Monday Reads: Women’s Day Edition

Good Morning!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be a woman in a society that only values you under specific circumstances.  It’s probably related to the passage of yet another Women’s day on March 8 where I look around and see more lost ground than ground gained. The stereotypes we identified in my women’s studies group in high school are still alive and flung across the internet.

I didn’t watch the Oscars–having no interest in celebs or movies–but I did notice the next few days were filled with the usual snipes and compliments on dresses.  Then, there was the hooplah on the plastic surgery of Kim Novak and Goldie Hawn that many deemed’ pathetic and unrecognizable.   Novak is 81. 

The Internet gasped in horror—or was it amusement? —when the Vertigo star took the stage with Matthew McConaughey to present the award for Best Animated Feature to Disney’s Frozen (an unfortunate coincidence, generating countless rudimentary puns on social media). A sampling of tweets, including several from well-known figures in the entertainment and media industries: Comedian Nick Youssef joked that “Kim Novak was just safely transported back to the Hollywood Wax Museum”; Chelsea Lately writer Fortune Feimster quipped, “I’m assuming Kim Novak was representing the movie ‘Mask’”; Huffington Post editorial director Howard Fineman broadened the mockery: “#AcademyAward for worst plastic surgery: tie between Kim Novak and Goldie Hawn.”

And blowback against the comments was equally fierce. Newly minted MSNBC host Ronan Farrow shot back, “Half the people being cruel about Kim Novak are ten years away from being Kim Novak.” Actress Rose McGowan tweeted a picture of the actress in her heyday as a sex symbol, adding, “Self-obsessed and disrespectful, that sums up the Oscar audience.”

In a way, by tweeting a picture of Novak sprawled out on a bed in a scene from the 1958 film, Bell, Book and Candle, McGowan was unwittingly acknowledging that we should judge actresses by their looks—because beauty is indeed one of the most important attributes for a Hollywood actress, young or old. Had Novak not won the genetic lottery, she could have easily lost her breakout role in Hitchcock’sVertigo to a prettier face (Novak was a good actress, but not a great one). So why are we surprised when, years after being out of the limelight, viewers continue obsessing over the face that once made her famous? And we should be no less surprised that Novak is obsessed with her face.

Goldie’s dress and face didn’t fare much better.  I’ve been thinking of both of them in light of Diane Keaton, Helen Mirren, and Dame Diana Rigg who are still trodding the boards and have passed on certain enhancements.  Diana Rigg is one among many devious women starring in HBO’s Game of thrones. She’s a fiesty delight and I enjoyed reading this interview with her.

Diana Rigg is trying to cross the Fulham Road in London. Elegant from two-tone shoes to circular, tinted glasses, she is thwarted by the traffic. “Good timing,” she says after I introduce myself. “You can help me get across.” In the 60s, when she played Emma Peel in The Avengers, a catsuit-wearing Rigg would have vaulted across car bonnets, and if any male driver had remonstrated, she would have karate-chopped him in the throat and kicked him in the crown jewels. But not today.

“It’s my damned tin knees,” she says as we link arms and hobble across the street. She had an operation on one of them recently. I had heard that she damaged her knees with those lengthy tap-dancing routines in the 1987 West End production of Sondheim’s Follies? “No, it’s genetic. My brother, who is 80, has the same problem.”

Not that the 75-year-old actor is unhappy with her lot.”The older you get, I have to say, the funnier you find life,” she says. “That’s the only way to go. If you get serious about yourself as you get old, you are pathetic.”

We settle in the garden of a French cafe. A few years ago Rigg would have sought out the garden to indulge her 20-a-day habit, but Dame Diana gave up smoking a couple of years ago, and today wants to catch the early spring rays and feed crumbs to the birds.

“I found myself talking aloud to the pigeons in the park the other day,” she tells me. “The male pigeons were busily pursuing the female pigeons. I said: ‘You silly farts. Can’t you see they’re not interested?’ And then I realised there were people listening to me.” And what applies to birds, she reckons, applies to elderly men and women. “I think women of my age are still attractive.” She removes her glasses and faces me down with brown eyes that have turned strong men – and, indeed, women – to jelly. “Men of my age aren’t.” Why? “They’ve got their cojones halfway to their knees,” she says, giggling. “They have the same descent as tits.”

