In this week’s YouTube video chat, Dr. Laura Schlessinger addresses an unnatural new development of modern life: stay-at-home dads. What are the possible psychological effects of this strange permutation of the traditional child-rearing arrangement? A listener writes in Thinking of the Children:

If a mom works, and the dad stays home with the children, does this have any psychological effect on the kids, with respect to their relationships later in life? You talk a lot about stay-at-home-moms, but I don’t recall hearing much about what happens when the roles are reversed. Is it better for boys if the dad stays home or does it matter?

Dr. Laura, for her part, is far more concerned with Thinking Of the Wives:

This is one which gets very sensitive, because in general—that means there are exceptions everywhere, OK—when the moms are working, and the dads are at home, the moms, the women, the wives, tend to change their feelings somewhat about their husbands. They tend not to see them as the heroes. The warrior. The man. The caretaker. The provider. The protector. And those feelings are really very significant. And I have found over the years that there often is more marital strife when the roles are reserved. Whether you’re a feminist or not, whether you like it or not, them’s just the facts.

You see, when a woman wanders outside her natural role as child-rearer and housekeeper and enters into the dangerous world of the male warrior heroes, she’s liable to start getting some Ideas. Ideas like, “Despite what I’ve been told, my feeble female brain can perform tasks outside of raising babies.” Ideas like, “This is the ‘work’ my husband has been self-importantly occupying himself with for all these years? All these people do is dick around and watch YouTube videos.” Ideas like, “Now that I’m getting paid for all the work I do, perhaps I shouldn’t have settled for that loveless marriage after all.”

But never fear: As long as women agree to leave the home without applying their critical thinking skills, the kids will be all right:

Now: it often works very well. And when it works very well—OK, when it works very well it’s good for the kids, when it doesn’t work very well, it’s not good for the kids. The point is not, are the rolls reversed and is that good for the children? The point is, are the parents RHHHHGGG about it? Is dad being treated with less respect? Is mom coming home sort of bitter that she’s not with the kids, and feeling like since she earns the money, she’s the boss? If there is this kind of negativity and dissention, that hurts the kids.

In other words, are you still treating mom like a woman (with less respect), and dad like a man (the boss)? You’re good to go. But once mom starts to get empowered by her new position—or dad starts feeling emasculated—it’s back to the kitchen with her.

In this edition of Sexist Beatdown, Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown and I reconvene to solve the enduring mystery of ABC’s LOST: Why have all the compelling female characters been systematically eliminated from the plot, while Jack is allowed to live on as Dr. McFixALot, a character who exists only to fail unspectacularly at everything and shoot enduring looks at Kate?

Theories:

a. The plane crash unhinged Jack from space-time, forcing him to relive the same moment in his life over and over again. In that moment, Jack attempts to fix something in the dumbest way possible, and fails unspectacularly at it;

b. Jack is an agent of the smoke monster, sent to the island to torture women into killing themselves;

c. The Island represents the purgatory between the states of Jaded Spinal Surgeon With Daddy Issues and Bearded Alcoholic With Lady Issues;

d. Jack’s asshole is a black hole.

SADY: Hi there! Are you LOST? Have I LOST you? It would be a shame if I LOST my internet connection! Also, kill me.

AMANDA: Wait, let me do one: I’m beginning to think i have “LOST” interest in LOST this season.

SADY: I have LOST track of all the times I have LOST interest in LOST, really.

AMANDA: It’s part of the whole deja vu thing.

SADY: It stems from the fact that we seem to have LOST 98% of all the female characters.

AMANDA: Right. I think we’re down to two now! Wait, plus, Ana Lucia 2.

SADY: Yes, that Ilana chick! I do not know what is up with LOST (not letting go of the caps!) and the death of all the ladies. It is true, however, that it is a big hit on some fronts! For example: having more than one character of color, and having them have conversations with each other. Conversations that do not go like, “I am an Asian man! I hear that you are Latino! Truly, neither of us is a white person.” Instead, they talk about Star Wars fan fiction. Which is fine by me!

AMANDA: Sure. And all-capital LOST has always had a tendency to dispose of characters after their most compelling storylines have been drained, or before even. I mean, a lot of people die on this show. What I want to know is where this murderous impulse was when Jack was bloated on pills and drunk at work and wouldn’t shave and was trying to make his fake baby fly back with him to a magical island? I could have dealt with Jack dying.

SADY: I can constantly deal with Jack dying. Every episode, I hope it will be the one where Jack makes a cry face or starts to make a speech about “fixing things” and then a polar bear sneaks up behind him and eats his entire head. My problem with the “most interesting story lines” though, to be troublesomely ladybusiness for a moment, is this: Claire’s most interesting story line was having a baby and a boyfriend. Sun’s most interesting storyline is having a husband and a baby. Kate’s most interesting story line is having two potential boyfriends, between whom she cannot choose, and also a baby eventually. Juliet’s most important storyline was that her boyfriend might have thought for 1.5 seconds about liking another girl so she had to fall down a mine shaft and explode three times on screen.

Some LOST fan actually made a slow-motion YouTube tribute to Jack’s awful need to fix everything all the time. Soundtrack: Coldplay’s “Fix You.” Super bonus: Not the only LOST fan with this same idea.

AMANDA: Shannon has the best ladybusiness storyline, which is revealing to viewers that she’s not a stuck-up bitch by making sweet love to a man she had previously regarded as a terrorist. I had forgotten that Shannon even existed until LOST had to go back and reset this whole thing. But yes. Yes. Juliet’s death is the one that really bothered me, because she is this woman who always had really interesting motives that had little to do with which boyfriend she wanted to pick. And she was never all that likable. She was the woman you were supposed to not root for while you were rooting for Kate to claim both of the boyfriends. But then, LOST turns her into the Dharma initiative’s model wife – a role that she has played before, except that she was unhappy and independent and rebellious in that role. And after LOST made Juliet accept that role happily, boom. Dead! Storyline resolved.

SADY: Yeah, precisely. And I want to believe that she just exploded because she got a role on a TV show! But it is true that she showed up, and she had all of these complicated, unreadable motives, and this completely complex and interesting back story, and then she was like: hey, a boyfriend! I love my boyfriend. Oh no, my boyfriend! EXPLODE. And this is a thing that is interesting to me, because: I don’t think LOST is great art. I think LOST is good-to-great pulp fiction. I have a high tolerance for good-to-great pulp fiction, as it happens. But it’s so masculinized — it’s seen as such a boy thing — that the only roles for women (or plotlines for women) are things about love interests. The boys are all saving the world and the girls are all saving their marriages.

AMANDA: Yeah. And we have to make sure to fix Jack so that Jack can get back to saving us. But can we turn to one of the only remaining original ladies for a moment, the one with the most explicitly ladybusiness plotline?

SADY: Yes! Let us do so!

AMANDA: I am speaking, of course, of Sun, who crash-landed on a desert island with her abusive husband and then gradually taught him not to be such a huge jerk anymore so they could fall in love again.

SADY: Ha, yeah. And then we learned that she had to keep her cardigan buttoned on a tropical isle because SHE WAS A CHEATER! CHEATER! And he was insecure.

AMANDA: The interesting thing about Sun’s plotline now, is that if the plane hadn’t crashed, we see Jin being taken away by customs and Sun escaping him. And we’re supposed to be… sad… about this development, because we know that if Sun had just WAITED IT OUT on a DESERT ISLAND, Jin would have come around.

SADY: Ha, yeah. And here is where my feelings about feminism and romance and storytelling get all complicated, because: I actually do love the romance of Sun and Jin on some levels. I like that it’s a story of a marriage getting into this unbelievably shitty place, because two people misunderstood each other, over and over, profoundly. I know that story. “I was trying to be what you wanted! So now I am unhappy! And mad at you!” “Yes, well, I was trying to be what YOU wanted, so now I am EQUALLY UNHAPPY, and mad at YOU.” And I like that it’s a story about two people getting to re-know each other. But, yeah: Sun getting away from Jin in the airport? Not such a bad idea, given the story we were told! Actually!

AMANDA: Yeah. And I feel like a lot of long-running stories like this often engage with storylines where stuff like abuse is eventually just forgotten in order to preserve these relationships between the show’s main characters, when really: Kate, a person who BLEW UP HER STEPDAD because he abused her mom, would probably never have indulged Jack in his fantasy to crash land herself on the island, given his extremely unstable behavior in front of the child they were raising together. But Kate and Jack, it must endure, so of course they are going to go back together.

SADY: Right. I mean, Jack? Unstable, abusive, alcoholic stalker. With lady problems. Who will not trust a grown lady doctor to do a basic surgery on him without passing up anesthesia so he can be hyper-critical of her operating moves the whole way through. THE ROMANCE OF KATE AND JACK MUST NEVER DIE! Because… they gave each other sexy looks in the pilot episode? With all the plot threads they have exploded or forgotten or just plain shrugged and said “sorry, not going to happen” about, I really am puzzled as to why THIS is the one that they will just never, ever, ever drop.

AMANDA: Right. And I was discussing with someone earlier how the most exciting thing about LOST has always been figuring out the rules to the game, but now that we’re getting to the final season, it’s becoming more and more obvious that there are no real rules to figure out, and that the creators are more interested in putting the finishing touches on these longrunning personal relationships. Perhaps they will surprise me in the end! But from where I’m standing now it looks like they’re putting more effort into reestablishing John Locke as Disabled Character who falls off his wheelchair out of pride—I mean really?—than explaining to me where the fucking black hole is or whatever

SADY: Yeah. The plot points are being doled out! However, what is more important, for some reason, is making sure that we know who ends up with who running whose temp agency. So… okay. My prediction is that Hurley and Kate end up together. That’s what I’m pushing for!

AMANDA: Haha. I know. I love how that was set up as such a MYSTERIOUS REVEAL. It is ROSE who runs the temp agency!

SADY: “Welcome to Healthful Lectures Employment Services. How may I lecture you today?”

AMANDA: So, I’ve been watching the episodes this season around my male companion, who has not watched the rest of the show

SADY: Oh, FOR REALS? That has got to be a bucketload of explanations!

AMANDA: Well … he just overhears the dialogue. And so I have on many occasions had the opportunity to hear his reaction to the dialogue in these episodes, and his reaction is, “This show sucks so hard.” And he’s not wrong. It is often terrible. I’m not going to stop watching it, but I do wonder how much I’m going to end up hating it when it’s over.

SADY: I know. I’m hoping for a “Battlestar Galactica” finale where the answer turns out to be, like, Cavemen. But I do love the final seasons of shows, because you have to stop dicking around and decide what you are saying and amp up all the drama and emotion as far as you can. And for that, I am enjoying this season immensely. When it is over, however, I am confident that I will have learned one thing: JACK NEEDS TO FIX THINGS. That, I will never forget. Give Jack a thing! He will fix that thing! He needs to fix the thing you gave him! Does the thing need fixing? Jack Jack fixing fixing Jack fixing Jack.

AMANDA: And of course this final season is about Jack Returning to Being A Person Who Can Fix Things and Not a Dangerous Alcoholic Stalker Who Cannot Fix a Drink Without Spilling It All Over His Ridiculous Beard. It is Jack’s greatest fix of all. Fixing himself.

The worst of the worst, after the jump.

Women: Nature’s victims. According to Valdosta State coppers, women “make easy targets for random acts of violence” for three reasons: (1) they’re dumb; (2) they insist on walking around like dainty little ladies; (3) they go places girls aren’t allowed.

