anythings.org

Not only is today Leap Year (and another lame excuse for things to be one sale in stores), but today is also Sadie Hawkins Day. Which means, for you ladies who are so inclined, today is the one day every four years where a woman can propose to a man and get away with it.

Now I was under the impression that we were living in the 2000s, but I’ll go with it. I remember when I was reading the Sweet Valley High books (back when I was like, 10) and one of the twins was in a wedding where the woman proposed and it was so obvious that he didn’t want to marry her, he was just doing it because he didn’t want to say no.

I know it’s kind of a big deal for women to propose to men, but I think it’s just as big of a deal for a man to propose. However, I believe that you shouldn’t ask someone to marry you unless you are 100% sure they will say yes. And if you say no, you don’t have the right to get mad at them.

Wikipedia and Cate say this completely chauvinistic point of view dates back to 1288:

In 1288 the Scottish parliament under Queen Margaret legislated that any woman could propose in Leap Year; few parliament records of that time exist, and none concern February 29.[1] Another component of this tradition was that if the man rejects the proposal, he should soften the blow by providing a kiss, one pound currency, and a pair of gloves.

And yet, when women turn men down, they don’t have to “soften the blow” with a kiss, gloves, or money. They just get to say no and continue with their spinster-y ways, forever having to live with the fact that they let down women everywhere by saying no to someone who wanted to marry them.

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Yesterday I was browsing through CNN’s front page when I saw the headline “Prince Harry sent to Afghanistan”. Now, how is that safe? How is that ok? Why would the media think that is something that is ok to report? More importantly - why did the military release that information about Prince (hello! Valued citizen!) Harry? I think it’s obvious that by releasing that information, they were endangering Harry. More danger than he already was in for fighting in Afghanistan anyways. Not to mention the danger this information poses on the people he is stationed with.

And then, first thing this morning, I check CNN’s front page and the headline says “Prince Harry pulled from Afghanistan”. Fucking duh.

If George W. Bush had a son and he was fighting in Afghanistan, I guarantee you the United States military would think more than twice about releasing that information.

And now people are getting angry that Harry has been pulled from Afghanistan and that the media was hesitant to report it. Harry wants to serve in the military like all the men in his family did. If he wasn’t Prince Harry, just Harry, there wouldn’t be media stories about it. When you serve in the military, you generally can’t disclose too much information about where you’re stationed… but because he’s Prince Harry and his every move is national news, he doesn’t get the pleasure of serving a normal amount of time in the military the same way other soldiers are.

The problem is that it isn’t news when the military deploys people to a secret location. That information is secret for a reason - and while I don’t support the government fighting in wars or hiding information from the people paying for the wars, I think information such as this should have been kept secret.

I am very against censorship, but there is a reason all the major media outlets in the UK agreed to not report this story: they knew better than to endanger the lives of innocent soldiers. Matt Drudge? Not so much.

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, aka Reagan 2.0, has just recently endorsed an amendment to the Colorado constitution that would consider a fetus a person.

Aside from the whole ridiculousness surrounding when a fetus becomes a person, this is a dangerous line to cross. When you consider a fetus a person with individual rights, you have to decide whose rights are more important - the mother’s or the child’s? Of course, without the mother, the child wouldn’t exist, but the anti-choice movement doesn’t care about that. They care so much about preventing abortions that they’d do anything to make them completely inaccessible to women in need.

The problem with defining life at conception is most women don’t know they’re pregnant for the first 6 to 8 weeks of their pregnancy. If you are going to a hold a woman responsible for a fetus (aka a person, according to Huckabee) from conception, you need to understand the science behind why you CAN’T.

Huckabee had a few choice words to say in support of the amendment:

“This proposed constitutional amendment will define a person as a human being from the moment life begins at conception,” Huckabee said in a statement.

