Feminist Law Professors

Before Bush began the Iraq war, when many people naively thought there might be a way to prevent it, people who opposed the war used a variety of approaches to draw attention to their messages, inluding nudity. Here are just two examples:

From here.

From here.

It seemed funny and harmless (assuming no one caught a cold!) and mostly it probably was. But note this story from Feminista!

Barely a week before US troops began their procession towards Baghdad, a small website was unveiled at Nudeforpeace.org. Capitalizing on previous examples of anti-war activists gaining media attention through nudity, the Australian website invited visitors to submit their own nude images to the project. The vast majority of the existing pictures were of young women — some very so — who were photographed in a peculiarly clinical way, despite the juvenile nature of the sayings written on their bodies. One woman stood as a statue, staring blankly, as she held a razor to her pubic bone, pointing her other hand to the words, “No Bush,” scrawled in makeup across her abdomen. Two men were also photographed, though both appeared older and were demurely shot from the waist up. Strangely, of the first dozen or so images, five women, claiming to be from nearly as many nations across the globe, were each shown standing before the same painted-brick wall.

News of Nudeforpeace.org spread quickly across the Internet. Few seemed to notice the more curious aspects of the website as untold numbers of visitors descended upon it, rushing back to their own forums and web logs to share their opinion of what they saw. The immense traffic momentarily put Nudeforpeace.org out of commission, leading many to theorize that the site was hacked by pro-war activists, though most eventually conceded that it was likely just experiencing technical difficulties. Despite the austere “server bandwidth exceeded” message that was displayed on the front page of the website, many secondary pages and images were still available to viewers: something that should have again indicated that all was not as it seemed. …

…The exact specifics of these events remain unknown and are largely irrelevant. Whether those involved with the website were perpetrating an elaborate hoax or were genuine activists who fell victim to opportunism — given their line of work — it seems unnecessary to grant them yet another editorial platform given their behavior in either case. Pornographers are certainly entitled to hold anti-war views and there is certainly nothing novel about them doing so: reading Playboy for the articles is a longstanding cliche and, to this day, many male liberals defend its sexism by citing its anti-war stance during the Vietnam era. Whether the initial models of Nudeforpeace.org were activist volunteers or paid employees is certainly a cause for feminist concern, as is the exploitation of those who freely submitted their own images to the project, not knowing that it was conducted by those who routinely profit from such imagery. However, such ethical lapses on the part of pornographers are to be expected; more disappointing is how easily they were able to both deceive and exploit the male progressive community, who eagerly accepted the website at face value. …

The popularity of Nudeforpeace.org was fueled by derision, largely by men who have embraced the brand of neo-libertarianism espoused by magazines such as Maxim; the glossy combination of capitalism and sexism complementing their meteoric ascensions within the Information Technology industry and the rewards that have come with it. Given their aptitudes and free time during working hours, they often set the pace for the Internet at large. Fark.com, one such news portal for the demographic, brought roughly 89,000 “click-through” sessions to Nudeforpeace.org within just a few days. Although many of those were surely duplicate visitors, it was not the only large site linking to it and a good portion of its participants maintain their own smaller web pages and journals, making the news of the project proliferate quite rapidly amongst those who were opposed to it politically — much more quickly than it filtered through the far more rudimentary channels employed by activists. Among the men responding to the website, most were quite vociferous in both their pro-war stances and in their attacks upon the models, whom they deemed undesirable in the most rabid of terms. Nudeforpeace.org symbolized everything that they had to come to expect from liberals: trivial actions, futile in significance. The method in this case, female nudity, only served to bolster their misogyny, giving them the opportunity to insult the women both in body and in mind.

