- “Female Privilege” and Sexist Arguments.
- LDF Files Lawsuit to Challenge Alabama’s Racially Discriminatory Photo ID Law | NAACP LDF
- What would Earth’s skies look like with Saturn’s rings? | The Planetary Society
- Asking the Wrong Questions: Five Comments on Hamilton
- Robot Hugs – Overheard Thanks to Grace for this link.
- How Iowa Became the New Battleground for African Hair Braiders
- Auto Mechanics Recreate Renaissance Paintings | Bored Panda The photos are really quite beautiful.
- School Cancels Reading Of Storybook With Trans Character After Parents Threaten to Sue | GalleyCat
- Carrie Fisher’s Interview on Good Morning America was kind of awesome.
- Supreme Court to hear challenge to Texas redistricting plan – The Washington Post Basically, some conservatives are arguing that districts should be counted based on voting population, rather than based on population. See also: “Assessing the Potential Impact of Evenwel v. Abbott”.
- Viral Video Shows What Happens When You Show People a Bible With a Quran’s Cover on It. What I found most entertaining about this video – which is in Dutch with English subtitles – is that the folks in the video swear in English.
- Finland Wants to Replace Welfare Programs With a Minimum Income for All Residents – Hit & Run : Reason.com It will be really interesting to see how this works out.
- Here’s How Sex Work Changed After the Government Shut Down Rentboy.Com. Unsurprisingly, the change was bad for sex workers.
- We’re Watching You: Printed Eyes Reduce Littering and Anti-Social Behavior | Neuroscience News
- Total Abortion Ban Reinstated in Dominican Republic – Hit & Run : Reason.com If you read all the way to the bottom of the article, it gets even worse.
- George Zimmerman Suspended From Twitter for Revenge-Porn Posts – Hit & Run : Reason.com. Zimmerman really seems to be an amazing scumbag.
- The Unit of Caring – a nuanced criticism of the “I believe women” slogan.
- Elizabeth Warren Shows Support for Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street Plan – The New York Times. But Warren stops short of endorsing Clinton’s candidacy.
- Writing Vs. Art In Comics (with tweets) · Just some of Amp’s late-night tweets about comics · Storify
- Australia’s Oldest Man Spends His Time Knitting Tiny Sweaters for Rescued Penguins | One Green Planet. It’s actually a very good penguin rescue strategy, after an oil spill.
- The breast-feeding extremists who put “lactivism” ahead of protecting babies from HIV. And, needless to say, ahead of mothers’ welfare.
- Donald Trump’s Islamophobic rhetoric is just a cruder version of what many of the other GOP candidates have been saying. Trump isn’t the problem; the GOP’s entire culture is the problem.
- Pepperidge Farm thinks it owns the concept of oval, chocolate-filled cookies – Vox
- What To Know About The Sexual Assault Allegations Against James Deen. They say they’ll update this page as the story develops.
- Women cast the porn star—now accused of sexual assault—in their fantasies. They can just as easily cast him out. Interesting article talking about how Deen’s now-demolished feminist rep came, not from anything Deen himself did, but from his Tumblr fanbase of young women.
Seasonal question du jour: In Miracle on 34th Street, is Fred Gailey a Manic Pixie Dream Boy?
Released in 1947, the film centers on Doris Walker, single mom/business woman who once had her heart broken and therefore forthrightly refuses to follow her heart thereafter — and raises her 7-yr-old daughter to do likewise. The film’s story arch follows her emotional transformation at the hands of the men in the movie.
One man is Kris Kringle. He’s a classic manic pixie dream boy — a doer of good deeds without backstory or motive.
But there’s also Fred Gailey, a single, successful attorney at a firm, who lives next door to Doris. Despite rebuffs, he struggles to build a relationship with this divorcee single mom next door — not an obvious choice in the mid-1940s. He has no backstory, and midway through the film he quits his firm so that he can pursue quixotic litigation on behalf of “the little man,” a motivation that apparently had not occurred to him before that point. This prompts the self-contained Doris to chide him on his unrealistic, impulsive behavior. This drives them apart — setting up the final reconciliation.
The status of Fred Gailey comes to mind because I’ve recently seen Here’s Love, the musical based on the movie. It was written by Meredith Willson, the guy who wrote Music Man and Unsinkable Molly Brown. It features Wilson’s song “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” (which pre-dated the show) combined with the counterpoint melody “Pinecones and Holly Berries” (which was written for the show).
