the definition of “sex” is not actually any particular combination of penises, vaginas, anuses, and mouths, but rather a tool for cheaters to pretend they’re not cheating and homophobes to pretend they’re different from gays. Good morning, by the way!

AMANDA: hi

SADY: why hello!

AMANDA: do you want to talk now?

SADY: yes indeed! first off, i think we should acknowledge that approximately 125,000 celebrities will have died by the time we post this. THE GRIM REAPER HAS COME FOR CELEBRITY

AMANDA: and they never learned the true meaning of sex!

SADY: ah, yes. apparently, americans “can’t agree” on it! this is something i could in no way have learned from my own personal life of dating. i define sex as a peanut butter sandwich. is that so wrong?

AMANDA: when involved in a high-profile political scandal, i define sex as “one step past whatever i did with that woman”

SADY: i personally define sex as “anything you can’t tell grandma about for fear she might lose her tenuous grip on this mortal coil.” but the studies themselves are intriguing!

AMANDA: yeah definitely. i think, though, that they may be lacking in context. like, it’s not as important to define what “sex” is as it is to define what we’re comfortable with people doing with us or with other people. i feel like defining sex is just inviting loopholes. see: anal sex to keep virginity.

SADY: right, exactly.

AMANDA: and any cheater’s excuse about anything

SADY: and many many men’s magazine think-pieces about how it’s not cheating if it is with a stripper or other sex worker

AMANDA: or in argentina. etc.

SADY: oddly, the men’s definitions of sex tend to be more liberal than the ladies’, though, as per this particular article! like: forty-four percent of men surveyed said that oral sex was doin’ it. only thirty-seven percent of ladies said the same.

AMANDA: yeah, that was a surprise to me. i have a theory on this. it’s good.

SADY: i eagerly await it!

AMANDA: ok, so women are socialized to downplay their sexual expertise in order to not appear as— i believe the scientific word is “slutty”. and so may tend for the stricter definition in self-reporting. whereas men may want to fudge it a little bit in order to be able to put another notch in the bedpost

SADY: there is actually a long passage in that keith gessen novel (”All The Sad Young Literary Men”) that backs up your theory. observe how i move smoothly from actual science to literature! but: the dude is trying to figure out his Number and his List and whatever and is trying to figure out how liberal his definition needs to be. he concludes, if i remember aright, that blowjobs should indeed count in The Number!

AMANDA: sha-wing

SADY: whereas ladies might indeed self-identify as Virgins, a la Dionne in “Clueless” (CINEMA! INTERDISCIPLINARIAN THOUGHT!) had they only, say, given the BJs, or received the Lady BJs. actually, this study is weirdly non-specific about Giving and Receiving of sexual favors.

AMANDA: yeah, i noticed that also. allow me to extend an example from yet another genre, the Hip Hopera.

SADY: please do!

AMANDA: one thing that i’ve always found is important in these definitions is who is doing the sexing or non-sexing. so, a man could get Very Very mad at his girlfriend kissing another man, while he’s out Real Penis Vagina sexing some other woman. and maybe it’s not so much men excusing their own behavior while demonizing women, but that, as an individual, you can excuse your own guilt because you know the emotional context, the strength of the temptation, etc. etc. See: R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet, where everyone is fucking everyone else and they all get PISSED when they find out their significant other has been doing the same thing.

SADY: yes, and yet i feel that (since this article is all about contextualizing “sex” in light of certain political figures putting the Thing in the Places Where You Ought Not To) that there has probably never been a case of someone being cheaterly without KNOWING that they were being a cheaterly cheater. i think you can basically define “cheating” as “that thing you’re going to feel really guilty about not telling your wife and/or husband and/or unmarried life partner because you know, for some reason, even if there was no Sexual contact involved by any definition, that you did something they would not like.”

AMANDA: totally. i think the rush to define it, in the case of the high-profile cheating, is that the public is just honestly curious about the sexy details. not that we like, want to know what sex is.

SADY: right? especially if they took place in argentina! and involve THE FORBIDDEN PASSIONS that you told everyone you were on the Appalachian Trail to cover up! all of the futzing around, semantically, can be useful only when trying to figure out how the other person involved sees your sexual exchange… but no-one’s denying that the exchange was sexual, in that case. the actual interest is kind of in knowing what other people have been up to.

AMANDA: and, in the case of say, gay sex, trying to define them out of the mainstream or out of existence. like, sure, you can put your penis in his butt, but it’s not sex, whatever it is you’re doing. which i refuse to equate with my penis in vagina business.

SADY: ha, yeah, or sex between women, in which case basically everything outside of a strap-on is relegated to “foreplay.” never “duringplay.”

AMANDA: UGGGGHHHH i feel myself sliding into the inevitable rant about the supremacy of the male orgasm in the sexual blah de blah and how that’s what this is all REALLY about and i can’t force myself to do it.

SADY: you sure? i have lots of thoughts about how the penis-in-vagina-as-real-sex thing is totally not good even for couples that have, respectively, penises and vaginas! LOTS OF THOUGHTS I TELL YOU.

AMANDA: save it for another sexist beatdown.

Photo by Mike Licht

Sady of Tiger Beatdown and I were totally prepared to have a Very Serious Discussion Concerning Our Feelings on the Defense Of Marriage Act and Why Obama Was Or Was Not A Dick About It (VSDCOFOTDOMAAWOWOWNADAI) today.

But then we read this awesome piece by Steve Haruch, dude in Texas, about why post-post-feminism in pop music is just pre-feminism in disguise, and we thought, “fuck it, let’s talk about Beyonce in a cop outfit.”

Can pop music ever be more than just, as Steve says, “Feminist Lite”?

Spoiler: Yes it can, but only under certain delicate conditions involving Beyonce acting like a jerk, tacos, and Britney Spears cutting the crap already and just hiring me as her feminist advisor.

SADY: lady! are you ready to have a discussion about postpostpostpostpostfeminism?

AMANDA: hi! Sorry! first of all, since you seem to have been doing a bit of “research” into modes of feminism lately can you tell me what post-feminism is? and what post-post-feminism might be?

SADY: post-feminism is the one where progress has been accomplished so we can all be SEXY again and also camille paglia can blame us for our date rapes! post-post-feminism is… um… feminism again? or the one where we have to fight each other in Thunderdome. no wait, that’s post-APOCALYPTIC-post-

She kissed a girl, she liked it, but I’m betting “boyfriend don’t mind it” is a bit of an understatement here

Sucks.

“If I Were a Boy,” or, more appropriately, “If I Were A Dick”

SADY: “if i were a boy, we’d be engaging in non-demeaning and mutually respectful activities, such as going to a church group, and holding hands. ” “woooo, girl, i want to play zelda and not make out or consider sexual activities at all with youuuu.”

AMANDA: You know, somebody kind of made this point in the Bitch comment section, and I think it’s pretty apt: as far as POP music is concerned, maybe it’s enough for us to have expectations that it not be misogynistic. and that other forms of music that are not played on the radio will tackle the more explicitly radical subjects. that being said, i would really love to write for Britney Spears.

SADY: haha. i’m seriously trying to think of a mainstream pop hit that handled anything vaguely feminist in its subject matter. the best i can come up with is “human nature,” by madonna. and that’s a tenuous pick. i would love for you to write for britney spears, too! actually!

AMANDA: i understand that she often takes up best-friends-for-a-few-hours fairly often. i think i could be a good influence on her.

SADY: i think my work with the postpostfeminist stars of stage and screen would be brutal, ugly, and short

AMANDA: i thought the misogyny consulting thing would really work out for you

SADY: i think my hit katy perry song, “i kissed the person that it was most pleasing for me to kiss at the time without thinking about or trying to present my sexuality as a performance for the benefit of the male gaze” would not, probably, sell like hotcakes. the b-side, “i like tacos,” might be a little more well-received. who doesn’t like tacos?! why is our pop landscape so post-tacos?

AMANDA: eww, post-taco

SADY: hahahahaha. ok. it’s NOT AN ELOQUENT TERM for my movement. rest assured, you’ll soon be hearing the sound of post-taco across the nation.

AMANDA: hahah

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.

SADY: hello there lady. are you prepared – prepared, that is, to debate the fine points of dude comedy?

AMANDA: i can’t say i’m as prepared as you are, sady. but i am willing to confess: i believe that i enjoyed nearly all the films you profiled in your apatow series. when i saw them. in the theater.

SADY: yes, it’s true: apatow has become my great white whale. he is basically all i think about these days. i dream in Apatowvision. well: i enjoyed some of them too! (shhhhhh.) I enjoyed “Knocked Up” immensely, for example.

AMANDA: i CRIED at the end of knocked up. i was on a really bad date, which may have had something to do with it.

SADY: OH GOD. YOU SHARE MY TERRIBLE SECRET. i cried too. also, broke up with the dude i saw it with?

AMANDA: same. well i’m glad we’ve cleared the air.

Judd Apatow craftily inserted this song into the film’s end credits in order to make me cry.

SADY: yeah. my reactions to “knocked up” kind of define my relationship to the Apatow canon. I was totally digging Leslie Mann’s character – oh, that poor lady! She is totally at the end of her rope! – and then left the theater, and discussed it with people, and realized that YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE ROOTING FOR PAUL RUDD. In that particular sub-plot.

AMANDA: i think i had the same reaction as you did, honestly. i thought she was sympathetic, but totally pathetic. all of apatow’s male characters are pathetic, too, but they seem to ease out of that gracefully without having to think about it too much.

SADY: right – plus, they are pathetic in a totally fun way! they get to hang out and do bong hits and fart on each others’ pillows and such! so, by the end, where it’s like, “sadly, we realize that procreative monogamy with one of these strange ‘woman’ creatures is necessary to maturation” you kind of get their sadness at giving up the pillow farts and lightbub battles. whereas women are just grown-ass-adults by the time they hit puberty, apparently. or at least they’re scripted that way.

AMANDA: yeah, so the women are just haggard at the end. one thing your reviews always touch on are these coiteries of man-children that apatow scripts. and you mention the rejoinder from defenders of the movie that ‘you’re not supposed to LIKE or IDENTIFY with them.’ and i do think that you are supposed to like these characters, and even like them for (and not despite of) their date rape punch-lines. but they’re still in a context, i think, where they’re there to provide a contrast to the hero of the story. their douchiness must be overcome, basically.

SADY: yeah, exactly. they’re given such loving attention, and their little world of date-rape jokes and vague bromosocial lady-avoidance is presented as so much fun. so you forgive them for being immature in order to forgive your own immaturity, like, “well, my wife may be at home sobbing but i can’t help it! i’m a regular bro!” and then you get a Valuable Life Lesson that sticks for maybe ten to fifteen minutes.

AMANDA: … but they’re funny!