Beyond the basic irony that many men, not at all unlike those above, continue to pay a fair amount of money to view those same women in more flattering images, it would appear that the bland photography and the painted-brick wall each served their purpose well, disguising the true agents behind the project. Many anti-war activists who had submitted pictures to Nudeforpeace.org felt dejected after the website imploded — unhappy that their participation was in vain — and quickly began to organize themselves to pick up where the defunct organization left off. They created a small online community using popular journaling software for the express purpose of posting of similar imagery. The overwhelming majority of such pictures were far more sexualized than their progenitors. This, of course, is to be expected to a great extent: no one wishes to be seen in unflattering terms and aping the conventions of popular media, from the advertising industry to pornography, is largely unavoidable. Indeed, none of these contributors would have had cause to actively work towards not looking like a porn star. Although Nudeforpeace.org was never picked up by the mainstream media in any significant fashion, given its late introduction and early demise, the work of these people has made what was likely a short-lived hoax into a historical reality, working to solidify public perception of the anti-war effort. While the number of protestors in conventional demonstrations were routinely downplayed by the press, the millions of Europeans taking to the streets ignored by the American media, nudity based activism received a disproportionate amount of attention.

Read the full text of the essay here.

At Unfogged, in a post called “Live my glamorous NYC life vicariously through me, please.”

According to this NYT article, it is Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” Most of the runners up were by white guys. The only other book by a woman, “Housekeeping” by Marilynne Robinson, seems to be the only one on the list that the NYT never bothered reviewing.

From this column at “Sequential Tart” we learn more about female comic book characters, to wit:

Rule Number Two discusses a simple concept: exaggerate the breasts by putting them atop a disproportionately thin waist. The subject is the female spinal cord.

Rule Number Two, Part A: On female characters, spines will appear as if they’ve been yanked out of place.

For obvious reasons – smaller sentences are easier to understand – this got shortened to Spines Will Appear Yanked. To illustrate this rule (so to speak), I bring forth a comic that burned even my own battle-hardened eyes: the chromium-wraparound-covered Glory/Avengelyne crossover from – you guessed it – Extreme Studios. Warning: I take no responsibility for the health of your eyes or psyche after viewing this. You’re on your own, gentle reader.

Take note of Avengelyne’s waist and how it is thinner than her head. Minus the hair. Note how it hangs beneath her ribcage like a suspension bridge, rather than actually supporting the top of her body. (Her torso must be kept afloat by those helium breasts.) Note the scoliosis gone grossly untreated. Note the little leather bags which wouldn’t fit around a normal person’s wrist. Especially note that the artist put her in the most obvious POSE to exaggerate the spine: a profile shot with negative space between her back and arm. That’s correct – our intrepid heroine’s spine would appear yanked. Avengelyne is a SWAYbackâ„¢.

Avengelyne isn’t the only sufferer…just where does Glory’s waist end behind her elbow?

More here.

From here.

–Ann Bartow

According to this CNN article:

An estimated 2 million babies die within their first 24 hours each year worldwide and the United States has the second worst newborn mortality rate in the developed world, according to a new report.

American babies are three times more likely to die in their first month as children born in Japan, and newborn mortality is 2.5 times higher in the United States than in Finland, Iceland or Norway, Save the Children researchers found.

Only Latvia, with six deaths per 1,000 live births, has a higher death rate for newborns than the United States, which is tied near the bottom of industrialized nations with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with five deaths per 1,000 births.

“The United States has more neonatologists and neonatal intensive care beds per person than Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, but its newborn rate is higher than any of those countries,” said the annual State of the World’s Mothers report.

The entire report is available in full text here. An index with some useful links is available here.

Since DC Comics will use this drawing on the cover of “All Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder #5” (July 2006):

Karen at Oddity Collector wonders if we will also be seeing comic book covers like this anytime soon:

More graphic ideas, and commentary, here!

Via Hoyden-About-Town, via The Anonymous Law Prof Avenger.

At Center of Gravitas, Gayprof writes:

…According to anonymous testimony from one of his graduate students, this particular professor has been starting his classes by telling his women students,”In my class, you check your vaginas at the door.”

I don’t have the words to express my astoundment. Check what at the door? Since when did vaginas become detachable? Who the hell is this guy? Why hasn’t this university and my department been sued for ten million dollars for sexual harassment and creating a hostile learning/working environment? With all the shit tossed at students and junior faculty, one would think somebody would have a slam-dunk of a case. …

He later notes:

…Yet, I wonder about this most recent situation and the state of our battles against people like my senior-colleague(s). Those of us interested in social justice and fights against sexism, homophobia, and racism face an up-hill battle. The fear that has kept his students quiet makes me the most sad about this instance. None of them want to come forward with an open accusation. Those of us on the left have failed to create an environment where students feel confident enough to speak up for their own rights.

