Is Hilary Clinton going to go away now, please? Please?!
(As of 10:17PM, Obama won North Carolina with a double-digit percentage lead, and Clinton is right now leading Obama with only a 4% lead.)
Testicles to Spare
James Carville recently joked that if Clinton gave Obama one of her testicles, they’d both have two.
har de har har.
That, plus the joke about her “testicular fortitude” – ugh, does a woman running for president have to have balls?
Worse, making a joke about the black candidate having less than two is really ugly – and historically, a pretty loaded thing to say, considering the sexualization of black males, specifically as predators, & the way so many black men who were lynched were also subject to castration or other genital mutilation.
Carville turned into an asshole this campaign season, imho (which started with the whole Bill “Judas” Richardson fracas.) To me, this is unforgivably ignorant of American history and some of the racialized hate we’ve experienced as a nation. There is no excuse for someone as high up as Carville to make this kind of wisecrack. As if gender baiting weren’t bad enough.
Shakesville summarizes why the gendered part of the joke isn’t funny, either:
“From “pansy” to “testicular fortitude”2 to this little outburst, Clinton surrogates have been trying to paint Clinton as a tough, manly man, and Obama as, for lack of a better word, a sissy. This is a line of attack that demeans Obama, demeans Clinton, demeans women, demeans men, demeans anyone who believes that toughness and sensitivity need not be tied directly to gender. I expect more from the Clinton campaign; given the amount of misogyny that Clinton has faced, I’d like to think her campaign would be free of it. But evidently it’s easier to paint Hillary as a man than to argue that women can be tough too; it’s easier to paint Obama as less than a man than to argue that women can be tougher than men. And it’s a shame, because clearly, there are some women tougher than some men. Hillary Clinton may be tougher than Barack Obama. But it isn’t because she’s a guy, and it isn’t because he’s a girl.”
(via Shakesville)
Who Knew?
It’s amazing the small ways that the culture’ s inequalities show themselves. In this case, a man decided to take his wife’s last name, because he was a lot closer to her father than his own. But there is no bureaucratic pathway for such thing – as there is for women to change their names when they get married – so he had to go through a formal name change (much as trans people do).
It’s always a similar feeling, for me, when we fill out our taxes, and I have to remember I’m the spouse, and not Betty.
(thanks to Lena, as usual, for the interesting link)
Party with the Sexerati
It just so happens that some of our sexed-up friend are throwing a double book launch party on our 39th birthday, so of course we’re going, & you’re free to join us:
On May 13, 7:00-10:00 pm, you and your peeps are invited to….Party with the Sexerati!
Come celebrate the release of two exciting new books:
- Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships by Tristan Taormino and
- Tantra for Erotic Empowerment: The Key to Enriching Your Sexual Life by Mark Michaels and Patricia Johnson.
Tantra teachers Mark Michaels and Patricia Johnson and sex expert/Village Voice columnist Tristan Taormino will party with the Sexerati as they schmooze, dance, and sip on special complimentary cocktails provided by Espiritu del Ecuador. You’ll get an exclusive sneak preview of their latest collaboration: see Mark and Patricia teach Tantra techniques to performers in Tristan’s latest volume of her award-winning porn reality series, Chemistry 4: The Orgy Edition. Every person who purchases a book will get a free tantra, sex ed, or porn DVD. Guests will also be treated to fabulous gift bags full of sexy, sensual, fun goodies hand-picked by the authors. Plus, don’t miss an exciting performance at 9 pm by a very special guest!
(Directions & other info below the break) Continue reading “Party with the Sexerati”
Will Work for Food
I recently corresponded with two different people putting together an anthology about trans lives, and I asked if contributors were getting paid. I was told no one is getting paid, but they’re pitching to commercial publishers.
What the hell is that? I’m writing about this because it terrifies me. I’m not making a living writing – not many authors do – but jesus h., we still need to get paid! Sometimes I worry that because of the fierce competition in academic circles that people will do *anything* to get published, but goddamn.
So here’s Harlan Ellison giving you the what-for, writers. Get paid! & Join a damn union, whether you write books or scripts.
Guest Author : Mercedes Allen
(crossposted in several places, and people are welcome to forward this on freely to others in the transgender and GLBT communities, as I see this as being very serious — Mercedes)
A short time ago, I’d discussed the movement to have “Gender Identity Disorder†(GID, a.k.a. “Gender Dysphoriaâ€) removed from the DSM-IV or reclassified, and how we needed to work to ensure that any such change was an improvement on the existing model, rather than a scrapping or savaging of it.