SADY: it’s true! sometimes they really really are! I subconsciously repeat Jonah Hill’s pronunciation of “abortion” as “shmushmortion” at least once a week! and then i realize it’s a joke about making a lady have an abortion because obviously her fetus is YOUR decision!

AMANDA: yeah. and apatow’s versions of women i cannot excuse. they are either bitches or whores. but caricatures of douchebags, even lovable ones, i cannot resist. see: paul rudd in wet hot american summer. i think it’s just possible to love the character and not the character if they were a real person / your boyfriend.

SADY: exactly. question: where the lady douchebags at? where are the stoned ladies that can’t get it together to have an actual apartment, and get jobs that require nothing of them because they’re afraid real jobs would be too much of a commitment, and pretend to be gandalf or some business when no-one’s looking? the ladies who would rather watch “the muppet show,” again, than do anything useful with their lives? WHERE ARE THOSE LADIES? Because I want movies about them! They exist! So I am told in a way that has nothing to do with my own personal life, at all.

AMANDA: i know, which is why I desperately want Apatow to write a movie for them. partly because i think his brain might explode, but also because i think it would be funny.

SADY: exactly. like, writing a movie about a lady that is not a sexy/stupid harlot or a knife-tongued scold would be fantastic. because the closest we’ve got to an Apatowomany character, right now, is Juno. I DON’T WANT JUNO.

AMANDA: sometimes i look at popular culture and i think of the female characters who have had abortions and i get really sad that like carrie bradshaw is the only one i can think of. but that’s a tangent.

SADY: yes, well, my forthcoming feature movie film, “50 First Abortions,” will be an exciting new direction for film, i think.

AMANDA: indeed. I think we should start a letter campaign that mirrors the request of Pixar to make a film with a heroine who is not a princess.

SADY: but, you know? i think that women have all the same maturity/commitment/not-being-an-idiot problems that these dudes have. PLUS, what with all the work we have to do to make our bodies presentable, there are many more occasions for gross jokes about our inherent schlubbiness. HUMOROUS BIKINI WAXING SCENE? I think so!

In Wurtzel’s latest essay, “Failure to Launch: When Beauty Fades” (published in this month’s Elle), Elizabeth Wurtzel is depressed again. This time, because she is “old” (41)—and also, maybe, secretly, because she’s spent the greater part of those years getting shit thrown at her face by epic douchebags. While aging has brought Wurtzel fame, book deals, and a J.D. from Columbia, it has also stolen the precious glint of youth from her eyes, and left her pining for her Original Epic Douche—the beautiful peppermint-flavored-foot-massaging, bottle-chucking graduate student douchebag GREGG. The essay is, in typical Wurtzel fashion, funny, sad, honest, and problematic.

AMANDA: hello!

SADY: hello lady. your beautiful dream of talking to me while i’m all hopped up on the cough syrup is about to come true. and also we get to talk about how wacky elizabeth wurtzel (still) is! is she not wacky?

AMANDA: she is, Sady. I was introduced to her wackiness at a tender young age, when my mother bought me Prozac Nation. I was maybe 13, so I loved it.

SADY: yes. I recall reading Bitch in junior high. and hiding it from my mom, due to its provocative cover!

AMANDA: looks like she hasn’t “aged well,” though! ha ha … hmmm.

SADY: well… she still has mermaid hair! actually, this article is weird, because it is like, “i am old and ugly now. i should have settled down. however, i am neither old nor ugly, and still have lots of dates and sex.” so, when you’re reading it, it’s like… “sad! umm… happy! umm… happysad?”

AMANDA: but those dates want her for what she used to be (young and not ugly), which leads me to believe, you know, it may be a personal problem. but i think she admits that throughout.

SADY: yeah. i think she still misses gregg. can we talk about how gross gregg, the perfect boyfriend, sounds? is that cruel? “sensitive, an inveterate graduate student who used to rub my feet at the end of the day with a lovely pink peppermint lotion from the Body Shop.”

AMANDA: yeah, who was surprised when he threw a bottle at her face?

SADY: that was a shocking twist! he also pronounced that he was “her only chance at happiness,” and that she would now fail at life, due to not dating GREGG. GREGG is a witch! He laid a curse on her!

AMANDA: i found that part really interesting. a few of the commenters were chastising her for “bragging” about her looks, but i thought she made an interesting point about societal expectations for young women … i definitely identified with that, not with the “beautiful” part, but with the “smart young woman” part. not that i’m old and ugly or anything, but it was always like “you’re so smart, why are you [with him]?” or you’re so smart, why [aren't you happy]?” stuff like that. and in her case, it turned out to be, you’re so smart and beautiful, why aren’t you with someone like GREGG who doesn’t fucking understand you at all and who does not make you happy? (and throws bottles). (like all your other boyfriends).

SADY: yeah, seriously. i mean, i get that she felt like the world was offered to her – and it was! she was elizabeth wurtzel! – and it still didn’t make her happy, and that would be enough to send anyone into a tailspin. i can identify with that. but also: tying it to your looks seems to gloss over sooooo many of the other problems. like, there’s this undercurrent of abusive bottle-throwing (or lamp-throwing, or frying-pan-chasing-with) relationships that i think it would be worthwhile to get into. yet she seems to blame herself for MAKING the dudes be all abusive, like so: “Now that I am a woman whom some man might actually like to be with, might actually not want to punch in the face—or, at least, now that I don’t like guys who want to do that to me—I am sadly 41.” Ummmm… maybe they did that because they were jerks? Also: maybe it’s good that you DIDN’T STAY WITH ANY OF THEM? Due to the jerk thing?

AMANDA: yeah man. i’m not sure she takes away the same lesson from GREGG—beautiful, perfect, peppermint foot-rubbing, complete jerk—that we might, either. Surely, she can’t be serious that she ACTUALLY THINKS her one chance of happiness was with GREGG?

SADY: Right? I mean, she’s all like, “if only I had stayed with GREGG – a dude i was so unhappy with that I cheated on him, multiple times, and also he broke into my computer, and also he threw a bottle at my face – I would be happy.” Um, probably not. Probably you’d be begging him to throw away his damn hemp necklaces. And then banging the mailman. Interesting fact: Elizabeth Wurtzel passed the BAR EXAM! She became a LAWYER, for a LAW FIRM! I find it interesting that this whole “I wasted my life” thing does not take into account the fact that she has had two separate careers that require a pretty tremendous amount of work and intelligence to pursue. Apparently, if you’re not with GREGG or a GREGG analogue, it’s all for nothing.

AMANDA: points for honesty i guess

SADY: yeah, and wurtzel always gets those points. i just think it’s weird that we have this narrative for women – and you see these pieces ALL THE TIME, it’s not just her – that are like, “i once thought i could date around and not settle down and pursue my career, but now I know I should have SETTLED. For I am SAD, SAD, SAD.”

AMANDA: yeah, but based on her earlier work, i mean, she’s been sad throughout. the essay is just a sequel: “Sad at 40.” that’s not to belittle it — i like her work — but given what we know, i can’t say that 40 has much to do with it.

SADY: exactly. i like a lot of what wurtzel has done, too. yet: it doesn’t make sense to position oneself as a cautionary tale about regret and wasted youth, if your youth was also spent feeling sad. i guess it’s just the positioning of this piece – as a one-more-lady-regrets-not-settling thing – that i have a problem with. that and the “i’ve finally learned how to make dudes not punch me in the face, because before it was my fault that they did that” thing.

Feminism: Oooooooooover it.

In this edition of Sexist Beatdown, Sady of Tiger Beatdown and myself of the Sexist talk of DoubleX, Slate’s new online magazine for women—it’s just like us, except we’re the problem! Also, people who don’t report their own rapes. It is mostly them (and not, saaaay, rapists) who are the problem.

Oh, problems. They create so many pageviews, which, in turn, solve our main problem ($$$). I think it’s about time for Sady and I to CASH IN: What’s the problem with DoubleX, anyway?

SADY: hello! are you ready to speak? or are you too busy KILLING FEMINISM?

AMANDA: i actually just thew up a blog post, which, as you shall see, is what i actually think is “killing” “feminism.” let me start with the Bust quote on DoubleX’s dead feminism obsession, though: “We don’t know about you, but we’re disappointed. (And we also need to figure out the best way to fight off this new undead feminism before it eats our brains.)”

SADY: yeah. I mean: any new publication that focuses on lady issues is exciting! And, Katha Pollitt! Latoya Peterson! That is super exciting!

AMANDA: did you follow XX Factor religiously (or, subscribed to the RSS) like i did?

SADY: Yes, I did! Every single day! So this new DoubleX thing, with its lead off of

7 reasons why feminism is boring/stupid/dead/anti-feminist” is kind of puzzling to me. the quote of the day on the first day was about hating feminism!

AMANDA: … april … fools

SADY: fortunately, today, it is about how dolphins are rapist babykillers. which is a slightly less controversial opinion. FUCKING DOLPHINS, man. they think they’re SO GREAT.

AMANDA: it’s just kind of bizarre, i think maybe the “conversation” format which worked so well for the blog hasn’t really panned out as a “magazine” yet

SADY: yeah, exactly. on XX factor you got to see people talking back and forth, which was exciting! this time around, it’s just weird and hard to navigate, because you don’t know who’s saying what or if anyone has yet spoken up to disagree with them.

AMANDA: yeah. did you read breslin’s piece about how DoubleX is an entity “beyond” feminism after its death? her point is, basically, “let’s shut up and just do it.” But isn’t the point of writing in general to “not do anything and just talk about it”? or more positively, “do something BY talking about it”?

SADY: oh, susannah. i’m happy that she writes in-depth stuff about porn and all, and i like what she writes, but every once in a while she’s just like “feminism! I hate it! I ran it over with my truck! Now it is dead! You are all victims!” And it’s just like, huh. I like your reading of it, though. That makes more sense than mine. And, you’/Susannah are right, it does make more sense for folks of this generation to LIVE their feminism, given that we have more opportunities to do that than elsewhere.

AMANDA: i don’t mind the “death of feminism” so much—hell, i’ve written a eulogy for feminism before, mostly because it’s kind of fun and pretty easy—but the way it’s weirdly tied in with rape victims is unsettling.

SADY: yeah, and that “Jezebel is hurting women” piece – it made no sense at all, or rather, made sense on a level I really can’t get down with, which was: (a) Megan Carpentier has taken exception to my stuff before, so I will write about how she is a bad rape survivor who makes ladies get raped, or something, and (b) what is a way to get traffic for our feminist blog? Attack another feminist blog in a way that is certain to cause controversy!

AMANDA: rape + Jezebel = $$$$$$$$

SADY: it’s odd. i am the first lady in the world to say that feminist (or “post-feminist,” whatevs) disagreements are enlightening and good and awesome. HOWEVER. It seems weird to me to lead off your (initially marketed as feminist) site with all of this stuff that is, basically, contrarian for the sake of contrarianism.