The three main reasons women make easy targets for random acts of violence are:

* Lack of awareness (you MUST know where you are & what’s going on around you.)

* Body language (keep your head up, swing your arms, stand straight up)

* Wrong place, wrong time (DON’T be walking alone in an alley, or driving in a bad neighborhood at night)

One major deficit of female “awareness”: Awareness of that serial killer parked next to you.

Some women have a tendency to get into their cars after shopping, eating, working, etc., and just sit (doing their checkbook, or making a list, etc.). DON’T DO THIS! A predator could be watching you, and this is the perfect opportunity for him to get in the passenger side, put a gun to your head, and tell you where to go. AS SOON AS YOU GET INTO YOUR CAR, LOCK THE DOORS AND LEAVE. . . . If you are parked next to a big van, enter your car from the passenger door. A lot of serial killers attack their victims by pulling them into their vans while the women are attempting to get into their cars.

Better just stick on the ground floor, ladies. First rule of multi-level buildings: Always remember that “stairwells are horrible places to be alone.” Second rule of multi-level buildings: Always remember that elevators are horrible places to be with other people. Ask yourself: Do you really need to get above the lobby today?

Always take the elevator instead of the stairs. (Stairwells are horrible places to be alone.)

* Do not get on an elevator if your instincts tell you that something is wrong (Remember, bad men don’t always look bad).

* Do not stand back in the corners of the elevator, be near the front, by the doors, ready to get off.

* If you get on the elevator on the 25th floor, and the Boogie Man gets on the 22nd, get off when he gets on.

Know your predator shooting statistics. Stop freaking out, delicate ladies: “it most likely WILL NOT be a vital organ.”

If the predator has a gun and you are not under his control, ALWAYS run!

* POLICE only make 4 of 10 shots when they are in range of 3-9 feet. This is due to stress.

* The predator will only hit you (a running target) 4 in 100 times. And even then, it most likely WILL NOT be a vital organ. RUN!

Live in fear of all other humans. If you don’t, you may get yourself raped.

Women are always trying to be sympathetic: STOP IT, it may get you raped, or killed.

Ted Bundy, the serial killer, was a good looking, well-educated man, who ALWAYS played on the sympathies of unsuspecting women. He walked with a cane, or a limp, and often asked “for help” into his vehicle or with his vehicle, which is when he abducted his next victim.

If you don’t gouge his eyes out, whatever happens to you is all your fault. Yes: It actually says that.

If he’s driving, find the right time, and stick your fingers in his eyes. He must watch the road, so choose an unsuspecting time, and gouge him. It maybe your ONLY defense. While he is in shock, GET OUT. (This sounds gross, but the alternative is your fault if you do not act.)

Stepping outside your car at noon on a Monday: Risky business.

BREAKDOWNS: (avoid this by ALWAYS keeping your car in good working order)

* If your car breaks down, you better have a cell phone to call for help, and lock your doors.

* Keep a blanket, and a pair of warm clothes and boots, and a flashlight in your car always for emergencies.

* If you don’t have a cell phone, shame on you.

* If it’s noon on a business day, you MAY want to put your hazards on and walk to safety.  If it’s 2 a.m. and you’re close to a populated and well lighted area, go there ASAP. Otherwise, your best bet is to stay in your vehicle.

Do not leave shelter after sundown.

If you are walking alone in the dark (which you shouldn’t be) and you find him following/chasing you:

* Try to get to a lighted area, preferably a populated area.

* If he’s following you, cross the street. If he follows you, turn around and look at him. He will know that he can now be identified and that he has lost the element of surprise.

* If he chases you, yell for help and run!

* Find an obstacle, such as a parked car, and run around it, like ring around the rosy. This may sound silly, but statistical data shows that this has SAVED LIVES.

I don’t know what this one means, but it doesn’t sound good.

Never let yourself or anyone that you know be a in any type of business (bar, store, restaurant, gas station).

Make sure to sign up for more great tips, in a class where a police officer will almost surely refer to you and your friends as “ladies,” without irony.

Sign up for VSU R.A.D. course. It’s a self-defense course for ladies.

And now, for some less sarcastic commentary: Here is what the sexual assault policy gurus at SAFER Campus have to say about these tips:

The University’s Police Department’s website for Sexual Assault Prevention is deeply offensive, misogynist, heterosexist and perpetuates myths about the reality of sexual assault. . . . It is difficult to believe that University endorses such so-called “life-saving” victim-blaming advice, which frames women as naive “easy targets”, overly “sympathetic” and illogical. This patriarchal and patronizing advice does nothing to address rape culture on campus, date rape or acquaintance rape. The school is informing students that a violent experience of sexual assault is their fault. No information was found that suggests that a sexual assault victim may be male or transgender.

• 32 of the dead are female.
• 21 of the dead are male.

Last year, in other words, 40 percent of people who died in Maryland as a result of domestic violence were male. Right about now, men’s rights activists are surely waiting in the wings, ready to pounce on this statistic as irrefutable evidence that men are victimized by domestic violence at nearly the same rate as women. The truth is much more complicated.

Let’s look at the numbers on the female side first (courtesy of the MNADV’s extensive research).

Of the 32 females who died as a result of domestic violence last year:

• 3 were children.
• 29 were adult women.

Of the 29 adult women:

• 28 were victims of domestic violence.
• The one remaining woman was a domestic violence aggressor who committed suicide. She is the sole occupier of the category of “females who killed themselves or were killed after committing murder/attempting to commit murder.”

Of the 28 adult female victims:

• 10 were wives or ex-wives of the offender.
• 17 were girlfriends or ex-girlfriends of the offender.
• One was a domestic violence victim who committed suicide.

And on the male side of things:

Of the 21 males who died as a result of domestic violence last year:

• 2 were children.
• 19 were adult men.

Of the 19 adult men:

• 9 were victims.
• 10 were domestic violence aggressors who died as a result of their own domestic violence—”males who killed themselves or were killed after committing murder/attempting to commit murder.”

Of the nine male victims:

• 2 were husbands or ex-husbands of the offender.
• 3 were boyfriends or ex-boyfriends of the offender.
• 3 were killed by their current partner’s ex.
• 1 was killed by his ex’s current partner.

Of the ten men who killed themselves or were killed after committing murder or attempting to commit murder:

• 1 man was killed by the police.
• 3 were killed by their partners in self-defense.
• 6 committed suicide.

Of the 53 total dead:

• 27 were killed by gun or rifle.
• 12 were killed by knife.
• 5 were killed by strangulation.
• 4 were killed by vehicle.
• 2 were killed by “physical force/hands.”
• 2 were killed by burning
• 1 cause of death was unknown.

Domestic violence kills in many ways. When it comes to male deaths by domestic violence, men are more likely to be killed as a result of attempting to murder their own partners than as a result of their partner’s aggression. Men who are victims of domestic violence are almost as likely to be killed by a partner’s ex than by their partners themselves. “Domestic violence is not as simple and straightforward as people think,” says Michele Cohen, MNADV’s Executive Director. “The work that we do attempts to capture the full picture of all the individuals who die as a result of domestic violence—both victims and offenders.”

Tonight, the MNADV will hold its 22nd Annual Memorial Service for all the “women, men, and children” who died over the past year from domestic violence. Find more information about the Annapolis, Md. service here [PDF].

The women’s poll asked questions like these: Have you ever been groped? How did you react? Did you report the incident? The men’s poll, on the other hand, asked questions like these: Have you ever groped a woman? Do you think groping is morally wrong? Do you think it’s inappropriate to furtively sniff a woman’s hair?

The gender-specific polling left us with a significant information gap. How many men are victims of groping, anyway? Do male groping victims call the police? How do they process the experience? Do they scream, hit, freeze, or quietly escape? And how many women have reached out and touched a man without his consent?

Below, four stories from D.C.’s male groping victims —and the testimony of one female groper.

“[I] could barely look myself in the mirror.”

A couple of years ago, a local law student was sitting on a crowded Red line train when his seat-mate decided to make it a bumpy ride. “As the train started moving . . . I felt some motion from the man next to me—his body was kind of moving slightly up and down against my side,” says the student, who was busy studying a casebook for class. “At first, I thought this was due to the natural movement of the Metro train, but it soon became clear that the movement was not from the train, but from the man.”

As the train continued down the track, the guy’s movements advanced beyond the realm of “natural movement.” “As the train moved on, the movements got more intense to the point where the man was grinding his side and back, half his ass, and part of his leg up against me,” the student says. When the student attempted to edge his body away and focus on the reading, his assailant stepped up his activity. “My efforts to get away from him seemed to only embolden him more, and at one point he even reached back to lift up his shirt so the skin of his back was rubbing up against my arm, leg, and side,” he says.

The escalating rubbing left the student “horrified and disgusted.” But as the train approached the student’s station, another response hit—”extremely frightened.” The assailant was trapping him in the seat, and he’d have to confront him to get out. At the last minute, the confrontation was avoided—one station before the student’s stop, the man abruptly exited the train. The student hadn’t uttered a word. “I got home to my apartment that night and could barely look myself in the mirror,” he says. “I was scared, disgusted, felt violated, and also was pissed off at myself for not doing anything.”

The crowded, enclosed train isn’t the only breeding ground for D.C. public transport groping; gropers have been known to stage their assaults in all corners of the Metrorail system. Another of the District’s male groping victims got grabbed while ascending from the Foggy Bottom station on an escalator. The man “felt someone drag their hand along the bottom of my ass and then give it a squeeze,” he says. “I looked back and it was a 20-something woman . . . She just gave me this ‘dare you’ smile back.”

As he stepped off the escalator, the woman commented about “loving a good ass,” then walked away. The victim, who said nothing at the time, says he had mixed feelings on the event: “I was kind of stunned and torn between outrage—how dare you grab—and flattery—hey, she likes my ass. And then wondering what the hell was wrong with me for feeling flattered.”

Later, the man was groped again on the Foggy Bottom stop’s escalator—this time, going down. As he descended into the station, “someone behind me slipped their hand into my back pocket,” he says. “I turned around and it was a lady in her 40s or 50s. She just smiled and told me I should be careful leaving my back pockets unbuttoned,” he says. “I was just . . . flabbergasted. . . . I never had a response for either of them, vocally or otherwise, other than stepping away. I’m not sure why.”

—
“I was too stunned to punch him.”

Recently, there’s been much discussion on the Sexist about how girl-on-girl sexism operates through pop stars trading catty insults about other women [Exhibit A, Exhibit B]. Now that the copious woman-on-woman violence in MTV’s Jersey Shore has reignited the popular imagination over so-called “cat-fighting,” it’s time to turn our attention to lyrical girl fights of the stick-and-stone variety. And the bottle variety. And the knife variety. And the strand-by-strand hair-pulling variety.

Women physically attacking other women is immoral, illegal, and popular. Conventional wisdom suggests that the popular obsession with cat-fighting is inspired by women fighting over dudes—and persists in order to arouse dudes. As these songs devoted to female aggression demonstrate, the cat-fight narrative actually accesses a variety of triggers that often have nothing to do with men. Case in point: On the Jersey Shore last week, J-WOWW attacked a woman at the club because she called fellow Guidette Snookie “fat.” (When JWOW is involved, apparently, words can hurt you). Seven anthems about girl-fighting—and the justification offered up for the outbursts therein—after the jump.