Aging is not an easy thing in a society that values women for their looks and their fertility. But, you’re either invisible or you’re fertile and thereby potential property of men and state.  Here’s a list of the crap Lousiana legislators are proposing for the women in my state.  

HB 388: Requires doctors to have admitting privileges at local hospital before performing abortions.

HB 401: Prohibits advertising of abortion services and distribution of abortofacients.

HB 727: Requires provision of psychological health information prior to abortion.

HB 590: (Constitutional amendment) Prohibits the use of public monies for abortion and provision of public monies to providers of abortion except as may be required by the federal government as a condition of federal financial participation in a public medical assistance program.

HB 348: Prohibits termination of life-sustaining procedures for pregnant women.

HB 305: Prohibits providers of elective abortions and their affiliates from delivering any instruction or materials in schools.

As you can see, the obsession with lady parts is ongoing.  In fact, any kind of focus on the state of women in this country brings to focus exactly how unkind of a country we can be.

According to the African American Policy Forum, black girls are  suspended at a higher ratethan all other girls and white and Latino boys. Sixty-seven percent of black girls reported feelings of sadness or hopelessness for more than two weeks straight compared to 31 percent of white girls and 40 percent of Latinas. Single black women have the lowest net wealth of any group, with research showing a median wealth of $100. Single black men by contrast have an average net wealth of $7,900 and single white women have an average net wealth of $41,500. Fifty-five percent of black women (and black men) have never been married, compared to 34 percent for white women.

This situation is dire at every level. But perhaps the most troubling thing of all: The report indicates that while over 100 million philanthropic dollars have been spent in the last decade creating mentoring and educational initiatives for black and brown boys, less than a million dollars has been given to the study of black and brown girls!

Several years ago, in line with the rise of the field of Girls Studies in academe, a group of students asked me to teach a course on Black Girls Studies. The number of books and scholarly articles barely added up to enough for a full course syllabus.

It’s amazing to me how many women are still invisible.  And, it’s still amazing that we can’t seem to gain ground on any particular front.  Here’s a bit from Robin Morgan that’s worth a read on dissent within the feminist ranks.  She has some ground rules.

But I have standards, seasoned over 40 years of activism. I don’t waste time debating patriarchy’s defenders. I don’t practise or tolerate personal trashing. I don’t engage with faux feminists who, whether under the aegis of religious fiat or sexual libertarianism, refuse to understand that all women deserve full reproductive rights, all women deserve to love whomever they choose, all women deserve freedom from violence, poverty and illiteracy, that the buying and selling of any human being is slavery. Feminism is for all women and girls, not a privileged few or one ethnicity, religion, age, sexual preference, ability, region or hemisphere. Women born and raised on this fragile planet have more uniting us than dividing us – and it’s the job of feminists to help us realise that. Those are my standards.

Women are still universally treated like chattel.

Around 14 million girls, some as young as eight years old, will be married in 2014.

An estimated 1.2m children are trafficked into slavery each year; 80 per cent are girls.

In 10 countries around the world women are legally bound to obey their husbands

Only 76 countries have legislation that specifically addresses domestic violence – and just 57 of them include sexual abuse.

It makes me dizzy thinking that my 40 years as an activist really haven’t led to much change at all.  I did find that there are a few places I can take refuge should I decide to move to a matriarchal society.

The Nagovisi community of South Bougainville, New Guinea is matrilineal with matriclans. The women of the Nagovisi hold positions of authority and power, traditionally in regards to the cultivation of their gardens. These gardens are the woman’s sphere, and are inherited by daughters. The community is largely based on crop cultivation. With this control of the food, like sweet potatoes and coconuts, woman may remain independent and men are dependent on the women for that food.

The man eating the woman’s food is a symbol of their marriage, and if he were to stop, it would be a sign of divorce. Men typically move into the woman’s family for marriage, and the women are the breadwinners. Men take care of the clearing of the lands, but typically follow the instructions of the woman.

That sounds interesting!

