Because women are not autonomous beings capable of using their own judgment to choose a candidate on any basis other than gender.
Because women routinely make their voting decisions based entirely on spite, or vengeance, or some other emotion.
Because a woman’s vote is never an actual vote for or against anything, but always just a reaction to what the real (read: men) voters think. (See? You were right, hon. Everything IS always about you!)
More here.
Because women are not autonomous beings capable of using their own judgment to choose a candidate on any basis other than gender.
Because women routinely make their voting decisions based entirely on spite, or vengeance, or some other emotion.
Because a woman’s vote is never an actual vote for or against anything, but always just a reaction to what the real (read: men) voters think. (See? You were right, hon. Everything IS always about you!)
More here.
Because women are not autonomous beings capable of using their own judgment to choose a candidate on any basis other than gender.
Because women routinely make their voting decisions based entirely on spite, or vengeance, or some other emotion.
Because a woman’s vote is never an actual vote for or against anything, but always just a reaction to what the real (read: men) voters think. (See? You were right, hon. Everything IS always about you!)
More here.
Because women are not autonomous beings capable of using their own judgment to choose a candidate on any basis other than gender.
Because women routinely make their voting decisions based entirely on spite, or vengeance, or some other emotion.
Because a woman’s vote is never an actual vote for or against anything, but always just a reaction to what the real (read: men) voters think. (See? You were right, hon. Everything IS always about you!)
More here.
Because women are not autonomous beings capable of using their own judgment to choose a candidate on any basis other than gender.
Because women routinely make their voting decisions based entirely on spite, or vengeance, or some other emotion.
Because a woman’s vote is never an actual vote for or against anything, but always just a reaction to what the real (read: men) voters think. (See? You were right, hon. Everything IS always about you!)
More here.
Because women are not autonomous beings capable of using their own judgment to choose a candidate on any basis other than gender.
Because women routinely make their voting decisions based entirely on spite, or vengeance, or some other emotion.
Because a woman’s vote is never an actual vote for or against anything, but always just a reaction to what the real (read: men) voters think. (See? You were right, hon. Everything IS always about you!)
More here.
Because women are not autonomous beings capable of using their own judgment to choose a candidate on any basis other than gender.
Because women routinely make their voting decisions based entirely on spite, or vengeance, or some other emotion.
Because a woman’s vote is never an actual vote for or against anything, but always just a reaction to what the real (read: men) voters think. (See? You were right, hon. Everything IS always about you!)
More here.
Because women are not autonomous beings capable of using their own judgment to choose a candidate on any basis other than gender.
Because women routinely make their voting decisions based entirely on spite, or vengeance, or some other emotion.
Because a woman’s vote is never an actual vote for or against anything, but always just a reaction to what the real (read: men) voters think. (See? You were right, hon. Everything IS always about you!)
More here.
Because women are not autonomous beings capable of using their own judgment to choose a candidate on any basis other than gender.
Because women routinely make their voting decisions based entirely on spite, or vengeance, or some other emotion.
Because a woman’s vote is never an actual vote for or against anything, but always just a reaction to what the real (read: men) voters think. (See? You were right, hon. Everything IS always about you!)
More here.
Because women are not autonomous beings capable of using their own judgment to choose a candidate on any basis other than gender.
Because women routinely make their voting decisions based entirely on spite, or vengeance, or some other emotion.
Because a woman’s vote is never an actual vote for or against anything, but always just a reaction to what the real (read: men) voters think. (See? You were right, hon. Everything IS always about you!)
More here.
Because women are not autonomous beings capable of using their own judgment to choose a candidate on any basis other than gender.
Because women routinely make their voting decisions based entirely on spite, or vengeance, or some other emotion.
Because a woman’s vote is never an actual vote for or against anything, but always just a reaction to what the real (read: men) voters think. (See? You were right, hon. Everything IS always about you!)
More here.
I buy into the usual reasons why mandatory individual filing is preferable to the current system that bestows benefits on only certain kinds of families:
(i) “fairness” in the sense of treating equals equally, both in terms of different family forms (i.e., single, married, unmarried, straight, gay) and single-earner versus dual earner families (note that to the extent one is offended by the result of taxing the $200,000, single-earner couple more than the $200,000, dual-earner couple we can give subsidies such as the “stay-at-home spouse tax credit” or “we think mama shouldn’t work tax credit,” but we should do it openly and in a transparent fashion rather than hide it in the rates);
(ii) explicitly recognizing the economic value of home production (in the sense that single-earner couples might shriek loudly about paying higher taxes than equal income dual-earner couples, but the response is “your home production has a market value that goes untaxed so be quiet before we tax your imputed income”);
(iii) mitigating secondary-earner biases that restrict choice and individual freedom, entrench power in the hands of the earner or primary earner, and, relatively, bestow bonuses on single-earner families that already enjoy significant imputed income;
(iv) “fairness” in the sense of moving from a system that provides tax benefits (both during life and at death) for those with a marriage certificate but requires those without a marriage certificate to engage in expensive tax planning to even begin to approximate the benefits of the married cohort; and
(v) provides lucrative work for divorce lawyers in the first few months of every year.