7. Girl Fight Anthem: Lily Allen’s “Friday Night”

Relevant Lyrics:

I see these girls and they’re shouting through the crowd
Can’t understand why they’re being really loud
Make their way over to me
and try to push me out the way
I push her back, she looks at me and says, “what you tryna say?”

Weapon of Choice: Pushing

How It Started: She pushed first!

—

6. Girl Fight Anthem: Crime Mob’s “Stilletos (Pumps)”

Relevant Lyrics:

Homegirl, bow down when you see me
Because I’m coming up fresh
Right with the realest, you feel this?
So you should call me the best
I can look jazzy and nasty with my stiletto heels on
But if a ho say something
Trust me, then her hair will get thrown

Weapon of Choice: Stilettos (pumps).

How It Started: The implication is that either a homegirl failed to bow down, or a ho said something. There’s also a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy going on here—if you fail to respect that these women look good in stilettos, they’re liable to remove their high-heels in order to assault you with them.

—

5. Girl Fight Anthem: Julie Brown’s “Girl Fight Tonight!”

Relevant Lyrics:

I’ve seen the way you check him out when you think I’m not around
Mentally undressing him, trying to shut me down
Well you know last night he told me all the nasty things you said
You ask him if he gets lonely, now you’re asking to be dead

Weapon of Choice: Brown is studied in a variety of hand-to-hand combat techniques: pulling out her hair strand by strand, choking, and knocking a woman’s mouth into the street.

How It Started: Brown is upset that some other woman is interested in her man’s looks. “I watched you watch him walk,” she taunts, creepily. But tthe “last straw” was when this other girl “told him he looked like Rob Lowe.” This was 1987. Also, she hates how tight this other chick wears her sweater. But Brown also points out that many girl-fight anthems are more talk than action: “I just don’t believe in any kind of violence against women,” Brown told a reporter. “I’m just doing this for fun.”

—

4. Girl Fight Anthem: Geisha’s “Shit’n on You Hoe!”

Relevant Lyrics:

I be shit’n on you ho, I be shit’n on you ho
I put that arch in my back, and I tool up my ass
I twist it to the right, to the left, to the left, right, left

Weapon of Choice: Feces?

How it Started: At the beginning of this track, an unidentified woman says, “Yeah Geisha you don’t remember me?” “Who the hell are you?” Geisha responds. Later, Geisha spells out her problem: “Ho, you don’t know me.” Do not claim to know Geisha.

—

3. Girl Fight Anthem: Blondie’s “Rip Her to Shreds”

Relevant Lyrics:

She looks like the Sunday comics
She thinks she’s Brenda Starr
Her nose job is real atomic
All she needs is an old knife scar

Weapon of Choice: An old knife.

How It Started: The origin of Blondie’s distaste for this woman is unclear, but Debbie Harry does tell us that the woman is a “groupie,” and also that she’s “dull.” Dull women are just asking to get cut, apparently!

—

2. Girl Fight Anthem: Ms. B’s “Bottle Action”

Relevant Lyrics:

Hit that bitch with a bottle, watch that head hit the floor
Cuz I ain’t the type a bitch that wanna start a lot of shit
Askin for the bottle action, yo, that’s what she gonna get

Weapon of Choice: A bottle.

How It Started: B insists that she “ain’t the type a bitch that wanna start a lot of shit.” So how did this bottle action get started? B attributes this fight’s origins to a) the other woman’s jealousy over her boyfriend showing B love; b) the other woman’s jealousy over B “lookin’ the best,” while she is looking a “mess”; c) the other woman’s overreaction to B’s friends “pourin’ liquor all over her dress.” So, really, that lady was asking to be hit over the head with a bottle, getting her forehead stamped with a boot, and ending up in the ICU. Remember: B doesn’t start shit, she just finishes it.

—

1. Girl Fight Anthem: Brooke Valentine’s “Girl Fight,” featuring Da Brat

Relevant Lyrics:

I ain’t tryin to be no victim, you wanna cross that line
I leave a bitch leakin’ blood, like it’s period time
Got that old school in me like Tampax
You can’t leave home without my CD like Air-Max

Weapon of Choice: Fists

How it Started: Valentine announces that she’s the “originator for girl fights” and that she’s “first to leave a heiffer in the hospital.” So perhaps this is a personal problem.

Now that we’ve exhausted the decade in masculine trends, it’s time for us to take a look back at the aughts’ many cultural incarnations of femininity. The versions of femininity that have been aggressively marketed to us over the past ten years, from “not that innocent” pop tarts to Sex & the City fashionistas to Kill Bill’s ass-kicker.

POP TARTS.

Peak Year: 2000

When Britney Spears‘ first single, “. . . Baby One More Time,” dropped in 1998, Spears’ aesthetics presented a “disturbing mix of childhood innocence and adult sexuality” (according to the immortal words of the American Family Association). By the 2000’s, Spears had abandoned the “innocence” part in favor of shimmying on-stage in nude bodysuits, cavorting with a live python, and frenching Madonna. Soon, Spears was accidentally flashing her genitals, shaving her head, and endangering her children (providing the AFA even more fodder for their campaign against sexual girls). For a time, fellow sexy-innocent (and former Mouseketeer buddy) Christina Aguilera appeared to be on the Spears trajectory—in 2002, Aguilera began referring to herself as “XTina” and appeared in assless chaps in the video for “Dirrty.” Then, Aguliera got (and stayed) married and had a son. That was the narrative of the pop tarts of the aughts—her commercialized and sexually-charged celebrity either forced her to crash and burn, or petered out into a more traditionally feminine role—wife and mother.

Ambassadors: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera

Uniform: Live snake, belly-button piercing, thong or nothing.

Activities: Writhing, belting, riding with Paris

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NERVOUS WRECKS.

Peak Year: 2001

In 2001, Bridget Jones arrived on-screen to comfort every woman who believes she is too old, too fat, too drunk, and too daft to ever be loved. Hey! Despite all the self-loathing, she comes away with two handsome suitors (and aren’t men the point of life, anyway?) Despite Jones’ more anti-feminist tendencies—she’s a career girl, but she’s still obsessed with losing weight and finding a boyfriend—she helped make way for the comedy based on the flawed leading lady. By the end of the decade, viewers were ready to embrace a more interesting flawed character—Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon. Amanda Marcotte has this to say about how Lemon’s flaws work: “Over the course of the show, we’ve learned that Liz is lazy, a glutton, anti-social, a bully, insecure, prone to fantasies, and emotionally screwed up to the point where she can’t have normal relationships. These facts have caused some feminists to bunch up, but I’m pretty happy overall with it. If we don’t want women relegated to window dressing in comedy, they have to play deeply flawed characters, because comedy is built around laughing at deeply flawed people navigate the world, making light of our own flaws and making us feel superior.” The difference between Bridget and Liz is that Liz isn’t ultimately rewarded for her self-loathing.

Ambassadors: Bridget Jones, Liz Lemon

Uniform: Granny panties, food stains.

Activities: Obsessive dieting, lying, self-mockery.

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The holiday season is upon us, which means that you are gradually sinking into a pit of hopeless despair, if you are a woman. According to the Daily Mail’s steady holiday diet of personal essays detailing women’s lack of holiday cheer, Christmas time can bring only embarrassment and ruin upon society’s females. (To men and children, Christmas time brings presents, as is appropriate).

Perhaps I am too young, and have not yet been broken by all the unreasonable expectations heaped upon women during the holidays, but—Christmas is not that bad, seriously. It can be a little bit of a pain in the ass, it doesn’t always deliver the warmth and happiness it promises, but it’s certainly not cause for debilitating loneliness or the haunting feelings of inadequacy. Is it possible we’re overthinking this, ladies?

POSSIBLE VARIATIONS ON FEMALE HOLIDAY SADNESS:

SAD HOLIDAY FEMALE #1: The aging single woman with 17 cats.

Feel her pain: Liz Jones sees major holidays as a reflection of her worth as a woman. Around Christmas time, even television newscasts and grocery store lines can send Jones into a sobbing fit. “Everywhere you look, you are reminded you are a pariah, that you have failed to even dampen life’s litmus test of happiness,” writes Jones, who is single with 17 cats. “Everywhere you look at this time of year, those of us who live alone are deemed wanting. The inevitable footage on the TV news of traffic jams on the motorways makes me wail: ‘Why is no one driving to see me, laden with parcels and food hampers?’”

Get happy: Liz Jones is sad, and you are too! Jones takes comfort in the fact that at least women who are married with children despise Christmas, as well. “I have 17 cats, all of whom worship at the altar of St Michael, my sheepdog. There will be sheep nestled like something from a nativity play, horses breathing steam with icicles in their manes,” Jones writes about her Christmas plans out in the countryside. “And lonely as I may be, the thought of doing just that will, I’m sure, make many women, who are desperately trying to make everything perfect for a family who remain resolutely ungrateful, turn an appropriately festive shade of red and green.”

Listen, big props to anyone who will admit to owning 17 cats in a major newspaper, but don’t think you’re living out every woman’s unrequited fantasy just because you’re herding cats instead of kids. There are some women in the world who do not descend into a pattern of self-loathing each December, and dragging them down to your level will not make you any happier. Just be content that being the proud owner of 17 cats is what you want to do with your life.

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SAD HOLIDAY FEMALE #2: (Practically) married with children.

Feel her pain: Alexandra Shulman—career woman, mother, girlfriend, Christmas tree decorator—resents Christmas because it tests all of her feminine wiles. “Christmas wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for womankind. It’s modern women’s keenness to pressurise ourselves into exhausting over-achievement that make possible the festive season as we know it,” Shulman writes. “Perfect gifts, imaginative wrapping, tasteful trees, beautiful decorations, impeccable food, happy families, a glamorous outfit and thoughtfully annotated Christmas cards are just a few of the goals women set out to achieve.”

You know, whenever I list out the goals of women, as a gender, “imaginative wrapping” never seems to make it into the top 10. Perhaps some women have aspirations beyond holiday homemaking? Why, yes they do! Having careers, for example! And perhaps this confusing set of goals explains why they are so fucking sad at Christmas!

“The point is that many of the demands that women feel compelled to fulfil are placed on us by ourselves,” Shulman wries. “The reality is that as more of us are balancing the schizophrenic lives of career women and carers, wage slaves and employers, that list has grown accordingly. We may well be able to have it all, but increasingly the question is becoming: can we actually do it all?”

Get happy: This has always struck me as an unconvincing argument for the utter unhappiness of all women: The problem is that we women just love to do everything, but there aren’t enough hours in the day to fit in all of the things we love to do. I don’t see having an over-interesting career and a too-satisfying home life as a very compelling problem, actually. How about this for a problem: Women don’t love to do everything, and we wish our significant others and children would pick up some of our imaginative wrapping duties so we could go to work in the month of December?

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SAD HOLIDAY FEMALE #3: The nervous wreck.

Feel her pain: This year, Janet Street-Porter files a story about how a tangled mess of Christmas tree “fairy lights”—and the holiday’s other nuisances—always manage to leave her sobbing, “drunk, and binge-eating.” “Fairy lights as we know them were invented by a bloke (obviously) in the 20th century at around the same time as women started to claim a few rights beyond the vote and the right to be the person who always did the washing-up and the shopping,” Street-Porter writes. “The minute we started to demand equal pay and better jobs, they invented fairy lights, the one thing that can reduce any highly intelligent woman normally capable of multi-tasking at an advanced level, to a crying, snivelling wreck.”

