This (Was) A Great Country

I just watched Philip Seymour Hoffman try to be a blond Michael Moore in the documentary The Party’s Over, about the 2000 presidential campaign. Very nostalgic.

The documentary was interesting and fresh only because it covered a side of the campaign that I previously hadn’t seen: the protesters.

I have masochistically relived many times the trauma of Gore’s “defeat” and even worse, his and his party’s unwillingness to fight for their base which was disenfranchised in that election. But every time I’ve revisited this topic, it’s been from the Democratic perspective.

Hoffman’s documentary is more representing those lefties who have been boycotting our political system — Gore and Bush were the same to them and they protested during both the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention. Watching these radicals — mostly young, often white — was both infuriating and inspiring. They are boycotting the only system through which we can work some change. But they are also standing up for higher principles than our current systems can deliver on.

I have sympathy for both sides.

It’s partly because of those protesters that I love this country. I’m having a difficult time giving up on the political systems which I’ve admired from afar for so long. This was a great country. The Constitution used to have the power to make me weep with sentimental admiration. Now it just makes me wistful.

We are no longer a democracy. Our leaders, the best among them, don’t do a very good job of representing our values. Half of them are in power to prevent government from actually doing anything useful — on principle, because dammit! they believe in “small government.”

I keep coming back to the people. I think it’s unfair to keep on blaming the people for the mess we’re in. The people come out on the streets. The people give generously to charities for services the government should be providing. The people vote. The people fight. It’s not their fault that they are being systematically disenfranchised and it’s not their fault they don’t have the time, between holding down two jobs and taking care of their kids and doing the housework, to look up “the issues” on candidates’ websites. Yet they do their best and many of them vote. Last couple of times, that hasn’t mattered. Their votes didn’t count.

If it wasn’t clear in 2000, it’s pretty clear now. The people have ceased to matter. But it’s the people that make me go on loving America. “Freedom” rings hollow when one examines America’s recent crimes against human rights at home and abroad. But freedom nevertheless is part of every American’s upbringing and it gives them an arrogant sense of entitlement to their rights that is infinitely encouraging. You don’t have to have a college education or any kind of authority to have faith in your humanity in this country — as an American, you are free.

I hope this spirit prevails over the impending disasters and Americans, when it comes down to it, fight to keep their freedom. They’ve lost it already on the books. But I doubt they’ll tolerate the jackboot in their own homes.

P.S. Yes, Larry and I are buying guns if the jackboots do come. Larry’s always been an anti-gun liberal, whereas I can’t get away from the coolness of firearms and killing unpleasant people. We finally see eye to eye on this bone of contention in our marriage. Woo!

Douchebag Commenters

There are some people who are addicted to me/my blog and can’t stop themselves from leaving nasty comments. I often end up telling them to just leave, stop reading me if I’m disappointing them so damn much. Then I don’t publish their comments. That doesn’t, believe it or not, stop them from continuing to leave comments.

What’s that all about anyway? What’s wrong with people? Don’t they have anything better to do than stalk people they claim not to like/respect/enjoy reading?

If I don’t like a blog or blogger, guess what? I stop reading them. If a blogger doesn’t publish a dissenting comment I left or actively tells me to leave their territory (never has happened), I promptly do (or would if it happened).

This is not that hard. Either you have a life or you don’t. Either you’re a douchebag or you’re not.

Strangely enough, douchebags who demonstrate this behavior on my blog have so far been men. The one woman I shooed off the blog actually left and didn’t try to leave more comments. Amazing!

Take this douchebag, Aerik, for instance.

Back in April, he ranted against “chronological [sic] man-haters” and told me I’d just “made a complete jackass of myself.” Okay. Thanks, Aerik. I’m crushed. More recently, he arrives on the scene to say, “You really disappoint me, Apostate. Kind of often.”

I despair of myself, honestly I do. What a terrible person I must be to go on disappointing Aerik like this. Sick of his shit, I tell him to fuck off. I tell him plainly that he’s not welcome and his comments won’t be published. One would think he would get the simple message and fuck off.