AMANDA: and i think that’s a problem that affects the blog/commentary world in general: what’s around, and how can we be different—let’s find something to criticize about something else. i do it all the time, you do it all the time — we just choose different targets. and if they think feminism is boring, i think that’s okay! but it’s more interesting than talking about why feminism is boring. i’d rather they talked about the dolphins.

SADY: RIGHT? we have got to end this mindless social acceptance of dolphins. and, you know, it’s fun to make fun, or to criticize, and sometimes it’s easier to define yourself in opposition to something else. like, “see, this is what I DON’T believe, so now I can talk about what i DO.”

AMANDA: i think they should have gone meta and asked their contributors what the problem is with DoubleX instead of what the problem is with “feminism”

SADY: yeah. and, you know, probably all of this “AUGGGH DOUBLE X LAUNCH” is going to open up conversations that we can use. at some point. i have a story with a moral about snarky blogging. can i tell you my story?

AMANDA: yes.

SADY: okay. so, a million years ago, when i was a tiny little blog person with a blog that was read by 3.5 people in the whole world, i wrote a very snarky post about john devore from the frisky. and this morning, when i opened my e-mail, there was a message! from john devore of the frisky! telling me he liked my blog! and i was like, “ha ha, um… THANKS?!?!” but the moral of the story is that this dude i wrote a cranky post to make fun of turned out to be a totally reasonable dude who writes very nice e-mails. and this established for me some of the things that you DON’T know when you sit down to write a weinery post about somebody else on the Internet. and, yeah, i like the fact that double x is committed to writing stuff that can be snarky (MUST STOP WRITING THIS WORD) or harsh or controversial. still. maybe peeing all over feminism’s bloody corpse is not the best tactic, given the fact that the people who are going to read your new lady blog are likely to be… you know. feminist, and stuff.

AMANDA: definitely. and maybe we should think about why it’s almost a guarantee that people who write mean blogs also write really nice emails. ALWAYS TRUE. So i usually just write the blog stuff off as a big game that we’re all trying to win, but isn’t personal—but that gets complicated when you write about personal stuff (rape experience) and a writer takes that personal life (not reporting your rape) and turns it into snarky commentary. in short, bloggers are people too. people who need pageviews.

SADY: ha. yes, we do. which is why my latest story, “How Linda Hirshman Is Hurting Women, and Me Specifically, Because She Made Dolphins Give Me an Abortion” is going to be SOLID INTERNET GOLD.

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!

SADY: i, too, am driven to the verge of madness by her statements! actually, this is technically somewhat true. i mean. i read the “modern love” column that “bad mother” was based on, and: all i could think of was, seriously, you’re opposing the fetishization of motherhood by talking about how much you WORSHIP YOUR HUSBAND?

AMANDA: i know, right? where is the response Modern Love column that says, “i probably don’t love either of them.”

SADY: hahaha. i mean. if the whole weird mother/wife axis is about (1) being an untiring source of boundless Virgin Mary love and devotion for your children, and (2) keeping your man sat-is-fied, writing the article that’s like, “i can’t be all boundless or whatever with my kids because i’m too busy DOING IT with my hot husband, who I LOVE, and have i mentioned WE DO IT” is kind of… not necessarily a step FORWARD, you know?

AMANDA: yeah. i think she’s a controversial figure for another reason, too. she wrote this essay, right, and it’s basically a slap in the face to the whole love-transfer idea that’s expected of a mother, and she even goes far enough to say she’d basically save her husband’s life over her child’s if they were like being held hostage by Two-Face or whatever and she had to choose. but then, she’s spent about 4 years having to explain herself for that, and EVERYTHING SHE WRITES—her fiction, her nonfiction—is about being a mom! and obviously it’s something that she appears to struggle with, but it has consumed her.

SADY: right? like, for someone who doesn’t want to be defined by having babies, she sure does write a lot about having babies. and the “bad mother” label – the thing she seems to castigate herself for most fiercely is having an abortion when she knew the fetus wasn’t totally healthy.

AMANDA: i know, that part made me so sad, that she has these own expectations for herself, and that even though she freely choses not to meet those expectations, she feels like a bad person for doing so

SADY: right? i mean, i can understand that being a difficult, emotional decision, but it really seems like that would only make you a “bad” mother if you had a really over-demanding list of requirements for being a “good” mother.

AMANDA: yeah. there is another really interesting unspoken element here. she met chabon 12 years ago and has had four of his children since then. she indicates that he was very early on — the day they met, i think! — clear that he wanted children. but that was never a priority for her. when she quits her job, it’s not because she wants to spend time with her kid. she makes it clear she finds that boring. it’s because she’s jealous of him wanting that. you have to state the obvious here — the man that you love so much is the reason you have been burdened with motherhood.

SADY: yeah, exactly. and, i mean, she mentions that they got engaged three weeks after they met! which is clearly indicative of the fact that the whole “let’s talk about kids and whether i want them on the first date” thing was not, ultimately, a dealbreaker.

AMANDA: yeah, and was her voice heard there? i mean she spent four of their 12 years just being pregnant with the kids. plus another pregnancy that was physically and emotionally straining. she sure had a lot of kids for not wanting them too much, right? what is the deal with that?

SADY: yeah, and then there’s this, from the “modern love” column: “Every so often we escape from the children for a few days. We talk about our love, about how much we love each other’s bodies and brains, about the things that make us happy in our marriage… And afterward my husband will say that we, he and I, are the core of what he cherishes, that the children are satellites, beloved but tangential.” this is really caitlin-flanagan-y. SOMETHING is going on here, with the husband who tells you he wants kids and then you have four kids and then he tells you that you’re the one that’s most important, not the kids. SOMEONE is understating how important the kids are here, you know?

AMANDA: add that to the “abortion makes you a bad mother” thing and it’s almost like, not making babies when you’re able to make babies makes you a bad mother. what else explains the apparent lack of contraception here?

SADY: i get the sense that, really, waldman’s either way more into having kids than she’s letting on, or she’s backed into this corner of defining herself as a mother while constantly talking about how she shouldn’t be defined that way.

AMANDA: yeah, and i wish the people interviewing her (ok—i will send her an interview request when we finish this) would ask her these things

SADY: like, the mommy-guilt thing is interesting – “of woman born,” by adrienne rich, is a good thing about mommy-guilt – because, yeah, women are constantly told HAVE BABIES HAVE BABIES HAVE BABIES and then they’re told YOU’RE NOT DOING WELL ENOUGH WITH THE BABIES, so, it’s like, childless or with tons of kids, you don’t get to measure up, EVER.

AMANDA: and i get that she feels there are all these expectations that she has to face and can’t live up to. but at the same time, there’s the expectation to HAVE the kids in the first place, and she didn’t have to do that—and then do it again and again and again. it would be interesting to know why, you know?

SADY: yeah, and we sentimentalize maternal instinct to the point that women who express ANYTHING deviating from the message of “i spend all day and all night thinking about my children and wanting more children and then knitting them booties and baby blankets and did i mention they are thirty-four and twenty-three” are demonized. but: there’s got to be a way to tell the story of, “ok, so i have kids, and i didn’t magically become a caring and perfect person who would allow her children to feast on her own flesh if necessary overnight” without slapping a title on it that’s like “BAD MOTHER” and having to state that it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if your kids were run over by a truck. i guess my thing is, there’s a good story in here, and i wish it weren’t so hyped and Mommy-Wars-ified.

AMANDA: yeah. i do appreciate that she’s coming from a place of sincerity (almost to a fault), but i wish other people were asking her the right questions (instead of just, ’star jones doesn’t like you what do you think of that’). or why don’t you like play doh. ok — i have to GO. have four babies. wait, i mean, do my job

SADY: oh, well, good luck with that. YOU BARREN MONSTER.

Photo by viZZZual.com

Okay, before anything else: Please read this. I’m not sure what it is—more on that later—but it appears to be a column for the Globe and Mail penned by Lynn Crosbie about the true definition of “Samoan,” the reason why “Two & A Half Men” is “excellent,” and whether women in popular culture have been effectively replaced by mere “warmins.” Anyway, it’s a must read, but mostly because I could never possibly fucking explain it to you.

Ahem. Welcome to Sexist Beatdown, hosted by Sady from Tiger Beatdown and myself of the Sexist. Every week we do this little experiment where we drink a couple glasses of wine, sip a bit too plentifully from the NyQuil, and leave long, rambling voice messages on each others’ telephones that we then transcribe and place on the Internet for public consumption. Oh wait, that’s not us, that’s the way we imagine Lynn Crosbie’s latest column came into existence. My bad.

Although: Sady. Darling. WE SHOULD TOTALLY DO THAT ONE WEEK.

But for now:

AMANDA: “a woman is anyone who once was a tiny gamete with XX sex chromosomes instead of X plus Y.” oh boy. we’re getting into really enlightened conversation here.

SADY: oh, yes. apparently, “feminism” is about defining exactly who gets to be or not be a real lady on a profoundly restrictive biological basis! did you know ladies have the “indoor” “plumbing”?

AMANDA: that makes us more sophisticated

SADY: it does, in fact. sophisticated enough to appreciate the excellent sitcom, “two and a half men!”

AMANDA: I like this woman’s style! I could never write a sentence like this: “It is this, the plumbing, not the chromosomes, that define and estrange us from the brothers.” I think this is written in some sort of code. See: lede, “What is a real Samoan?”

SADY: right? in the end, we are told that defining Samoans is USELESS. there IS no such thing as a person of Samoan heritage or citizenship! i guess my question as to what this means for feminism in pop culture – the subject (?) of her article – is, HUH?

AMANDA: wait, is that what we learn? i truly cant tell if the sendoff is a joke: “Next week: Your American Idol! Comments?” hmm, yes, I have a comment. umm … get an editor?

SADY: hahaha this seriously reads like someone drank a whole bottle of nyquil and hammered out an article 1.5 seconds before deadline. like, her complaint seems to be that women can’t be defined a certain way although also she can define women but women in pop culture have not been sufficiently indefinable, so, what’s with defining things, Media?

AMANDA: i’m not sure why “Obsessed” will be good for feminism in pop culture but “The Reader” isnt? yeah, she seems to have an aversion to defining anything, like her point, or subjects of sentences

SADY: well, in “Obsessed,” we learn the very important lessons that women are natural energies and also that you should STAY AWAY FROM MY MAN. ENEMIES, not energies. i have been stricken with ill-definedness!

AMANDA: “the very image of a woman so fluid in her possibilities.” as is this essay, which i like to imagine was transcribed from a drunken voicemail

SADY: women are the trees, and the rain, and the wind.

AMANDA: the only thing i can say for sure about women is that they clearly ALWAYS have two XX sex chromosomes!