Senior-colleague and his fellow white, straight traditional historians still have all the power. The graduate students in this case knew all too well their own vulnerability. They fear discussing sexism in the classroom because senior colleague(s) could literally destroy their fragile careers as a graduate student and beyond. They see those of us who have tried to change the atmosphere in the department being labeled as”trouble makers”or the ever ready”not team players.”….

And later:

…I have simply never understood the knee-jerk hostility to being”politically correct.”Opting to chose words that are inclusive or don’t hurt another person’s feelings hardly seems like a major chore to me. For some, though, clearly this infringes on their personal liberties. To those who whine about”political correctness,”let me say this:”Yes, we are asking you to do some work. It means you will have to think more about your own race, gender, and sexuality. Live with it. We have lost our patience for your racism, sexism, and homophobia.”

Amen, Gayprof. Read the entire post here.

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While unwinding after a weekend full of empirical research, I saw a new commercial for Heineken Light, which involved sexualizing a beer bottle and playing a song by the Pussycat Dolls with the refrain ‘Don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?’ One wonders whether women have been so essentialized that their essence is comparable to a beer bottle.

Others have expressed being a bit perplexed by Heineken’s choice. See this (“the company’s new television spot shows their trademark green bottles moving back and forth in a sort of striptease. The soundtrack for the spot is some dance song right out of a seedy gentleman’s club”); see also this (“Between the implied sexuality of moist bottles, and wet, slippery surfaces, and the blatant message of the music this is almost high camp. The advertisement’s message is essentially that if you grab a Heinie light, you are going to shake the weight of your crappy relationship and get some action man.”).

You can see a short version of the commercial here (after the Flash intro loads, click on “The Latest” tab, then on “The Ads,” then on “TV Campaign”). You can link to the Pussycat Dolls song on iTunes here.

–Susan Franck

Blogging under a pseudonym is appropriate and understandable in many circumstances, especially if the blog engages with controversial issues, and the blogger has reason to fear for her personal safety and well being. Lobbing nasty personal insults from behind a pseudonym is another matter entirely, and it is the act of a petty, meanspirited coward. However one feels about Ana Marie Cox, she does not deserve the sexist, vitriolic abuse she received in this comments thread at Hullabaloo or in this comments thread at Eschaton. Hatemongering is not “liberal,” and neither is misogyny, no matter how righteously or amusingly it is spun. Disagree with her on the merits or lack thereof; leave the bile spewing personal attacks to the right. We CAN be better than them, the bar isn’t too high.

–Ann Bartow

Update: Excellent relevant comment over at Pandagon, here’s an excerpt:

I also understand that all these jokes about”civility”and niceties are quite funny, and maybe I’m just a prude, but the tendency towards crassness, obnoxiousness & plain rudeness for its own sake in the blogosphere, rubs me the wrong way sometimes. It doesen’t seem all that different from Wingnuts & other clowns who are deliberately provocative & offensive & say things beyond the pale, and when somebody calls them on it, they snicker about offending square liberals’ PC sensibilities. It’s absolutely infuriating when they do it, I don’t imagine it’s any different when progressives do it either.

Another reason I object to is that I see how it affects those who discuss women’s issues. E.J. Graff writes about feminism & women’s issues over at TPMCafe and she usually ends up getting some incredibly intimidating hate-filled comments for her troubles. So much so that after she discussed the myth of the”war on boys”she had to write this;

“Oh, and before you comment on the Rivers/Barnett article, here’s another thought: a number of writers have noticed that when we write about feminism or women’s issues, we get truly vicious commentary, far worse than when we write about anything else. Personally, I was shocked to discover how much more verbally violent the response is on on women’s issues”

In other words, those writing about women’s issues are being intimidated by violent comments & e-mails (on a liberal site no less) to the extent they are actually writing about it as a plea for civility. According to blogger conventional wisdom though, “if E.J. Graff & other assclowns can’t take the fucking heat that comes from publishing their insipid feminist shitfests well they can GET OUT OF THE FUCKING KITCHEN! & stop writing self pitying horseshit about”civility”, to fuck all with decorum, niceties & all that other bullshit.”