Given the celebrated nature of the source material, the composer, and these songs, you may be surprised that you haven’t heard of this musical. You might even be suspicious of the musical’s quality. And those suspicions might be justified.
The musical differs from the film in various, often curious, ways. One notable departure is the fact that in the musical, Fred Gailey is given his own backstory, his own friends, and his own anxieties. This makes him much more human — and, alas, muddies the show’s storyline.
Regarding #8:
The community’s reaction.
The schoolboard’s reaction.
Awesome. The kind of “awesome” which should be routine, but since it’s not, awesome.
Grace
Re: #9,
Did you like Carrie Fisher’s interview? Would you like about three hours more just like that?
She has an audiobook version of her one woman show “Wishful Drinking,” available through iTunes (and other outlets, I assume). She talks about growing up with her famous parents, mental illness, drug addiction, and Star Wars. It’s really a delight to listen to, and a steal at $15.
Kohai sez check it out!
Grace:
Just the fact that it can – and did – happen is awesome. GLBT acceptance has come so, so far just in my adult life. It’s incredible and wonderful even if we’re not close to where we’re heading.
In response to the latest terrorist attack on Planned Parenthood, I have given the largest charitable donation of my life. I can’t fight terrorism with violence, but I can give my financial support to those people and institutions under attack.
It seems like a ton of the reporting on the PP terrorist attack, both domestically and internationally (I’m thinking mainly of BBC) has been poor. It’s my understanding they don’t even perform abortions at that PP, but so many news outlets are calling it an abortion clinic, and I haven’t seen anyone – not that I’ve read all stories, for sure – point out that the killer was wrong in thinking it was an abortion clinic. He might have wanted to target the organization generally or he might have just been confused, but if I’m not mistaken that really basic fact about the story is largely absent from reports.
It’s my understanding they don’t even perform abortions at that PP, but so many news outlets are calling it an abortion clinic, and I haven’t seen anyone – not that I’ve read all stories, for sure – point out that the killer was wrong in thinking it was an abortion clinic.
This was a terror attack. One can argue that it was made more effective by not targeting a location that performs abortions. You want to make the largest number of people afraid. For example, it would have been a good approach to target a place that collects donations, so that people are afraid to donate, and even better, so that people are afraid to process donations.
Transgender reading in the elementary school:
Based on the fact that Mt. Horeb, Wisc. is about 25 miles from what is colloquially known as “The People’s Republic of Madison”, the outcome there is not too surprising.
The PP shooting:
My guess is that the guy was confused and probably figured that all PP facilities did abortion services. And I’m shocked, shocked
to find that gambling is going on in herethat the media neglected to report basic facts in this story.If you have one of the HBO streaming services, you can also watch Wishful Drinking that way. There are several parts that I think really need the visual.
On the Bible/Quran video, I was surprised they didn’t use the “Blessed are they who dash your infants’ heads against the rocks” verse.
Where, oh where! could he have gotten that idea?
Seems irrelevant to the fact that it was a terrorist attack, though.
NYT: Trump’s anti-Muslim plan is reprehensible and likely immune to judicial review. (The headline says it’s “constitutional,” but the author later distinguishes between policies that are constitutional and policies that a court would decline to scrutinize.)
From a new member of the blogroll, here is another treatment of the constitutionality of banning alien Muslims from entering the U.S.
The blog Hot Air is not one that I had any thought that Amp would put on the blogroll here. However, they do raise an interesting and I believe valid question in this posting. On November 22nd, in Bunny Friend Park in New Orleans, multiple shooters fired into a crowd of over 300 people and wounded 17 of them. By the grace of God no one died, but there were multiple severe injuries – one man will likely never walk again.
So how come none of us ever heard of it? Why are not anti-2nd Amendment activists speaking out about it? Why wasn’t it featured in media outlets all over the country? How does a mass shooting of 17 people not pop up on the radar screen?
Things to note:
1) The shooters and victims were all black.
2) No “assault weapons” were used.
The blog post basically holds that because of those two factors the shooting does not fit the general “gun control” narrative. The tone of the article is not one you may like, but I ask you to read it anyway and address the question yourselves.
