Unless you live in Minnesota or are really, really plugged in to state-level politics, you probably don’t know who Margaret Anderson Kelliher is. So allow me to introduce her. She’s the current Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, the second and longest-serving woman to hold the position. She’s also one of the DFL candidates seeking to replace incumbent Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty in 2010. She’s considered one of the front-runners for the DFL nomination, along with a handful of others, like former Sen. Mark Dayton, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak (who has not officially announced, but who is widely expected to run), and former Minnesota House Minority Leader Matt Entenza. If nominated, she’d be the first woman to head a major-party gubernatorial ticket in the state’s history.
Oh, and she’s also a gossipy teenage girl.
That assessment of Speaker Anderson Kelliher comes from progressive Minnesota blogger Brian Fallidin. Fallidin has not endorsed a candidate for governor yet, but he’s been pretty supportive of Entenza thus far, which is a feeling that I, ahem, do not really share.
But that’s fine. Fallidin is allowed to like Entenza, just as I’m allowed to dislike him. I don’t know, ultimately, who he plans to vote for (I’m leaning toward Rybak myself, but am still persuadable). And he’s allowed to dislike Margaret Anderson Kelliher, a candidate who definitely has her flaws (as does, to be honest, every DFLer running).
But Fallidin crossed the line in his latest post criticizing Anderson Kelliher. Part of the post was about minor, inside-baseball type stuff (Anderson Kelliher claiming a supporter who apparently had previously indicated support for Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner, a second-tier candidate), the sort of vaguely embarrassing mistake that hits every campaign. That’s not the part I mind. No, the part I mind is this:
It seems that Margaret Anderson Kelliher is doing a MAK-Attack on pretty much everyone these days. Her gossip girl comment originally reported in the City Pages where she said “You’re going to have a lot of fun doing a fact-check on what he says….” about Matt Entenza reminds me of that one girl we all hated in high-school–you know the one that desperately wanted you to like them, and when you didn’t they’d say nasty things behind your back?
Okay, quickly disposing of the substance of Fallidin’s complaint: Matt Entenza has a history of lying. It’s the reason I’ve vowed not to support him. Anderson Kelliher is allowed to raise character issues, especially as they relate to a candidate’s public conduct (and spying on your party’s endorsed gubernatorial candidate — while you’re running for Attorney General — is public conduct). Just as Entenza is allowed to raise the fact that Pawlenty drank the DFL’s milkshake last legislative session. These are legitimate issues for voters to discuss, and frankly, issues that should be brought up.
So it’s an absurd complaint. But more absurd is the way Fallidin frames his complaint. Here, reread the paragraph again, this time, with some emphasis added to the relative parts:
It seems that Margaret Anderson Kelliher is doing a MAK-Attack on pretty much everyone these days. Her gossip girl comment originally reported in the City Pages where she said “You’re going to have a lot of fun doing a fact-check on what he says….” about Matt Entenza reminds me of that one girl we all hated in high-school–you know the one that desperately wanted you to like them, and when you didn’t they’d say nasty things behind your back?
Now, Brian has told me via email that he didn’t intend to write anything sexist. And maybe he didn’t.
But damn, that’s pretty sexist.
Look, there’s nothing wrong with decrying Anderson Kelliher for brining up character if, for some reason, you don’t think character should be brought up in a campaign. But when you choose to focus on “gossip,” twice in two sentences, and when you compare the highest DFL officeholder in state government to “that one girl we all hated in high-school–you know the one that desperately wanted you to like them,” you’re not making a comment on Anderson Kelliher’s behavior. You’re making a comment on her gender.
Because women gossip — amirite, fellas? They just love to pick-pick-pick at people in the out crowd, not like men who get all brawny and manly and stuff. So girly, that gossip. Except, of course, that men gossip more than women, and also, nobody more fits the idea of a gossip than the guy who hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on Mike Hatch. But that, of course, wasn’t “gossipy,” because Entenza’s a dude.
