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Michal Coren gets it wrong even at the best of times. I can always count on the Sun Newspaper to annoy me enough to blog about the inanity that fills its pages.
I really want to agree at least once with Coren before I die and with the opening sentence of his article I though today would be the day.
“These are sad days for the American right.” intones Coren.
My eyebrow twitched, would this be the day? Naa… It would be easier to smash an atom with my shoe then agree with Mr.Coren. Case in point – next sentence (italics mine):
“The Republicans have no credible leader, Rush Limbaugh has conquered the art of perennial outrage and the men in smart suits and women in shrinking skirts at Fox try to outdo each other in their use of hyperbole.”
Very nice ass-hat. ‘Smart’ men and sexualized women. Isn’t institutionalized misogyny great?
“The tragedy is that all this comes at a time when we have one of the most worrying presidents in American history. Then, just as we think it can’t get any worse, comes the dream ticket of Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean, both former beauty queens and both proving that jokes about beauty queens are somewhat justified.”
Ah, yes. Beauty queens are always stupid. Check. Throwing a “somewhat justified” does not fix the message. Just like after punching someone in the face then saying ‘sorry’ does not mitigate the initial transgression.
“Actually she is an ordinary, nice woman blessed with beauty, a devoted husband and a good family. It really should end with that. But no.”
Bra-vo! She should be constantly pregnant, barefoot and in the kitchen too. Sex class! Back to the galley with you and make me a sam’ich bitch.
“Palin wants power and is willing to close her eyes to the facts as she marches forward in glorious denial. Perhaps most chilling is how so many conservatives refuse to accept the obvious and twist into awful shapes trying to justify the woman’s failings.”
The ‘facts’: You are a woman and should never ever aspire to power. The public sphere is not your domain and how dare you even contemplate running for the highest office in the land. How could the Right even think of backing a female candidate? Patriarchally speaking, we have not gotten past the archetypal feminine “built in” flaws! The horror.
“Her daughter Bristol’s pregnancy,[…] Yet, where was your relationship with your daughter, one that would have indicated to you in numerous ways that the girl was hiding and doing something that was wrong?”
Because mother daughter relationships are always open and communicative, if only you’d just play your role and tend to the children. I guess Mr.Palin does not get the whole ‘girl’ thing and could not spend the extra time strengthening his role and bond with her daughter, his culpability is never questioned, while hers is immediately put front and center.
Awesome. Could this patriarchal values 101 lesson get any worse? Of course it does, the ass hattery kicks into overdrive as Coren trashes Carrie Prejean. What follows is his cogent response against her arguments(insipid as they my be). Hmmm…calculating the possibility my previous sentence being true…err… did I mention the smashing atom thing with my shoe… ?
“Carrie Prejean is an even more frightening example of right-wing hypocrisy. Her now famous defence of genuine marriage — only between a man and a woman [Wow, parroting the hetronormative standard. You go girl!]. […] she has posed almost-naked for photographs and that she made at least one graphic sex tape for a former boyfriend. We’re also supposed to believe that her recent relationships with young athletes have all been entirely celibate.”
What?! Pose nekkid for pictures? How dare you, whore! You are a public figure and you go off parading your sluty-slut-slut-lifestyle for all to see? No, no. You keep your sexuality ensconced in terms of patriarchal expectations or it will be a extra slut-shaming lightning round for the likes of you, after-all it isn’t your sex life for heavens sake.
“What she does on her own time is her business, but a moral position demands consistency and so should the response of social conservatives. This woman has even less right to speak for the American right than does Sarah Palin. And that, I’m afraid, is something I thought I’d never say.”
If only the italicized phrase applied to women…
So the calculus is in. If you have taken nekkid photos of yourself, and/or had sex with more than one partner (outside of marraige…ohhh the vapours take me now) as a woman that is an automatic disqualification from being in the ‘moral’ category.
The burning nuclear stupid burns! No Mr.Coren the morality of women is not intrinsically tied to their ranking in the Sex class. Women are autonomous beings capable of thinking outside of their imposed gender roles.
You should try it sometime.
I do not endorse what Mrs.Palin or Ms.Prejean represent, it is social conservatism of the most repugnant variety. Would it be too much to ask that we tackle their arguments as opposed to their gender?
Intend to get an Xbox off of eBay? Watch out, you might be getting one that Microsoft has banned from Xbox live for having illegal modifications – that is to say, you can play copied game disks on them.
I do not own an Xbox 360, nor will I. I am always a touch paranoid about buying into proprietary networks and systems just to be able to use a specific product.