Geena Davis founded an organization called “See Jane” with this mission statement:

See Jane seeks to engage professionals and parents in a call to dramatically increase the percentages of female characters — and to reduce gender stereotyping — in media made for children 11 and under. See Jane founder, Academy Award winner Geena Davis, says, “By making it common for our youngest children to see everywhere a balance of active and complex male and female characters, girls and boys will grow up to empathize with and care more about each others’ stories.”

The organization has published a new study called “G Movies Give Boys A D: Potraying Males as Dominant, Disconnected and Dangerous” that looked at gender stereotyping in movies pitched at children. The study “reveals how male characters in children’s films are portrayed as significantly more important than females, more likely to be violent, and less likely to be fathers or husbands. Males of color are shown even more negatively.”

See Jane previously released a research report entitled “Where the Girls Aren’t: Gender Disparity Saturates G-Rated Films.” Its macro conclusion was that “in America’s top grossing general audience movies for young children, more than two out of three characters are males and females are far less likely to be central characters driving the storyline….”

“The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism” was written by Carrie Lukas, who works for the Independent Women’s Forum. She says she wrote the book in part to keep feminists from deliberately misleading women about their fertility. Nope, not making that up:

The thing that surprised me most:what really motivated me to write the book in fact:was when I began reading about fertility issues and the feminists’ efforts to keep women from knowing the facts. In 2001, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) launched an advertising campaign intended to make women aware of factors that affect their fertility:including age. Kim Gandy and NOW were outraged. They thought it was too upsetting for women to be reminded of these facts in the public square. How is that for treating women like adults?

The feminist movement is supposed to be all about so-called”reproductive rights,”but what about women who really want to have children? Women tend to overestimate how long their fertility lasts and discount the potential for problems. I have friends who thought they were doing the responsible thing by putting off having children while focusing on their careers. Now they’re having trouble getting pregnant and they’re angry that they put it off. They feel like the feminist movement, and feminist-dominated popular culture, deliberately misled them.

The Lukas book was recently reviewed by pundit Doug Giles, who runs the “Aventura Clash Christian Church.” Here is a little background on Giles:

Giles…[has a] new book, “The Bull Dog Attitude: Get It or Get Left Behind” : a treatise on muscular Christianity. In Giles’s view, the church has grown soft and lazy. And its traditions have become increasingly effeminate. As a result, men have fled the pews, America has lost its moral bearings, and secular forces are “hacking away at our religious roots like Paul Bunyan on crystal meth.” Giles aims to fix the problem by injecting testosterone back into the church. And his message is as brash and politically incorrect as it is macho.

He regularly bashes Muslims, undocumented immigrants, feminists, metrosexuals, and liberals of all stripes. And this approach has earned him a modest measure of fame. Each month, he says, more than 300,000 people tune to his Internet show, Clash Radio, where guests have included conservative luminaries like Ann Coulter, Oliver North, and Katherine Harris.

The Giles review of the Lukas book was unpacked quite cleverly by S.Z. at World O’Crap. Here is an excerpt:

…the piece is Doug’s review of the latest volume in the Regnery series”The Moron’s Guide to Politically Incorrect Drivel for Idiots.”This installment is by Carrie Lukas, a V.P. at the Independent Barefoot ‘n Pregnant Women’s Forum, and it’s called The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism. Doug loves it, of course, because he believes it wants to make him sandwiches, bear his children, and admire his manly prowess with the blow dryer.

It’s a very funny take down of two virulent anti-feminists. Read the whole post here.

“Sadly Normal” is a website for adult survivors of child sexual abuse. Learned about it via Angela Shelton. Angela Shelton made this documentary.