Well, I suppose taking stock of something where progress depends on the very people that benefit from the status quo is a lot to hope for.  Especially, when you look at the CPAC attendance and see how many women are willing to collaborate with the the worst of the worst.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today.

Monday Reads: A Game of Thrones

Good Morning!

I’ve been watching two HBO series recently as well as doing my usual reading of the latest news. I’ve sensed a theme. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s what I’m fascinated with, drawn to, or surround by in this existence. But, every where I look I see power brokers and money and ultimately war and violence against mostly the poor, women, and children. This is true in the worlds of True Detective and Game of Thrones which are fiction but appear to be loosely based on the corrupt mess of politics and religion in Louisiana and the nastiness of England’s War of the Roses respectively. It’s also true if you look around.

Grabbing power and vast wealth takes money, cunning, and the naked willingness to do anything to further one’s fortunes.  Every one else be damned!  I looked for news for the morning post and it appears that fiction does indeed mimic real life because the same threads of deceit and power grabbing rule the headlines too.  Evil power brokers and tyrants looking for more territory don’t only exist in the pages of literature and the visuals of cinema. They also don’t just haunt the pages of medieval history or swampy, backwards Louisiana.  The desire to corrupt the corruptible for personal gain is every where.

 It is, I believe, primarily a white man’s game and no one plays it better than the Koch Brothers IRL.

“People are really drawn to the Koch model,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a New York hedge fund investor and Republican fund-raiser, who attended the Kochs’ annual donor conference near Palm Springs, Calif., in January. “It’s adaptive, data-driven, and they are the most propitious capital allocators in political activism.”

The quiet revolt signals a broader shift in the world of big money. Clubs of elite donors in both parties are taking a more central role in shaping policy and campaigns, displacing party leaders and the outside-spending organizations they helped create after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010. And the sheer scale of their spending is almost certain to rewrite the playbook for political campaigns this year, as candidates reckon with the strongly held views of some of the world’s wealthiest people.

The phenomenon is not limited to the right. Super PACs blessed by Democratic congressional leaders have posted strong fund-raising over the last year, bolstered by victories in 2012. But those organizations are now being overshadowed by donors like Tom Steyer, the billionaire who is raising a $100 million political fund with other wealthy environmentalists to battle politicians deemed hostile to climate regulation.

Parties have “lost the ability to control the process,” said Jim Nicholson, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, partly because of legislation that cut the flow of money to party committees. “The party can’t coordinate with these super PACs and neither can the campaigns, so there’s a lot more chaos and disequilibrium in the campaigns. And the party structure clearly has a diminished role because they don’t have the resources they used to have.”

Rob Stein, a founder of the Democracy Alliance, one of the largest clubs of donors on the left, agreed.

“The devolution of the two-party system has begun,” Mr. Stein said. “Money is leaving the parties and going to independent expenditure groups. These now are fracturing the ‘big tents’ of our old two-party system into independent, narrow and well-funded wings.”

We’ve seen the Republican party struggle recently with so many factions that it has nearly made the country ungovernable.  The powerful–who once thought that religious kooks were their pawns–are now looking to other means of addressing their greed and expansion needs.  I’m watching Mary Landrieu be assaulted on TV by Koch Brothers money right now. There is not even a challenger at the moment although there are several very extremist congressmen hanging about in the wings. The point appears to be to remove the obstacles first. I’m not sure that they very much care about the overall results as long as the resulting chaos creates an environment where they can thrive without oversight and responsibility for the havoc they cause.

It’s also fascinating to watch Putin flex those old KGB muscles in the Crimea.  The same teapots seem to brew endless tempests.  Wow.  Did the establishment media and analysts miss this one.  They’d do a lot better spending time with reruns of Game of Thrones than sitting in their Georgetown condos discussing their talents for taking complex concepts and boiling them down to digestible and infinitely discussable bits of prose and sound bytes.

Nobody, including us, is infallible about the future. Giving the public your best thoughts about where things are headed is all a poor pundit (or government analyst) can do. But this massive intellectual breakdown has a lot to do with a common American mindset that is especially built into our intellectual and chattering classes. Well educated, successful and reasonably liberal minded Americans find it very hard to believe that other people actually see the world in different ways. They can see that Vladimir Putin is not a stupid man and that many of his Russian officials are sophisticated and seasoned observers of the world scene. American experts and academics assume that smart people everywhere must want the same things and reach the same conclusions about the way the world works.