-Dennis J. Ventry, Jr.
Here, at the CWLU Herstory Website archive. Accessible here as well.
In her essay Sex and the Stepford Wife, Katha Pollitt asked:
… if women are free to be whatever they want, why are they still so obsessed with fitting narrow and rigid definitions of beauty? Feminism was supposed to send those to the trash can along with girdles and white gloves. Who would have thought in 1975 that thirty years later women would be tottering about in excruciating shoes–and having their little toes cut off to fit into them?
Pollitt was referencing this NYT Op-Ed where Catherine Orenstein wrote: “Along with collagen implants and Botox, summer beauty treatments now include toe-shortening and even pinky-toe removal — the better to fit into pointy shoes.” How I hoped that was hyperbole. But today I read this excerpt from an interview with a plastic surgeon:
Along with the old favourites, such as tummy tucks, facelifts and nose jobs, Lewis’s book also features more unusual surgeries such as vaginal trimming. This reflects the fact that as cosmetic surgery becomes more and more popular, the range of surgeries increases, as does the range of body parts that we are meant to worry about. For instance, last week came news of the belly button “nip and tuck”, (umbilicoplasty) the latest offering for women wishing to expose a perfect midriff.
Toe removal also features in Lewis’s book. The growth of this procedure is apparently the result of the popularity of expensive designer heels. Second and third toes that poke out beyond the big toe can be shortened, and crooked fourth and fifth toes can be straightened out. The operation involves cutting a piece of bone out of the joint and reattaching the tendon. Another option is the removal of the baby toe to make pointed shoes more comfortable. Like all surgery, this procedure carries a risk of lifelong pain and disablement.
Interview link via the f-word. Hard to believe that women go to this extreme, but apparently some do, even though they must realize that eventually pointed shoes will be “out.” Something is really wrong here. As Echidne asked:
What is it about the society that makes some women willing to have amputations for the sake of shoes? Is it something similar to what caused the footbinding in ancient China? And if it is, what can we learn about the way the societal norms work on women?
–Ann Bartow
Via AdFreak, which notes: “The campaign, done pro bono by McCann Erickson, sends the fatties to HHS’s Smallstep site, where they are further encouraged to”shed those holiday pounds, reduce their risk for obesity and lead a healthy lifestyle,”according to the press materials.” Good grief, on top of everything else wrong with it, that’s just rude.
–Ann Bartow
Guardian essay by Moi here, below is an excerpt:
Everyone who cares about freedom and justice for women should read The Second Sex. Long before Amartya Sen, Beauvoir argued that abstract freedom (the right to vote, for example) will make no difference to women who are deprived of health, education and money to avail themselves of such rights.
Beauvoir’s analysis of sexism is perhaps her most powerful theoretical contribution to feminism. In a sexist society, she argues, man is the universal and woman is the particular; he is the One, she is the Other. Women therefore regularly find themselves placed in a position where they are faced with the “choice” between being imprisoned in their femininity and being obliged to masquerade as an abstract genderless subject.
To explain what she means, Beauvoir gives an example. In the middle of an abstract conversation, a man once said to her that “you say that because you are a woman”. If she were to answer “I say it because it is true”, she writes, she would be eliminating her own subjectivity. But if she were to say “I say it because I am a woman”, she would be imprisoned in her gender. In the first case, she has to give up her own lived experience; in the second, she must renounce her claim to say something of general validity.
The anecdote warns us against believing that feminism must choose between equality and difference. As long as that “choice” takes place in a society that casts man as the One and woman as the Other, it is not a choice, but an insoluble dilemma. …
Via Heart.
“This is an entertaining and educational video in Telugu on Condom usage, to prevent from sexually transmitted infections and HIV, from Nrityanjali Academy, Secunderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India.” Watch it all the way through. There is a bit of repetition but a few surprises toward the end. Via Newt In A Tea Cup, who writes: “I love how all the crowds are watching the shenanigans completely passively; why yes, that’s the local synchronised condom dance team. They practice every Sunday at four.”