Does he?

Of course not!

He comes back and gives me a lesson in feminism. Sean Bell is a feminist issue, he says, because black women exist. Get it? he says. Duh! How simple. Silly me. Thanks, Aerik! I’ve always needed men to march in and tell me what to think, especially about feminism. His comment wasn’t published.

Did that stop the guy? Hell, no.

He comes back to give me additional insights about myself. “Once again you prove what a fucking dolt you can be.” Then he blathered on for a paragraph, trying to make me repent of being a dolt, but I didn’t absorb the lesson because I stopped reading.

He obviously has no life. He keeps coming back to waste his time on the site of a dolt who disappoints him. There must be a real paucity of blogs out there.

Then there’s Mr. Barooq, of the tiny penis. He would start his insulting comments predicting that I wouldn’t publish him. That, predictably, gets to me since I probably wouldn’t have. His comments are garbage and I’m tempted to not give garbage airtime. But his garbage is also entertaining in the way Pakistani douchebaggers’ garbage tends to be.

The thing about Paki men? They have small penises. And they watch a lot of Internet porn. A lot. All the Internet cafe keyboards in Pakistan’s many Internet cafes are awfully sticky. So, naturally, they develop huge complexes. Then they worry that women are laughing at them (they are). So they come to my blog to vent their hostility. They hate an intelligent woman they can’t impress because they know if she caught them with their pants down, she’d laugh.

His comments I left up (starting here), because they were so hilarious and demonstrated so perfectly how much Paki men hate self-willed Paki women. It’s the reason I don’t like to delete most of these bastards — you can’t make this shit up. After all, this guy has nothing better to do with his time than come here and tell me he’s laughing at me.

Again, I’m absolutely crushed. Crushed, I tell you!

Most of these Paki trolls that I get on my blog seem to come from Toronto, Canada. Canada must be veritably overflowing with Paki douchebags. It’s too bad they’re making a convincing case against relaxing immigration restrictions. The last thing I want is for the Paki hordes to follow me into the clean public spaces of California.

How You Vote

There is a difference between voting for a “non-viable” third party candidate (letting an evil Republican win) and voting FOR that evil Republican, even if the end result is the same. Even if you have an idea that your vote for the third party is going to improve the evil Republican’s chances of winning, you have voted your conscience and you’ve sent a message to the Democrats that they are not doing a good job of representing their base.

I have long been a pragmatist. I have argued voting for Democrats as always the lesser evil, even when they are far more to the center than my politics. I’m a realist. I know these are politicians. I know this is the real world, where change is slow and progress, if it happens, crawls rather than runs. I know.

But I can’t deny that there is a good case to be made for voting your conscience, or at least voting so that your conscience is not offended. Your vote, before it does anything else, needs to represent your values and your voice.

What I don’t understand is people for whom McCain is an actively better choice than either Obama or Hillary if their first candidate of choice was a Democrat.

What the fuck.

Just what the fuck.

Especially as some of these people are cropping up in comments on a feminist’s blog and are women. Could they also by any chance be feminists? Why would feminists vote for the party of sexism? Why would feminists reward Republicans for their decades-long struggle to reverse the achievements of the women’s rights movement? Why would feminists even consider putting a sexist creep like McCain in the driver’s seat of a sadly misogynistic nation?

I mean, do we have enough problems or don’t we?

Friday Links

A migraine and general enervation kept me home from work today. Thank heavens. Here are some worthwhile links if you’re slacking at work.

Roger Ebert reviews America The Beautiful, a documentary about the pressures our culture places on young women.

5 Psychological Experiments That Prove Humanity is Doomed. [h/t: Barefoot Bum]

Suzie, at Echidne’s blog, takes apart yet another anti-Hillary article from the sexist Left. (Note, I used to subscribe both to The Nation and The New Republic. I’m glad I’ve let subscriptions to both magazines lapse, although The New Republic is demonstrating that they’re not smart enough to figure out that I’m not sending them any money — many months later, they’re still sending me their rag.)

Echidne muses metaphorically about the middle class’s economic woes.

