season of the bitch

Watching the Super Bowl today? Think women have the right to control their own damn bodies? Or just hate Focus on the Family and James Dobson?

Join the Super Bowl Tailgate for Choice party.

Donate at least $5 to a prochoice organization today in honor of the Focus on the Family anti-abortion ad and stick it to Dobson.

In addition to the big ones, there are some good smaller orgs that could use your cash: NLIRH and SisterSong, among others.

To Democrats:

GROW A PAIR

Seriously? At this time last year not only did we just have a new president that we were all excited about, we also had a brand-new super-exciting majority in the Senate. 58 votes! SO COOL!

Oh yeah, that’s right. We’ve had 60 votes for a couple of months, after Arlen Specter switched and Franken finally got his seat. While Franken’s made the most of that seat, the rest of the party has been mostly fucking spineless, undisciplined, and too busy worrying about the center.

The center didn’t elect Scott Brown. The tea party crowd elected Scott Brown with the help of a depressed Democratic base (gee, let me think, a boring law & order prosecutor type who doesn’t campaign and makes John Kerry look like a raging populist is gonna get them all fired up? Plus, um, Liebercare looks a lot like MassCare, which is not exactly popular with a lot of the Dem base either.)

Lesson we SHOULD learn from this shit? The teabaggers have the strategy right. Make a whole lot of noise, throw some money around, and bend the party to YOUR will instead of folding your hands and giving it the benefit of the doubt. (Also, candidates matter. A lot. Just ask that guy…what was his name again…Obama?)

But come the fuck on. With 60 votes we were going to get watered-down shitty health care reform that would mandate us giving our hard-earned cash to the people who’ve been fucking us for years. Can we stop pretending that we lost anything valuable Tuesday night? We lost the myth that any seats are safe. That’s GOOD news. Let’s have some real campaigns now.

You know, over and over, lefties and liberals have told feminists that they have to look beyond sexism and abortion rights. Hell, I’ve been one of them. I criticized feminists during the primaries who seemed to excuse blatant racism from the Clinton campaign while freaking out about Obama calling a reporter “Sweetie.” I’ve noted that historical feminism was a white middle-class movement with white middle-class goals.

But right now, I’m really, really pissed about this Stupak amendment (as if you couldn’t tell). And yes, this is an issue that is personal for me: I’m a cisgender woman, heterosexual and of childbearing age, and I have no desire for kids.

And I’m sick and tired of hearing that I should look at the broader picture, that there are worse issues than sexism, blah blah blah.

I’ve heard this from well-meaning “liberal” men, but I’ve also heard it from activists I admire, who are usually RIGHT when they point out the myopia of much of the feminist movement (such as it is).

But this is the thing: millions of poor women, many of them women of color, will be hurt badly if this amendment stays in the bill. Shit, it’ll affect me, but I can probably still get an abortion if I need one. This isn’t a bourgeois issue and we’re not being myopic or selfish assholes to be righteously, ferociously angry and ready to fight this tooth and nail.

This is women’s lives. I care about race and class issues, poverty and health care and immigration and transgender people’s rights.

There are lots of lines in the sand that I’ll draw. One of them has been crossed right now, and yes, it’s personal. Because over and over again our issues get written off as things that should be compromised for the greater good, or we’re made to feel guilty because we’re worrying about something silly when there are worse oppressions out there.

I’m not going to play oppression olympics or other such bullshit. I’m just going to keep fighting this with every breath I’ve got, and I don’t care who you are, if you tell me I’m wrong for that, you can kiss my ass.

Regular readers here will know that I love me some Gina Carano, female MMA fighting superstar.

Well, apparently some male sports writers believe Carano needs to be “protected from herself.”