But we’re not dealing with reality when we compare the Speaker of the Minnesota House to a high school sophomore. We’re dealing with stereotypes. And stereotypes are all about putting people in their place. Anderson Kelliher couldn’t be attacking Entenza for lying because she views him as a liar. ((As further proof that women are not the only ones who gossip, let me just say that several little birdies have told me that there is no love lost between Margaret Anderson Kelliher and Matt Entenza, and that the two are bitter enemies going back to before the time when Entenza was Minority Leader and Anderson Kelliher was Assistant Minority Leader. But you didn’t hear that from me.)) She must be doing it because that’s what girls do. And she’s a girl. A girly, girly girl.
I’m sorry, whether Fallidin intended the post as sexist or not, it was sexist. It belittled Anderson Kelliher and belittled women generally. I don’t care if you support Margaret Anderson Kelliher for Governor or not — as I said earlier, I’m not leaning toward her at the moment. But one should make that case based on her record as speaker and as a state representative, her positions on issues related to the state, and on her perceived ability to win the governor’s mansion for the DFL for the first time in nearly a quarter-century.
But Anderson Kelliher’s gender is not a reason to malign her, subtly or overtly. And while I dearly hope this is the last time I have to write a post like this, I know all to well that it will not be. If the 2008 primary fight between now-President Obama and now-Secretary of State Clinton taught us nothing else, it is that many progressives, sadly, are as willing to traffic in hackneyed, sorry stereotypes as the staunchest teabagger — if it helps their candidate win.
Here’s a list of blogs that are keeping up with the latest incidents involving police being assholes with tasers. Click on, scroll down, and if you are aware of any that I missed, tell me in the comments. In the meantime, I go to some sleep.
My brief, light-hearted fantasy story “Great, Golden Wings” is available on Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Check it out, if you like. I’m told it will also be available in audio soon.
Lady Percivalia watched the young cinematographist’s hands as he set up his equipment. They were narrow and graceful, dusted with pale-colored hair. His limber fingers moved rapidly as he angled his screens and adjusted his projectors.
Beside Lady Percivalia, the Lady Harrah gave a dramatic sigh. She sank back in her chair, fluttering her lashes, her face arrayed to look attractively ill. Lady Harrah was well-known for feigning such attacks of faintness. They’d won her the attentions of several young men who, while not known for their intelligence, were smart enough to seize the opportunity for getting close to a distressed young woman with a heaving bosom. Unfortunately, Lady Harrah’s best efforts had failed to make any impression on the cinematographist.
Lady Harrah enjoyed a miraculous recovery from her faint. She leaned over to Lady Percivalia. “Watch this,” she whispered. “I’ll get his attention.”
She unpinned a dragonet brooch that adorned her ruffled bodice and tapped its head. The intricate gold carving blinked into a semblance of life. It stretched like a waking cat and flew brightly into the air, a whir of jeweled wings. It caught the cinematographist’s sleeve in its jaws and tugged politely.
An amendment that would prevent the government from working with contractors who denied victims of assault the right to bring their case to court is in danger of being watered down or stripped entirely from a larger defense appropriations bill.
Multiple sources have told the Huffington Post that Sen. Dan Inouye, a longtime Democrat from Hawaii, is considering removing or altering the provision, which was offered by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and passed by the Senate several weeks ago.[…]
“The defense contractors have been storming his office,” said a source with knowledge of the situation. “Inouye either will get the amendment taken out altogether, or water it down significantly. If they water it down, they will take out the Title VII claims. This means that in discrimination cases, they will still force you into a secret forced arbitration on KBR’s (or other contractors’) own terms — with your chances of prevailing practically zero. The House seems to be very supportive of the original Franken amendment and all in line, but their hands are tied since it originated in the Senate. And since Inouye runs the show on this bill, he can easily take it out to get Republicans and the defense contractors off his back, which looks increasingly likely.”
This is possible because the bill is now in conference committee, where the House and Senate versions of the bill are merged into a single bill.
Kos has lots of contact info for Inouye, and more information (including the claim that various congressional staffers have anonymously accused Inouye of sexual harassment and in one case rape).