SADY: allow me to quote to you one of my favorite recent bits of feminism in pop culture, from singer/songwriter ben lee. it is called, “i’m a woman, too.”
AMANDA: haha. great. ok

SADY: It’s true, it’s true
I’m a woman too
I move with the flow of the seasons

I do, I do
Cause I’m a woman too
I don’t make sense but I got my reasons

AMANDA: this whole thing makes me want to bang my head on my keyboard. maybe the results could be published in the globe and mail?

SADY: yes, in womanly fashion. MOVE WITH THE FLOW OF THE SEASONS, my fellow woman. if there is one thing we have learned from ben lee and/or the globe and mail, it is that women make NO SENSE.

AMANDA: hear hear. incidentally, i have a small obsession with two and a half men. because—i’ve never seen it—but i always catch about 2 minutes of it before gossip girl comes on. and it’s always the sweet conclusion, which is usually charlie sheen sitting down on a couch and drinking a beer or something, and the other guy exiting and a laugh track. whatever happened before that may have been crazy interesting, but the end is always the same. it could be the same episode! i have no idea. and then the song comes on that’s like “Men, men, men MEN MEN MEN men men men MEN MEN MEN men men men”

SADY: that sounds amazing! why don’t women have a show like this!

AMANDA: pitch it

SADY: LADY LADY LADY: IS SHE SAMOAN? No way of knowing!

AMANDA: i do want to give lynn crosbie one credit here, which is, when I read the word “warmins,” i laughed out loud. i’m still laughing

SADY: yes, a show about how women may change from summer to spring to fall but Warmins are eternal i have a question for you: “What would you rather do: Consider seducing your hot boss in a bathroom stall or watch Queen Latifah being chased by bees?”

AMANDA: that’s a question for the ages.

Photo via cbs.com

Welcome back to Sexist Beatdown, a weekly ladyblog collaboration between myself and Sady of Tiger Beatdown: When our powers combine, etc.

Up for discussion this morning: Caitlin Flanagan’s most recent book review, “The Passion of Alec Baldwin,” an epic indulgence of armchair celebrity psychoanalysis in which Flanagan argues that:

(a) Alec Baldwin is a babe

(b) Ireland Baldwin totally has the hots for her babe dad, who has the hots for her, too

(c) Kim Basinger is a bitch

(d) choosing to spend your modest professor’s salary on expensive foreign perfumes to satisfy your wife’s whims instead of paying to fix the broken heater in your home will ensure that your daughter, Caitlin Flanagan, is raised with a purer vision of romance

(e) who the fuck knows for what this woman is truly arguing??

Begin.

SADY: hello! who wants to discuss DEEP PSYCHOSEXUAL TRAUMA? Specifically, the psychosexual trauma inflicted on me by Caitlin Flanagan and her latest piece.

AMANDA: sure dude

SADY: I had actually forgotten how deeply weird and wrong Caitlin Flanagan is in the past few years. Back in ‘06, her strange psychological issues and/or politics were all the rage. Now she basically has to assert that a famous man wants to sex his daughter in order to get noticed, I guess.

AMANDA: yeah, i’m wondering how much this “book review” about the baldwin family’s psychological problems is actually a concerted effort on flanagan’s part to air her own psychological problems in order to create a cult of personality around herself? it’s too obvious not to be intentional.

SADY: exactly. and flanagan is professionally a provocateur – writing that women should have sex with their hisbands when they don’t want to because it’s their “duty,” writing that working mothers damage their children irreparably with their selfishness, etc. this seems like another Flanagan Launch Party for her new theory, which is: women are basically giant incestuous adolescents, sexually speaking. oh, and divorce -no matter WHAT THE CONTEXT IN WHICH IT OCCURS – will make your child even more incesty, so don’t do it. EVER.

AMANDA: i’d like to indulge flanagan’s presence for a second here. let’s say that (a) alec baldwin is a total hunk, and (b) daughters are immediately sexual replacements for their desexualized mothers (even when their mothers are renowned beauty of film kim basinger)

SADY: sure! let’s say that!

AMANDA: why is divorce bad? then your hunky dad is totally a-vail-able! and he can shower you with all the fancy perfumes flanagan’s mom got or whatever

SADY: this would seem to be true! and yet, unless daddy and mommy are both there to show you the ruins of their faded yet once-torrid sexual passion for each other (which you will, of course, want to spend much time contemplating) you might have fewer chances to flirt with your dad!

AMANDA: i feel so bad for that girl. first, alec baldwin is her dad, and now flanagan seemingly wants to be her, but a version of her that wants to have sex with her dad, alec baldwin. all he did was call her a pig on the phone.

SADY: right? and while that crossed lines, and does seem like verbal abuse, it’s also a thing that I, a person not married to or spawned from a Baldwin/Basinger, feel I have a legitimate right to obsess about. yet flanagan (a) spends a ton of time talking about how abusive baldwin is, (b) furthermore posits the abuse as “almost sexual,” and (c) talks about how hot – and totally universal! – that is at length.

AMANDA: it’s actually kind of awesome. i feel kind of strange that i have to make the point that i’m a woman who doesn’t think her mom is a bitch and doesn’t want to have sex with her dad (or alec baldwin). i guess i’m a boring person to review a book. i kind of like that style: review a book about something fucked up, and try to one-up how fucked up it is. see: linda hirshman!

SADY: which is why i’ll be writing a review of “wetlands” entirely in my own feces at some point. the dad-as-romance thing kind of keys into the whole issue here, which is that flanagan also sees romance-as-dad. women are SUPPOSED to get turned on by guys who are bigger and stronger than they are, and have more authority than they do, in flanagan’s betty draper version of sexuality.

AMANDA: this is why jessica simpson’s marriage turned out so well.

SADY: hahaha. it’s kind of medieval: you will belong to your dad until you belong to your husband, so treat your husband like your dad, and vice versa!

AMANDA: and you will also neglect your children (a broken space heater is still a space heater!) to do so. i can’t really tell if she’s endorsing baldwin’s behavior toward his daughter. i mean she seems to endorse fathers who treat their daughters like girlfriends. i guess that only turns bad when you divorce your real girlfriend and start treating your daughter like your “mistress.” i have so much to learn about parenting.

SADY: i, too, need to learn about parenting. fortunately, i will have plenty of time to read caitlin flanagan’s advice on the issue once my beauty fades. i think she thinks that the only reason baldwin went all Glengarry Glenn Ross on his kid was the divorce. whereas, i submit to you, this could have made him a divorceable man in the first place!

AMANDA: it’s the chicken and the egg, man. we will never know if alec baldwin’s ex-wife drove him to abuse, or whether alec baldwin’s abuse of his wife drove her to divorce him.

SADY: yes, but fortunately it’s not our business: it is the business of noted columnist caitlin flanagan.

AMANDA: ok. i claim her. i will become as obsessed with her as she is obsessed with alec baldwin. i will pen long well-publicized columns insinuating that i want to have sex with her. and maybe her children.

SADY: JOURNALISM! Hurrah!

AMANDA: cheers.

It’s that time of the week, ladies. In this edition of Sexist Beatdown, Sady (of Tiger Beatdown) and myself (of a less cleverly-named blog) totally dish about boys! (and how to teach them not to rape girls without hurting their tender man-feelings).

Ripe for discussion is Dr. Perry Klass’s recent New York Times piece on how parents should talk the Talk, in which she argues that teaching boys about sexual assault could hurt their feelings, setting them up to be future rapists and/or emasculated girly-men. (Also, something about elevators? We didn’t really get that part).

Let the prepubescent victimization begin—but let’s try not to hurt Klass’s feelings, shall we?

—

SADY: hey lady! are you available to talk now? about BOYS?

AMANDA: i have so much to dish about. particularly, why is “when to get off the elevator” the only specific circumstance that story ventures to apply to its analysis of teaching girls and boys how to behave?

SADY: well, you know. clearly elevators are the most pressing sexual or gender issue for our nation today! i refer you, of course, to aerosmith’s “love in an elevator,” which explores these issues in depth.

AMANDA: “what can the most gender neutral experience ever teach us about how to teach boys not to rape people?”

SADY: that whole article weirds me out, because she’s talking about giving boys The Talk, yet stubbornly refuses to address anything in a specific or concrete manner.

AMANDA: yeah, anything. i was glad the Times decided to bring this issue to the forefront, after all the discussion lady publications have been giving to victim blaming / empowerment in domestic abuse situations. but it was mishandled

SADY: “you should know that there are certain people who will view you as dangerous in certain situations which are related to certain things.” she would give the worst Talk ever!

AMANDA: i know.

SADY: i mean, and i got this whole weird aura of defensiveness “people make MISTAKES [hitting people? raping?] and could be AUTOMATICALLY viewed as aggressors in AMBIGUOUS situations [again: hitting people? rape?]”

AMANDA: and, you know, maybe she really was just talking about getting out of the fucking way on an elevator? what was she talking about? the comment this piece begs to include is: well, girls learn about some things because they have to. boys will learn about them if we teach them.

SADY: ha. i think it’s important to address this stuff head-on with guys, because not only do they get messages that disrespecting girls is ok from the culture at large, they are likely to know other boys who ACT on that even if they personally do not. and, i mean, how awesome would it be if there were all these well-educated boys intervening with their friends to be like, “hey, perhaps you should not be such an asshole, for it is uncool?” god knows they won’t listen to GIRLS about this stuff, having already been told that girls should not be listened to, ever.

AMANDA: yeah, and of course there are more delicate ways to teach these lessons than say, you know, “you are a strong dangerous rapist in training, stop being the way you are!”

SADY: right. i mean, i too would probably give the worst Talk ever, because I would be like: Timmy, you have Urges. Girls also have Urges. Your Urges are OK and you should not treat anyone like crap because they respond or fail to respond to them. One day you will meet a nice person with Urges like yours – maybe a lady, maybe not – and on that day you can act on your Urges together in a mutually respectful manner. I apologize for naming you Timmy. The End.

AMANDA: haha. so i had forgotten what Perri Klass, MD’s conclusion was.

SADY: that we should teach boys AND girls to get off the damn elevator?

AMANDA: yeah (that also made absolutely no sense), but right before that: “It’s too bad that one side of teaching our children about sex and relationships means reminding them that there are bad people in the world; stay away from them, stay safe, speak up if someone hurts you or pushes you. But everyone needs that information, and that promise of adult support. We have to get that message across without defining some of our children as obvious perpetrators and others as obvious victims, because that insults everyone.”

SADY: yeah, and teaching both genders to protect themselves from predators is a nice message, or, to be more precise, FIFTY PERCENT of a very nice message. because teaching people not to BE predators is important too.