I’m not particularly sorry for those who were banned, but neither am I feeling pain for MS either. It really just boils down to the move/counter-move dance of the corporations and pirates. I am sure the banned consoles will be back online soon enough.
Twisty, from the blog I Blame the Patriarchy opines on the recent passage of the healthcare bill in the US with the Stupack amendment:
“What I’m getting at is this: my lack of surprise at this Stupak shit proceeds from irrefutable evidence that state ownership of women is among the most beloved of our violent culture’s violent traditions. Social conservatives appear to believe that God made patriarchy in his own image, and that he will withdraw his complimentary concierge services and cancel Christmas, NASCAR, and life everlasting if the state stops oppressing women for even one second. So-called progressives just want uninterrupted access to pussy.”
I lack the the colourful verbiage that Twisty uses, but in this quote she deftly describes the atrocious nature of this particular amendment.
Abortion is not a crime in Canada. Abortion is under siege by anti-choice zealots, par for the course, but a good portion Canadian women have access to reproductive health services.
A woman’s right to make reproductive decisions is foundational in women being recognized as autonomous beings. It is paramount that we keep abortion, safe, legal, and accessible in Canada.
As far as I am concerned the Stupak Amendment is one compromise too far.
I keep wondering why certain things are not just pushed through the legislative process in the US. George Bush was excellent and getting his boneheaded policy through congress and the senate.
As Jill from Feministe says: Katha Pollitt hits it out of the park. An excerpt from her article :
You know what I don’t want to hear right now about the Stupak-Pitts amendment banning abortion coverage from federally subsidized health insurance policies? That it’s the price of reform, and prochoice women should shut up and take one for the team. “If you want to rebuild the American welfare state,” Peter Beinart writes in the Daily Beast, “there is no alternative” than for Democrats to abandon “cultural” issues like gender and racial equality. Hey, Peter, Representative Stupak and your sixty-four Democratic supporters, Jim Wallis and other antichoice “progressive” Christians, men: why don’t you take one for the team for a change and see how you like it?
For example, budget hawks in Congress say they’ll vote against the bill because it’s too expensive. Maybe you could win them over if you volunteered to cut out funding for male-exclusive stuff, like prostate cancer, Viagra, male infertility, vasectomies, growth-hormone shots for short little boys, long-term care for macho guys who won’t wear motorcycle helmets and, I dunno, psychotherapy for pedophile priests. Men could always pay in advance for an insurance policy rider, as women are blithely told they can do if Stupak becomes part of the final bill.
President Obama, too, worries about the deficit. Maybe you could help him out by sacrificing your denomination’s tax exemption. The Catholic Church would be a good place to start, and it wouldn’t even be unfair, since the blatant politicking of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops on abortion violates the spirit of the ban on electoral meddling by tax-exempt religious institutions. Why should antichoicers be the only people who get to refuse to let their taxes support something they dislike? You don’t want your tax dollars to pay, even in the most notional way, for women’s abortion care, a legal medical procedure that one in three American women will have in her lifetime? I don’t want to pay for your misogynist fairy tales and sour-old-man hierarchies.
Great article. I just hope that Stupak-Pitts is a stillborn amendment. Women must not take another hit because of the radical christian rights inroads into politics.
This just in: Stephen Harper cares about Climate Change:
“Full global participation in cutting greenhouse gases is necessary to tackle global warming, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said at an APEC summit in Singapore on Saturday.”
There are just a few problems with all this tackling and cutting. When it comes to Canadian treatment of actually cutting greenhouse gases we need to consider a new adjective, ‘glad-handing’ for instance.
The reality of the situation:
“Ottawa will soon exceed its Kyoto limit by about 30%, yet it will face no penalty for doing so because the Kyoto parties never agreed on any meaningful punishments,” so says Michael Levi in the National Post article.
Climate change is a challenging problem perhaps we are just getting ‘up to speed’ on a Canadian solution. We need qualified scientists to lead the charge. Harper appointed Mark Mullins and John Weissenberger to key posts in the government’s science sections.
The Globe and Mail says this (this is a meta-link as the actual article is safely out of the public domain, earning a extended middle fingered salute to the asshats at the G&M):
The 18-member NSERC already includes another Harper government appointee, mathematician Christopher Essex, who wrote a book challenging the “myth of climate change.”
On the same day Dr. Mullins was appointed to NSERC, April 23, another skeptic of global warming was appointed to the board of the Canada Foundation for Innovation, which funds large research projects. John Weissenberger is a close friend of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a former chief of staff in the Harper government and a geologist who works for Husky Energy in Alberta.