Read more here.
Can’t access the e-mail account for this blog for some reason. This will slow comment moderation and impair posting.
–Ann Bartow
1. Atrios links to a post by Media Matters calling Chris Matthews out for his sexism, which is in fact egregious.
2. When a photographer snaps Matthews wearing a petulant expression, what does Atrios title it? “Pissy Chrissy” Because when he’s being peevish, Matthews is acting like a girl, apparently.
–Ann Bartow
You can see the linguistic slight of hand at work here. The bill at issue would allow unmarried women (some of whom might just be lesbians) greater access to fertility clinics. In other words, it would allow women to raise children without having men involved in their families. Hence, the alarm is raised about legions of fatherless (though obviously wanted and planned) children.
It’s not that there shouldn’t be a conversation about women raising children without men (something that happens often enough event without assisted reproduction). But what exactly did that have to do with the marrying twins?
–Julie Shapiro (cross-posted at Related Topics)
The 60s folk song,”If I Had a Hammer”has new resonance for women according to this Wall Street Journal article.
-Ralph Michael Stein
More here on the gender and race aspects of subprime lending.
-Ralph Michael Stein
Editor’s Note: See also Sex and the Subprime at Womenstake.org.
Bob Herbert’s editorial today in the Times says that the candidates should be addressing rampant misogyny in the United States. In less than 800 words, he takes on rape, sexual harassment, prostitution, sexualized advertising, sports, pornography, paparazzi, the military, and violence. He says the candidates should too:
If we’ve opened the door to the issue of sexism in the presidential campaign, then let’s have at it. It’s a big and important issue that deserves much more than lip service.
– David S. Cohen
From the wonderful Historiann:
If you are interested in reading more about how universities have changed in the past thirty years as women, queer scholars, and scholars of color have integrated (or infiltrated?) the faculty, see Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations: Life Stories From the Academy (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), edited by Hokulani K. Aikau, Karla A. Erickson, and Jennifer L. Pierce.
More here.
From Adrants:
Yup. we’re ready for it. Ready for everyone to tell us we’re reading way, way too much into this Target billboard that places a certain area of a woman’s body highly targeted by men right in the middle of its signature target logo. But you can’t tell us not a single soul at Target or its agency looked at this and didn’t see a certain interpretation that could be construed as objectifying to women. There’s just no way.
Would it have been that hard to place the image of the woman so her upper body was in the middle of the target rather than her…um…crotch?
She writes: “I am asking the Department of Defense and the State Department about their efforts to address crimes against government contracted employees, like in the case against former KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones.”
Heart has much more about this situation here.
Accessible here. The first two paragraphs are below:
“Sexual harassment doctrine owes its primary theoretical impetus to the work of Catharine MacKinnon, who convincingly argued that sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination. MacKinnon offered two different paradigms (the”difference”and the”dominance”paradigms) under which this form of discrimination could be analyzed.1 Though she clearly preferred the latter framework, MacKinnon prudently argued that the former paradigm, too, provided sufficient re-sources to show that sexual harassment was a form of sex discrimination under Title VII. MacKinnon’s analysis had, and has, great power, but it did not answer absolutely every question that the law would ultimately need to resolve. This left room for judges to work out the doctrine creatively, extending the analysis to cases not entirely covered under the MacKinnon analysis.