Get happy: Porter’s essay falls under the Bridget Jones tradition of women making self-deprecating British humor out of what utter messes they are. Street-Porter, like all these other women writing for the Daily Mail, is exaggerating her unhappiness for laughs, obviously, and I get that. But, hey! Wouldn’t it be funny if just one Christmas, one of these women commissioned to write a hilarious essay about how they are big, awful failures at being women, instead found, like, a new joke? Wouldn’t it be great if one of these women managed to write a piece that didn’t revolve around the fact that Christmas time converts all women into drunk, depressed, lonely, crying, helpless, overeating, thankless cat ladies? No? Okay, fine. Jesus Christ.

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SAD HOLIDAY FEMALE #4: The perpetually sad woman.

Feel her pain: Liz Jones, in her second story about why she hates Christmas so much, complains that it is the expectation that women be happy around Christmas that makes her so unhappy around Christmas. “But most of all at this time of year I hate the pressure to have a good time, to be all cheerful and festive,” she writes. “‘What are you doing on the Big Day?’ people keep asking me, throwing my singleton status into sharp relief. ‘What am I, 12 years old?’ I want to bark.”

Get happy: I don’t think being happy is an aspect of the Liz Jones experience.

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SAD HOLIDAY FEMALE #5: Married to Toby Young.

Feel her pain: Toby Young loves Christmas. He celebrates the holiday by uncorking a bottle of Champagne, inviting over 20 of his closest family members, then sitting back as his wife serves up “roast turkey, plenty of stuffing, roast potatoes, parsnips, Brussels sprouts and lashings of gravy . . . Christmas pudding with brandy butter, more champagne, then an orgy of cracker-pulling.” Then, Toby Young receives presents.

Toby Young’s wife hates Christmas, obviously. “The reality is that he appears from goodness knows where just as the doorbell rings for the first time, chirpily inquiring whether there is anything he can do,” Caroline Young files in her retort to Toby’s Christmas cheer. “Like most households in Britain, it is down to me, the wife, to do the work involved with creating Christmas . . . I only have to buy the presents, wrap the presents, write and post the cards, decorate the house, do the food shopping, roast the turkey, prepare four different vegetables, make the bread sauce, the vegetarian gravy, the meat gravy, two stuffings, the cranberry sauce, the Christmas pudding—and put a partridge in a pear tree.”

Get happy: I’d like to say that airing your grievances against your husband in the newspaper might help you get happy this Christmas, but I’m betting that Toby Young put Caroline up to participating in this absurdly gendered column in the Daily Mail, as well. Because it’s not like Caroline already has enough to do this Christmas! I’m not sure what Caroline can do to pull this one out, except maybe marry a man who doesn’t delight in watching as your relationship unfolds along the lines of a bad situational comedy?

Photo via George Eastman House, Flickr Commons

Yesterday, career Web guy James Chartrand admitted that “he” is a woman, actually. Chartrand said that after she adopted the male pseudonym several years ago—one that sounded like it “might command respect”—she did command respect, and began to ascend from struggling single-mom writer to respected male Web entrepreneur.

In light of the news that Chartrand is a lady, I am struck by some of the more masculine touches Chartrand inserted into her crowning achievement as James Chartland: The Web development team “Men With Pens.”

But first, a bit of feminist review. Upon reading Chartrand’s coming-out piece, The Frisky’s Jessica Wakeman took issue with Chartrand’s decision to obscure her gender to get ahead: “Honestly, there is something rather Uncle Tom-y about Chartrand hiding behind the opposite gender,” she wrote. “By assuming the identity of a male writer, she skirted the discrimination against women entirely while doing nothing to change womens’ lot. She just left the glass ceiling standing there, rather than shattering it.” Meanwhile, Broadsheet’s Kate Harding saw Chartrand’s pseudonym as a reminder that some old-school feminist battles have not been laid to rest: “I get furious when people insist that western women have achieved full equality,” Harding wrote. “But even I’ve bought into the myth of meritocracy enough that my first thought upon learning a female writer massively increased her success by adopting a male pseudonym was, ‘Wow, how retro! How Brontë, how Eliot, how Sand.’ Certainly not ‘how Rowling.’”

Whether you think Chartrand’s choice to adopt a male name was anti-feminist or illuminating, you should know that adopting a male name is not all Chartrand did.

* She also adopted a male persona—her biography refers to her repeatedly as “he.”

* She also named her company “Men With Pens.”

* She also crafted a company logo (above) that looks like it was directed by Michael Bay.

* She also slipped this line into the bio of one of her employees, copywriter Taylor Lindstrom: “She’s the team’s rogue woman who wowed us until our desire for her talents exceeded our desire for a good ol’ boys club.”

* She also introduced Lindstrom to the blog as “perky,” “adorable,” and capable of cooking and cleaning. (In introducing a male employee to the blog, Chartrand described their relationship as “bromantic,” one in which the Men With Pens “could be laid back together, chink beers and not argue over the remote control”).

* She also regularly used photos of naked women to illustrate her posts.

* She also occasionally essentialized women—”all the women” loved Jerry McGuire, Chartland wrote—while conveniently placing herself outside of the gender categories she set for them.

* She also used a photograph of a man silencing a woman with his hand as the logo for a “Men With Pens” role-playing game. When a few commenters noted that the photographed failed to create an “inviting community for women,” Chartrand replied: “Photography is very subjective. You see a woman being terrorized. I see a man helping a woman stay quiet so he can save her life.”

* She also penned this post—amazing, in hindsight!—which instructed “mommy bloggers” to stop “whin[ing] about being stereotyped” and begin welcoming male commenters in their spaces:

On the few occasions that I’ve risked my balls to post a comment on a mommy blog, I noticed my comments were skipped over as if they (I?) didn’t even exist. Sometimes my comments get a sharp, snappy, “piss off” kind of remark in reply. Sometimes I’m absolutely bashed, and I have a hard time figuring out why.

. . . I don’t understand making male readers and participants feel unwelcome. I know plenty of mothers who blog and who come off as. . . . well, bloggers who are mothers. They don’t perpetuate the stereotype of a frazzle Mom trying to work in a household of chaos. They don’t try to shave the balls of all males who dare to visit the blog. They don’t discount opinions from men. Everyone is equal. They blog, they work, and they raise their children.

So . . . Chartrand claims to have testicles in order to avoid being lumped in with all those whining, stereotypical mommy blogs, and then she has the nerve to insist all the lowly female bloggers let her into their club? Chartrand, of all people, knows that everyone is not equal on the Web. Chartrand herself pretended to have a pair of balls because she found her work perpetually discounted, insulted, and ignored by men. Men (and people who assume masculine identities) get to have the rest of the Internet. Women get their own tiny little part of it, where women’s voices are actually valued. In those spaces, comments about how these women “wield their feminism like a spiked mace” from the one man valiant enough to “risk his balls” to wade into the comments are not welcome. Obviously.

* She also made some shit up! Unlike Brontë, Eliot, Sand, or Rowling, Chartrand didn’t use a male pseudonym to get her works of fiction published—she parlayed her name into a successful blog which regularly touched on her life . . . except as a man. Every post that tried to recast Chartrand’s personality into a male persona—like this one about how “he” learned to knit back when “little kids don’t know that boys shouldn’t do girl things”—is pretty much untruth. If the sexist blogging world made Chartrand change her name, did it also make her throw in some defensive gender posturing to explain why she—a man, of all people!—would ever take up the feminine pastime of knitting? This is where Chartrand’s gender play goes beyond necessity and enters the realm of professional responsibility. Isn’t a habit of spinning absurd white lies a bit of a liability for any professional writer?

Of course, “Men With Pens” isn’t all gender stereotypes and objectification—mostly, it’s just straight-up professional advice for ‘net writers. But in light of Chartrand’s admission, the more sexist aspects of the Web site are hard to ignore. Are Chartrand’s hyper-masculine touches in “Men With Pens” tongue-in-cheek inside jokes? Are they defense mechanisms meant to ward off suspicion that she wasn’t really a man? Are they yet another way for Chartrand to use sexism for her own career advantage? Or is this just how Chartrand truly sees herself—as a “man with a pen” who enjoys jokingly categorizing her employees based off rigid gender norms, feels the need to bash mommies, and thinks that naked ladies best illustrate her points?

Chartrand thinks that adopting a male pen name was necessary to make her career. “Truth be told, if just a name and perception of gender creates such different levels of respect and income for a person, it says a lot more about the world and the people in it than it does about me,” she wrote. But Chartrand’s ruse went well beyond the public’s mere “perception” of her gender. She named her company “Men With Pens,” for Christ’s sake. Are we really expected to believe that financial necessity forced Chartrand not only to take a man’s name, but to actively define her career around the fact that she’s a male with precious balls she’s got to protect from vicious ladybloggers? Or that by doing so, Chartrand was in any way elevating her voice as a woman?

More likely, Chartrand owes her career to a willingness to play into the “boy’s club” mentality, not only in the name but in the content of her work. Chartrand responded to Web sexism by becoming a bit of a male chauvinist herself. She created a male space that—while welcoming to female commenters and clients—is, let’s be honest, more welcoming to men. That act may have been necessary when she was a single mom scraping by on welfare checks. But now that she’s a Web presence of her own, complete with clients, employees, and substantial readership, does she really have to keep perpetuating the guy thing? After all, Chartrand has now managed to shore up more recognition as a woman than she ever could as a man.

MTV reality sensation Jersey Shore (the Real Word, but with guidos), is only two episodes in, but it’s already infamous for a moment that hasn’t yet aired. Next week, Snookie, one of the show’s self-described “guidettes,” will get punched in the face by a man in a bar. Judging by the show’s trailer, Jersey Shore is positively built upon its cast members getting into drunken bar fights. So why do we only care about one woman’s hit to the face?

The punch, which MTV previewed in a trailer for the upcoming season, has inspired both excitement and disdain from commentators. One Web site delighted over an image of Snookie getting punched over and over again, calling it “the most gratifying animated gif you will ever see”; Jezebel, which framed Snookie’s punch as an incident of violence against women, called the “the clip and commentary chilling.”

This week, MTV responded to the concern. According to NY Daily News, next week’s Snookie-punching episode will be a Very Special Episode of Jersey Shore:

MTV will air a public service announcement after next week’s episode of the controversial series “Jersey Shore” because it includes an incident of violence against a woman.

. . . The PSA, set to air following the Dec. 17 episode, reads: “Violence against women in any form is a crime. If you or someone you know is being abused by a boyfriend, family member or total stranger, please call 911 or log on to www.loveisrespect.org for information and help. You can also call The National Teen Dating Abuse Helpline at 1-866-331-9474 for immediate support.”

Violence against women is a crime. Then again, violence against anyone is a crime. And in the two-minute preview for Jersey Shore, we see a lot of violence against everybody:

Ronnie forcefully pushing Sammy on the boardwalk:

A woman grabbing a man’s neck to force his face into her breasts:

Several brawls:

JWow throwing punches at Mike:

And of course, Snookie getting punched:

The violence on Jersey Shore started early. In the first episode, Pauly punches a stranger in the face in a bar, citing the fact that the stranger had been “looking at him.” Later, Pauly gleefully tells the camera that he knows the exact amount of pressure it takes to break a nose. So why do we only care about Snookie getting punched? I have a few theories:

a) Snookie is one of the most obnoxious television characters ever. No character is particularly charming on this show, but Snookie is the worst. In the two hours I have observed Snookie, she has a) passed out within hours of arriving at the Real World house; b) complained about not being the center of attention while MTV cameras were filming her for a reality show about her life; c) vomited in the sink instead of showing up to her first day of work; and d) threatened to go home after two days because she thought everyone was talking about her behind her back.