AMANDA: yeah, and nobody is saying, “don’t tell girls that their strength can be used for hurting.” i just can’t really see where klass is coming from here. she seems to think it’s a widespread problem that parents are only teaching their boys not to be bad citizens, not to rape, not to hit, not to be fucking jerks about the abortion. is that happening? i’m all for teaching girls not to be jerks about the abortion too, but i don’t think these conversations are happening at all, much less that there is a huge gender disparity in them. she seems to still be focused way back in time, on chivalry, which is horrifically misleading and not important.

SADY: yeah, exactly. lots of boys can be very courtly on a date, but courtly does not equal actual respect. i mean, yeah, i’m sorry, teen boys are getting messages that being predatory and violent specifically towards teen girls is acceptable. so addressing those messages head on (how do your friends talk about girls? Ah, I see, your friends are dicks) is maybe the only way to counteract that, and we can’t be afraid of HURTING SOMEONE’S FEELINGS by telling them that it’s not OK to hurt someone else. if she’s thinking that guys are getting traumatized by folks telling them that women are people and no means no, i really don’t get where she’s coming from.

AMANDA: agreed. it comes from the same place as the idea that like, teaching men about these things will emasculate them and they’ll turn into puny feminine gay boys. we don’t want oversensitive boys running around!

SADY: yes, if your son is taught to talk to ladies like they are people, his male parts will wither and he may BECOME a lady overnight. sad, but true.

AMANDA: it’s just funny that after months of conversations about the Celebrity Domestic Violence Incident that Klass Shall Not Name that focused on the idea of victim blaming and making women responsible for ending violence, we see this response—”hmm, awkward, should we really be blaming boys before they’ve actually done the violence?” ??? who is doing that?

SADY: yeah, right? because all i hear about these days is how it’s the lady’s responsibility and [via that crazy Linda Hirshman lady] ladies who get into abusive relationships should just leave – leave! LEAVE RIGHT NOW! – or else they are weak. i hear about nine million things each day about “don’t get drunk, don’t walk home alone at night, leave immediately if abuse happens, take responsibility or your raping/abuse/whatever will be YOUR FAULT for letting your guard down.” and women do have so many things they do to protect themselves. but one way? one REALLY EFFECTIVE WAY to make sure rape and abuse don’t happen? is to make dudes take responsibility for not abusing or attacking women. and to intervene with friends or peers when they see something like that take place.

AMANDA: “awkward”!

SADY: perri klass seems to think it’s incredibly sad that some people are scared of boys. i agree. so why not teach your boy to be someone people don’t need to be scared of?

Photo by freeparking

Earlier this week, I explained, ever-so-respectfully, why I thought sex-positive feminism was boring and dumb. In this edition of Sexist Beatdown, a chatty-thing, Tiger Beatdown’s Sady kindly explains how she came to personally identify as a “sex positive feminist” by being the only employee in a sex shop who didn’t know her anal nerve endings from the ones in her “cooter,” and I realize that a preponderance of rope restraints may be the only thing keeping me from the dark “sex-positive” side. Enjoy!

AMANDA: ok. so. sex sex sex sex feminism sex

SADY: Indeed! I have, at times – many, many, MANY times – identified as a “sex-positive” feminist. Yet your article demonstrated for me some of the reasons why that can be annoying even to my very own ears!

AMANDA: yeah, and the issue is actually a lot more interesting than the form it was presented in my post (”rant”)

SADY: Well, I feel like “sex-positive” is kind of a necessary construction, or was, at a certain point, when people were arguing with each other over whether porn, or heterosexual intercourse, was inherently oppressive to the ladies because of The Sexism. I even feel like right now we need to talk about ladies having sex drives and bodies that can enjoy sex and how that is not just necessarily some thing women inexplicably do to gratify man boners!

AMANDA: incidentally, i identify as a man boner gratifying feminist. i definitely agree with you, and i think the history of “sex positivity” and “feminist” is part of the reason it sort of nonsexually rubs me the wrong way. i just think at this point it’s so obvious that feminists are not sex-negative. but i am a young female feminist-identifying person, so maybe it’s not as obvious to, say, feminist-hating middle aged men.

SADY: RIGHT? They probably think you are out luring the man boners into wood chippers or something. OR marrying dudes so you can then divorce them, which I hear is quite popular. OR, you are a big old slutty slut slut boner slut. ALL OF THESE THINGS ARE TRUE, in the mind of the Middle-Aged-Feminist-Fearing-Dude.

Welcome back to “Sexist Beatdown,” the weekly event wherein Sady, of New York ladyblog “Tiger Beatdown,” and myself, of D.C. ladyblog “The Sexist” carry on evolved conversation on such topics as abnormal boners. This week, we discuss William Saletan, the Slate contributor obsessed with what Sady and I have, but what he does not: wombs (and the fetuses that sometimes develop in them).

Saletan is the king of the Ethical Ladypart Curveball, searching out freaky weird situations involving reproductive rights, in order to blow his fucking mind and encourage him to completely rethink the ethical rules involving abortion. Observe:

“If you stop paying a surrogate mother, what happens to the fetus?”

“Would you abort a fetus just because it wasn’t yours?”

Hey, we’re cool with “lady’s choice.” Not Saletan—it can never be that easy for Saletan. Is this awesome, or awesomely offensive? We decide, after the jump.

SADY: good morning! are you ready for SALETAN?

AMANDA: rarely am i afforded the pleasure of discussing a topic of such immediate ethical consequence!

SADY: indeed! i have now read the preface to SALETAN’s book! on! abortion! It is entitled “Bearing Right,” and it is about how conservatives have “won” the “abortion war” by changing the terms in which we talk about it, by, for example, not making it about a person’s right to choose what happens in her own body. i have also read several columns by saletan in which he refuses to frame abortion as a question of a person’s right to control what happens in her own body! so, he’s learned well, one supposes.

AMANDA: and this, i suppose, is why saletan continually frames the abortion debate around pregnancies that do not happen inside a woman’s body, but rather inside … another woman’s body.

SADY: exactly, or the IVF thing, which he hammers on constantly. he keeps talking about how, in the course of IVF, non-viable or extra embryos are produced and discarded. selecting embryos really pushes his buttons.

AMANDA: yes, i think it’s very problematic. he thinks that when a pre-baby is in a petrie dish, it is therefore out of the realm of concern for a woman’s body. but, look, it’s got to go in some woman’s body sometime. if saletan wants to implant all the frozen embryos in the world into his body to try to nurture them into little league, he’s free to do so. BUT i am here to defend saletan!

SADY: oh ho! an unexpected position! what, pray tell, is your defense? i am probably way too hard on him, i will tell you that much for free. i mean, a lot of his positions – contraception being the best way to avoid abortion, for example – are completely sensible. however, i feel he pushes for some weird policy of shaming people to make them better. even in a 100% perfect educated world, people will miss a pill or get drunk and forget their condoms. it’s not great, but it happens.

AMANDA: i think my only defense is a journalistic one. yeah. i dont think saletan and i agree on abortion, but i do share his interest in the fringe cases. the construction of his that you make fun of, an introduction, followed by a crazy ethical question like, “but, would you abort your medically unsafe pregnancy if there were a one percent chance your baby was the son of god?” i mean, i kind of LOVE those. i’m sure you take some sort of sick pleasure in them also

SADY: yes, it’s true, the Saletan Curveball is strong.

AMANDA: but the point i guess is that these very uncommon cases that may never actually happen are where all the interesting debate comes in. i do often disagree with the results he draws from them though. the one where the women aborted the fetus that was possibly not hers—saletan basically says she and the biological mom should talk it out. like he’s advising women who may go through this in the future—essentially, no one

SADY: exactly. i guess one of my main issues with the way he constructs these incredibly rare and weird scenarios is that i feel manipulated, as a reader. the second person that recurs – what if YOU, dear Reader, had YOUR fetus implanted in another lady’s uterus? what if YOU loved YOUR fetus? wouldn’t YOU be sad? – just sort of (a) runs right over these individual people and their individual perspectives, and (b) doesn’t seek to allow you any empathy or identification with anyone else in the story. i feel like he’s trying to back me into a corner, whereas, having a uterus, i could be either lady in some ridiculous implausible scenario. but i’m not either one! and i don’t know their positions in the matter, because saletan doesn’t tell me!

AMANDA: yeah. he essentially says that the person who cares more about fetuses should be able to make the decision

SADY: i say we do it biblically. cut that fetus in half! this is my King Solomon jurisprudence.

AMANDA: and in his mind, a woman who pays 100,000 for a surrogate womb cares about her fetus. the woman raking in the cash is just punching the clock. i looked at where the money goes, when you pay a company to find you a surrogate womb. one interesting tidbit: you have to pay the woman carrying the fetus $2,000 if you choose to abort it

SADY: oh, yowza.

AMANDA: so the assumption is that the bother or emotional stress of having to become pregnant and then abort it is worth 2,000 dollars. i say, if those women have to spend more than that on their pregnancies of these alien fetuses, that is when they are clear to abort without saletan’s concern. think about it—their abortion grief is established to be worth only 2,000 bucks to the people who donated the embryo. spending more than that on not aborting the baby is charity, in my opinion. i wish saletan would get even deeper into his arguments, is what i’m saying. the columns are just too short. i need more what ifs!!

SADY: exactly, yet when he raised the issue of surrogates terminating the pregnancies due to lack of funds, he POSTED A DUDE’S CONTACT INFORMATION so that people could contact him to stop it. without checking with the dude to see whether any surrogates actually sought to do so! and my understanding is, one did, then changed her mind, so there are Zero Aborting Broke Surrogates in the picture. yet that dude got a whole lot of e-mails, unexpectedly, probably some from 100% certified crazy-pantses. and saletan didn’t check on this? he has the dude’s contact information! yet did not use it!this is what i mean when i say that he has no concern for the people in the picture.

AMANDA: yeah, and he did then say—well, i mean, these women are working for free and they deserve the money anyway. but why is this different from any other sort of breach of contract? you get the money LATER, in court. not from saletan.

SADY: hah, yeah, maybe he should just set up a paypal link on the page!

AMANDA: i guess he feels like the “pregnancy” and the “women” are so delicate that they need the money now, or a terrible ethical situation will rise again. but i applaud saletan for bringing all this weird lady part shit to my attention, because i think it’s fascinating

SADY: oh, yeah, and i agree with you. more complexity = longer columns = better saletan. MORE SALETAN, is what we need! and, yes, i would never have learned as much as i have about weird pregnancy issues without him. so: thanks, guy.

AMANDA: i have a lot of unanswered questions. for example: if the woman implanted with the other lady’s embryo did not abort the fetus would saletan ask her to give the baby to the other woman? or does she get to keep it? this could possibly be MORE traumatic for the other woman.

SADY: well, considering that he referred to it as THAT LADY’s baby throughout, and talked about how she might never get another chance, i think he’s asking her to be a surrogate.