I’ve been hearing a lot lately about the terrifying scale of the racist hatred being directed toward Obama. Yesterday I saw this article, which implied that the Secret Service is struggling to keep up with threats against the president.
Since Mr Obama took office, the rate of threats against the president has increased 400 per cent from the 3,000 a year or so under President George W. Bush, according to Ronald Kessler, author of In the President’s Secret Service.
Some threats to Mr Obama, whose Secret Service codename is Renegade, have been publicised, including an alleged plot by white supremacists in Tennessee late last year to rob a gun store, shoot 88 black people, decapitate another 14 and then assassinate the first black president in American history.
And today there’s this article, about a creepy militia-like organization (one of several hundred just like it, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center [cited in the article]) that’s convinced Obama is Hitler and is therefore preparing to fight back against his impending “dictatorship”:
Oath Keepers is not preaching violence or government overthrow, Rhodes said. On the contrary, it is asking police and the military to lay down their arms in response to unlawful orders.
The group’s Web site, www.oathkeepers.org, features videos and testimonials in which supporters compare President Barack Obama’s America to Adolf Hitler’s Germany. They also liken Obama to England’s King George III during the American Revolution.
One member, in a videotaped speech at an event in Washington, D.C., calls Obama “the domestic enemy the Constitution is talking about.”
OK, none of this is surprising to me, nor should it be to anyone who understands just how racist this country is. This is simply the new face of the KKK — the sheets are off, the N-word is gone, and they’re using code-words like “patriotism”, but these people are preparing for a race war. They’re terrified that Obama’s election means… something. That PoC will enslave white people, maybe. The end of white dominance in the country’s bastions of power and privilege. The fact that these bastions are in no danger whatsoever of a mass “browning” is beside the fact; Obama is a symbol, and they’re terrified of the potential change that he represents. And to assuage their terror, they’re gearing up to kill… well, not just him, but pretty much anybody who scares them. I figure most of us ABW bloggers and readers are probably somewhere on that list, if you go far enough down. I mean, really — we’ve got radical Christianists* praying for the man’s death. These are the terrorists we should really fear.
But I found myself wondering, today, what Barack and Michelle Obama have told their children about this.
Because parents of black children have to do that. If they have any sense of responsibility, they prepare their children for the racism they’ll inevitably face. I don’t have kids, but I certainly remember my parents and grandparents carefully pointing out incidents and disparities and stereotypes, and talking with me about them. I remember my mother instructing me about how to act with the police — as a woman I’m not in quite as much danger from them as a black man would be, but I’m not safe either. Yet even with this advance preparation, I remember being shocked as I grew older and realized that racism had not ended with the Civil Rights Act, as I had been taught in school. It was still happening, still killing — still a near-daily threat to my personal health and welfare. My parents had done what they could to cushion this shock, but it was still painful, even terrifying, when I finally understood it as more than an intellectual exercise.
So what, I wonder, does the first couple tell Sasha and Malia? Do they try and prepare their daughters for the possibility that their father will be assassinated because of his race? Have they warned the girls that they’ll probably never be able to leave Secret Service or bodyguard protection, at any point in their lives? Do they keep the girls off the internet, for fear they’ll find out that Dad is getting 30 death threats a day? Or when they talk with the girls about it — how the hell do you talk to a child about something like that, without traumatizing them for life? How do you keep children, when they’re immersed in so much hatred and fear, from growing up hateful and fearful themselves?
I’m not a parent yet, so fortunately I don’t have to deal with these questions. (I am an official “auntie” to my best friends’ kids, but like a good auntie I get to defer the tough questions to Mom and Dad. To a degree.) But I cannot help empathizing with Michelle, who was younger than me when she had Malia, and wondering how I would handle the matter if I were in her position.
PoC parents: how do you do this? How do you prepare your kids for this fucked-up world?
* Using this term consciously to mimic the way most of American society refers to “radical Islamists.”