Lynn Conway reports that on May 1st, 2008, the American Psychiatric Association named its work group members appointed to revise the Manual for Diagnosis of Mental Disorders in preparation for the DSM-V. Such a revision would include the entry for GID.
On the Task Force, named as Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders Chair, we find Dr. Kenneth Zucker, from Toronto’s infamous Centre for Addictions and Mental Health (CAMH, formerly the Clarke Institute). Dr. Zucker is infamous for utilizing reparative (i.e. “ex-gayâ€) therapy to “cure†gender-variant children. Named to his work group, we find Zucker’s mentor, Dr. Ray Blanchard, Head of Clinical Sexology Services at CAMH and creator of the theory of autogynephilia, categorized as a paraphilia and defined as “a man’s paraphilic tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman.â€
Cliff’s Notes
A seven-minute overview of the Democratic nominee process. Genius.
(Thanks to Lena for the link.)
The Problem of Digby
Many of you have asked about whether I won the “Top Ten Female Bloggers” contest over at WVWV, and in fact I did not. Digby did. and Digby should have; she’s a damn good blogger.
But what’s interesting to me is that she was not known to be female when she started blogging in 2003. Nor in 2004, 2005, & 2006. The many years she was being linked to by the likes of Kos, no one knew she was female.
No, it was when she won an award she accepted in person, in the summer of 2007, that everyone found out she is a woman. If you read some of those comments, the surprise was a little more than “Oh, Digby’s a woman, huh” but people were a little more upset than that by the revelation, which is interesting since she never said she wasn’t a woman; her readers did the assuming, & we all know what assuming means, thanks to that classic moment in The Odd Couple.
As a gendery-y sort, & especially as a writer of a gender-y sort, I find that interesting. I don’t want to admit that maybe George Eliot’s method still works better than being known as a woman, that hiding your gender, if you’re female, lends you more credibility than not.
But I fear that is true, & that Digby’s win perhaps underlines that point. Still & all, she is a fantastic political blogger. I am not in anyway trying to say she isn’t. What I am trying to say is that I’m not sure she would have been recognized if she had been known as female from the outset.
Either way, I think it was damned smart of her, since the likeliness is high that people will diminish or ignore the political opinions of women.
Which is sad in itself, of course, but still true.
Shocker. Not.
Not only don’t men do housework, they create 7 hours more of it for their wives.
Based on 2005 data, which have been compared to those from national time diaries, the research shows women, of all ages with no children, on average do 10 hours of housework a week before marriage and 17 hours of housework a week after marriage. Men of all ages with no children, on the other hand, do eight hours before marriage and seven hours afterwards.
“The situation gets worse for women when they have children,” says Stafford.
Married women with more than three kids recorded an average of about 28 hours of housework a week, while married men with more than three kids logged only about 10 hours of housework a week.
Not that any woman living with a man will be surprised.
Not a Donkey
A New Yorker article about C.S. Lewis I’d missed that talks about the “two Lewises.” I’m a huge fan, & this was a good piece about him. I like this bit especially:
What is so moving about the Narnia stories is that, though Lewis began with a number of haunted images—a street lamp in the snow, the magic wardrobe itself, the gentle intelligent faun who meets Lucy—he never wrote down to, or even for, children, except to use them as characters, and to make his sentences one shade simpler than usual. He never tries to engineer an entertainment for kids. He writes, instead, as real writers must, a real book for a circle of readers large and small, and the result is a fairy tale that includes, encyclopedically, everything he feels most passionate about: the nature of redemption, the problem of pain, the Passion and the Resurrection, all set in his favored mystical English winter-and-spring landscape. Had he tried for less, the books would not have lasted so long. The trouble was that though he could encompass his obsessions, he could not entirely surrender to his imagination. The emotional power of the book, as every sensitive child has known, diminishes as the religious part intensifies. The most explicitly religious part of his myth is the most strenuously, and the least successfully, allegorized. Aslan the lion, the Christ symbol, who has exasperated generations of freethinking parents and delighted generations of worried Anglicans, is, after all, a very weird symbol for that famous carpenter’s son—not just an un-Christian but in many ways an anti-Christian figure.
Prince Caspian comes out May 16th. The trailer gives me hope.
(Courtesy of Neil Gaiman’s blog.)