Where to begin with Flanagan’s doofy Time article?

I am a 44-year-old woman who grew up in Berkeley who has never once voted for a Republican, or crossed a picket line, or failed to send in a small check when the Doctors Without Borders envelope showed up. I believe that we should not have invaded Iraq, that we should have signed the Kyoto treaty, that the Starr Report was, in part, the result of a vast right-wing conspiracy. I believe that poverty is our most pressing issue and that we should be pouring money and energy into its eradication. I believe that allowing migrant women and children to die of thirst in American deserts is a moral transgression that will stain us forever.

But despite all that, there is apparently no room for me in the Democratic Party. In fact, I have spent much of the past week on a forced march to the G.O.P. And the bayonet at my back isn’t in the hands of the Republicans; the Democrats are the bullyboys. Such lions of the left as Barbara Ehrenreich, the writers at Salon and much of the Upper West Side of Manhattan have made it abundantly clear to me that I ought to start packing my bags. I’m not leaving, but sometimes I wonder: When did I sign up to be the beaten wife of the Democratic Party?

Here’s why they’re after me: I have made a lifestyle choice that they can’t stand, and I’m not cowering in the closet because of it. I’m out, and I’m proud. I am a happy member of an exceedingly “traditional” family. I’m in charge of the house and the kids, my husband is in charge of the finances and the car maintenance, and we all go to church every Sunday. This month Little, Brown published a collection of my essays about family life called To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife. It’s written in the spirit of one of my great heroes, the late housewife writer and feminist Erma Bombeck. It’s not a book about social policy or alternative lifestyles or anything even vaguely political. It’s a book about how much I miss my mother, who died recently, and about the struggles I have had fighting breast cancer without my mom around to help me. It’s a book that pays tribute to the ’50s housewife instead of ridiculing her.

As far as I can tell, every reviewer and reporter who has encountered my book has assumed that I’m a conservative Republican. At the end of an interview on a national TV network, a reporter said, “Caitlin, I can’t let you go without asking you one question.” Here was her question: Was it really true that I’m a Democrat? Those reporters’ assumptions don’t tell you anything about me, nor do they tell you much about the reporters themselves: they made an honest mistake. What it tells you a whole lot about is the Democratic Party and the face it projects to the world. It’s a party that supports gay families, as I do, and has vast sympathy for many other kinds of alternative lifestyles. But we let the Republicans have complete ownership of the image of the traditional family. And that’s one reason we keep losing elections.

Most of the 60 million people who voted against George W. Bush have lifestyles more like mine than the Democratic Party would like to admit. Most of us aren’t the Hollywood elite or the nontraditional family. Many of us do what I do, which is go to church on Sunday, work hard and value my marriage. Again, it’s not so much my party’s platform that rejects the family; God help us all if Bush’s brutality to the poor continues much longer. It’s a small but very vocal minority, the Democratic pundits, who abhor what I represent because it doesn’t fit the stereotypical image of the modern woman who has escaped from domestic prison. Fifty years ago, a stay-at-home mom who loved her husband would not automatically be assumed to be a Republican. The image of the Democratic Party that used to come to mind was of a workingman and his wife sitting at the kitchen table worrying about how they were going to pay the bills and voting for Adlai Stevenson because he was going to help them squeak by every month and maybe even afford to send their kids to college.

The Democrats made a huge tactical error a few decades ago. In the middle of doing the great work of the ’60s–civil rights, women’s liberation, gay inclusion–we decided to stigmatize the white male. The union dues–paying, churchgoing, beer-drinking family man got nothing but ridicule and venom from us. So he dumped us. And he took the wife and kids with him.

And now here we are, living in a country with a political and economic agenda we deplore, losing election after election and wondering why.

It’s the contempt, stupid.