Bush might deliver a severe blow before he leaves office to Planned Parenthood and other providers of family planning services if they continue to offer abortion in the same facilities, by denying Title X funding.

Mildred Loving has died. A black woman married to a white man, she challenged Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage which led to the landmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide. It’s hard for me to keep in mind that my marriage wouldn’t feel so normal if it weren’t for her and people like her. Gay marriage is the next step.

Josef Fritzl, the man who entrapped and raped his daughter for 24 years, fathering her seven children, “explains” his motivations.

Alia Sabur — yes, a woman! — now holds the record for the youngest college professor, at 19. She has broken the record held by Newton’s student, in 1717.

Now, the person with the highest IQ AND the youngest college professor are both women. And yet there are men who continue to spout the old canard that women are, at best, merely average, never geniuses. You gave us a measly forty years in a few parts of the world and we’re already beating you at your own game.

Fuck Unity

I’ve disapproved in the past of those who voted for Nader rather than a sensible Democratic candidate, even if he was centrist.

Until recently, I’ve wholeheartedly agreed that all Obama supporters need to vote for Hillary and vice versa, depending on whoever is the Democratic candidate. We need to beat McCain and that’s paramount.

My very intelligent husband has disagreed with me and said that unless we call the Democratic party to account for selling us out time and time again, if we go on electing them no matter how many fundamental values they compromise, they won’t work for us and they don’t deserve our vote.

I finally agree.

I’m still very glad that I won’t have to follow through this recently formed moral conviction by actually letting a Republican win because I’m angry at the party I would normally support. That’s hard to do. But I believe it would be pretty hard for me to vote for Obama in good conscience.

I was reading the primary results today and came across this comment, showcased on the Washington Post blog which had a roundup of reactions: “infuse said, “By Friday I predict that more than enough of the superdelegates will have endorsed Barack Obama to end the insanity. Let the snake writhe about with no chance of recovery. It’s head has been cut off.” [emphasis mine.] Let me add that I didn’t wander over to this round-up by force of habit. I don’t read the Washington Post. This round-up was the ONLY headline from a news outlet reporting on the primaries that I could find on Google News this morning.

Andrew Sullivan today gleefully quoted a “college senior”: “Hillz is now that person at the party who’s had 6 too many jello shots, is talking abnormally loudly and is incapable of understanding the fact that she has overstayed her welcome. And she’s starting to hiccup. C’mon Hillz, let’s get your coat and we’ll walk with you to the door…”

Good fucking grief. Are there any ways left of shaming and insulting a brilliant woman running for president?

And then Reclusive Leftist removed what few doubts were left. We can’t support Obama. This is not our party. This is the party of frat boys, and so is the other one.

If I could vote, I would vote for anyone but either of the two major party nominees. And as I can’t vote, I can vocally be a bad non-citizen, giving us all the gift of McCain. Fuck it. It’s not like Obama’s going to fix jack-shit anyway and with either one of them, we’ll get the likes of Roberts on the Supreme Court.

So be it.

Anyone Can Do It

Well, no. Renegade Evolution has a point, although I don’t know who these people are who’re saying anyone can do what she does.

I HAVE read a lot of people express a lot of horror at what sex work involves, often extrapolating from their own feelings to thinking everyone feels freaked out by paunchy men with BO slobbering over them. But Ren’s post just drives that point home even more — yeah, it’s damned hard and risky.

I’m the naive girl, who, in her first American strip club visit (Thai strip clubs felt safer and friendlier) was terrified of being assaulted if I went to the restroom. Yeah. Dozens of half naked women wandering around the place offering their sexual services, and they were going to sneak in after ME. Yeah. I was naive, shut up. Dens of vice and all.

No, it’s not easy. It’s so weird and difficult and dangerous and out of the ordinary that people end up “othering” sex workers and putting them in a category of work all by themselves. They do that more often than saying, “Anyone could do it.” Part of this othering is implying their lily-white selves are too good for it.

In quite another sense, anyone can do it, in that, the demand for it is ubiquitous enough that if you’re desperate enough and keep your price low enough, you can always just walk out and have someone pay you $20 to suck his cock.