“Judge Posner’s opinion in Carr v Allison Gas Turbine Division, General Motors Corp,2 I shall argue, is one of the most creative such extensions, establishing that harassment of a woman in the workplace can be”sexual harassment”even in the absence of any attempt to have sexual relations with the woman, or any meaningful reference to such relations, and establishing, further, that a difference of power in the workplace was part of the”facts”of such cases that any judge must recognize (an insight that lay deep in MacKinnon’s analysis, but one that previous courts had not recognized). In this Essay, I shall show the importance of Posner’s contribution in Carr. I shall argue, however, that the somewhat casual and undertheorized nature of his contribution made it unstable, even within the canon of his own opinions. Arriving at his analysis of Carr pragmatically and without explicit theoretical analysis, he lost sight of its insights in at least one subsequent case.” …
Read it here, you will be absolutely riveted. Below are the first few paragraphs:
“In August 2000, a panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of Audrey Jo DeClue’s complaint of hostile environment sexual harassment against her employer, the Central Illinois Light Company, for whom DeClue had completed an apprenticeship as a lineman. The panel was unanimous in holding that most incidents of which DeClue complained,”includ[ing] a coworker’s deliberately urinating on the floor near where the plaintiff was working, repeated shoving, pushing, and hitting her, sexually offensive touching, exposing her to pornographic magazines, and:the point she particularly emphasizes:failing to make adequate provision for restroom facilities for her”had occurred”before the 300-day limitations period”and hence were time-barred. With respect to”[t]he only significant act:omission would be more precise:of alleged sexual harassment that occurred during the limitations period[, . . .] the electric company’s continued failure to provide restroom facilities for the plaintiff, who was the only woman in the crew of linemen to which she was as-signed:in fact the only woman lineman employed by the company,”dissenting Judge Ilana Rovner would have allowed DeClue to pursue her hostile environment claim. But, writing for himself and Judge Wil-liam Bauer, Judge Richard Posner held that the”defendant’s failure to respond to the plaintiff’s request for civilized bathroom facilities can[not] be thought a form of sexual harassment.”Because plaintiff had”insisted on litigating her case as a hostile-work-environment case throughout”and had not so much as mentioned the term”disparate-impact”in her papers, the district court had been right, in the majority’s view, to grant summary judgment to the defendant. According to Posner,”hostile work environment”harassment is:
the form of sex discrimination in the terms or conditions of employment that consists of efforts either by coworkers or supervisors to make the workplace intolerable or at least severely and discriminatorily uncongenial to women . . . . It is a form of, rather than a synonym for, sex discrimination. It is remote, for example, from a simple refusal to hire women, from holding them to higher standards than their male coworkers, or from refusing to make accommodations for differences in upper-body strength or other characteristics that differ systematically between the sexes. The last is the classic disparate-impact claim, and it is the claim suggested by the facts of this case but not presented by the plaintiff.
“At the time the DeClue case came down, I was a newcomer to the law faculty of The University of Chicago and had recently begun my still-ongoing work on public toilets as gendered spaces. I knew Dick Posner only well enough to suppose that he would at least indulge, if not revel in, the inquiries of a colleague about positions he had taken. So I emailed him, explaining my particular interest in DeClue and adding that I:
wondered if I could prevail on you in all seriousness to react to a hypothetical to help me understand the scope of your position in that case that”failure to alter working conditions that just hap-pen, without any discriminatory intent, to bear more heavily”on employees of one sex cannot”be thought a form of sex harassment.”Would you have the same reasoning and the same result if the first and only male nurse in a hospital were required to wear exactly the same uniform as his female colleagues had been is-sued from time immemorial:white shirtdress, bonnet, pantyhose and pumps? If not, why not?
“Although I had emailed my query shortly after 10 pm, I received a response in little more than an hour. It read, in its entirety:
That’s not a good example, because the employer would have no reason to require the male nurse to dress that way. Since male nurses don’t want to dress up as women, the employer would have to pay a higher wage to its male nurses (and hence to the female ones as well, because of the Equal Pay Act) to compensate them for the indignity, with no offsetting benefit to the employer. In contrast, the employer saves money by not making an accommodation to women’s desire for greater privacy. Think of a better example!
“At the time, I was speechless. Now, years later, I would like to take the opportunity offered by this commemoration of Judge Posner’s first twenty-five years on the federal bench to explain why I have always remained convinced the example is a good one. The process will lead me to a number of more general observations about the law and the fact of sex discrimination and some speculation about an even more complicated subject:the way Judge Posner’s mind works. …”
–Ann Bartow
James Grimmelmann has an interesting mediation on advertising and blogs at The Laboratorium. I found it via Froomkin who has a somewhat different take on the issue. I find myself agreeing with Grimmelmann, with an added concern about transparency and subterfuge. Linking to certain blogs, or simply maintaining them in your blogroll, can advance agendas with which you strenuously disagree, even if you are generally on the same side politically, see e.g. this and this. Those that use disguised links rather than overt advertisements to avoid being challenged on their hyprocrisy are pretty unethical, in my view (e.g. see comments by me here). Lawyer bloggers based in NY may need to be especially careful.
–Ann Bartow
I confess that as a serious film buff I really liked “Juno” while understanding that the situation of many, probably most, teens in the title character’s position have it a lot harder and certainly do often experience emotional upheaval after electing to abort or giving up a newborn. But what was good about “Juno,” apart from first-rate acting, was the warmth and acceptance of Juno’s parents and the loving support of her best friend, Leah (by the way Olivia Thirlby who played Leah is a young actress to keep an eye on. Like Emily Blunt, she’s a scene-stealer). My teenage son and his friends, male and female, really liked “Juno” which surprised me because he’s rarely into movies with any kind of family warmth, much preferring mayhem. But this flick clicked in his small universe as it has elsewhere. Don’t be surprised if Ellen Page walks off with the Best Actress Oscar.