How many times did foolishly confident American experts and officials come out with some variant of the phrase “We all share a common interest in a stable and prosperous Ukraine.” We may think that’s true, but Putin doesn’t.

We blame this in part on the absence of true intellectual and ideological diversity in so much of the academy, the policy world and the mainstream media. Most college kids at good schools today know many more people from different races and cultural groups than their grandparents did, but they are much less exposed to people who think outside the left-liberal box. How many faithful New York Times readers have no idea what American conservatives think, much less how Russian oligarchs do? Well bred and well read Americans live in an ideological and cultural cocoon and this makes them fatally slow to understand the very different motivations that animate actors ranging from the Tea Party to the Kremlin to, dare we say it, the Supreme Leader and Guide of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

As far as we can tell, the default assumption guiding our political leadership these days is that the people on the other side of the bargaining table (unless they are mindless Tea Party Republicans) are fundamentally reasonable people who see the world as we do, and are motivated by the same things that motivate us. Many people are, of course, guided by an outlook not all that dissimilar from the standard upper middle class gentry American set of progressive ideas. But some aren’t, and when worlds collide, trouble comes.

Too much of the Washington policy establishment looks around the world and sees only reflections of its own enlightened self. That’s natural and perhaps inevitable to some degree. The people who rise through the competitive bureaucracies of American academic, media and think tank life tend to be those who’ve most thoroughly absorbed and internalized the set of beliefs and behavioral norms that those institutions embody and respect. On the whole, those beliefs and norms have a lot going for them. It would not be an improvement if America’s elite institutions started to look more like their counterparts in Russia or Zimbabwe.

But while those ideas and beliefs help people rise through the machinery of the American power system, they can get in the way when it comes to understanding the motives and calculations of people like President Putin. The best of the journalists, think tankers and officials will profit from the Crimean policy fiasco and will never again be as smug or as blind as so much of Washington was last week. The mediocre majority will go on as before.

It seems power brokers do lose interest though.  A few years ago, this skirmish was centermost on the minds of those folks getting their opiate on via the Oscars last night.  There is just one more imperialist army left in the Afghanistan dirt. Russia has moved on from there.  And, now, so do we.  There is one more little outraged pawn exiting the global throne room.

In an unusually emotional interview, the departing Afghan president sought to explain why he has been such a harsh critic of the 12-year-old U.S. war effort here. He said he’s deeply troubled by all the casualties he has seen, including those in U.S. military operations. He feels betrayed by what he calls an insufficient U.S. focus on targeting Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan. And he insists that public criticism was the only way to guarantee an American response to his concerns.

To Karzai, the war was not waged with his country’s interests in mind.

“Afghans died in a war that’s not ours,’ he said in the interview, his first in two years with a U.S. newspaper.

In Karzai’s mind, al-Qaeda is “more a myth than a reality” and the majority of the United States’ prisoners here were innocent. He’s certain that the war was “for the U.S. security and for the Western interest.”

Such statements elicit scorn and shock from U.S. officials, who point out that Americans have sacrificed mightily for Afghanistan — losing more than 2,000 lives and spending more than $600 billion in the effort to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban and rebuild the country.

So much hubris. So much detritus. So  much power and money to be generated by fresh adventures. 

Let’s call it McDomination. It’s been a well thought out and highly financed war plan since the 1970s.  Big Business and Power Brokers dislike all the little people taking to the streets about ecology and civil rights.

On August 23, 1971, Lewis Powell sent a confidential memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., the director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memo was both a call to arms and a battle plan for a business response to its growing legion of opponents. Powell was a corporate lawyer, a former president of the American Bar Association, and a board member of eleven corporations, including Philip Morris and the Ethyl Corporation, a company that made the lead for leaded gasoline. Powell had also represented the Tobacco Institute, the research arm of the tobacco industry, and various tobacco companies. Later that year, President Richard Nixon would nominate Powell to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, where he served for fifteen years.