Dr. Weissenberger has written opinion pieces in the media and on his Internet blog expressing his “skepticism about global warming.” That and other comments by the two appointees on the public record were compiled by NDP researchers and verified by The Globe and Mail.
So we are committed to climate change, yet we seem to be appointing people who are climate change deniers. You wonder why we have no credibility on climate change, just look at the annotated Frasier Institute report.
I’m not a big fan of Capitalism, nor its ideological bretheren libertarianism and objectivism. And to my critics, yes I know…markets are wonderful they give us lots of choice blah blah, free market blah blah blah.
It would be all good if we could get away from the tremendous income inequalities that are endemic to capitalism. Exploitation of the working class, the environment and even the state itself are all corollaries of the capitalism we know today.
Spare me the tales of the working business man fettered by government regulations and taxes. Without the superstructure the state provides, you would not even have a business. When discussing economic systems it never fails that I must cut through the glowing capitalist mythology to get even remotely close to what is really going on in the world.
I assume that it is why it is so difficult to debate Libertarians and Objectivists because their respective points of view dovetail so succinctly with capitalist ethos. Greed is good, and if I am doing well then by that virtue others will benefit when I accumulate more wealth.
Whoops, more free market mythology. It grows on ya, like ringworm.
What galls me more is the impertinence of the business class. Privatizing the profits and letting the public assume the risk seems to be the grand strategy and sadly we let them get away with it. Consistently.
**Update: You know what absolutely tickles me frakking pink? This post is getting hits from people searching for rape pictures and pictures of pornography depicting rape. If you’re here that reason, welcome to exactly what you do not what to see. Women being treated as people instead of objects for your distortedly pervtacular fantasy world. I savour the sweet irony of you being directed to a feminist blog while looking for rape pictures. Your kind is pathetic.
But, hey if you are not here looking to reinforce mindless observance to patriarchal norms, be welcome and read on!
Andrea Dworkin was a brilliant feminist theorist, activist and writer. The question you should be asking yourself is why does this sound radical? Dworkin makes many brilliant points in her speech entitled “I Want A Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There is No Rape”.
Dworkin pulls no punches:
“We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us. We use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist. Those statistics are not abstractions. It is easy to say, “Ah, the statistics, somebody writes them up one way and somebody writes them up another way.” That’s true. But I hear about the rapes one by one by one by one by one, which is also how they happen. Those statistics are not abstract to me. Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.”
On the Patriarchy:
“The power exercised by men day to day in life is power that is institutionalized. It is protected by law. It is protected by religion and religious practice. It is protected by universities, which are strongholds of male supremacy. It is protected by a police force. It is protected by those whom Shelley called “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”: the poets, the artists. Against that power, we have silence.”
On Male Privilege:
“That is the way the power of men is manifest in real life. That is what theory about male supremacy means. It means you can rape. It means you can hit. It means you can hurt. It means you can buy and sell women. It means that there is a class of people there to provide you with what you need. You stay richer than they are, so that they have to sell you sex. Not just on street corners, but in the workplace. That’s another right that you can presume to have: sexual access to any woman in your environment, when you want. Now, the men’s movement suggests that men don’t want the kind of power I have just described. I’ve actually heard explicit whole sentences to that effect. And yet, everything is a reason not to do something about changing the fact that you do have that power.”
On the Politics of the Right Wing:
“Some of you are very concerned about the rise of the Right in this country, as if that is something separate from the issues of feminism or the men’s movement. There is a cartoon I saw that brought it all together nicely. It was a big picture of Ronald Reagan as a cowboy with a big hat and a gun. And it said: “A gun in every holster; a pregnant woman in every home. Make America a man again.” Those are the politics of the Right.
If you are afraid of the ascendancy of fascism in this country–and you would be very foolish not to be right now–then you had better understand that the root issue here has to do with male supremacy and the control of women; sexual access to women; women as reproductive slaves; private ownership of women. That is the program of the Right. That is the morality they talk about. That is what they mean. That is what they want. And the only opposition to them that matters is an opposition to men owning women.”
Why if Freedom is to be had, Rape must stop:
“And on that day, that day of truce, that day when not one woman is raped, we will begin the real practice of equality,
because we can’t begin it before that day. Before that day it means nothing because it is nothing: it is not real; it is not true. But on that day it becomes real. And then, instead of rape we will for the first time in our lives–both men and women–begin to experience freedom. If you have a conception of freedom that includes the existence of rape, you are wrong. You cannot change what you say you want to change. For myself, I want to experience just one day of real freedom before I die. I leave you here to do that for me and for the women whom you say you love.”
You want to know where to start to fight the Rape Culture? Start here. One teaspoon, one hour, one woman at a time.
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