In today’s New York Times, Caitlin Flanagan has an op-ed entitled “Sex and the Teenage Girl:”
[S]urrendering a baby whom you will never know comes with a steep and lifelong cost. Nor is an abortion psychologically or physically simple. It is an invasive and frightening procedure, and for some adolescent girls it constitutes part of their first gynecological exam. I know grown women who’ve wept bitterly after abortions, no matter how sound their decisions were. How much harder are these procedures for girls, whose moral and emotional universe is just taking shape? ***
Even the much-discussed pregnancy of 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears reveals the rudely unfair toll that a few minutes of pleasure can exact on a girl. The very fact that the gossip magazines are still debating the identity of the father proves again that the burden of sex is the woman’s to bear. He has a chance to maintain his privacy, but if she becomes pregnant by mistake, soon all the world will know.
Pregnancy robs a teenager of her girlhood. *** Does the full enfranchisement of girls depend on their being sexually liberated? And if it does, can we somehow change or diminish among the very young the trauma of pregnancy, the occasional result of even safe sex?
Flanagan’s full op-ed is here.
-Ralph Michael Stein
Maybe whether or not Wonder Woman is an appropriate feminist icon could be debated, but I can’t imagine any feminist being pleased about this. Ugh.
Update: For an interesting contrarian take on this issue see:
Update the second: Here’s a Ms. Magazine cover from 1972:
Jaya Ramji-Nogales has a post by this title here at IntLawGrrls.
From a local newspaper: “Many polling places closed on primary day”
Many South Carolina voters will be sent to new polling places on presidential primary day, as one-fifth of regular state polling places will be closed.
The closed polls are the result of a state law passed last year turning control of the Jan. 19 Republican primary and Jan. 26 Democratic primary over to the South Carolina State Election Commission.
About 400 of 2,200 polling places will be merged, according to Chris Whitmire, spokesman for the State Election Commission.
The change was meant to ensure a professionally run election, with the use of state resources and electronic voting machines. But in trying to limit costs, the Legislature required local election officials to merge some precincts into one polling place.
This year’s changes have been approved by the U.S. Justice Department, and local officials said they have worked to limit the inconvenience. But the result, many observers said, is that voters will be surprised to find their normal polling place closed on primary day. …
I’ve blogged about this general issue previously, here. I’m not at all surprised that the Bush Justice Department approved this plan. Counties like Lexington, which have extremely high rates of Republicans, will have all of their polling places available. My Richland County polling place will apparently be open, but the one next door has been closed and those folks will be flooding what are already usually very long lines. People who cannot devote four hours or more to the voting process will probably stay away from polling places altogether.
Oddball aside: The South Carolina Association of Registration and Election Officials goes by the acronym SCARE.
–Ann Bartow
Here at Philobiblon!
Anecdotal research at Jezebel, kinda explicit.
Via Feministing:
Using overtly sexist language, he has referred to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) as a “she devil” and compared her to a “strip-teaser.” He has called her “witchy” and likened her voice to “fingernails on a blackboard.” He has referred to men who support her as “castratos in the eunuch chorus.” He has suggested Clinton is not “a convincing mom” and said “modern women” like Clinton are unacceptable to “Midwest guys.” He has called her “Madame Defarge” and “Nurse Ratched.”
After Clinton won the New Hampshire Democratic primary, Matthews asserted: “[T]he reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around.” He described her performance at a debate last Saturday as apparently “good enough to seem good enough here for women who wanted to root for her anyway.” Had enough? Contact MSNBC to tell them what you think.
MSNBC
viewerservices@msnbc.com
MSNBC TV
One MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, N.J. 07094
University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and coauthor Sudhir Venkatesh conducted a study which is based on surveys conducted with prostitutes and pimps in Chicago neighborhoods and incident data from the Chicago Police Department. Their focus seems to be on women prostitutes. Their working paper is here (pdf). The abstract is as follows:
Combining transaction-level data on street prostitutes with ethnographic observation and official police force data, we analyze the economics of prostitution in Chicago. Prostitution, because it is a market, is much more geographically concentrated than other criminal activity. Street prostitutes earn roughly $25-$30 per hour, roughly four times their hourly wage in other activities, but this higher wage represents relatively meager compensation for the significant risk they bear. Prostitution activities are organized very differently across neighborhoods. Where pimps are active, prostitutes appear to do better, with pimps both providing protection and paying efficiency wages. Condoms are used only one-fourth of the time and the price premium for unprotected sex is small. The supply of prostitutes is relatively elastic, as evidenced by the supply response to a 4th of July demand shock. Although technically illegal, punishments are minimal for prostitutes and johns. A prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one. We estimate that there are 4,400 street prostitutes active in Chicago in an average week.