Sorry for the delay in this week’s dollhouse episode. I’ve been a bit busy, and this was a solid episode. Not so world-changing that I had to spend the next three days searching for superlatives, or so incompetent that I was instantly driven to rant. Just solid. I think in some ways it proves that Dollhouse can have solid Engagement of the week episodes, so I was wrong last week.
So for those who haven’t been following dollhouse ratings from the edge of your seats – the news has been all over the place. The episodes were appalling, they were better but still awful, Fox was going to pull it, Fox was committed to making and airing all 13 episodes, Fox had confirmed airdates for the next 5 episodes
Well four days or so after that good news Fox has announced that they’re not airing Dollhouse during sweeps, but instead they’re airing double episodes through December. This means I’m going to be in withdrawl all through November, and also I’m grumpy. If anyone out there has a Nielson box, the offer is still on for a very small bribe.
There’s something that gets bandied about a lot in workshops when people are talking to newbies. “You don’t have to kill your characters to up the stakes,” they say. “There are worse things that can happen to people than death.”
This is… well, I don’t know if it’s true, as stated. But there are certainly many things that are more fictionally interesting than death (in most cases) that one can do to one’s characters.
The art of character torture is one that all writers need to master. For those writers who wuv their characters, it can be a hard thing to force them into dangerous situations, to push them to emotional brinks, and to take away the things they love. For others of us who are more cold-hearted, character torture can be a fun way to pass the time. When I was in college, I used to spend hours with a friend of mine plotting ways we could torture our characters.
To torture your character effectively you have to really understand them. You have to know what their fears are so that you can force them to face those fears. You have to know what they love so that you can take it away. If your character has a deftly, deeply created psychology, then you can accomplish subtle and fascinating things by forcing them to face the things that they, personally, don’t want to face, instead of just forcing them to come up against the problems that scare everyone.
To use TV as an example, if you really want to torture Monk (or Felix Unger from the Odd Couple), you make him use a port-a-potty. If you really want to bother House (or Sherlock Holmes), you make him face a problem he can’t solve.
Those are big, bold characters with big, bold problems, but it applies to subtler characterization, too. It’s a little harder to find cultural touchstones to tap into here, but literature is full of moments where a character is crushed because of a seemingly small event that symbolizes a great deal more to them because of their history.
Now, if you wanted to push these characters’ buttons, you could do it with less subtle devices. They all fear death. None of them want to see their family members killed. But good characterization gives you more than one tool with which to up the stakes for your characters — not just the hammer that you can use to devastate any character, but also all the little pincers and hot irons that are tailored to your character specifically.
However, when I see this advice handed out in workshops, I usually see it being invoked in an ableist way. “Your character doesn’t have to lose his life to show he’s sacrificed to show that he’s lost something. There are other things you can do that are even worse. You can…”
And here comes the ableist parade: You could mutilate him. He could lose his arm. He could lose his legs. He could become disabled.
Now, I’m not going to argue that becoming disabled isn’t a bad thing for most characters who start out abled. Losing an ability that you used to have is no fun. But you know what it isn’t? Worse than death. Being disabled is not worse than death.
Yet I know I’ve sat in workshops where these statements were made, and I nodded along, and I probably even repeated the sentiment (hopefully not to students, but I certainly don’t remember every thing I’ve ever said in class). It wasn’t until I was sitting here, thinking about ableism, that suddenly an old piece of criticism someone gave me on a story drifted into my mind — he has to lose something, maybe you could have someone cut off his arm — that I realized: Oh, hello ableism. How are you today?
I know that writers have different techniques for writing, and so I wouldn’t submit this as being proscriptive for everyone. But I’d like to ask people, including myself, to think about what it would be like if we removed disability from the list of things that we can use to torture any generic character with, the things like death, and losing family members.
It would still be a tool we could use when we wanted to torture a character whose psychology made them specifically susceptible to fears of being disabled — doctors who pride themselves on being able to cure everything and can’t deal with their disability because it’s a constant reminder of their failure to do so (to bring us back to House), but also piano players who fear losing their manual dexterity, athletes whose careers are built on being able to run, or even just people who are really ableist.
