Change is entirely natural

What a surprise — once upon a time, way back when we lived in Pennsylvania, I voted for Harris Wofford for the senate. He lost. He was defeated by Rick Santorum. I haven’t heard much about him since we moved out west to Minnesota.

I’ve now learned that his wife died in 1996, 20 years ago, and a few years later, he started dating again. He’s been in a long-term relationship ever since, and is now, at age 90, planning to get married, to Matthew Charlton. No big deal; he loved his wife, Clare, sadly lost her to leukemia, and found new love with a same-sex partner.

Too often, our society seeks to label people by pinning them on the wall — straight, gay or in between. I don’t categorize myself based on the gender of those I love. I had a half-century of marriage with a wonderful woman, and now am lucky for a second time to have found happiness.

I thought that was wonderful. You love a person, not just the sex of the body they inhabit. And hey, you can keep romance alive into your 90s? Good news!

Infantilization and brutality

spankings

Jezebel does it again. They’ve gone rummaging through film archives and compiled a collection of clips that expose the mainstream attitude towards women: they are like children, and deserve to be spanked by a strong man.

With the camera rolling or not, stories coming from Hollywood studios presented a consistent message that spankings were a healthy part of a woman’s life. At the same time, all across America women were getting spanked by their husbands—and taking them to court.

To many American women, a spanking was the fruit not of charming adoration but domestic tyranny. Sometimes these spankings were precipitated by violent behavior on the part of the wife—but just as often it was for her failure to be a docile servant.

It got me wondering…was there ever a scene in an old movie in which a man gets rude or uppity or deserving of discipline, and another man grabs him, flings him over his knee, and starts walloping his butt with a hairbrush? Ever? And wouldn’t the public have been horrified at the impropriety of such a scene, with all its implications of ownership, disrespect and disregard, and sexuality?

Toxic gallantry

supermansaves

This afternoon I’m giving a talk on how evolution, and fundamentally, the naturalistic fallacy, is abused all over the place, and then I find this open letter to the various heroines of recent movies, and I just want gak all over it. Not only does this guy call on bad biology to defend his traditionally misogynistic position, but he’s a fundie Christian who believes humans were created by a deity, so he doesn’t even accept the biology he’s misusing.

I know the whole world is ladling on the adoration for your brave contributions to modern womanhood. However, you are behaving, all of you, in ways that do not befit your sex or glorify God. Frankly, and I’m sorry to have to say this, I really am, many of you look ridiculous. Your friends and family and fans may not laugh at you. But the angels do and history will. What you’re doing might be good politics (of a sort), but it’s bad biology, bad theology, and bad storytelling. It lies about who you are as a woman and how God made you. And it makes for lousy movies and TV.

Okay, that’s the nastiest part. Now let me explain.

Let’s talk about biology first, who you are as a woman.

The most obvious things are the hardest to defend. You can write whole textbooks proving something unseen and unexpected like gravity or photosynthesis. But how do you prove the existence of Mt. Everest besides saying “Look, there it is?”

That’s why I feel dumb saying this, but:

Women are the weaker sex. They may be the smarter sex, they are often the wiser sex, they’re probably the more industrious sex, they’re definitely the prettier sex. But they’re also the weaker sex.

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Guys who make me embarrassed to be a guy

Stop it. Just stop it. I’m usually quite happy to be male — it’s an incredibly lucky sex to be, and I’m chockful of hormones that joyfully confirm all of my biases — but then there are these other guys that are so stupid about it that I become uncomfortable. We should all be happy with who we are, and it’s not women who make me squirm, it’s the members of my own sex who do everything so badly. And there have been some terrible examples lately.

  • Men who think women owe them sex. Like this terrible story of a man who didn’t get the sex he wanted on a date. Don’t you know, he spent $30 on tolls?

    rejection

    It’s her decision, full stop. Don’t argue. And when you go on that kind of entitled rant, it just confirms how right her decision was.

  • Here’s another brand of obliviousness: a man wants his mother to be in the delivery room when his wife gives birth. His mother is apparently very critical and demanding, and his wife put her foot down and said no, so he went…running to Reddit to get advice on how to overrule her?

    You know you’ve got problems when you think Reddit is a good source for relationship advice. You ought to know you’re really screwed up when even the Reddit community is nearly unanimous in declaring that you’re a clueless doofus and you need to respect your wife’s wishes.