What’s particularly interesting is the authors’ section on bargaining and the law. They estimate that roughly 3 percent of all tricks performed by prostitutes who aren’t working with pimps are freebies given to police to avoid arrest. In fact, prostitutes get officially arrested only once per 450 tricks or so, leading the authors to conclude that “a prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one.” When freebies given to gang members are factored in, about one in 20 tricks go solely for protection and the “privilege” of plying their trade.
The most depressing news is the woeful lack of condom use. Just as with recent studies of Mexican and Indian prostitutes, Levitt and Venkatesh find that payments go up substantially when condoms aren’t used. And plenty of johns are apparently happy to pay the premium: Condoms only get used about 20 percent of the time, the authors estimate. …
A somewhat different overview of the study is available here, where the author noted:
The numbers confirm the view that the life of a street prostitute is far from easy. The women were beaten up by their clients once a month on average and the sex acts requested by these clients were often “mind boggling,” Levitt said.
“The availability of premarital sex has largely crowded out standard garden variety prostitution,” Levitt told the packed room. “What’s left is a lot of stuff that the market of wives and girlfriends won’t easily provide.”
The current draft ends with this depressing sentence: “Surprising to an outsider are the fluidity with which these women move in and out of prostitution and other work, their willingness to absorb enormous risk for a small pecuniary reward, and the blurred lines between good and evil, where police extort sex and pimps pay efficiency wages.”
–Ann Bartow
Obama’s campaign co-chair says Hillary was crying about “her appearance.”
From Our Bodies, Our Blog:
… Diet Coke and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute are teaming up to promote “The Heart Truth” campaign, which aims to raise awareness of women’s risk of heart disease. In 2002, The Heart Truth campaign introduced a red dress as a national symbol for women’s heart disease. If you haven’t seen it yet, you will soon.
Starting Jan. 22, the red dress will appear on Diet Coke, Caffeine-Free Diet Coke and Diet Coke Plus products — 2.5 billion of them, AdWeek reported Monday. Look for print and online ads to begin in February, during American Heart Month.
And what says heart disease better than Fashion Week? According to AdWeek:
Diet Coke will be leveraging events as well, sponsoring the Heart Truth’s Red Dress Collection fashion show during Fashion Week 2008. From mid-February through April, Diet Coke will tour 10 cities with the Heart Truth Road Show. The exhibit will show six red dresses previously worn by celebrities and offer free health screenings.
How very chic.
What’s not so chic — and what Coca-Cola would prefer doesn’t get mentioned — is that consumption of both regular and diet soda is linked to a metabolic condition that can lead to heart disease. A study published last year in the American Heart Association journal Circulation found that people who drink one or more soft drinks per day have a more than 50 percent higher risk of developing the metabolic syndrome that has been linked to heart disease, stroke and diabetes than people who drink less than one soda per day. …
Read more here.
From this site:
As much as we think we know about the modern university, very little has been said about what it’s like to work there. Instead of the high-wage, high-profit world of knowledge work, most campus employees : including the vast majority of faculty : really work in the low-wage, low-profit sphere of the service economy. Tenure-track positions are at an all-time low, with adjuncts and graduate students teaching the majority of courses. This super-exploited corps of disposable workers commonly earn fewer than $16,000 annually, without benefits, teaching as many as eight classes per year. Even undergraduates are being exploited as a low-cost, disposable workforce.
Via Historiann. Feminist Law Prof Marina Angel has done related work concerning the legal academy, see e.g. this.
Here’s an example of stereotyping that hurts youngsters of both genders:
Bobby Thorn wanted to be the only boy on his school’s cheerleading squad, but that didn’t happen.
The 13-year-old attends East Hardin Middle School in Glendale, but the controversial decision to cut him from the team expands beyond the district’s boundaries.
Bobby’s mother filed a discrimination claim with the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights two years ago, and now a settlement has been reached.
Bobby works with coach Jen Brewer at a gym called Becca’s Fliptown, something he’s been doing since he was about 5. He’s been successful, too, winning trophies for gymnastics and cheerleading. * * *
Despite his flips, his tryout was a flop. He didn’t make the team.