Such a bitter closing line. As a reader, I do indeed feel a lot of contempt for her, and she apparently thinks I’m stupid, so I guess we are even. But I feel the need to address a few of her assertions in this article, like that part where she asks: “When did I sign up to be the beaten wife of the Democratic Party?” Nice way to trivialize domestic violence and self-aggrandize simultaneously, huh? She’s the Bride of the Democratic Party! But The Party is violently abusing her! Democratic “bullboys” put her on “a forced march!” There was a “bayonet at [her] back!” Sheesh. This overwrought, self-pitying rhetoric is really sickening; to equate mere criticism, no matter how passionate, with some sort of violent political plot against her makes her sound incredibly narcissistic.

I disgaree with her writings because I feel she expresses contempt for me, and for a lot of women who are important to me. I regret that her mother died, which she apparently brought up here so I’d feel sorry for her, and I do. And I’m sorry she had breast cancer, which must have been awful, and is also apparently raised here so she’ll have my sympathies, and she does. Life is hard and terrible things happen. Maybe someday her suffering will teach her a little empathy for other people, and her essays won’t be so mean-spirited and intolerant, and I won’t hate them so much.

I wish she’d provided a little factual support for her assertion that the Democratic party is “losing the housewife vote.” All the data I’ve seen supports the opposite conclusion (see e.g. this), and makes her look even more like a self-serving liar. And does she really think that “the union dues–paying, churchgoing, beer-drinking family man” has a traditional stay-at-home wife? I doubt he can very readily afford it, but obviously that won’t stop Flanagan from invoking a fanciful construction of him for her own benefit. He’s a perfect match for her fictional ’50s housewife.

–Ann Bartow

Update: See also Echidne of the Snakes, Amanda at Pandagon, and Scott at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

According to this article in the Guardian:

They mature more quickly, are said to be more responsible and do better at school. Now media-savvy girls are putting another one over the boys by leading the digital communications revolution.

After one of the most comprehensive studies of the effect on children of the explosion in media choices of the past 15 years, the regulator Ofcom said girls aged 12 to 15 are more likely than boys to have a mobile phone, use the internet, listen to the radio and read newspapers or magazines. Only when it comes to playing computer and console games do boys overtake girls.

Given the historic domination of the home telephone by teenage girls, perhaps it is not surprising they are using the internet to communicate with friends for hours on end. Almost all children between 12 and 15 with the internet at home said they were “confident” surfing the web and did so on average for eight hours a week. But girls are more likely than boys to use the web as a communication tool.

The study, focusing on children aged between eight and 15, also showed the extent to which mobile phones and the internet are taken for granted by primary school children. Their 11th birthday appears to be the tipping point, with eight of out of 10 children having their own handset by that age.

The picture of a generation used to juggling a range of electronic devices will be heavily drawn upon by ageing media executives grappling with the rapidly changing landscape. The BBC director general, Mark Thompson, last week announced a radical reimagining of the corporation’s role in an on-demand age.

Read the entire piece here. Via cool law prof Eileen Kane.

Nine years after becoming one of the NBA’s first female referees, Violet Palmer is set to break another barrier by becoming the first woman to officiate an NBA playoff game.

For Palmer, 33, working the playoffs is a goal she has been working toward for years.

“I wasn’t sure I could reach it,” Palmer said. “I knew I had the ability but this is the top of the pedestal for me.”

Palmer made her NBA debut on Oct. 31, 1997 when she, along with Denise Kantner, became the first women to referee a regular season game for any all-male professional sports league. They officiated the season opener between the Vancouver Grizzlies and the Dallas Mavericks.

In the beginning, Palmer said, players and coaches openly questioned her competence, and some even objected to her presence outright. But over time, she has earned the respect of both her colleagues and the players.

“As the years went on, the players and coaches realized that I’m just one of the guys,” Palmer said. “If you can do your job, you’re going to earn the respect of the players and coaches.”

Palmer’s career includes eight years of officiating women’s collegiate basketball, working in NBA summer league and pre-season games, refereeing WNBA games and playing as a starting point guard at Cal Poly Pomona, where she was part of the NCAA Division II women’s championship teams in 1985 and 1986.

It would be a shame if Keith Hernandez had courtside seats, and she accidentally stepped on his foot!