I had heard about the shooting in New Orleans — it was trending on Facebook the day it happened — but I haven’t seen too much about it since then. I posted something about it on my Facebook page, and the only response from any of my friends was basically, “Yeah, New Orleans hasn’t changed.”
Ron, searching google news for “Bunny Friend Park shooting” gets over 70,000 results. Which, frankly, seems like a lot of coverage for an event at which no one died, given that there are plenty of shootings people DO die at for news orgs to cover. (Although probably the metric of using Google News counts is flawed in many ways.)
What mass shootings with zero casualties, and no celebs involved, can you name, which have received significantly more coverage than this shooting?
Do you disagree that mass shootings in which people die seem like they SHOULD be bigger news stories than mass shootings in which no one dies?
See also this article: Not every mass shooting gets equal billing: Jarvis DeBerry | NOLA.com
I liked this blog post On ‘Obvious’ Research Results from Brute Reason. (Also, Brute Reason is maybe a blogroll candidate?)
Closetpuritan: I love Brute Reason! Blogrolled.
Amp, my standard for coverage on this kind of thing is not how many hits you get on Google. You can get lots of hits on Google for all kinds of stuff. My standard in this case is how heavily it was covered in the MSM, for how long, what commentary you get from the anti-2nd Amendment groups, etc.
Yup, no one died. That’s going to affect it, I’ll grant. But seventeen people is an awful lot of people to get shot – in a public park with 300+ people present and multiple shooters – and never hit the front page of the papers or get rolling coverage from Fox, CNN, MSNBCBSABC, etc. You’d still think that the anti-gun folks would find it ideal fodder to once again push for restrictions of civilian firearm ownership.
That article on female privilege illustrates some of the reasons why I have fallen out of love with the concept of privilege in general.
That certainly is a Catch 22-ish way of looking at things. Just as Yossarian was comforted to know that anti-aircraft fire wasn’t a personal attack on him specifically, I’m sure the men who were drafted or beaten up for wearing dresses are comforted by the fact that those things aren’t motivated by a general hatred of men.
Here’s what bothers me about the entire article; all throughout it, Bailey Poland accepts the premise that if people could demonstrate female privilege, this would somehow be an attack on all women, or a way to demonstrate that women don’t suffer from their own very real disadvantages and problems.
If I told you that the idea of male privilege was an attempt to attack all men, you’d say I didn’t understand privilege. If I told you that I can’t have privilege because I have real problems you’d say I don’t understand privilege. If I told you I can’t have privilege because the people supporting institutional sexism don’t represent or listen to me, you’d say I don’t understand privilege.
In other words, if I’m told I have privilege, I should not take it as a personal attack. In fact, if I took it as a personal attack that would be a laughable admission that I don’t know what privilege is.
But I’m being told this by people like Poland, who, when they are told they might have privilege, absolutely take that as a personal attack and as an attempt to blame them personally for the ills of the world.
There’s no reason for Poland to debunk these examples of female privilege, because even if every single one of them were true, that wouldn’t prove that male privilege is a myth, and it wouldn’t implicate every woman.
But Poland totally accepts that it would. Even the people who claim to understand privilege act like it’s a personal attack when confronted with it in unfamiliar ways, suddenly pulling out all the reactionary arguments they usually make fun of.
Ron, did you notice I said I was searching Google News, which is not the same as “hits on Google,” as Google news disproportionately measures professional news stories?
I don’t think the Google News count is perfectly accurate, but it indicates that the Bunny Friend shooting did get coverage in major news outlets. Looking through the results, I see stories in USA Today, CNN, the NY Times, and others. Of course, none of those outlets covered the story nearly as much as local news outlets did – but that’s the way it should be.
In comparison, the Daniel Holtzclaw story – a white cop who raped 13 Black women – got much less coverage than the Bunny Friend shooting until yesterday (there was a surge of new stories yesterday, because of yesterday’s guilty verdict). Even now, there are still about 10,000 fewer google news hits for “Daniel Holtzclaw” than for “Bunny Friend shooting.”
According to your link, “”You see, it doesn’t serve the narrative. Black Lives Matter when they are (on exceedingly rare occasions) taken by white police officers either in tragic accidents or clearly bad shootings”
But if that’s the case – If media coverage is determined by whether or not a story shows white cops preying on Black lives – then why isn’t Daniel Holtzclaw a household name? Why are the two stories receiving roughly equivalent coverage, when only one of the stories serves this supposed “narrative”?