“I was devastated,”he said.
So was Bobby’s mother, Melissa Barner, who said she has sworn statements from other parents stating the coach admitted cutting Bobby because she didn’t want a boy on her team. * * * Barner took the case to the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights. A settlement has been reached.
The full news article is here.
-Ralph Michael Stein
Email is a great way to send out information, misinformation, and disinformation. I keep receiving the same false e-message about Barack Obama. His opponents appear to have enlisted my family and friends as their dupes. More about this here.
–Susan Kuo
A lawsuit in federal court in New York (described here) seeks to force an end to Ladies’ Night. The defendants believe they have a meritorious position. I’ve never liked the whole idea, especially Ladies’ Day at the car wash. Why should I pay more for the same lackadaisical service including smeared windows they get?
-Ralph Michael Stein
Today I visited the (relatively) new Sociological Images blog run by Professor Lisa D. Wade at Occidental College. Professor Wade says in one post:
What with the kids these days being all media-saturated and all, a good image is often more effective for getting a point across than all the citations, repetition, or jumping up and down and saying “really I swear.”
The post on Pink Sports Team Clothing: Making a Masculine Arena Safe for Women (featuring the image above) caught my eye. It adds to the critiques of pink predominance that Ann, for example, has made here and here and here.
-Bridget Crawford
Here’s a D.A. in a major jurisdiction who surely can’t be counted on to take protecting women seriously. Story about Harris County (Houston, Texas) DA Chuck Rosenthal here.
-Ralph Michael Stein
I have been reluctant to wade in the discussion on Obama because I am conflicted. On the one hand, I am very proud of Obama. I truly believe that he wants a better america and on the other hand, I am very skeptical of his willingness to eliminate the gap in black people’s lives in access to and quality of goods, services, resources and opportunity. A race based gap that exist at every income level in every area of black life.
I have long felt that when black people and white people hear his message of hope – they hear the exact opposite. Black people hear the hope of having a black president who will eliminate the gap between whites and blacks in access to services, goods, resources and opportunities. White people hear the hope of not only improved lives from themselves but also the hope not having to deal the issue of race any more.
This makes Obama’s presidency particularly dangerous to the black community.
Given America’s almost universal unwillingness to address issues of institutional/cultural racism, the aggressive criminalization of black men and the black child, the dehumanization of black women, the historical destruction of the black family, the inability to elect blacks to the senate and house in proportion to the representation in the population – I can’t help but wonder what makes Obama the exception, what makes him the safe black man. What hope does his personage provide to the white masses that is different from the hope that is being provided to the Black masses. What hope does Obama provide to White masses that allows them to “not see him as Black.”
A British Broadcasting Corporation program “Is America ready for a Black President” may be informative. Below is a relevant part of the transcript discussing why white people like Obama. The full video/transcript is here.
Professor DREW WESTEN [white male]
Political Psychologist
There is no escaping that America is a divided nation divided by race and that even those of us who have.. who consciously are not racist and don’t make decisions based on race are still influenced by the colour of a person’s skin, whether we’d like to be or not.
NAR: Obama knows exactly what he’s doing though, bye bye slums of black America, hello Barrington Chicago. He’s raised eye-popping sums of money from America’s elite. Obama is a hit in well-heeled Liberal white suburbs like this. In this peaceful haven it’s easy to imagine that America’s race problems don’t exist. We’ve been invited to an Obama barbeque organised by enthusiastic local supporters.
MICHELLE HARDMAN [white female]: If you stay long enough you can have lunch and dinner here, you’re more than welcome. Have fun. Thank you for coming out.
[Applause]
NAR: Neighbourhood do’s like this have turbo boosted his campaign.
MICHELLE HARDMAN
I actually invented a recipe just for the event today and it’s my Barack the ribs, South Side Chicago Hawaiian fusion and we’ve got a bit of South Side Chicago sauces mixed with some pineapple salsa and some coconut and a little bit of Asian twist in the spices, so we thought we’d blend it cos he’s a blended kind of guy.
NAR: So do you see Barack Obama as a black candidate?
No, I see him as a global candidate.
NAR: The white middle classes are taken with Obama’s charisma and his vision of unity. Today’s American, they say, is not the country they grew up in.
FRED WARD [white male]
George Bush has pretty much destroyed our country and if anybody could heal it I think it’s Barack Obama.
NAR: And frankly here they like the fact that he doesn’t go on about black victims of poverty.