AMANDA: shit, i would keep it. the one thing that i have to ask, personally, about all this stuff is: why is this even happening? the lengths people will go. just buy one! i think it’s cheaper

SADY: exactly! i have an ethical question: is it wrong for me to sell my babies on the black market? what if they’re REALLY CUTE? but, yeah, for all the every-sperm-is-sacred thing we’re hearing, adoption never even enters the picture.

AMANDA: yeah. every sperm and egg are sacred, as long as they are mine. the other ones you have to birth, too, i just don’t have any insight into what the hell you do with them once they’re not fetuses anymore

SADY: well, you know. at that point the ETHICAL QUANDARIES become far less fascinating, i suppose.

AMANDA: yeah, then it’s just kind of a bummer

SADY: until the ex-fetus grows up, and becomes a lady, and somehow gets pregnant with a toaster! how did THAT get in there? what do we do with the embryonic toasters? don’t they deserve a chance to toast? i guess what i am saying is, there are many odd fringe cases left unexplored.

AMANDA: yeah, but the point is, we already have a mechanism by which to deal with those. the woman decides, the end. but saletan can certainly write an overture to her which she may or may not consider. what i want to know is—how do i get saletan to set up a paypal account for me? i’m currently not considering aborting anything

SADY: hah, yeah, we were all once fetuses. we deserve the right to live, and in my case, cable, which i can’t afford. how do i get saletan to extend his noble efforts to my cable bill?

AMANDA: what about the fetuses without cable?

SADY: um, can they download stuff from itunes, maybe?

AMANDA: kids, they can do anything

SADY: just don’t put an iphone in there, or your fetus will sext!

AMANDA: by william saletan

Welcome back to “Sexist Beatdown,” wherein the very abnormal Sady of Tiger Beatdown, and the merely abnormal Amanda, of the Sexist, chat about topics of interest to finer women. This week: Sex, is it normal or abnormal? How about when there is pee, children, and/or wheelchairs involved? Canadian young adults shall reveal all!

Last year, the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality published a study asking 104 undergraduate college students—36 men, 68 women, 96.2 percent heterosexual, two of whom had engaged in anal sex within four weeks of taking the survey—whether certain sexual behaviors were “normal” or “abnormal.” Half the respondents were provided surveys had the sexual acts being performed by men; half of the surveys had females performing the acts. The sex acts mentioned ranged from the routine (”A man/woman having sex somewhere other than a bed”) to the—let’s face it—abnormal (”A man/woman becoming aroused by watching children play in a playground”). Read the study here [PDF].

After a National Post story interpreted the findings to mean that “society accords men less ’sexual latitude’ than women,” and that a “new sexual double standard” was now at work against men, not women, in the bedroom. The Internet exploded: The battle of the sexes was again rehashed on the Daily Beast; Jezebel defended men against shame; somebody twittered that “Jezebel is the new patriarchy.”

Frankly, we’re not exactly buying any of this.

AMANDA: hi

SADY: hello! i am just perusing the great “who is a sex freak” study now. confession: i’m kind of bad at just reading raw statistics. did you read through it?

AMANDA: i did read through it. i skipped most of the intro.

SADY: as did i

AMANDA: but i basically get the findings

SADY: so, the operating theory behind this study is that men are judged more harshly than ladies for getting all freaky in the sack. here is an interesting fact: MOST OF THE PEOPLE WHO RESPONDED TO THE SURVEY WERE LADIES. so seriously, are we surprised that girls are maybe more understanding of girls getting off in weird ways?

AMANDA: that’s a good point. But i think commentators—and the original news story—are overestimating the difference between perceptions of men and women here. and i think it’s important to note what respondents were asked. they were asked whether something was “normal” or “abnormal,” not whether something was acceptable or unacceptable. so when i see a question like this one:

A man (woman) in a wheelchair performing oral sex on someone who is able-bodied

do I think that’s normal? I’ve never done this, or heard a story about this happening, or seen it in porn. i think it’s very abnormal. That just doesn’t fucking happen all that often. That doesn’t mean that it’s wrong, it’s just not really an average thing

SADY: yeah, it’s unusual, but probably not to folks who are romantically involved with someone who’s disabled. my favorite question is “a normal weight person having sex with a person who weighs 322 pounds.” surprisingly, 32% of folks surveyed thought it was “abnormal” for a “normal weight” dude to have sex with a 322-pound lady, but only 25% thought it was “abnormal” for women to have sex with a 322-pound man! That’s not freaky sex time, that’s the plot of “King of Queens.”

AMANDA: i know. and how specific the weight is! but that’s exactly where i was going to go with this—a lot of our idea (or 104 Canadian college students’ idea) of what is normal comes from what we see regularly on television or in porn. you’re more likely to see a 3-way with two women and a man than two men and a woman—that’s “more normal.” you’re more likely to see a girl get peed on than the other way around—that’s “more normal.” also, i can see why some men would want to say, you know, for example, it’s totally normal for a woman to want to have anal sex, because i want to have anal sex with my girlfriend.

SADY: hah, right, and a lot of that (porn) IS based on a model of sex and gender wherein men are totally active and in control and hypersexual and women are only responsive and there to gratify the dudes. that’s just the way these things go.
AMANDA: right, exactly. i think the idea that this study has any implications on the sexual double standard is misleading. a man can say he thinks it’s normal for a girl to want to have a threesome, and a man may want to have a threesome with two girls, but does he want to date a girl who he knows has had a threesome? that’s an entirely different survey.

SADY: that’s the survey of my life, friend.

AMANDA: hahaha

SADY: i do think it’s interesting, though, even though we admit that we’re looking at this totally overtly normative version of sex, that there are two questions with HUGE disparities: one, it’s considered way abnormal for dudes not to get turned on by nekkid ladies, and two, it’s considered way abnormal for dudes to get turned on by wearing lady clothes. neither of those are AS abnormal for girls.

AMANDA: you’re right about that. i did read somewhere that the vast majority of respondents were heterosexual, with only one gay male reporting

SADY: yeah, precisely… and all of the questions about partner sex were phrased in an overtly hetero way, the only question where you don’t know the gender of the partner are the ones where somebody’s getting peed on.

AMANDA: also, while everyone thought it was abnormal for men to get turned on by children playing, only 91.7 percent of respondents thought the same of women

SADY: UM?

AMANDA: i have no explanation for that one

SADY: yeah, well, it’s also more “abnormal” for dudes to have rape fantasies than ladies.

AMANDA: i think this study would be more interesting if it were accompanied by one that surveyed people about their actual turn-ons. how many dudes get turned on by peeing vs. how many women think that is normal? now we’ll see who’s normal!

SADY: that would be exciting! there could be a whole undercurrent of pee-love in the American populace, and we wouldn’t know about it. but who’s going to answer those questions honestly? this all reminds me of the bonobo porn study from a while back.

AMANDA: i know, maybe we’re not ready to rehash that just yet. it would be interesting to know, at least, how attitudes about what’s “normal” affect your feelings for a person. “would you be more/less likely to date a man who liked to be peed on?” i’ll answer that: i would date him, but not necessarily pee on him.

SADY: i would feel bad about dating that dude. i would be unable to pee on him and i would know that he was missing out. i think he should meet a nice girl who drinks a lot of beer and coffee, that’s my answer.

AMANDA: no very abnormal feelings toward you though, man. also, what university can only find one gay person out of a hundred?

SADY: exactly. i mean, these are just questions about Generic Dude and Generic Lady and their many (hetero)sexy adventures. so are we surprised that we’re coming up with this super-generic picture here?

AMANDA: you’re right, there’s no personal investment here at all. i bet most of them don’t give a shit what a theoretical person does on or off a wheelchair

SADY: exactly. there’s no history there at all. like, is the wheelchair dude or lady in question having sex with his/her spouse? girlfriend? MAILMAN? we don’t know!

AMANDA: and do they get off on the disability, or do they just happen to be with a disabled person? inquiring bloggers want to know. in short, this study was not nearly sexy enough

SADY: too true. one thing i have learned from this study is that the 68 ladies who took it (as opposed to the 36 men) are REALLY not into (a) dudes not getting turned on by their nekkid parts, and (b) dudes masturbating while in a relationship. are we that insecure that dudes can’t occasionally NOT have boners, or get boners on their own sometimes? there are plenty of boners to go around! in conclusion, boners.

AMANDA: boners

SADY: embrace your boners, people of the world! let no-one tell you they are abnormal!

AMANDA: boners.

Photo by venetia joubert sarah oosterveld

Parents! Do you know what felonies your tweens could be committing with their very own cellular telephones, and what stupid name the you will coin in order to facillitate freaking out to the newsmedia? Hint: the felony is “child pornography,” and the stupid name you have chosen is “sexting.”

Before, your children were simply sending naked photographs of themselves to each other in pursuit of eagerly snatching at adulthood. Now, they may be listed as sex offenders well into their adult lives. Good job, team!

Allow Sady of Tiger Beatdown and myself, of The Sexist, to take you back to a simpler time, when a child could only be a child pornographer for taking photgraphs of other children, and scoolgirls had to deliver naked photos of themselves to their classmates uphill in the snow both ways. [Bonus! Read Sady's take on sexting here].

AMANDA: Sexting!

SADY: oh, yes. the sexy teens, sending each other sexy messages. is there no way we can stop it? perhaps through ridiculous charges of child pornography!

AMANDA: that ought to do it.

SADY: what strikes me, with this, is the way that so much of the burden of shame – and sometimes actual, legal guilt – rests on the girls who send naked pictures. instead of the dudes who “accidentally” send these naked pictures to every other dude they know!

AMANDA: yeah, it is a weird double standard. first they’re told, don’t send naked photos of yourself! it is a form of “dating violence” against YOU. then, don’t send naked photos of yourself! you are a pornographer, the objectifier!

SADY: hah, yeah. oh the violence of maybe sending a dude a photo of your boob! oh, the slutty pornographer you will be if you do so! it reminds me of the conversations people are having about “hooking up.” (did you know the young people are doing this now?) first, girls are told they’re being taken advantage of by men, who are of course the only people to actually experience a desire for sex. THEN, they’re told that they’re making it impossible for any man to ever NOT treat them like crap, by putting out!

AMANDA: i also wonder how much this is condescending to teens, too. is this a “teen” epidemic? don’t older people also regrettably send naked photos of themselves to their significant others?

SADY: i have spoken to many adult women who are in the practice of it, yes.

there was an episode of 30 Rock about it, so you know it is a pressing social concern.

AMANDA: the name is really, really dumb. it smacks of Parent. with the aid of Fox 5 at 10.

SADY: I know, right? It’s very late-night-local-news, seven-ways-your-dishwasher-can-kill-you. SEX + TEXTING = SEXTING! Great work, Bob!

AMANDA: yeah. the whole thing really is just old news repackaged for a “new generation.” teens have always gotten naked in front of each other. teens have always talked about it to other teens. teens have always coerced other teens to do something they’re not really ready to do, in some cases. now their parents can just find out a little bit easier.