Viewers hate Snookie enough to get excited about seeing her hit in the face. They only dislike the other characters enough to not give a shit one way or another when they get pounded.

b) Snookie is more annoying because she is a woman. Let’s face it: There are plenty of gender-neutral things to hate about Snookie. Still, some viewers hate Snookie more because she’s a guidette. Check out this helpful comment:

Well chicks want equal everything, so here ya go Snookie. Equal being what it is when guys talk a bunch of shit they have to back it up or get knocked the fuck out.

Welcome to being equal Snookie. I’m guessing I won’t see you lined up to collect any combat pay anytime soon.

Snookie does a lot of things in the first two episodes—she twirls her hair despondently, gets naked in the hot tub, becomes confused at a telephone in the shape of a duck, calls her dad, and misses her first day of work. What she doesn’t do is go off on some sort of feminist tirade about women being equal to men. Positioning Snookie as a women’s libber who got what she deserved is completely off-point. It’s also pretty sexist.

c) Punching a woman in the face is more taboo than punching a man. Did you see how many people got victimized by violence in that trailer? Like every character, practically! So why does only Snookie get the PSA treatment? A couple of the incidents showcased in the trailer could be seen as legitimate examples of domestic abuse (Ronnie pushing Sammy; JWow going after Mike). After all, these people do live together and have relationships with one another.

Snookie getting punched, on the other hand, is not a particularly gendered form of violence. The guy in the bar wasn’t her boyfriend or family member who trades off between affection and abuse. Furthermore, Snookie’s punch in the face was an entirely public act—domestic violence against women is so problematic because it is hushed up, excused, covered with a coat of foundation and a tale of “falling down the stairs.” Snookie was punched in the face by a drunk guy in a bar, a type of violence which is far more likely to target a guido than a guidette.

Was it right to punch Snookie in the face? Of course not. Was it a necessary side-effect of women’s liberation? Hell no. But as long as we’re talking equality, how about we start giving a shit about women punching women, men punching men, and women punching men, too?

Last week, New York Times theater reviewer Charles McGrath penned a piece on Sienna Miller’s Broadway debut. The piece has been roundly criticized for overstating Miller’s affairs with famous men. The story begins by reviewing Miller’s “long and well-documented romantic history,” which includes “flings” with “Jude Law, Daniel Craig, James Franco and most recently the married oil heir Balthazar Getty, with whom she was photographed topless and in a sailor hat.”

Originally, McGrath had grouped Heath Ledger and Puff Daddy in with the bunch. A correction appended to the story later clarified that the”misstates the nature of the relationships that she had with Heath Ledger and Sean Combs. She was friends with both of them; she did not have romantic flings with either of them.” But the problems with McGrath’s piece go far beyond the inflated slut-shaming.

Take the paragraph that follows up the topless sailor incident:

Ms. Miller is opening on Thursday in the Roundabout Theater production of “After Miss Julie,” Patrick Marber’s adaptation of the Strindberg play “Miss Julie.” The audience at previews has included Sienna lookalikes, blond fashionistas in miniskirts and heavy makeup, and scholars less of Scandinavian theater, perhaps, than of her Vogue cover appearances. That some people have trouble taking Ms. Miller seriously as an actress—or don’t even know she is one—is because she has so frequently been her own worst enemy.

According to McGrath, Miller’s fanbase is a group of shallow “fashionistas” who are so dumb they don’t even know that Miller is an actress. Boy, I bet they were confused when they showed up at a Broadway theater to see Miller in a play, and ended up having to sit through hours of acting.

McGrath is concerned that nobody is taking Miller “seriously as an actress.” Perhaps the problem is that McGrath refuses to take Miller’s fans seriously. Apparently, the people who are willing to shell out the cash to see Miller on Broadway are not “serious” because they read Vogue, wear skirts, and apply make-up. In short, they’re girls. Worse, they’re girls who look like Sienna Miller. The fact that McGrath instantly discredits entire groups of people who happen to resemble his interview subject says a lot about his own bias in writing this profile.

McGrath spends the remainder of the piece attempting to convince his readers that Miller is capable of “charming” and “sensitive” performances, as if he is the only one who can see past Miller’s beauty and relationship history. “Not a great many people have actually seen what she can do,” McGrath writes—as if the women lining up to see Miller on Broadway have somehow failed to complete the simpler task of watching one of her films. And despite McGrath’s presumably unique appreciation of Miller’s talent, he continually refuses to focus strictly on her work throughout the piece. Miller, he writes, is “smaller” and “prettier” in person. She manages to be a good actress despite being “beautiful.”

After all this—the rehashing of her former “flings,” the snarking on her female fans, the constant protestations of Miller’s beauty, and the condescending admission that the girl can actually act in addition to fucking dudes and looking hot, McGrath concludes that Miller is not taken seriously because she has “so frequently been her own worst enemy.” I think it’s time Miller transfer the “worst enemy” title on over to Charles McGrath.

Photo by Caroline Bonarde Uni via Wikipedia Commons

I was reading over the Cosmopolitan Wikipedia page today, as you do, when I came across the “Controversy” section of the lady mag’s history. In it, one Wikipedia contributor attempts to resolve the long-standing feminist debate over Cosmo, once and for all:

“And it wasn’t just prudes and conservatives who took issue with the mag: A number of hard-core feminists were anti-Cosmo as well,” writes the contributor. “What they didn’t seem to realize was, Cosmo’s gentler brand of feminism was more realistic and palatable.”

Hey, it’s on Wikipedia. It must be true! The contributor goes on to quote former Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown as simply “Helen,” and states that the typical Cosmo reader “loves having a smokin’ hot sex life.” Citation needed.

On Cosmo’s Wikipedia talk page, user Dasani airs her concerns with the history. “This article needs serious help. Who says this magazine is the most popular among women in the world? I highly doubt such a claim,” she writes. This magazine is packed with garbage. Every issue is about how to give good blowjobs or how to lose 112 pounds in a week.”

Sexy Cosmo Confession time: I do not know how to edit a Wikipedia page. So if anybody wants to waste a few minutes of their life to ensure that Wikipedia readers don’t have to read mag-ready phrases about how fun-hating “hard-core feminists” want to keep all the real ladies from lovin’ their “smokin’ hot sex lives,” I will repay my debt to you with a free t-shirt, which I will mail to the address of your choice. Thanks!

The first time I heard Usher’s new gender-bending single, “Trading Places,” the D.J. introduced it as a “backseat jam”—a track that’s very conducive to fucking. “Trading Places,” which follows Usher and his lady-friend as they trade gender roles in the bedroom for an evening, presents gender transgression as a one-off sexual novelty. It’s also not very sexy (in one verse, Usher’s girlfriend orders Chinese food and demands that Usher not wash his hands before they do it. Thrilling). Needless to say, it wasn’t really a jam I was willing to climb into the backseat for—and that was before I knew that the song is also a stealth anal sex anthem!

Let’s analyze the male/female dichotomy through the lens of Usher, shall we?

Now we gonna do this thing a lil different tonight
You gonna come over and pick me up in your ride
You gon knock and then you gon wait
Ooo you gon take me on a date
You gonna open my door and I’ma reach over and open yours
Gon pay for dinner take me to see a movie
And whisper in my ear I bet you really wanna do me
Girl now take me home and get up in my Benz
Pour me up a shot and force me to the bed

Things men do: drive cars, take people on dates, open doors, pay for dinner, pay for a movie, voice their desire for sex, pour liquor, force people into bed.

Things women do: ride in cars, go on dates, eat dinner, watch movies, get propositioned, drink liquor, go to bed.

I’m always on the top tonight I’m on the bottom
Cause we trading places
When I cant take no more, tell me you ain’t stopping
Cause we trading places
Now put it on me baby till I say “oooo weee”
And tell me to shut up before the neighbors hear me
This is how it feels when you do it like me
We trading places

Things men do: Be on top, not stop, put it on people, tell people to shut up.

Things women do: Be on the bottom, not be able to take things anymore, be loud.

I’ll be waking you up to a cup of Folgers
Pancakes and eggs I owe ya breakfast in bed, oh baby
And your orange juice sitting on the coaster
Toast on the side baby strawberry and grape jelly
You finished let me get that drink,
Pull the curtain from the window
Time to get up baby let me make this bed up
Today we going shopping blow 30 on me
Make it 60, spend it like u really love me
Skip dinner and we gon rent a movie
You order chinese food right before u do me
You coming on strong baby let me wash me hands
She said hurry up then get your ass to bed

Things men do: Drink coffee, eat pancakes, drink orange juice, eat toast, get out of bed, spend money, rent movies, order Chinese food, do people, come on strong, tell people to hurry up.

Things women do: Make coffee, make pancakes, pour orange juice, butter toast, make the bed, receive gifts, wash their hands, go to bed.

(yeah) Wash the car
(yeah) I’m gonna walk the dog
(yeah) Take out the trash
(yeah) With nothing but your t-shirt on
(yeah) I’m gonna press your shirt
(yeah) I’m gonna wrinkle mines up
(yeah) In the kitchen girl we crazy we don’t give a—
Where you want me?

Things men do: Wash cars.

Things women do: Walk dogs, empty the trash, press shirts, do it wherever they want.

Stay tuned for part two
You been me, I been you
But we gon switch this thing back
I’ma put it on your ass.

Things men do: Force their girlfriends to play out comical male stereotypes while assuming the role of the subservient female. Then, in order to reclaim their masculinity, threaten to insert their dicks into their girlfriends’ anuses.

Things women do: Play along with the gender stereotype game at the request of their boyfriends. Prepare hard, phallic objects to force it into their boyfriends’ anuses at the height of the gender-bending sex. It’s what men do!

The would-be first Latina justice faced a committee with only two women members in order to get confirmed by a Senate with only 17 women for a seat on a court with only one woman. And yet Sotomayor had to prove that she wasn’t biased: “Men and women [are] equally capable of being wise and fair judges.”

Last week, Politico’s Melanie Mason tackled the question of why female politicians are so rarely caught with their pants down. Mason starts out with a pretty good theory—”Men far outnumber women in elected office, and statistical probability dictates that if a random politician is caught in a sex scandal, it is overwhelmingly likely that the politician would be male”—and then offers up a bargain basement of half-baked ideas in order to cover all the basis—and sexist stereotypes against women. Most of these reasons would never, ever actually stop a woman from messing around, but that won’t stop us from buying into it all again.

Strong Women Aren’t Hot Enough:

“I guess men in power are terribly attractive to some women, but I don’t think that women in power are attractive to some men,” said former Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.), who was co-chairwoman of Gary Hart’s scandal-plagued presidential campaign in 1988.

Love Finds A Way: Please. This isn’t true, but even if it were—everybody can find somebody who wants to fuck them. This theory also conveniently lets male politicians off the hook. It’s not their fault! All the women who unexpectedly want to fuck them are to blame, somehow:

male politicians may be lavished with sexual attention they are unprepared to handle. “Most of these politicians were the high school boys that couldn’t get the cheerleader,” said [Suzie] Johnson, whose website GoAskSuzie.com specializes in issues of infidelity. “Now the situation is reversed.”