MIKE & MARIANNE FARINAS DE LEON
MARIANNE [white female]: Part of why I like him is because I think he represents everybody.
MIKE [white male]: He doesn’t take the tack that Jessie Jackson would. It isn’t so in your face and aggressive, we deserve to be in this position.
MARIANNE: That’s what we like about him, that he seems to care and represent us, you know, everybody, regardless of race, culture, religion, any of that.
NAR: Obama’s vision has inspired whites partly because he appears to have neutralised the race issue and made people feel good about themselves.
DREW WESTEN [white male]: He’s every white person’s fantasy of what they’d like a black man to be. You know, he’s thoughtful, he’s articulate, he’s handsome, he doesn’t fit any of the stereotypes of the dangerous, dark skinned, black male that people see every day on television, you know, hauled off in handcuffs by the police. He’s the kind of man that Americans would like to imagine themselves being able to vote for and being able to say: “You know what, race doesn’t matter.”
OBAMA: There is not a black America and a white America, a Latino America, an Asian American, just the United States of America.
Also, yesterday (January 9th) on “Morning Joe”, Joe Scarborough said that as a conservative he really liked Obama. He said that he loved his message of hope and the fact that Obama did not try to load guilty on white people like “so-called civil rights leaders.”
If it is true that what every first term president wants is a second term, if Obama gets elected on an implicit promise to whites that he will not overtly address racial issues, will he take aggressive steps in to eliminate the significant racial gap between blacks and whites in the access to and quality of services, goods, resources and opportunities?
I am worried.
His message has been if he improves the United States for everyone, he improves the United States for Black people. Although he articulates support for affirmative action (which of course is very limited ins ability to address all forms of racial discrimination) and other issues of importance such as racial profiling and sentencing disparities, he has also said that there is no need for special programs targeted to Blacks. So I don’t see how he plans to “eliminate the gap or disparities between whites and Blacks, Latino/as, Asian, Native Americans. You can’t eliminate a gap or disparities by moving everyone up at the same pace.
Will he take the Bill Cosby route and ultimate blame black people?
NAR: Obama visited a school here in August. Yes, he says, blacks have it worse, but the answer isn’t lots of black programmes. It’s a strong economy. He says this isn’t just a race issue. His message for blacks is tough. “Clean up your rubbish, stop having children you can’t care for” and he adds “be better parents.”
OBAMA: What parents are doing is critical and parents need to parent and they need to turn off the television and put away the video games and emphasize educational excellence in their children.
I know that some will say that he isn’t different than the white candidates. They are right.
Some may say it is unfair to expect more of Obama than we expect of white candidates. They are wrong.
Obama is more dangerous to the Black community than a white candidate taking exactly the same position. He is more dangerous because when he is president whites will feel validated in believing that there is little (10% by Obama’s account) racial issues, that racism is not among the most significant problems facing America and that if Black people are not doing well it is there fault. On the issue of race and racism he is more dangerous than any of the white candidates because white people will be saying “I can’t be racist I supported a black man”. “I can’t be racist because if my objection to “special programs” were racist than Obama would object because he is a Black man.”
If the candidates in general, and Obama specifically, want our support we should demand of them clear an unequivocal acknowledgment that racism and discrimination, particularly institutional and cultural racism, is a significant issue facing America and list it as a separate issue from civil rights that they will be addressing. They should also commit to supporting an anti-discrimination law for the 21st century and to introducing legislation in the first six month of their presidency which, at a minimum, outlaws not only intentional discrimination, but disparate impact discrimination and negligent discrimination; which allows individuals, testers and advocacy organizations to sue based on statistical discrimination; and which requires data collection and reporting on racial discrimination by all governmental agencies and large employers
Without these commitments, we [the Black community] may be in fact be better off – because as Obama says “all America will be better off” – but we will still be uniquely suffering under discrimination and racism, while rest of America is in denial and self-congratulation because they elected a Black president.
This in the long run will make us worst off!
–Vernellia Randall
… a speedy review of the history of the U. S. Presidency suggests that of course, as ususal, it’s men who benefit far disproportionately from nepotism. The Presidency has been marked by father-son and other intrafamily male Presidential dynasties: John Adams and son John Quincy Adams; William Henry Harrison and grandson Benjamin Harrison; Theodore Roosevelt and distant cousin (and nephew by marriage) Franklin Roosevelt; John Kennedy and his brothers and would-be presidents Bobby and Edward M. Kennedy. And, of course, George Bush and son George W. Bush. (Am I missing any others? I went only for the low-hanging fruit of identical surnames.) …