SADY: yeah, precisely.

AMANDA: they should just make some iphone app and get over it.

SADY: haha, “THIS TEXT MESSAGE HAS BEEN DETERMINED TO CONTAIN NIP SLIP. ACCESS DENIED.” i could use that one, actually.
AMANDA: yeah. another point of concern that i have is: my phone is busted and i can’t take photos. why do these teens have way sweeter phones than i do?

SADY: it’s their darn permissive parents, i say! in my day, we had to use polaroids, or make crude etchings of our privates!

AMANDA: hahaha

SADY: i think that it’s way easier to see the hysteria underlying ANY sex when we look at TEEN sex, because teens are supposed to have bodies specifically under control of their parents. as opposed to everyone else, who is supposed to have a body under the control of DEEP SHAME.

AMANDA: yeah, it takes about 18 years to get that ingrained in you.

SADY: haha

AMANDA: this most recent case in spotsylvania though (real name) one of the girls whose photos were spread around is twelve years old. and even i, as a relatively young person hip to the underage sex, have to pause at that one

SADY: yeah, that one gives me pause. and i think that this is a weird thing, because girls, specifically, are under pressure as soon as they hit any region vaguely definable as “puberty” to be sexy. but not SEXUAL. be hot. but DON’T GIVE IT UP. and i wonder what combination of intimate and social pressures were happening to make this girl think she needed or wanted to do this. because one thing you can’t do at that age is walk a line that charged without getting confused or fucking up. and now, obviously, she’s being punished for it.

AMANDA: lock her up! lock her up! this all makes me very glad i’m not in school anymore. if my naked photos were sent around to people, i can at least know that most of them would not be people i’m forced to sit still with for six hours every day of my life. it would probably just be on some blog or something. whatever.

SADY: i really think that the technology aspect of it is part of what causes the furor. i mean. not that i’ve never woken up and thought “oh, god, what did i do last night and is it on facebook?” but you’re right, the access to a technology which allows you to notify the whole school of your boobal region, combined with the fact that none of these kids is probably even sure of how to handle sexuality ANYWAY, because they receive NINETY-SEVEN CONFLICTING MESSAGES on a daily basis, makes it scary. particularly for the olden-timey folks who are raising them!

AMANDA: i know, i’m sure they are so very confused. it’s just how everything is.future employers can google you, future boyfriends can google you, stalkers can google you. things you do stick around longer but they also get buried in so many things that also stick around that i think they can become less important. not that this isn’t a shocking and terrible thing for a 12 year old to go through, but i think shocking and terrible things are just changing.

SADY: right? i mean, i recall passing a note to a boy when i was maybe twelve. because i had a crush on him. and i think it contained the phrase “i wish we could make out.” also, maybe lyrics to janet jackson’s smash hit “if?” I WAS TWELVE. anyway, the moral of the story is that he did not return my affections and consequently read it out loud to the entire school bus. but AT LEAST IT WAS NOT AN E-MAIL, JESUS.

AMANDA: adolescence is tragic, i tell you. at least we weren’t prosecuted for it

SADY: yeah. that note has been lost in the sands of time. only the memory does not fade. unlike some of these girls, who are maybe going to be on a register of sex offenders that shows up, ON THE INTERNET, for the rest of their lives! because that will show them.

Photo by KB35

Welcome back to Sexist Beatdown, the weekly feature wherein Sady of Tiger Beatdown (white, heterosexual, cisgendered, American) and myself of The Sexist (white, heterosexual, cisgendered, American), chat. Except for last week, when we did not do it. My fault. BUT THIS WEEK WE ARE BACK, to discuss whether the feminist blogosphere is a form of digital colonialism, and if so, does that explain why feminist blogs are sometimes very boring? Ready, aim:

REFERENCED:

What If The Feminist Blogosphere Is A Form of Digital Colonialism, in which two lady bloggers, Brittany and Mandy, postulate that the feminist blogosphere may, in fact, be a form of digital colonialism.

An Apology From Brittany and Mandy, in which the aforementioned bloggers apologize for postulating that the feminist blogosphere may, in face, be a form of colonialism.

Well Allow Me To Retort, in which an alleged victim of said digital colonialism argues that she is not, in fact, a victim of digital colonialism.

Then: a series, in which alleged digital colonizer Feministe talks, and talks, and talks about whether it is, in fact, guilty of digital conolialism.

Our turn!

—

SADY: it is time for the discussion of why GUEST BLOGGING WILL DESTROY THE WORLD, apparently! did you even get through all the billions of words in the links i sent you? i have been re-reading them myself this very evening.

AMANDA: i got through many of them. i got very tired. let me start off by saying, i apologize for featuring your words in a weekly token guest blog. i did not mean to offend

SADY: you know, i will have to think that over. as a LARGER ELITE BLOG, i am aware that my decision to work with you is based on my own misguided naivete, so really, i have only myself to blame!

AMANDA: you’re white though, so i think it’s better? or maybe worse, i can’t keep it straight.

SADY: i am a white lady, yes. therefore this argument is not nearly so insulting to me as to many! but what frustrates me in the “what if the feminist blogosphere is a form of digital colonialism” post is that its one central point—women of color who guest post at Big Feminist Elite Blogs are being exploited and don’t know it somehow—is so very NOT REALLY THE POINT AT ALL, if you read it closely. it mainly seems to be about Big Feminist Blogs and how they are keeping people—like maybe the authors of this very post!—out of the spotlight, and guest blogging is… causing this? i do not know. what i do know, from reading feministe, is that one of the authors once had a fight with jessica valenti

AMANDA: i see. i read a lot of the stuff, but i got bored around the middle of the feministe series.

SADY: awww

AMANDA: yeah, i’m sorry. i did get a little frustrated at how vilified the two women who wrote the post were by these other blogs that they had implicated in the post, to the point where they felt the need to write a long and excessively delicate, i thought, apology on it

SADY: yeah, i sort of read through that apology but i kind of was not able to keep my attention on it. i should say that i originally found the post through Shark-Fu’s response.

AMANDA: Shark-Fu’s response was great, and actually this whole exercise has brought up a criticism that I’ve had about some of the larger group blogs for some time, which is that they can be very, very boring sometimes. regardless of the identity politics of the writers, most of which i’m not really familiar with—this being on the internet and all—i think that the smaller individual blogs are where great voices are really cultivated and stranger issues are addressed, and when they’re filtered into these larger monoliths i think a lot of that gets lost. (except for Shark-Fu, whose voice can never be silenced). take jezebel, for example, which i like—after reading that blog for a couple years, it just begins to feel very safe. though there are points of daring writing by some of the women who blog there, i wish there was a little more branching out in terms of content and voice.

SADY: yeah, i definitely agree with you about jezebel. although i think some of jezebel brings up the issue of maybe Blogging While Corporate, in that a lot of the writers I definitely sought out on that site were lost or started posting a lot less after they were moved to “part-time.” but i agree that single-person blogs, where you really get to watch one voice grow and develop and chart out the areas of its obsession, are usually more fascinating to me.

AMANDA: definitely. also, the very sad loss of Pot Psychology. i think one of the problems with blogs is that they are for people to just talk and talk and talk (see: this very blog post), and so these areas of opinion are worked over and over again, which draws a lot of conversation, but which doesn’t always advance the scope of the topics we’re actually talking about. which is the sad fallout of the fall of dead tree journalistic outfits i suppose.

SADY: ha, yeah. i also think that this one post we’re talking about now has some interesting stuff to say, but that stuff is (ironic!) drawn from critiques, largely framed by ladies of color, that they didn’t link to directly except through WEIRDLY ACADEMIC FOOTNOTES BECAUSE THEY ARE BORING, sorry. but the questions of who gets “authority,” who gets to be “representative,” and how that lines up with the class or racial privilege you have, i definitely think are worth investigating. i mean, blogs are for talking and talking and talking, but are we also listening and listening and listening? and to whom? and what are we doing with what we learn there?

AMANDA: i thought their original post was very interesting, and often right, and also wrong, and that the bigger blogs (i suppose i am only talking about feministe here) did a sort of cop-out move to focus only on the criticisms that were easy to shoot down. (not only . . . largely). i think one of the very interesting aspects of the original post was that it made the point that, hey, the Internet is great because everybody has a voice, but actually, there are so many voices on the Internet that the little blog representative of one aspect of feminism is not heard if it’s not picked up by the larger sites. so really, no, not everyone has a voice.

SADY: true enough, and there may be a lot of factors (like, if someone is writing from a marginalized perspective within feminism—if they are a trans feminist, or a feminist sex worker, or a lady of color) that may cause people to view those as… i don’t want to impute ill will to anybody, but let’s say those are viewed as “specialized” whereas if you are writing from a more privileged place you get to present your concerns (and have them accepted) as “universal”

AMANDA: definitely

SADY: am i saying any of this right? i am pretty sure i am not!

AMANDA: yeah, and i wish that jezebel and some of the other blogs would touch on more glbtq stuff sometimes, but they’re allowed to define their content area as they please. on the other hand, they’re in this position to do so much interesting stuff that i think a lot of times they don’t take the opportunity to. and part of that is because they’re getting cut, they’re overworked, underpaid, etc.

SADY: yeah, right, and here’s where i think the questions about money and audience and status and whatever get very interesting. because if you’re getting paid, let alone paid WELL, to be a feminist blogger (and are dependent for your paycheck on the goodwill of a dude who is not precisely known for being warm and cuddly, in jezebel’s case) then… well, you have to write in a way that will capture your audience’s attention and justofy those ad purchases on your site, and that might lead to the kind of “safe” stuff you were talking about, where you go back to things that you know will work and don’t get to have the same sense of adventure as a blog without those concerns. which is not to say that i don’t get a lot of news from jezebel! or even that i think jezebel is what they were talking about rather than feministing, feministe, shakesville, which i’m told make far less money, and which i also read.

AMANDA: yeah. i think it’s just like any other capitalist industry, really, it’s a meritocracy but it’s not, and it’s important to remember that. at the same time … hell, it offers a lot of opportunity for a lot of discussion, and that’s great! though very very extended discussions about Why We Are Not Racist i’m pretty much over with for now. thankfully, once the pageviews subside the blogs will move on to something else.

SADY: yes, thank god for the Internet: proving once and for all that if you just stop paying attention to some people, they will go away. and then maybe you can actually pay attention to people for doing something good! like being talented! it’s sad how much easier it is to talk and talk forever about someone you don’t like.

AMANDA: it is sad, but that is the internet in a nutshell. it’s also easy to come up with reasons you don’t like something that you might even have good things to say about.

SADY: it’s also easy to say purposefully inflammatory things to get attention. I DON’T LIKE NUNS OR BABIES. Next baby I see: I’m punching it, HARD. see how easy that is?