See, cutting weight is part of fighting. It’s one that I’m disgusted by, having lived with a fighter for two years and seen the battles that he–yes, he–went through with the process and the damage it did to his body image. Fighters weigh in a day or two before their fight, and the idea is to take a fight at a low weight, lose some of it off your body and sweat the rest of it out so that when you rehydrate, you weigh more–hopefully more than your  opponent, and you get an advantage. So no one actually fights at their real body weight, except amateur boxers and wrestlers, who weigh in the day of the event, just hours before their bouts. And even they  often sweat out a few pounds and hope to be able to hydrate and eat before their fight.

But thousands of men across the world do this regularly. Boxers, muay thai fighters, and MMA fighters, as well as even high school wrestlers “cut” weight. It’s been dramatized on shows such as The Ultimate Fighter and Fight Girls, which starred Carano.

None of them were called out by name as being in danger of injuring themselves by taking fights at weights too low to make, even though there are many who struggle with the weight-cutting process.

Instead, the writer here chose to make the female MMA star–and there is no argument that Gina Carano is the biggest female mixed martial arts star out there–the subject of his article.

Once again, the female body is there to be policed by men.

If this writer is so concerned with the health of fighters, he should have written an article exposing the entire weight-cutting process for what it is: physical damage done in the attempt to gain a somewhat unfair advantage. He could’ve written about high school coaches encouraging teenagers to go into the ring weakened and dehydrated in order to make a lower weight class.

In other words, he could’ve written this article without making it about a woman.

Instead, Carano needs to be protected from herself. She needs to be stopped from doing damage to her body. He throws in some images of naked Carano being weighed in between two towels, and jokes about internet fans hoping someone would drop the towel.

This is completely unnecessary. If he had a specific point to make about how women are more likely to be encouraged to lose weight, how the thin ideal is encouraged on women more than men, he could’ve done it. He could’ve proposed same-day or even right-before-bout weigh-ins (like jockeys on the racetrack, though they routinely go into races dehydrated and starved as well).

But he didn’t. He chose to sexualize and then scold the woman.

h/t Natalia Antonova.

Reasons: Pipeline (in case that’s intercepted the alternative is Russian pipeline), NATO (’our former in our very soft South underbelly can’t be part of NATO’), and personal dislike of our President Saakashvili by Russian Prime Minister Putin.

Then there is Kosovo - “if they should get independence, why shouldn’t the Ossetians?” - the thinking goes.

Then there is Iraq - “if US can hang whomever they dislike, why can’t we?”

Go read it all. Now.

Hi there, new readers.

Since my humble lil’ blog stats have quadrupled in the last couple of days, thanks mostly to Twisty, I suppose I should introduce myself again. So, Hi! I’m Sarah.

If you actually care, there are lots of posts that explain where I’m coming from. If you don’t, you could refer to the title here, which a recent commenter called me.

“Naive,” because, well, as you probably heard, there’s a picture of my ass in a pair of boyshorts below. Hustler brand boyshorts. Never mind that it’s not a thong and you pretty much see no skin, I’m “naive” for posting it.

Well, here’s the thing. First off, I’m probably older than you think. Been around the block a few times. Been a freelance writer for quite a few years (written for BUST and SuicideGirls.com, two places you probably hate if you’re coming from Twisty’s, but I don’t particularly care), and I currently teach classes at a university. Yeah, I’m one of those overeducated types who think it’s “empowerfulizing” to show my ass to a group of strangers, right?

Wrong.

I didn’t put that picture up to empower myself. If I’m seeking validation on my ass, all I have to do is walk down the damn street–I’ll get catcalled plenty, and it’ll remind me that women get sexualized whether we like it or not.

I do, lately, take a certain pleasure in wearing items of clothing that my controlling ex-fiance might have called “slutty” if he hadn’t known I’d punch him in the mouth for using that term around me. While it’s not necessarily “empowering,” it sure is nice to know that no one except for some radical feminist bloggers whom I usually don’t read will be shaming me for my choice in clothing.

(I also find it funny that one commenter said “when guys approve, it’s a great guage[sic] of whether or not something is feminist at all.” By that token, me wearing a low-cut shirt and short shorts is indeed feminist, since my ex would heartily have disapproved. But what happens when teh mens agree with the radical feminists? Because you know, I’m pretty sure James Dobson would agree that strippers and sex workers are terrible people…so doesn’t that mean you’re pleasing the patriarchy too?