What would it be like if disability was portrayed as something that specific people feared for specific reasons, rather than being used as something unilaterally feared and reviled?
There was a blowup in the feminist blogosphere recently on the lack of intersectional recognition and dealing with disability. I’ve have not been following it as well as I should have, but one of the posts I read mentioned FWD/Forward In it’s About section, the contributors explain their mission:
FWD/Forward is a group blog written by feminists with disabilities. It is a place to discuss disability issues and the intersection between feminism and disability rights activism. The content here ranges from basic information which is designed to introduce people who are new to disability issues or feminism to some core concepts, to more advanced topics, with the goal of promoting discussion, conversation, fellowship, and education.
This site does not claim to speak for all feminists with disabilities. However, we are trying to cultivate a broad perspective which incorporates as many experiences and viewpoints as possible. We have attempted to assemble a diverse team of contributors with a broad spectrum of disabilities who come from different cultural, racial, religious, and class backgrounds, as well as age groups, and we welcome contributions such as guest posts, suggestions for article topics, and engagement in the comments from people interested in disability issues, disability feminism, and related topics, especially if those contributions will broaden our perspective.MORE
I learned a lot and I think that lots of people could too. Which is why I am highlighting this blog specifically. And I encourage you all to go there and read everything else, cause what I linked is but a fraction of the stuff there.
One of the more bizarre sub-plots from the bizarre story that is the faked balloon voyage of Falcon Heene is the YouTube video in which Falcon and his brothers claimed to be “not pussified.”
It’s a lovely video about how three young boys aren’t being “pussified,” and also, how they hate gay people. Hard to see how a family where dad has his children opine about how much they don’t want to be girls could go wrong, and so surprising that there have been, at the very least, allegations of domestic abuse against Richard Heene, the boys’ father.
Now obviously, this video is all about hating on the soi disant “feminizing” of American men, but it was the title of it — “Not Pussified” — that caught my eye. Because that links Heene back to one of the great moments in blog history.
I don’t know that Heene read du Toit’s screed, but it seems pretty likely. At the very least, he picked up the word pussified from one du Toit’s readers, and then cheerfully passed it along to his sons. And that says something — for du Toit’s ideals are, to be blunt, awful.
The essay really should be read by anyone seeking to understand the mind of someone like Richard Heene, although I caution that it should not be read without a vomit bag by one’s side. It can’t be summarized, but here are a few choice passages:
We have become a nation of women.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. There was a time when men put their signatures to a document, knowing full well that this single act would result in their execution if captured, and in the forfeiture of their property to the State. Their wives and children would be turned out by the soldiers, and their farms and businesses most probably given to someone who didn’t sign the document.
[Several other examples of manly manliness deleted]
There was even a time when a President of the United States threatened to punch a man in the face and kick him in the balls, because the man had the temerity to say bad things about the President’s daughter’s singing.
We’re not like that anymore.
Quick interjection — du Toit is from South Africa. Yes, he now lives in America; still, I can’t help reading this and thinking, “who are you calling ‘we?'”
Now, little boys in grade school are suspended for playing cowboys and Indians, cops and crooks, and all the other familiar variations of “good guy vs. bad guy” that helped them learn, at an early age, what it was like to have decent men hunt you down, because you were a lawbreaker.
Now, men are taught that violence is bad—that when a thief breaks into your house, or threatens you in the street, that the proper way to deal with this is to “give him what he wants”, instead of taking a horsewhip to the rascal or shooting him dead where he stands.
[Several paragraphs of “proof” that modern men are weaklings deleted]
And finally, our President, who happens to have been a qualified fighter pilot, lands on an aircraft carrier wearing a flight suit, and is immediately dismissed with words like “swaggering”, “macho” and the favorite epithet of Euro girly-men, “cowboy”. Of course he was bound to get that reaction—and most especially from the Press in Europe, because the process of male pussification Over There is almost complete.
How did we get to this?
Remember, this was back in 2003, when our President was at his apex of manliness. Still, it says something that du Toit was swooning at the Mission Accomplished landing, doesn’t it?