Powell’s memo serves as a useful starting point for understanding how the transformation of the corporate system that began in the 1970s set the stage for today’s global health problems. “No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack,” wrote Powell. “The assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued. It is gaining momentum and converts.” “One of the bewildering paradoxes of our time,” Powell continued, “is the extent to which the enterprise system tolerates, if not participates in, its own destruction.” He enumerated the system’s enemies: well-meaning liberals, government officials intent on regulating business, news media, student activists, and an emerging environmental and consumer movement— especially its most visible leader, Ralph Nader, in Powell’s view “the single most effective antagonist of American business.”

Powell called on business, especially the Chamber of Commerce, to end its “appeasement” of its critics and launch an aggressive and systematic counter-assault. The memo warned that “independent and uncoordinated activity by individual corporations, as important as this is, will not be sufficient. Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years … and in the political power available only though united action and national organizations.”

Powell urged new, well-funded public media campaigns to support the free enterprise system, the creation of think tanks and institutes to develop policy proposals and “direct political action” in legislative and judicial arenas. “It is time,” he argued, for “American business … to apply their great talents vigorously to the preservation of the system itself.” Powell’s “confidential” memo was first circulated within the Chamber of Commerce, then released in 1972 by investigative reporter Jack Anderson during the Powell Supreme Court confirmation hearings. While the document may not have been the blueprint for the rise of the Republican right that some analysts claim, its real value is as the articulation of the corporate prescription for capitalism’s ills.

Today, more than forty years after business took up Powell’s appeal, its success in achieving the goals he laid out makes it hard to fathom the depth of his concern.

A new fresh hell from the minds and money of Putin, Charles Koch, Ted Cruz, Henry Kissinger and Richard II .   Perhaps I should be watching less dark fiction and I’d be less prone to pick up the similarities.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today.

Friday Reads: Mansplaining and other Nightmares of the American Culture Wars

Sometimes I just really want to reach through the TV or computer screen and slap the shit out of people. Bill O’Reilly is always high on my list. The last time he interviewed our country’s president he interrupted so many times that you had to wonder why he just didn’t lecture a chair like grizzly old Clint Eastwood did at the Republican National Convention. O’Reilly is at the top of my list for men I’d like to slap the crap out of for mansplaining why Madam President might have a downside to a pair of political consultants that are women..

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly invited two women onto his show  to discuss whether a woman could be the leader of the free world, expressing his concern about her “gender deficiency.”

Neither guest was having it.

Following up on a previous interview with Michele Bachman (R-MN), who stated that she did not feel that America was ready for a woman president, O’Reilly invited Republican strategist Kate Obenshain and Fox contributor Kirsten Powers on to discuss the issue.

O’Reilly started with Powers asking if there was “some downside to having a woman president, something that may not fit with that office, correct?”

“Hmmm, I’m gonna say say, no, Bill,” Powers replied, while Obenshain laughed.

“Just because you’re female that it would… something … ummmm,” Powers said, running out of words before asking O’Reilly, “Let me ask you this, whats the downside of a man being president?”

O’Reilly replied that it would take “three years” to discuss, stating, “look at some of the guys we’ve had in there since 1864.”

Turning to Obenshain, O’Reilly admitted that  men “may not be as open to sensitive discussion as women” and asked, “There’s gotta be a downside for a woman, do you know one?”

“Uh, you know , I’m having a tough time with this one too, Bill. It depends on the certain individual,” she replied before Powers interjected and Obenshain laughed and added, “Oh, good.”

Yes, folks!  There has to be a downside to stuff that makes you feel threatened and icky.  Ever notice how many straight men obsess on icky girl parts and icky gay sex?   I thought penis cakes were for Bachelorette parties, but there’s a Republican Man that thinks they’re an essential part of a gay wedding.  “Judson Phillips, president of Tea Party Nation, is a little upset about Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s decision last night to veto a bill that would have expanded the ability of business owners to discriminate against LGBT people and others.”  Methinks the dude doth protest a little too much.  He seems to have an unhealthy interest in other people’s sex lives.