—

The Media Has Eliminated the Female Politician’s Sex Life:

Being so outnumbered in the political realm can also lead to greater media scrutiny for politicians—think, for example, of the brouhaha over Hillary Clinton’s V-neck blouse that sparked a lengthy discussion on the appropriate amount of cleavage a female politician should reveal.

Love Finds A Way: I won’t argue with the fact that female politicians are often unfairly scrutinized by the news-media. Even when they’re not caught with their pants down, women are often scrutinized over infidelity—Bill’s blowjob meant a lot of obsession over Hillary’s reaction. However, it’s not like the Governor of South Carolina doesn’t have reporters watching his every cross-continental flight—and monitoring his sexy e-mails—as well.

—

Having A Career Is Hard Enough For Women!:

Others say women in high-power careers are so overloaded already that affairs are an unlikely possibility. As Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) points out, “Who has the time? I don’t have enough time in the day to take care of the responsibilities I have between work and family.”

Women tend to be able to juggle a lot, but with so many pressures, throwing an extra romance in the mix may feel like just another item to have to multitask. “In a certain way, it’s a privilege, and it still belongs predominantly to men,” said Williams, who is herself a mother.

Love Finds a Way: First, women were too preoccupied with homemaking and baby-raisin’ that they simply didn’t have the time or energy to hold down a career. They just couldn’t handle it! Now, women are too preoccupied with homemaking, baby-raisin’, and that career they insisted upon, they just can’t manage to squeeze the infidelity in. Are female politicians too busy with their careers to ruin their careers, or are there—again—just not that many women who have had the opportunity to fuck up?

—

Women Can Make Babies, Didn’t You Know!

“The tendency or willingness to transgress sexual boundaries in general is much more likely in men than in women,” said Paul Abramson, author of the forthcoming book “Sex Appeal: Six Ethical Principles for the 21st Century.” Abramson, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, added that “women are socialized to be much more cautious about sexuality due to the fact that they can get pregnant. Having an affair is a sexual risk, and women are much less inclined to do that.”

Love Finds a Way: As Megan Carpentier points out on Jezebel, these women are in menopause. And if they’re not: condoms.

—

Women Are Too Emotional To Have Casual Sex!

“That’s the reason you don’t see more female politicians having affairs,” Johnson said. “Women are less likely to have physical affairs but more likely to have emotional affairs, and there’s no way to bust those.”

Love finds a way: Emotional affairs leave paper trails, too. See: Mark Foley’s illicit AIM conversations, Mark Sanford’s flowery e-mails. Also, why are we listening to the advice of Suzie Johnson of GoAskSuzie.com again? You don’t have to take the URL literally!

—

Women are wily bitches.

And, of course, there is always the possibility that female politicians have their own sexual indiscretions the public simply doesn’t know about. Those secrets may stay hidden for a while. According to Johnson, “women are way more clever at covering [affairs] up.”

Love Finds A Way: This is likely true—but it’s likely true for many male politicians, as well. The idea that women are inherently better at hiding affairs is a tempting, completely unsubstantiated, and useless theory.

Photo by veni markovski

They came, they researched, they let us in on a “little secret”. Now, “CockBibs,” the first novelty item for keeping your genitals creepily dry, are officially available for sale. And the Inventor of the CockBib has reached out to the females to let them know that CockBibs are for us, too (and certainly not offensive to anyone!). A notice on the Web site reads:

***Attention*** We apologize for any misunderstanding in regards to our appreciation for women as it relates to them orally pleasing us men. We love and have the utmost respect for women. The CockBib is just our attempt at creating a fun and humorous novelty item. It is not our intent to offend or disrespect anyone. Thank You! :)

No, CockBib. Thank you.

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

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

Pwned.

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

Photo by Fated to Pretend

This time around: cat fights!

New York Times columnist Mickey Meece (seriously) is here to explain why the recession has resulted in a frightening “workplace bullying” epidemic that threatens to destroy all working women. Why are working girls bitchier than ever to each other? Let me count the ways:

Because “workplace researchers say”:

During this downturn, as stress levels rise, workplace researchers say, bullies are likely to sharpen their elbows and ratchet up their attacks.

Because even though most bullies are male, the female bullies are bitchier (or, cat fights are more interesting than regular old boy office politics):

It’s probably no surprise that most of these bullies are men, as a survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute, an advocacy group, makes clear. But a good 40 percent of bullies are women. And at least the male bullies take an egalitarian approach, mowing down men and women pretty much in equal measure. The women appear to prefer their own kind, choosing other women as targets more than 70 percent of the time.

Because even when you have a career, you still have to be the mother:

Women don’t like to talk about it because it is “so antithetical to the way that we are supposed to behave to other women,” Ms. Klaus said. “We are supposed to be the nurturers and the supporters.”

Because pretending there are “magical keys” to correct female behavior in the workplace makes it easier to market “executive leadership coaches” to women:

“Women are trying to figure out the magical keys to the kingdom,” said Laura Steck, president of the Growth and Leadership Center in Sunnyvale, Calif., and an executive leadership coach.

Women feel they have to be aggressive to be promoted, she said, and then they keep it up. Then, suddenly, they see the need to be collegial and collaborative instead of competitive.

Because men have nothing to do with this:

“As we get into the corporate world,” Ms. Cirocco added, “we’re taught or we’re led to believe that we don’t get ahead because of men. But, we really don’t get ahead because of ourselves. Instead of building each other up and showcasing each other, we’re constantly tearing each other down.”

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

Sociological Images accuses Facebook of sexism and ethnocentricsm for using a “white and male” image as its default avatar to represent a typical user, while opting for “orange avatars of both sexes” to represent its “global connection” capabilities.

So why does this shadowy male figure look just like me?

Sociological Images writes:

So when Facebook wants to represent global humanity, the avatars are orange and of mixed sex; when Facebook is charged with representing an individual, the avatar is white and male. This is not random or accidental. Globally, as Facebook, ironically, reminds us, people are not “white.” Representing people in this way centers men, Western countries, and whiteness (because there are non-white people in Western countries, too) and marginalizes women, non-Western countries, and non-whites (though one might argue that at least ALL of the avatars aren’t white and male).

What Sociological Images fails to note is that the Facebook avatar is only as exclusively “white” as a silhouette artist’s subject is exclusively black (which is to say, not at all). Similarly, the avatar is only as exclusively “male” as its haircut—short hair with a funny cowlick. Nope, can’t be a woman!:

All woman.

Facebook’s “global” avatars don’t represent users of both sexes—they represent users with both long and short hair. As far as a vague shadow drawing of human can ever have a gender, the avatars looks pretty gender-neutral to me. I identify more with the short-haired “dude” than the more substantially-coiffed orange “lady.” It seems to me that the argument for a more “female” avatar is actually just an argument that the androgyn get a girlier haircut.

Perhaps Sociological Images should be asking why Facebook is so sexist and racist, but not sufficiently heteronormative? Why, Facebook, is your default avatar so vaguely androgynous for all users—male, female, gay, straight, cisgendered and trans? Shouldn’t real men be able to choose a manlier avatar (the chin could be better-defined), and women one with a less queer-looking haircut?

I am outraged.

Bored magazine columnists have debated for years as to why women are, or are not, funny.  Inspired by Tiger Beatdown’s post yesterday on another drop in the unfunny girl barrel—a study that found that women do not immediately react to the sight of a unicycle with humor (I fucking wonder why)—I believe it’s time to rephrase the question.

Why are those who argue that women are not funny so unfunny?

First, let us review:

Funny women are not sexy. According to a 2006 study by Eric Bressler and Sigal Balshine, women rated “funny” men as more sexually attractive than men they didn’t find funny. The opposite was not true. “And women, don’t start trying to tell jokes to attract men,” writes Tom Siegfried of the study. “The study found that men rated ‘funny’ women as no more desirable than the others.”

Women don’t have enough testosterone to be funny, concluded Professor Sam Shuste, after riding around a lot on his unicycle and noting that only men made fun of him. “The sex difference was striking. 95% of adult women were praising, encouraging or showed concern. There were very few comic or snide remarks. In contrast, only 25% of adult men responded as did the women, for example, by praise or encouragement; instead 75% attempted comedy, often snide or combative as an intended put-down.”

Women are too concerned with having babies to be funny, according to this classic Vanity Fair piece by Christopher Hitchens. “Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can’t afford to be too frivolous,” he writes. “One tiny snuffle that turns into a wheeze, one little cut that goes septic, one pathetically small coffin, and the woman’s universe is left in ashes and ruin. Try being funny about that, if you like.”

Women are not funny because Germaine Greer needs to explain why she said women were not funny. Reasons include: They focus too much on bras and weight loss, cut down other women, are bad at improvisation, aren’t competetive enough, would prefer to marry than work, and they’re not desperate enough to be funny to get laid.

Those tasked with defending women in comedy have their own explanations for why women are not funny.

Women write their own stuff now. Alessandra Stanley begins her Vanity Fair response, “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?” strangely: “There are people who lament that no women now are as funny as Carole Lombard or Barbara Stanwyck in the screwball comedies of Lubitsch, Sturges, and Hawks. They are missing the point: today’s comediennes are on television, where they are often responsible for their own material.” So, women aren’t as funny as they were before, but at least they write their own material now, which is less funny than the male material they used to do.

The comedy environment is too hostile for women. In a response to Greer, Lynne Parker writes: “Moreover, there has been a common perception that comedy is a hostile environment for women. We are compliant in creating this image. The practicalities of life on the circuit are not for the faint-hearted—many hours on the road and antisocial hours do not engender a traditional home life. Many a promising female act has given up the juggling of career, marriage and motherhood, even temporarily, for the sake of an easier life.”

Women are not socialized to be funny, as men are. On Broadsheet, Kate Harding responds to Greer: “Throughout the essay, Greer keeps offering great setups for an analysis of why women are culturally discouraged from developing and displaying robust senses of humor, then following them up with conclusions that amount to, ‘We’re from Venus — whaddaya gonna do?’”

Since all these arguements as to why women aren’t funny—or why they’re not allowed to be funny—are based on half-baked speculation and anecdotal evidence anyway, let’s float a new theory: Why are people who argue that women aren’t funny so unfunny?

The study by Bressler and Bashine showing that women are more attracted to funny men used the following statement as an example of humor: “Birthday cake is the only food you can blow on and spit on and everybody rushes to get a piece.” The researchers themselves acknowledged that their funny statements were not very funny. “Given the sophomoric nature of some of our humorous statements, it is not surprising that participants did not ascribe ‘intelligence’ to our humorous individuals,” they wrote. Perhaps women are actually more attracted to men who are not funny, and also stupid?

And those unicycle quips? “Equally striking [said Shuste] was the repetitive and predictable nature of the comments from men; two thirds of their ‘comic’ responses referred to the number of wheels—’Lost your wheel?,’ for example.” Hilarious.

Germaine Greer is humorless, but she gets a pass because she has a body that can produce children, and is without a good handle on the inherent comedy of the unicycle. (Christopher Hitchens, actually, is pretty funny).

So, we’re not funny, the birthday cake and unicycle comedians of the world claim, because we’re girls. What’s their excuse?