In the first instance, what we have to understand is that America is first and foremost, a culture dominated by one figure: Mother. It wasn’t always so: there was a time when it was Father who ruled the home, worked at his job, and voted.
But in the twentieth century, women became more and more involved in the body politic, and in industry, and in the media—and mostly, this has not been a good thing. When women got the vote, it was inevitable that government was going to become more powerful, more intrusive, and more “protective” (ie. more coddling), because women are hard-wired to treasure security more than uncertainty and danger. It was therefore inevitable that their feminine influence on politics was going to emphasize (lowercase “s”) social security.
Yes, ladies — it’s your fault! Your fault that men no longer fight duels! Your fault that we no longer engage in fisticuffs, or drink until our livers explode! Blast you, and your belief that maybe it’s okay if drunken bar fights are not a daily occurrence in one’s life!
Kim du Toit whines for several more paragraphs about how television commercials show men as big doofuses, and therefore women are castrating bitches who deserve to be lonely (no, seriously: “What this guy is going to do is smile ruefully, finish his cereal, and then go and fuck his secretary, who doesn’t try to cut his balls off on a daily basis. Then, when the affair is discovered, people are going to rally around the castrating bitch called his wife, and call him all sorts of names. He’ll lose custody of his kids, and they will be brought up by our ultimate modern-day figure of sympathy: The Single Mom. You know what? Some women deserve to be single moms.”) and ranting about Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (“A bunch of homosexuals trying to “improve” ordinary men into something “better” [ie. more acceptable to women]: changing the guy’s clothes, his home decor, his music—for fuck’s sake, what kind of girly-man would allow these simpering butt-bandits to change his life around?”) and embracing misandry (“Yes, the men are, by and large, slobs. Big fucking deal. Last time I looked, that’s normal. Men are slobs, and that only changes when women try to civilize them by marriage. That’s the natural order of things.”) Oh, and also supporting sports like dog- and cock-fighting. And claiming that George W. Bush is a real man who doesn’t have to prove it. And making racist statements. And then comes perhaps the most asinine four paragraphs ever written in the English language.
Speaking of rap music, do you want to know why more White boys buy that crap than Black boys do? You know why rape is such a problem on college campuses? Why binge drinking is a problem among college freshmen?
It’s a reaction: a reaction against being pussified. And I understand it, completely. Young males are aggressive, they do fight amongst themselves, they are destructive, and all this does happen for a purpose.
Because only the strong men propagate.
And women know it. You want to know why I know this to be true? Because powerful men still attract women. Women, even liberal women, swooned over George Bush in a naval aviator’s uniform. Donald Trump still gets access to some of the most beautiful pussy available, despite looking like a medieval gargoyle. Donald Rumsfeld, if he wanted to, could fuck 90% of all women over 50 if he wanted to, and a goodly portion of younger ones too.
This is what Kim du Toit called for: the manliness of Donald Rumsfeld, and the condoning of rape — for rape is understandable, given how mean women are. And only the strong propagate — those strong enough to take by force what is not given.
That is what manhood is to men like this. Compare with the “pussification” seen by sneering troglodytes like Heene and du Toit: men taking responsibility for themselves. Choosing to think before acting, talk before fighting. Picking up the floor, maybe washing the dishes. Cleaning ourselves. Not putting our children heedlessly into harm’s way. Behaving, in short, like civilized human beings are supposed to.
It does not surprise me that a man who would raise his sons to declare that they weren’t going to be pussified would be the same kind of man who would beat his wife. Would be the same kind of man who would use his children to get ahead. Would be the same kind of man who would commit several felonies, and lie to the police, in a vain effort to get on television. It doesn’t surprise me at all, because the kind of man du Toit praised, and the kind of man Heene claimed to be, is at heart a narcissist, far more interested in himself than anyone else in the world, far more willing to risk himself and his family than to change course and admit fault. If the pussification of the Western male means fewer men like Heene and du Toit, then all I can say is that we can’t get pussified fast enough.
I also think a lot of people genuinely think that a woman can not be strong enough to be president…