  • MRAs. Enough said.

We wuv you so much, Governor McCrory!

The Minnesota GOP is just as backward and ignorant as the GOP in any southern state. They recently tried to pass one of those awful bathroom bill that are the hot new fad among regressives; it got killed, fortunately. But we still got to listen to some prudish whining about safety (because transgender people are dangerous) and privacy (because peering at crotches is standard behavior in the bathroom), and lots of accusations that transgender people are the real bullies here. Watch the parade of bigots here:

They got their dreams of slapping down transgender men and women crushed, so the 35 Republican Minnesotans wrote a letter to McCrory of North Carolina telling him how much they liked him and wanted to follow his ideas.

[Read more…]

It’s the stereotypes that are toxic

Digby finds some interesting quotes. Did you know that this presidential election is about masculine vs. feminine values?

Harry Enten: I think it has more to do with society overall. A ridiculously high 68 percent of Trump supporters say society is becoming too soft and feminine. Cruz and Kasich supporters come in with 57 percent and 52 percent, respectively. Now compare those numbers with the Democratic side, where Sanders supporters were slightly less likely than Clinton supporters to say that (28 percent vs. 31 percent).

I don’t even…my first objection has to be the equation of “feminine” and “soft”, which is simply taken for granted in the question. I don’t even know what “feminine” means, or should mean — the women I know have all sorts of personalities, as do the men, and it’s simply silly to assign one stereotypical set of traits, especially an implicitly negative set, to an entire group of people and the entirety of society.

In a country where only 19% of the members of the house of representatives are women, 20% of the senate are women (an all-time high!), a third of the Supreme Court are women, and no woman has ever been president, I fully support the increasing “femininization” of our government until representation is fair and equal.

And then Digby finds another quote from a 2003 article that elevates the stereotyping to a new level of ironic absurdity.

In the House, Dennis Hastert is the Republican speaker, Nancy Pelosi the leader of the Democratic minority. Mr Hastert, a hulking former wrestling coach, is a fairly straightforward conservative: he is against abortion, gay marriage, the Kyoto protocol; for the invasion of Iraq, the death penalty. Ms Pelosi, a tiny bird-like woman, is an unabashed, card-carrying liberal.

So is child molestation one of those masculine qualities we want to increase in society?

I’d also like to know how a high school wrestling coach became a multi-millionaire. Perhaps corruption is also manly?

What has become of the good Texans?

The latest in absurd prudishness to come out of the Republican party is Ted Cruz’s opposition to masturbation, which is exactly what you’d expect of an advocate of small government.

In perhaps the most noticeable line of the brief, Cruz’s office declared, There is no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship. That is, the pursuit of such happiness had no constitutional standing.

You have no right to touch yourself. I don’t know how he would intend to enforce such a prohibition. but all I could think of was the work of another Texan who, unfortunately, is no longer around to respond appropriately to this nonsense. Molly Ivins is the exception that probes the rule about Texans.

That woman was a treasure.

Feminists are doomed…to laugh

ferengi

Someone mentioned me on Reddit, which is never a good thing, I’ve learned, but at least this time their comment is ironically funny. This person is announcing the imminent demise of feminism and America because human beings are apparently going extinct, to be replaced by cats.

They will trumpet nothing. They will not exist. They don’t tend to breed, having cats instead of kids, and even if they did the West will collapse soon. Occasionally some of these freaks do breed, like PZ Myers or Jessica Valenti, but those are rare exceptions. Plus PZ bred in the era before feminism completely destroyed America so I’m not sure how applicable his example is anyway.

Hey, I’m not that old! They make it sound like I was born in the paleolithic or something. Humanity is also not undergoing a population crash, so that argument is always kind of silly.

But what amused me is where this argument was made: feminists don’t breed, except for a few freakish outliers, says the guy on the Trucels subreddit.

The Truecels subreddit is an online community where involuntarily celibate males can vent and express their feelings and frustrations without fear of getting banned. The moderators of other online communities for incels (e.g. ForeverAlone) are often not so welcoming to the very people they are supposed to cater to. Females may post here too, but they will not be given any special treatment, and you will not be banned for disagreeing with one. This is a free speech subreddit.

If Jessica Valenti and I are freaks who have children (as do a great many feminists), we’re going to need a new word for people who are bitterly envious. Maybe incels ought to adopt a cat?