Twisty’s right that you can’t avoid the patriarchy. So I choose to not give it even more control over my life by trying to do everything the opposite of what men want.

I certainly don’t give it any more power over my life by letting disputes over what it wants lead me into tearing down other women for how they look or how they choose to perform their sexuality (more on how sexuality is inherently performative later, with added intellectual thoughts on blowjobs! I promise!). And I definitely don’t let it limit my pleasures.

To quote Lydia Lunch, “I do exactly what I wanna do.”

What I wanted to do with that picture, below, was to tell a group of people being judgmental exactly what I thought of their judgments. I’m not “naive” and I didn’t think it was going to make a bunch of people go “Oh! Now I see! Porn is great!” or anything like that. So, annoying? Yeah, that was kind of the point.

The point was also to illustrate that you never know what people are hiding under their clothes. I’m not a sex worker, never have been. I have been assorted other things, including bicycle mechanic and teacher at a nonprofit literacy program. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that when I came to feminism, it led me to stop judging other women, not to find a new way to do it.

In “Cunt,” Inga Muscio talks about her project to make her stop hating on other women: reading autobiographies, or at least biographies. I’ve done a good bit of that, too. It can be fascinating. I read Poppy Z. Brite’s biography of Courtney Love, and Traci Lords’ autobiography, plus Antonia Fraser’s excellent volumes on Marie Antoinette and the queens of Henry VIII, just to name a few faves.

It opens you up to understanding other women as women. To stopping before you pass judgment.

So, naive about showing my ass on my blog? I’ll let you in on a little secret: I did think twice about putting it up there. This blog is under my real name, and is hosted on the same site with my professional resume and portfolio (which are in desperate need of updates…). But you know, I decided I wasn’t going to let people’s decisions of what is ‘appropriate’ and ‘obscene’ or ‘derive[s] a lot of your identity from your conformance to patriarchal expectations.’

That last commenter continued, ‘And if you talk about it in public, you are necessarily inviting people to “judge” you.’

No, actually I’m not. I was inviting you to kiss my ass. But you can judge me all you want. I’ll let through any comments you want to throw at me on this post right here. Call me a slut, a whore, a patriarchy-pleaser, a naive young dimwit. Hell, bring out some racialized and ableist language if you want. It’s not going to hurt me any. Do you think it’s the first time I’ve heard it? And it won’t say anything about me. It’ll just say something about you, and where you derive your validation from: tearing other women down.

But I sure made y’all look, didn’t I?

New Orleans to begin fining people for living in FEMA trailers?!?!?

fuck you, government.

Really, fuck Viacom, too. Prof BW has the details on a nasty little court decision that will have your YouTube records handed over to those shady bastards at Viacom. Every video you’ve ever watched. Because they need to know about the popularity of copyright-infringing videos?

Yeah, sounds like crap to me too.

Since I’ve been out pounding the streets and all, I haven’t been blogging and in my absence, a bunch of people said things I wanted to say, but said ‘em better anyway:

1. Bill Clinton can kiss my ass.
For real.

2. Barack is, well, badass.

3. I also missed Equal Pay Day.

4. About the Penn Primary: what he said. Except it was a 9-point win.

5. White priest defends Jeremiah Wright, makes FOX News look like assholes. Not that it’s hard. (htp BitchPhD)

6. This says it all, about feminisms, blinders, and unwillingness to listen.

7. Susie Bright gives some love to New Orleans.

Oh, and to the New York Times (I’m not linking ’cause I’m over it): Most of us have already realized that there are two reasons the Democratic race ain’t over yet: Obama’s black, and Hillary’s last name is Clinton.

And we fight on…

(Remind me to talk about Angela Davis’s talk about “Communities of Struggle” and the campaign trail when my brain doesn’t hurt.)