A forty-something friend of mine who is over the hill in more than one sense, a down-and-out hippie type, once did just that. When she told me about it, my first reaction was shock and my second was a huge amount of guilt. Why wasn’t I there for my friend, rescuing her from such a terrible terrible fate? Reduced to sucking cock for $20! Oh noes!

She was dismissive of it so I got over my guilt, but yes. In one sense, if you’ve got the right equipment, the right orifices, and low enough prices and the willingness to do it, sure you can do it. At a time when a temp agency wouldn’t have sent me in for an administrative job, when I wasn’t getting calls back for menial office work (receptionist), I could’ve sucked cock with my clothes on for the same pay, no questions asked.

People tell me I’m hot and men are always hitting on me, and every time I think about whoring halfway seriously, I go, “Nah, sure they’d fuck me for free, but they wouldn’t want to pay for it.” I’ve always felt uncomfortable even about allowing men to pick up the tab after drinks or dinner because I’m sure they’d feel ripped off if they had to cough up $40 for the pleasure of my company. Of course, what I’m talking about is different — I’m not sure they’d pay me $300-$400 an hour, and less than that I’m not willing to do it for.

I know I can walk out right now and command $100 for a lousy blowjob. Easy. No skills required. There’s sex work. I think that’s the kind people mean when they say, “Any[woman] can do it.” My mother, the 50-something virgin, could probably do it. Then there’s the glamor sex work that Renegade described and yeah, you need a whole different level of skills and attributes for that.

Amanda Marcotte’s It’s A Jungle Out There

I wouldn’t have bought Marcotte’s It’s a Jungle Out There if it weren’t for the Big Flap around it. However, as soon as I heard the second printing would be censored, I ordered the book off Amazon. It arrived a few days ago and I’ve been actually laughing out loud at some parts.

It’s funnier and better written than I expected.

I’m almost done with it and I came across this sentence:

“We still have never had a female president, and women make up but a tiny fraction of the number of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies…”

Well!

If Amanda thinks having a female president might be a good thing — an important feminist milestone — why isn’t she supporting Hillary? I would understand if Hillary were a Republican. I would understand if Amanda wasn’t willing to support any centrist Democrat.

But she supported Edwards and now she’s supporting Obama. I see not much difference between Hillary and Obama except that I trust Obama a little less when it comes to appointing Supreme Court justices. Obama is a corporate ass-kisser and about as centrist as it is possible to get while still remaining a Democrat.

So why not Hillary? It’s possible Amanda has answered this question ten times over on her blog, but as I don’t read her blog, I haven’t read the answer.

On the face of it, it’s not at all obvious what possible reason she could have for picking Obama over Hillary.

(If you think I’m obnoxious for asking a question the answer to which I could find if I weren’t so lazy, please refrain from informing me so in the comments. I’m already aware of my toolishness.)

Sex and Power

Renegade Evolution talks about sex and power.

She concludes:

But as Madonna, perhaps the best at the game yet, once said: “Fuck isn’t a bad word. If it wasn’t for fuck, none of us would be here.” She’s a woman who realized that sex? Yeah, sex is power. And you can use it.

(For the record, I love Madonna.)

Yes, of course there’s power in sex. It’s a very fundamental, primal, omnipresent force. It really is a force. This is not controversial. If it weren’t powerful, there wouldn’t be so much victimization and trauma and obsession and fear and neurosis over and around it. There also wouldn’t be so much celebration, joy, risk, self-forgetfulness and life around it.

What’s objectionable, from a feminist standpoint, is not the undeniable power of sex. We don’t seek to trivialize sex. What’s objectionable is when women have power ONLY through sex.

See, it’s always been trivially easy for women to exercise a degree of power through their sexuality. They’ve managed to feed themselves, raise families, inspire villages, just through making themselves sexually available to pacify male-children’s egos, i.e., by utilizing the power of their sex (in both senses).