Breaking girly news from the Financial Times: FT reports that the “Lipstick Index” has been replaced by the “Foundation Index,” signaling a shift in female consumers’ recession-era makeup of choice.

The “Lipstick Index” was coined by Estee Lauder leader Leonard Lauder in 2001 “to highlight the correlation between economic downturns and upticks in lipstick sales.” Now, another cosmetics company—L’Oréal—is claiming that it’s foundation sales that are skyrocketing as lipstick—and everything else—bottoms out.

Here’s a question: Why are the guys behind fucking Estee Lauder and L’Oréal the ones that financial news outlets are turning to to objectively report on the recession’s impact on female consumers?

Lauder’s Lipstick Index has now been discredited—sales are down 5.7 percent so far this year. So why not just invent another index that makes the cosmetic companies look good and makes women appear more frivolous? If it’s not lipstick, it’s foundation! When foundation tanks, it will be mascara! When mascara tanks, it will be Estee Lauder Bronze Goddess Soft Shimmer Bronzer! Call it the “Bronze Goddess Soft Shimmer Bronzer Index.” Quick, ring the Financial Times!

Check out this graf from the FT: “The index may be a frivolous indicator—some researchers point out that lipstick sales have at times grown in periods of prosperity as well as downturns—but in this recession, foundation is the cosmetic to watch.”

Translation: We know these cosmetics indexes to be bullshit, but here’s another bullshit cosmetics index we’ll report on anyway because we get to use fun phrases like “Flawless skin is replacing the perfect pout as a woman’s answer to tough times.”

So what do all these bullshit indexes mean, anyway, if they appear to make no economic sense? Nothing! I don’t know, let’s ask L’Oréal again:

However, L’Oréal says there is one clear conclusion about tough economic times: looking good remains paramount. The group points out the wider beauty market is still growing.

Yeah, if there’s one thing the cosmetics industry can conclusively say about the recession, it’s that women need to keep buying cosmetics. What are you waiting for, ladies?

Photo by Porcelaingirl° {è un triangolo isoscele}

The weird part about this whole thing isn’t that the brothel was called “Heaven’s Gate”; or that he was mysteriously driven there by a taxi driver named “Silky”; or that Bradlee didn’t even figure out what he was paying for until “she started to take off her clothes”; or that he was “glad it happened”; or that he immediately told his mother; or that his mother then dragged him back to the brothel to pick up his prostitute and test her for HIV because Sally Quinn “worries way too much, if you ask me.”

No, the weird part is that this hilarious little Carribean prostitution adventure is Bradlee’s way of introducing a much more serious topic: “Girls.” Bradlee closes out the chapter by wondering why he’s been unlucky with the ladies:

More than anything, I want a girlfriend. I think one of the reasons I have a hard time taking it to the next level with girls is because I had no contact with girls for much of my adolescence. Sometimes I think that I’m a loser, that I’ll never find a girlfriend, that I’ll be a nobody for the rest of my life.

I seem to have the worst luck with women no matter how hard I try. I feel they’re picking up some vibe from me that says I can’t handle a relationship, or I’m not mature enough to be in a relationship. Whatever it is, I am apparently doing something wrong. I’ve taken and followed all of the advice my friends and my parents have given me about dating, but it hasn’t quite worked out for me yet.

I have trouble with reading cues and I can never tell if girls like me sexually. If you’re having an intimate friendly conversation and a woman is smiling and you’re making her laugh, then you think that maybe it’s possible to take it to the next level. But, typically, the day after that kind of thing would happen with a girl, I wouldn’t hear back from her.

It goes on and on. Hmm, okay, perhaps Bradlee should first try skipping the prostitute story, and also, actually, any story where Sally Quinn completely freaks out. He might also pare down the six excrutiating paragraghs detailing why, specifically, women have never liked him down to, I don’t know, zero.

Or maybe I’m wrong: Maybe the “my mom’s crazy, I fucked a prostitute, women don’t understand me” tactic has worked out: Bradlee’s Web site says he’s currently in a relationship.

Attention local cougars and MILFs: The search for “Ms. Senior D.C. 2009″ has begun.

If you are “a woman 60 years of age or older” who “lives in the District of Columbia,” “inspires others with her enthusiasm,” “is poised, charming and articulate,” has a “positive philosophy of life” that “reflects her inner beauty,” and “is an active, vital member of her community” who is “blessed with a special talent” which “defies the myths of aging”—and who isn’t?—you could get a sash, or something.

To get yourself in the running, contact Ms. Senior D.C. Planning Committee Chairperson Gwen Coleman at (202) 289-1510, ext. 1170/1171.

Photo by DerrickT

According to Chris Cilliza’s The Fix, “President Obama will sign an executive order tomorrow [that's today now, readers] to establish a White House Council on Women and Girls.” Cilliza’s intel may be good, but his analysis of the move leaves something to be desired.

Writes Cilliza: “Obama has both personal—his wife and two daughters—and political reasons to make this sort of high profile move to ensure that women’s needs are being addressed by his administration.”

Well, allow me to retort.

Is it really necessary to note that men should be interested in women’s issues because they, like, know a few of them? Does Cilliza report on the stimulus bill by writing, “Obama has personal reasons to pass his bill, because he knows several humans”? Does he report on Obama’s FDA appointments by writing, “Obama clearly has a personal stake in this issue, seeing as the President himself consumes food to sustain life”?

No—only women’s issues would need to be explained through “personal” reasons. Obama’s a man! What the hell would he want to help women for? Oh, he has two lovely daughters.

Ugh. Okay. Back to less infuriating details on the new ladies’ group:

According to a White House memo, “The mission of the Council will be to provide a coordinated federal response to the challenges confronted by women and girls to ensure that all Cabinet and Cabinet-level agencies consider how their policies and programs impact women and families.”

The council will be headed by Valerie Jarrett.

Photo by Bascom Hogue

March is Women’s History Month, which I plan to celebrate by ceremoniously deleting the press release the U.S. Census sends out listing boring statistics pertaining to ladies. Welp, here we goooo . . . hey, wait! Something actually interesting!

According to data collected in the 2007 American Community Survey, women workers earn less than male workers in all 50 states. Only in the District of Columbia are women’s median earnings equal to that of its men. Well, almost equal—women who work full-time year-round earn 93.4 percent as much as men who do the same, a difference the census deems not statistically significant.

Women’s wages in D.C. aren’t only more equal than in any other state. They’re also higher. In no state is a woman’s median income above $50,000 a year, but D.C. gets pretty close: Our median is $49,364. Only in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland and New Jersey are median wages for women even above the $40,000 mark.

Photo by ziak

Tom Petty’s got a lot of songs about women. Pretty much all the songs—the ones that aren’t about smoking weed, road trips, rock, or vague generalities—are about girls. So, what women inspired Petty? Runnin’ Down a Dream—while completely awesome—doesn’t offer many clues. These are the only mentions I could find of women in Petty’s life:

- Vague reference to heading out on the road with the band “a couple days” after getting married to a woman, whereupon:

- she is never mentioned again, even when Tom Petty’s house burns down and it’s revealed he has two daughters with her, whereupon:

- Petty delivers a heartfelt testimonial about how much he loved his dear mother, who died too early in his life, whereupon:

- Stevie Nicks keeps asking Petty to let her join the Heartbreakers but he won’t because “there are no girls in the Heartbreakers,” whereupon:

- Stevie Nicks keeps asking Petty to write a song for her but when he gives it to her and she starts practicing on it he steals it back because he likes it too much and wants it for himself, whereupon:

- Eurythmics musician/autobiographical vibrator designer Dave Stewart writes a song for Stevie Nicks, but calls Petty in to write some lyrics and he steals that song, too, whereupon:

- it is revealed that actually, Petty’s mother dieed after a long illness when Petty was like 30 years old or something reasonably old like that, but he never stopped in to see her that often because he was touring Japan with Bob Dylan and dancing with Mary Jane, whereupon:

- we fast forward to “Echo,” an album vaguely about Petty’s vague divorce from his vague wife that nobody in audience can fucking believe has stayed married to him this long, whereupon:

- Dana, Petty’s new wife, emerges on the scene in a skin-tight patent leather bodysuit posed on a Harley, then proceeds to dance seductively on the side of the stage in skin-tight, fringed leather bodysuits for the remainder of the Heartbreaker shows.

What can we take away from this?

Point: Tom Petty doesn’t care about women.
Counterpoint: Tom Petty doesn’t want to air his family’s dirty laundry on film.

Point: Really, though, he doesn’t appear to spend any time with his family! He’s just like, okay, marriage, babies, then peace, I’m going to go create the great American rock band, check’s in the mail.
Counterpoint: The band was really good.

Point: Tom Petty was kind of a dick to Stevie Nicks, though.
Counterpoint: That Dave Stewart song that Petty stole from Nicks? “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” Fucking classic! Plus the Heartbreakers would have sucked with Stevie Nicks in it.

Point: Tom Petty could have been nicer to his mom, at least.
Counterpoint: Yeah, we all could have.

The blogger over at Teaching Artist knows it’s tough. It’s all about ladies. It costs ten bucks. It took Teaching Artist a year and a half to make a visit. Still, TA says just suck it up and go to the National Museum of Women in the Arts:

I’m aware that there may be some apprehension among you out there that you’ll buy a (relatively cheap) ticket only to find the museum is a case of gender politics going too far. Maybe you don’t have art in a museum and you’re bitterly delusional about reverse discrimination. I don’t know. In the least you’ve probably seen art exhibitions that fall short because they assemble a bunch of very different art works on the single unifying principle that they were all made by artists who have similar, non-phallic, genitalia.

It took me five years in D.C. to get over there. Yesterday, I finally did. I’ll have a review of one of the NMWA’s current shows, “Role Models: Feminine Identity in Contemporary American Photography,” in next week’s paper.

Photo: Nikki S. Lee, “The Ohio Project,” 1999

In the spirit of post-election adventure, Slate is starting to work on a new web magazine: Double X. A magazine by women but not just for women, Double X will spin out from our XX Factor blog, where we’ve started a conversation among women—about politics, sex, and culture—that both men and women enjoy listening in on. The new site will do all this and more. It will take the Slate and XX Factor sensibility and apply it to sexual politics, fashion, parenting, health, science, sex, friendship, work-life balance, and anything else you might talk about with your friends over coffee. We’ll tackle subjects high and low with an approach that’s unabashedly intellectual but not dry or condescending. The blog will be at the heart of the site, but we’ll also publish essays, reporting, and other features.

The foundation also breaks down the new female house members’ positions on abortion, after the jump.

7 Pro-Choice Democrats:
Ann Kirkpatrick (D-AZ)
Betsy Markey (D-CO)
Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL)
Debbie Halvorson (D-IL)
Chellie Pingree (D-ME)
Dina Titus (D-NV)
Marcia Fudge (D-OH)

1 Pro-Choice Republican:
Lynn Jenkins (R-KS)

1 Anti-Choice Democrat:
Kathy Dahlkemper (D-PA)

1 Anti-Choice Republican:
Cynthia Lummis (R-WY)

* Feministing has a comprehensive round-up of ballot measures of interest to both women and gays. Overall, the results are “pro-choice, anti-gay,” with three anti-choice measures failing across America. (Feministing also throws in the anti-immigrant and anti-equal opportunity initiatives for good measure). The most ridiculous, Colorado’s Amendment 48, was shut down by 73% of voters who spoke out “against granting fertilized eggs full rights.” Whew, because you never know when you’re gonna get one of those, am I right ladies?