Also, in your comment, you mentioned Fox as a news source which has not sufficiently covered the Bunny Friend shooting. So is FoxNews also pursuing this “narrative”? Is Fox a supporter of the Black Lives Matter agenda?
Virtually every major news outfit in the country reported the Bunny Friend park shooting, as far as I can tell. But a shooting in which no one gets killed just isn’t newsworthy enough to require “rolling coverage” or to be front-page news across the nation (although of course it was front-page news in New Orleans) – at least, not in a year that has seen multiple shootings including deaths.
It’s a real stretch to claim that it’s a sign of bias that a shooting in which no one got killed wasn’t front-page news nationwide – especially when Fox seemed to concur that this wasn’t a story that required that high a level of coverage.
Christopher: Yeah, I felt very similar. It’s a terrible, defensive crouch of an article and it misses a lot of important things about both privilege and patriarchy.
yrs–
–Ben
I think that’s a really good point.
I still think there’s a difference between male privileges and the things that are referred to as female privileges*, and in a lot of cases, Poland is right about the difference. When women get special or beneficial treatment, like not getting drafted, it’s frequently as a result of not seeing them as competent adults, but as children who need to be protected. And the infantilization of women as a whole has more negative consequences for women than it does positive ones. So, “not getting drafted” is a silver lining to the overarching negative of not being viewed as a competent adult.
*I’m using the “s” deliberately because I think privilege works better as a single, concrete thing than as a binary “you have it or you don’t” thing. That is, it’s more of a count noun than a mass noun. It’s still part of an overarching system, but it’s too easy for people to hear “privilege” as “all the advantages, all the time” and “a privilege” might not read that way.
I think the argument she’s rebutting is “there is systemic, institutional oppression of men for the benefit of women.” There is not, and examples brought up to the contrary by MRAs, like the draft, represent a misunderstanding of history and structural sexism. Whether it’s appropriate to shorthand this as privilege or not is a different question I suppose (and not one I’m interested in having, personally, but I’ll just drop out if that’s where the conversation is).
Also, not participating in the draft is a bright spot because we are anti war, but I don’t think it’s useful to project our understanding of military endeavors as contemporary leftists back onto the people who were originally formulating these laws and the historical military tradition that underlies them.
Contemporary USians are likely to see the option to eat meat as a positive compared to being given no option about the matter; that doesn’t mean that it’s appropriate to generalize that belief and consider it a good way to understand privilege. Historically, lower caste people may technically have had the “privilege” of choice in the matter, but it’s not actually a way in which they were privileged over higher caste people. Framing it as a privilege, in the sense that contemporary social justice intends the term, occludes rather than illuminates power and oppression.
And because I hate triple posts and am therefore sometimes condemned by the universe to make them… I think many of the “privileges” assigned to women, such as the ability for most of us to wear dresses unchallenged, are better understood in the context of femmephobia or the penalty for non gender conformity, rather than as oppositional sexism. It’s not women privileged over men; it’s conformity privileged over nonconformity (or cis presentation privileged above other gender presentations), and the formulation of feminine things as degrading, especially to men. Conceiving of this as female privilege over men, therefore, again occludes rather than illuminates power structures; that’s not the correct lens for analysis.
I don’t think it’s necessary to tie oneself into knots over the draft.
The draft — including draft registration — is the patriarchal oppression of young men. The same patriarchal culture that fetishes and insists upon the forced pregnancy of young women “for the good of society” fetishes and insists upon the military sacrifice of young men “for the good of society.”
It’s quite simply a bodily autonomy issue. Patriarchal society believes that it’s desirable to seize control of the bodies of young people. The dialogue about this –for either gender — is framed simultaneously as “sacrifice,” fulfillment of gender roles, and as reformative character building.
It’s not just that the story of the wayward young woman, forced into pregnancy and reformed by motherhood, and the story of the wayward young man, forced into the military and reformed by violence, are both fetishized stories in our society. They’re fetishized in exactly the same way for very similar reasons.
yrs–
–Ben
Well, but seeing that as female privilege over men is kind of weird.
Ben Lehman @26: That’s a good point.
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