Jane Hamsher at firedoglake writes:

…when liberals like TBogg or Gavin M. or SZ or Roy Edroso or any other of the wits of the liberal blogosphere sit down behind their keyboards and start tapping out daggers, slicing up the right with eviscerating humor that cuts to the bone, they know full well they are going into battle with unarmed opponents. I don’t know what it is about the right that they completely lack any ability to appreciate humor, but they sure as shit can’t write it either. I would never mess with the General for fear of what he’d come back at me with. Digby? Oh lord. Atrios, Wolcott, John Rogers … and I personally send Roger Ailes a fruit basket once a month just to stay on his good side.

While I have only seen a couple of the bloggers Jane mentioned above in person, and none in the buff, and I seem to remember that Digby has refused to disclose her or his gender, I’d fairly confidently guess that only one of the bloggers listed is female: SZ of World O’Crap. She is also consistently the funniest, and the least likely to resort to sexism, gay baiting or bigotry in her humor, though several of the others are quite decent (and “liberal”!) in this regard as well. Read today’s World O’Crap post, “A Day Without Wingnuts” and note how artfully she takes down Hugh Hewitt and Tom Tancredo without once calling them gay, bitches, slutty, feminine, “cracker,” (okay, admittedly they aren’t Southern) or fat.

Here are some other smart, funny women bloggers Jane could have listed: Pam and Amanda at Pandagon, Susie at Suburban Guerilla, Belle Waring at John & Belle Have a Blog, Sheezlebub at Pinko Feminist Hellcat, Flea at One Good Thing, Shakespeare’s Sister, Dr. Bitch at Bitch Ph.D., Dr. Violet Socks at Reclusive Leftist, Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy, Roxanne at Rox Populi, Mrs. Goatwax at Molly Goatwax … cripes you get the idea already, and I’ve only scratched the surface – feel free to leave other examples in the comments.

–Ann Bartow

“Students Trade Bibles for Porn”

A group of atheists at the University of Texas at San Antonio is putting a novel twist on the toys-for-guns programs run by many urban police departments. But instead of toys, they are handing out porn in exchange for bibles.

“We consider the bible to be a very negative force in the history of the world,”student Ryan Walker said. Walker is part of a student group that calls itself the Atheist Agenda.

Club members this week posted fliers promoting what they call the”Smut for Smut”campaign then set up a table in the student union to collect religious materials and pass out adult magazines such as Black Label and Playboy.

The group is not officially sanctioned by the university and has raised the ire of several religious organizations on campus.

“In my opinion, there are no atheists. There are fools,”Pastor Rick Hawkins of UTSA’s Family Praise Center said.”So, that would be foolish propaganda. I don’t know one believer that would take his Bible and turn it in for pornography.”

Hawkins obviously didn’t stop by the Atheist Agenda table, where several students had dropped off copies of the good book and walked away with skin mags.

Athiest Agenda isn’t the first student group to explore the idea of introducing porn to former bible toters. Members say they got the idea from students in Austin who ran a similar pro-porn drive.

Walker added that members thought it sounded like a creative way to exercise their freedom of speech.

And what better way to honor the First Amendment than with commercial photographs of naked women, right? Because anyone who doesn’t love porn must be a right wing religious fundamentalist reactionary.

There is a website called “The Saddest Thing I Own,” where people are invited:

“…to share the saddest thing they own. What are these sad things? What makes things sad? Do things start off sad? Do some sad things begin as happy things that then become sad? Are some things only sad because for some sad reason we kept them? Are some things just plain sad no matter what? This is what we want to know.”

The very first post I read there started out as follows:

The emotional aftermath of the breakup was horrible enough, but he also felt it necessary to burn my house down. Some guys just like to make their point a little more flamboyantly than others apparently. My young son and I were left with literally nothing. Everything we owned; all our memories and all our physical possessions, all my writings and research, and all his stuffed animals and sketchbooks were vaporized in the total fire. When we drove up to see the smoking ruins we were both almost pathologically concerned about how we would react to the loss. We took each other’s hand and I could feel us both trembling with worry for the other.

Read the entire entry here. Most of the entries at the site are quite poignant.

–Ann Bartow