Should a devote baker be required to create a cake for a homosexual wedding that has a giant phallic symbol on it or should a baker be required to create pastries for a homosexual wedding in the shape of genitallia [sic]?  Or should a photographer be required to photograph a homosexual wedding where the participants decide they want to be nude or engage in sexual behavior?  Would they force a Jewish photographer to work a Klan or Nazi event? How about forcing a Muslim caterer to work a pork barbeque dinner?

Perhaps he’s went to see “Hot Jesus” at the movie theatre and became bicurious?

Clearly Jesus was sexy.

After all, He is the Son of God.

I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but as I watched the trailer for the new movie, “Son of God,” I found myself gawking at the actor portraying Jesus.

For a group of people obsessed with immaculate conception and virgins, we sure seem to have a close up view of a few secret gardens, don’t we?  Yes, no one excels at mansplaining more than Catholic League President Bill Donohue who thinks that no one ever, EVER discriminates against the GLBT community and wants some one to come up with an example.

“Where are the examples of gays being discriminated against?” Donohue asked. “If they’re being discriminated against, how come they make more money than straight people on average?”

“Is somebody being denied at Applebee’s getting a hamburger? Where are these examples?” he followed up.

“Under the law in Arizona, there is no special protection of the LGBT community, so a business member, if he or she wanted to or she wanted to, could discriminate without violation,” Como said. “That’s why the law was unnecessary. Do you get that?”

“Can you enumerate for me examples of gay people in Arizona who are having their right violated by people of faith?” Donohue asked.

Yes. Nothing to see here.  Just move on with those penis cakes to some other place.

Turning oppressors into victims seems to be the new tactic in the Culture War.  White men with guns are scared of you black unarmed teenage boys going about your business.  Guess who has the right to use deadly force?  Then, there’s the continual series of jaw dropping court findings that continue to represent the worst of rape apologia.  Let’s just let the mansplaining begin.

In 2006, Kelly Vosgien pled guilty to three counts of rape, three counts of sodomy, one count of sexual abuse and three counts of compelling prostitution. The Oregon state court gave him a sentence of 55 years. These charges were brought against Vosgien after he traded cigarettes and money to his daughter and her friend in return for sex. Both girls were minors at the time.

The case had seemingly been put to rest until 2013, when Vosgien applied for habeas relief, claiming “actual innocence” with regard to his previous convictions, paying special attention to the charges of compelling prostitution. Vosgien missed the one-year filing deadline for habeas, but as is common and often imperative with retrials, the appeal was allowed to proceed.

The Oregon district court that handled this initial appeal used Bousley v. United States to throw out the innocence claim, citing precedent: “In cases where the Government has forgone more serious charges in the course of plea bargaining, petitioner’s showing of actual innocence must also extend to those charges.”

The second part of the court’s argument, less lawyerly and therefore more straightforward, claimed that bribing one’s daughter, or any child, in exchange for sex must constitute some sort of crime under Oregon state law.

In the end, the judge refused to alter any charges on the 2006 conviction, so Vosgien applied for a second appeal, which went to the 9th Circuit court.

This move, amazingly, worked—sort of. The court’s decision, filed February 13, reversed the ruling of the district court in part by throwing out the three counts of compelling prostitution. The argument that got Vosgien off the hook was based on a 2010 case, State v. Vargas-Torres, which narrowed the legal definition of “compelling prostitution” in Oregon. The court determined such a charge now requires that goods be traded for sex through a third party. Since Kelly Vosgien procured the sexual favors only for himself, these three counts will be stricken from his sentence.

“Goods be traded for sex through a third party”.  WTF?

Yes, everything up is down.  

Paula Deen’s $100 million empire crumbled last year after she admitted to using the N-word in her life, and as she continues campaigning to repair her public image with a $75 million investment deal on her side, the celebrity chef has compared her struggles to those of the NFL’s first openly gay prospect, Michael Sam.

“I feel like ‘embattled’ or ‘disgraced’ will always follow my name. It’s like that black football player who recently came out,” Deen said in a People Magazine cover story, which hits newsstands on Friday. “He said, ‘I just want to be known as a football player. I don’t want to be known as a gay football player.’ I know exactly what he’s saying.”

Yes, a white southern woman using a racist slur and giving plantation themed parties is just like the struggle of a black gay man trying to live authentically in the the NFL.

Is it too early for a whiskey neat?

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?