* Jezebel’s Megan (and former Jezebel Moe) discuss the morning after, reflect on grown men crying. Says Megan:

I think most people had pretty good parties, from the looks of things. I was actually sort of fascinated last night, flipping channels, Juan Williams, Eugene Robinson and Roland Martin (Fox, MSNBC, and CNN, respectively) were all crying. I mean, these are men who, while not anchors, are literally quite close to the tops of their professions, and yet it took this to make them feel actually accepted, was the sense that I got. It was kind of amazing.

* And the folks at The Onion put a damper on all our celebration with their funnies:

As we enter a new era of equality for all people, the election of Barack Obama will decidedly be a milestone in U.S. history, undeniable proof that Americans, when pushed to the very brink, are willing to look past outward appearances and judge a person by the quality of his character and strength of his record. So as long as that person is not a woman.

* Shakesville offers “words of hope from an old queer.”

* Meanwhile, Meghan McCain, who has done a great job documenting the campaign, blogs her father’s concession speech. Here’s to hopping Meghan sets off on her own now and starts her own blog.

Welcome back to The Sexist’s Manliest Workplace in D.C. tournament, our ongoing unscientific investigation into the male/female ratios of local employers’ org charts. Last week, we sewed up the Media Bracket, in which the Washington Times crushed the competition with an impressive 94.5 percent manly factor. Now, we move on to an even more high-fallutin’ category of D.C. workplace: “Culture.” Check out the entire 64-workplace bracket here; today, the one-seed Washington Redskins take on eight-seed National Museum of Women in the Arts. May the manliest cultural institution win!

WASHINGTON REDSKINS: These hometown heroes may have the manliest profession this side of the American Presidency, but do they have the manly goods where it counts—the execs? Let’s check out the team’s ownership and coaching staff [PDF]:

Owner Dan Snyder (Male, 10 points)
Ownership Group Member Arlette Snyder (Female, ZERO)
Ownership Group Member Michele Snyder (Female, ZERO)
Ownership Group Member Robert Rothman (Male, 7 points)
Ownership Group Member Dwight Schar (Male, 6 points)
Ownership Group Member Frederick W. Smith (Male, 5 points)
Executive VP Vinny Cerrato (Male, 4 points)
Head Coach Jim Zorn (Male, 3 points)
Assistant Coach Greg Blanche (Male, 2 points)
Assistant Coach Sherman Smith (Male, 1 point)

With only 38 points out of a possible 55, or 69% manliness, first-seed contenders the Washington Redskins prove to be even worse at manliness than they are at football (75% wins this season). No amount of sis-boom-bah-ing from scantily-clad ‘Skins cheerleaders can mediate this stunning blow, which was decided early in the contest when Dan incubated himself with a pair of female Snyders in his ownership group. Consolation prize: Homosocial ass-slap rate in organization remains high.

—

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WOMEN IN THE ARTS: Oh, man. This does not look promising. But even though this contender stumbles by having “Women” in its very name, an upset against the sorta-manly Redskins is possible. Because NMWA qualifies as a traditionally female workplace, it stands to reap in some free manly points under the Sexist’s affirmative action clause. Accordingly, NMWA will receive a 10-point jump after its index is calculated. Let’s get to the goods:

Director Susan Fisher Sterling (Female, ZERO)
Deputy Director Ilene Gutman (Female, ZERO)
Deputy Director Pam Ayres (Female, ZERO)
Chief Curator Jordana Pomeroy (Female, ZERO)
Director of Library Jason Stieber (Male, 5)
Media Relations Manager Michelle Cragle (Female, ZERO)
Exhibitions Coordinator Rebecca Price (Female, ZERO)
Chief Preparator Greg Abgelone (Male, 2)
Director of Special Events Lori Brubaker (Female, ZERO)
Director of Retail Operations Lynda Marks (Female, ZERO)

Ouch. Even with the free 10-pointer, NMWA scores a weak 17/55 on the manly index, or just over 30 percent manliness. The National Museum of Women in the Arts is so hopelessly unmanly I’ll save them excessive man-punning in this roundup. But check out their new exhibition, “Role Models: Feminine Identity in Contemporary American Photograph,” which I hear is delightful!

Tune in tomorrow for a pan-religious bro-off, when the National Cathedral takes on the Founding Church of Scientology!

Photo by smata2.

THREE! Sarah Palin appeared on Saturday Night Live last week to get back at Tina Fey for being so mean all the time. Palin proved she really knows how to act presidential use that Northern Idaho journalism degree. Let’s go straight to the video (includes Mean Girls-style bitchy stare-off between Palin and Fey)!

TWO! Yesterday, the McCain/Palin camp announced the endorsement of Telemundo actress Katie Barberi, a Mexican-American. The announcement came on the same day some other minority came out in favor of the Obama campaign. “As a Hispanic-American, I understand how important this election is for Hispanics,” said Barberi. A little birdie told me Barberi’s endorsin’ qualifications include an uncredited role as an economics student in a little something called Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

ONE! Michele Bachmann, a Republican Congresswoman from Minnesota, has the ghost of Joe McCarthy in her, and boy is Congress’s face red! In an appearance on Hardball with Chris Matthews, Bahmann—whom I did not even know existed, much less existed solely to warn the American people against the creeping spectre of communism—made her stunning debut on the national stage. Bahmann accused Barack Obama—who is currently running for president of the United States of America—of being “anti-American.”

“If we look at the collection of friends that Barack Obama has had in his life,” Huffington Post reports Bahmann as saying, “it calls into question what Barack Obama’s true beliefs and values and thoughts are. His attitudes, values, and beliefs with Jeremiah Wright on his view of the United States…is negative; Bill Ayers, his negative view of the United States. We have seen one friend after another call into question his judgment — but also, what it is that Barack Obama really believes?” Following her indictment of Obama, Bachmann called for an investigation into the American values of all members of Congress. “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out if they are pro-America or anti-America,” she said. Believe us, Michelle—we’re listening!

AND THE BUZZER! Totally non-Republican (educated guess) lovely lady Amy Poehler matches your Palin and raises you a Fey with her Alaskan rap bit (SNL rap bits: Making me laugh since 2007):

Ever since “bro” crept out of the frat house basement and into the mainstream, the now-ubiquitous term has suffered a backlash. Consider the dominant definition of “bro” on urbandictionary.com: “Stupid white trash guys . . . with lifted trucks, wife beaters, shitty music . . . ugly girlfriends, ugly hair, mouths constantly open, retarded as all get up, have no common sense . . . Fags.”

Also indicative of the term’s current status: Even the founder of forthcoming online community BroBible.com —the world’s first online “brocial network“—hesitates to self-identify as “bro.” “The word bro has a negative connotation to some,” admits Doug Banker, the bro behind Bro Bible. “I’m definitely a bro in certain aspects,” he adds. “But I consider myself a well-rounded bro.”

But to Banker, 23, the term “bro” means something different. “We see it in the playful way . . . Really, a bro is just someone who likes to go out and have a good time, who likes to stay connected to their group of friends while expanding their horizons,” he says. “It’s not one of our goals to make the word ‘bro’ more positive,” adds banker. “But yes, hopefully, that will happen.”

Banker, who graduated this year from the University of Richmond with a B.A. in “Leadership Studies,” hopes that BroBible.com will give a voice to what he views as a sorely underrepresented demographic. The Web site, tag-lined “Every bro has a story,” will debut its mix of social networking, open forums, and bro-generated content on Oct. 15. “This is one of the first sites that’s tailored specifically to the needs and interests of the bro,” says Banker. “Finally, there will be an outlet on the Internet where [bros] can truly express themselves.”

The nationwide site aims to connect a diverse network of bros around the country. “The actual type of bro varies, but there are bros everywhere,” explains Banker. “You’ve got the Southern bro, enjoys being outside; the Colorado ski bro; the California surf bro; the Texas down-South bro; the Northeastern preppy lacrosse bro. There are all different types of bros, but they share common attributes.”

Banker hopes to court the bros of the District of Columbia specifically. “A lot of my friends at Georgetown are huge bros, and they really enjoy the nightlife scene there,” he says. “In the bars, you can find a great deal of bros. Any sporting event, a lot of bros. I would imagine that D.C is full of them,” he says. Banker says he is planning to take his promotional bro tour to Washington, D.C. within the next month.

Other types of bros, however, are less welcome in the online community. “It’s not the ‘yo, bro’ type of thing,” says Banker, “We’re not trying to get a guy who’s going to drink ten beers and crash them over his head. . . . The site is not going to be glorifying male conquest and championing their exploits.”

Still, Banker says he hopes to promote an “open forum” where bros “can share all types of stories and not feel embarrassed to get that information out,” he says. “And if that includes beer and hooking up, then so be it.”

Though the bro is typically defined as male, Banker says that female bros—and women close to bros—are also encouraged to check out the site. “I think it’s going to be very popular with women,” Banker says. “Women are really going to enjoy the site. They’ll be able to gain insight into the male ego, the male bravado, how the male mind works. At the very least, they’re going to want to know why their boyfriend is spending so much time on the site.”

Banker is hopeful that, with the help of the online bro community, a new term for a female bro will soon be coined. “I’ve been looking for one. I can’t think of one off the top of my head,” says Banker. “Trust me, I’ve been wracking my brain for a long time.”

Photo by Tavallai.

* For Slate, The Abstinence Teacher author Tom Perrotta explains the political appeal of Sarah Palin’s “Sexy Puritan” archetype:

I’m only trying to locate her within the context of the great American culture war, which she seems to have single-handedly reignited during an election season that was supposed to have been dominated by other issues (and may well be again, now that Wall Street has imploded). With the selection of Palin, McCain succeeded not only in thrilling the Christian right but in scrambling the categories of the campaign. It used to be perfectly clear which ticket represented youth and change, which seemed old and boring, and which had more appeal to women voters. For a moment, at least, Palin seems to have turned these certainties into open questions.

* Also in Slate: How the financial crisis is good for the high-end prostitute business:

Sex workers of the past waited on street corners, outside bars, and around parks, and their transactions were fleeting and usually for a few dollars. Today’s high-end sex workers see themselves as therapists, part of a vast metropolitan wellness industry that includes private chefs and yoga teachers. Many have regular clients who visit them several times per month, paying them not only for sex but also for comfort and affirmation.

Ahh, but what of the comfort and affirmation of your local alt-weekly?

* Stuff Hipsters Don’t Like: Hipsters. Thinking about the economy. Pregnancy:

Hipsters are very torn about pregnancy. On the one hand, they don’t have any problem with abortion seeing as they got their BA in post-structuralist conceptual astrology and have endured hundreds of hours of NPR, Ira Glass’ infanticidal socialist drone lingering in their subconscious. On the other hand, being pregnant is kind of cool. It gives them some sort of purpose in an otherwise directionless post-graduate existence. In fact, some hipster girls dream of having a traditional nuclear family. They fantasize about their husband handsomely dressed in wool flannel and Ray-Bans returning home from his long shift at the record store and coddling their infant son decked out in a vintage neon Morrissey romper.

That said, most of the time they just get an abortion.

* Women dumb! Men lazy! Unfabulouz.com shows “the difference between men and women” in this recovered gender cartoon.

* Guess what’s the only supreme court case Sarah Palin can name! Yeah, that one.

Photo by dreamsjung