AMANDA: piece of cake.

Welcome back to a weekly collaboration in which, through the magic of Gchat, New York-based blogger Sady of Tiger Beatdown joins D.C.-based me of The Sexist to hash out the most pressing women’s issues of the day. This time it was a no-brainer: Duh, Rihanna. In this edition: what happens when “the people entering into the domestic violence debate are people who are normally, you know, drawing jizz on Zac Ephron’s face.”

So. Chris Brown allegedly beat up (now-former) girlfriend Rihanna, and:

SADY: it’s really troubling. i think it is just hard for people to even approach it without getting into iffy territory, because we have so many messed-up ideas about partner violence itself. and the idea of it surfacing in this huge and troubling way between two super-famous people, who both have (apparently) super clean public images, is really weird.

AMANDA: it is very weird. but then chris brown’s whole history is resurfacing now—how he grew up in a really bad situation with an abusive step-dad—and everyone is upset about that. a lot of people are saying ‘how dare you bring that up?’ as if bringing up the history excuses domestic violence. I have to pee really quick. keep writing. i’ll be right back.

SADY: Right. what it tells us is that brown has a history of being exposed to that stuff, and some people are reading that as an excuse-type statement, “oh but he didn’t like it when his dad did it so he couldn’t have,” whereas other folks are reading it as: kids who grow up in those situations sometimes repeat them, it’s a programming thing. i am reading a d.h. lawrence novel about how his dad beat up his mom! and lawrence hated it! and then went on to perpetrate it in at least one relationship, i understand! so d.h. and chris brown apparently have something in common.

AMANDA: who knew. i think it’s been kind of interesting how the celebrity aspect of this has revealed a lot about how people talk about domestic violence. i remember reading a rumor on the internets shortly after the incident happened that said, “Chris Brown Beats Rihanna For Giving Him Herpes,” and then there was this firestorm of people reacting to that, saying, why perpetuate this rumor, and even if it’s true, it doesn’t excuse anything. But still, I heard that rumor maybe 3 or 4 times just from people that i know.

SADY: right. exactly. it was all over.

AMANDA: because that’s how celebrity news works—you hear a rumor, you repeat it. it doesn’t have anything to do with your moral position on domestic violence.

SADY: yet i think it is interesting that the first thing people wanted to know was: how did she make it happen? was she possessive? cheating on him? was it the herp? the idea of an abuser as someone who makes a CHOICE, to ABUSE, is kind of absent.

AMANDA: i think part of it is that people just like to talk about celebrities, and now there’s this whole movement to make the discussion of this domestic violence somehow more sacred than that—more tempered and more positive—and of course the whole situation is very serious and awful, but i think it’s a little too much to expect here. the only reason we’re dissecting every little part of it in the first place is because it’s chris brown and rihanna, not some joe schmos from down the street who are probably beating each other right now.

SADY: yeah, true enough.

AMANDA: so, the people entering into the domestic violence debate are people who are normally, you know, drawing jizz on zac ephron’s face. which is a frustrating place to be in for people who see this as an opportunity to talk about some issues that don’t get a lot of time in the public conversation.

SADY: yeah, there’s a lot of “if chris brown were MY boyfriend he wouldn’t beat me up,” versus “rihanna is so pretty, why would you hit HER?” it’s kind of weird to acknowledge that people’s positions on this, because of the fame, might be less moral than “OMG must come to defense of person who has never seen me or spoken to me but will one day love me back!”

AMANDA: yeah, definitely. what did you think of the spokesperson’s comment? i think it was something like, “rihanna is well, we appreciate your concern.” i got this press release from some lady judge who was super pissed about that, saying it “glossed over” the issue . . . i thought it was just a pretty standard “no comment.”

SADY: yes, that was it, almost exactly. and, you know, normally people who report these things don’t have their names published. which makes sense to me given the fact that someone created a “rihanna deserved it” t-shirt – you really want to shield someone from that kind of shaming. so i can see her wanting to be private above all right now. you’re a journalist, i mean, way more so than i—what do you think of the fact that her name was reported?

AMANDA: wow, they create t-shirts fast these days.

SADY: yes, and take them down almost as quickly.

AMANDA: i mean, i think that’s probably a result of how this was reported, and how all celebrity news is reported. if you’re reporting from a police report, the name is struck and there are journalistic standards blah blah. but if paparazzi have the photo of RIHANNA and bloggers are writing first-person accounts of RIHANNA . . . it’s out the window then.

SADY: yeah, exactly. and then people are like, “if only we had pictures! if only we had a statement from each of them! they are fame-os, how can they withhold this incredibly fascinating story from us, the public!”

AMANDA: it’s too bad, but i think that privacy is one that all celebrities sacrifice, and journalistic standards are really lax for them. you can say pretty much anything about a celebrity and people are rarely sued. so do you think chris brown is going to fade into obscurity?

SADY: i dunno if it’s going to be obscurity or infamy. i mean, axl rose was accused of domestic violence. ike turner, obvs. r. kelly not only got a “not guilty” sentence, he got even more famous. there is now a song called “don’t call me whitney, bobby.” i think that’s where this is going.

AMANDA: i like that song. yeah, i guess we just wait for the comeback!

SADY: as do i!

AMANDA: let’s agree to meet back here, same place, at the time of chris brown’s inevitable comeback.

SADY: okay, i am scheduling it for a year from now. let’s place bets. we’ll talk.

—

AND NOW: the musical fruits of domestic violence, courtesy of Islands.

And now, suddenly, a new tradition: Every Friday, the amazing Sady of the New York-based lady blog Tiger Beatdown and myself, of the Washington, D.C.-based blog you are reading now, will discuss the lady issues of the day.

In this episode, Sady and I dissect a Congressional morality play, in which President Barack Obama convinces Democrats to drop a $200 million family planning provision from the $825 billion economic stimulus bill in order to court Republican support, only to find that the Republicans don’t give a shit and none of them vote for it anyway.

AMANDA: first up, i hear via Wonkette tweet that Rod Blagojayavavovich is out.

SADY: is he now? i will be sad when he is gone and irrelevant, for he is such a hugely entertaining figure in American life.

AMANDA: he did a lot for women’s health in his state, and then said a lot about how he did a lot for women’s health in his state over and over again, in order to avoid talking about all the wire tapping business.

SADY: oh, well, yes. he should be in touch with the women’s health needs of his constituency, given that he is maybe secretly listening to their dreams while they sleep.

AMANDA: but he’s not going to discuss those allegations at this point. okay, so isn’t it weird that a) the postal service is taking Saturdays off now forever, and b) the stimulus bill just passed the house with no Republican support?

SADY: damn those postal services. oh, wait, i do everything through e-mail.

AMANDA: yeah i do not use the mail, ever.

SADY: and yes, which makes the “bipartisanship” moves of, say, dropping women’s health funding from it, kind of sad now. the more i look at this the more it seems to be a question of economic differences: GOP in favor of tax cuts, Dems in favor of spending on programs they think will create jobs.

AMANDA: why was there a whole big to-do about the family planning stuff then? there were all these reports of obama working congress for hours and hours, shaking hands and kissing babies and whatnot, and it turns out it didn’t even matter to the Republicans.

SADY: i honestly think it was just sort of casual misogyny, because the GOP wanted to pick a fuss about “unnecessary” spending, and (in their eyes) what is more unnecessary than extended health services for poor ladies!

AMANDA: yeah, i feel like it’s also easy to explain to “the people.” it’s easier to say, “they want to kill babies with this stimulus bill” than a whole bunch of economic jargon that I, admittedly, also do not understand.

SADY: right, and you get to scare people with the ever-present “poor woman slutting it up.”

AMANDA: and on the democratic side, don’t you imagine Pelosi et al were frustrated? i mean the economic sense of the family planning stuff seems fairly straightforward, but once you get “they want to fund abortions instead of rebuilding the country” into the equation, that’s probably hard to shake.

SADY: right, big ups for my Ohio homedude John Boehner for the scary scary thought of taxpayers! being forced! to fund! the abortion! industry!

AMANDA: “Boehner ” still makes me laugh, but that’s neither here nor there.

SADY: right, with a name like that your life can go either into porn or into insane puritanism. i imagine the mere thought of boners drives him mad with shame as he imagines the playgrounds of his youth. yet it’s weird that the dems backed off so easily.

AMANDA: and i think in a larger sense this just shows how women’s issues are sensationalized in the political process all the time. and i have to think a lot of it, as i think you said earlier, is that there are just vaginas involved. when there’s a vagina involved, suddenly everyone has an opinion— but the other billions and billions of dollars of provisions we don’t even hear about.

SADY: exactly. the actual bill itself just removed a step from a process that was already happening. yet Chris Matthews is like, “forcing people not to procreate with their vaginas any more? letting people have sex with their vaginas? Vaginas!” the rest of it is not salable in that same way.

AMANDA: vaginas. but, and speaking as someone who has a vagina, i can’t really be bothered with all this nonsense anymore. i just want to take my medicine or whatever and have it be as cheap as anyone else’s medicine.

SADY: exactly.

AMANDA: do you think that women’s health is always going to be a dividing line between these parties?

SADY: honestly, insofar as “women’s health” is linked with contraception is linked with abortion is linked with women’s being defined NOT entirely around popping out the babies for their husbands, i think it will always be a sore point. and one which can be exploited. yet so often it seems cynical to me. the socially conservative folks who vote based on these issues are not the same economically privileged folks who would be benefited by, say, the GOP’s tax cuts.

AMANDA: yeah, and it’s unfortunate that in this case, because that chain of associations was set off, women will suffer.

SADY: right, exactly. and i get that obama is looking to create coalitions, but (more boehner news) certain outlets are reporting that, as boehner walked to the floor for a vote, he, like, flashed a “zero” with his fingers to signify the number of GOP pro votes that would be cast there’s a determination not to cooperate that is really scary, because it honestly seems like it is not about the issues, but about opposing this current president.

AMANDA: and on the other hand, too, i mean there’s this massive bill that the democrats know isn’t going to get major republican support. and they don’t change much of the bill, they just decide to toss out what essentially is a “token” admission to the republicans. but why sacrifice women’s issues the token issue when you know they’re not going to support you anyway, and in fact, their support does not matter?

SADY: exactly! that’s what bothers me! how easily this was backed up on and characterized as inessential when it is totally not! i mean, i get the sense that we could be voting “innocent puppies: should they all be killed?” and certain folks would be like NO WAY AM I DEALING WITH THAT PUPPY SYMPATHIZER OBAMA.

AMANDA: hey, did he pick a puppy yet?

SADY: i don’t know, i seriously feel like this puppy is going to be the unseen force that governs all our lives. we may never know whether a puppy has been picked or not. this is an inexcusably long time to wait for a puppy, i am saying.

Photo by urbanshoegirl.