But what empowers women in sex also disempowers them. Which is why we needed feminism: To extend the value and meaning of being a woman beyond sex. This is why sex work is not subversive or revolutionary, even if you’re ripping off the “patriarchy” every time you shake your ass. You are fulfilling a gender role that has never been found to be all that distant from a woman’s purpose in life — to be the soldier’s entertainment. To be able to go beyond that is revolutionary, because it’s never happened in the history of the world for extended periods.

Which is not to say that all of us who are not doing sex work are “going beyond.” It’s not to say that those who are doing sex work are only tools of the patriarchy. For some sex workers — and Ren is a good example — being a sex worker is the fullest and completest expression of who they are. It’s self-actualizing.

And at the end of the day, that’s all we owe ourselves or anyone else — to be fully ourselves.

That’s what I want for all women — to be fully themselves. And for some of them, the ultimate power is not their sexuality, although they will use it if they want to or have to. That’s partly what feminism is — expanding and leveling the playing field, so that the human beings that women are can find fulfillment.

And not just in sex, important as that is. Women are multi-faceted! And that, my friends, is powerful.

This Is Why I Love Lance

Read this fine, fine post.

My mother called me up just before the New York primary to ask me my opinion on Obama and Clinton. She didn’t want to know which one I thought was sexier.

Or kinkier.

The only people I know who have done any speculating on the question are journalists like David Broder, the voyeurs who wrote that stupid article for the New York Times about how much alone time Bill and Hillary were managing, and now Michael Wolff.

“The Hillary story is—and how could it not be?—largely a sexual one. This is not so much a sexist view as a sexualist view: What’s up here? What’s the unsaid saying? What’s the vibe? Although it’s not discussed in reputable commentary, it’s discussed by everyone else: so what exactly is the thing with Hillary and sex, with the consensus being that she simply must not have it (at least not with her husband; there are, on the other hand, the various conspiracy scenarios of whom else she might have had it with). It’s partly around this consensus view of her not having sex that people support her or resist her. She’s the special-interest candidate of older women—the post-sexual set. She’s resisted by others (including older women who don’t see themselves as part of the post-sexual set) who see her as either frigid or sexually shunned—they turn from her inhibitions and her pain.”

I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead since by now a mob of “the post-sexual set” has probably dragged him from his office in the Conde Nast building and hauled him uptown to Central Park where they’ve hung him up by his genetalia from Cleopatra’s Needle, but that paragraph alone should consign Wolff to his shrink’s couch for several hundred hours of psychoanalytic unraveling.

Lance’s analysis is literary, historical, feminist, political and psychological. It was a similar post that got me hooked on his blog many months ago; few people can synthesize like this and produce such beautiful, nuanced and humorous prose. Do go read the rest.

I will add just one thing to his analysis of Hillary’s examination as a sexual figure. I think a large part of why this is done to her is that our media is flummoxed by the prominence of a woman who is not a sex symbol. Women are valued so strictly for their looks and sex appeal that it is mind-boggling to accept them as unsexed figures (but not necessarily nonsexual figures - Mother Teresa style - since Hillary obviously, at some point in her life, fucked Bill and produced Chelsea).

And because Hillary can’t be owned sexually (yet can’t be dismissed as a sexual being), the male dominant media doesn’t know what to do with her except speculate with the purpose of ridicule.

More Anti-Choice Talk From Obama

Via Bitch, Ph.D.:

…late last year, when his campaign filled out a questionnaire for a nonpartisan reproductive health group that answered a similar question with even more nuance.

“As a parent, Obama believes that young women, if they become pregnant, should talk to their parents before considering an abortion. But he realizes not all girls can turn to their mother or father in times of trouble, and in those instances, we should want these girls to seek the advice of trusted adults — an aunt, a grandmother, a pastor,” his campaign wrote to RH Reality Check.

This is particularly worrisome given that the California parental notification ballot initiative (on the ballot this November) actually includes the provision that a pregnant teen can get consent from a trusted relative (uncle, grandparent, etc.) if the parents are abusive or otherwise unsympathetic. So Obama would support that?

Disheartening. When will we get a pro-choice president in the White House?

[h/t: Feministing]