“With this amendment, Colorado has an opportunity to send a clear message that every human life has value,” Huckabee said. “Passing this amendment will mean the people of Colorado will protect the sanctity of life from conception until natural death occurs.”

Does this mean I can claim the fetus on my taxes before I abort it? Fab!

Even better - does this mean I can get pregnant and drive in the carpool lane legally before I abort it? Amazing!

Here I was thinking I had the right to decide what is in my body… but apparently Reagan 2.0 doesn’t think so. What’s next? If you get raped when you’re unconscious, it wasn’t really illegal?

Sexism in media is kind of a big topic. A lot of people research it for a living, and quite a few people have gone to painstaking efforts to observe the sexism that is occurring in the Democratic presidential election and all the publicity that surrounds it. Feministing even has an entire section devoted to Hillary Sexism Watch. I really don’t think there is anything wrong with this, it’s quite nice to have the media’s blatant sexism blasted into the average Joe’s face. The problem is when mainstream media asks the “is the media treating Hillary Clinton different because of her sex” question, they never seem to do it without sexism.

When John Cafferty asked that question, he said Clinton “whined” at the debate. I don’t think he needed to ask that question - he answered it himself. Whined? Seriously? Has that ever been applied to a presidential candidate prior to Clinton? I’m doubtful, and if it is has been, I will eat my words. Cafferty isn’t the only one who has done this, many other media outlets have described Clinton as snide or whiny when trying to determine if the media treats her unfairly.

The problem, of course, isn’t just the media. That’s too simple. It’s a classic battle of societal expectations for women being played out in the media. Society stereotypes women as emotional whiners who cry at the drop of a hat and can’t be relied upon to make decisions in times of stress, we all know this. When Clinton got emotional on the campaign trail, every single media outlet latched onto the story and said she cried. For those of us who watched the video clip, it was evident that she got choked up… but she didn’t cry. The difference between what is being reported and what really happened is sometimes this easy to distinguish, but most of the time it isn’t.

My local paper, the Sacramento Bee, had the Ohio debate on the front page of their paper. Each candidate had a picture of them speaking at the debate with a quote underneath it. The story was taken from the Boston Globe.

Obama, when asked if there was a question Clinton needed to answer about her worthiness to be president:

She would be worthy as a nominee. Now, I think I’d be better. That’s why I’m running.

Clinton, no explanation needed for those of you who watched the SNL clip:

Maybe we should ask Barack if he’s comfortable and needs another pillow.

How are those two quotes comparable? Why would you run them side by side on the front page of a newspaper? Are you telling me that in the entire debate that night, the only thing Clinton said that was worth reporting was a remark about the SNL clip? What about the snide remarks made by Obama? They were both particularly snippy in that debate, and yet, the Boston Globe only depicted Clinton’s snide remarks, while they showed Obama as responding to a legitimate debate question. They aren’t reporting news when they talk about Clinton, they are using quotes that reinforce their already negative opinions about her as a candidate, as a person, and as a woman. I call it bad reporting fueled by sexism.

I am sick and tired of people running around accusing the media of sexism in the presidential election, but I can’t help but get ridiculously pissed off when I see things like this. Yes, the sexism is there. And yes, people are more than happy to point it out every single time it happens. So yes, I am sick and tired of people talking about this - we’re beating a dead horse into glue at this point. However, if we’re talking about it this much and it’s still happening, we need to keep talking about it. More importantly, we need to start writing articles that aren’t sexist.

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When verbally assaulted at a rally by anti-choicers, Bill responded, and I have to say, I am impressed by his response… and not just because he’s Bill, but because it’s an awesome response. Yes, he got angry, and yes, he may have yelled more than a little… but he did get his point across and (I hope) filled the anti-choicers present at this rally with a more than a little embarrassment.

Anti-choicers have done NOTHING to reduce the number of abortions being provided in the United States, but pro-choicers have. Pro-choice activists have lobbied for more available birth control and other family planning methods to be made available on a wide spread range at extremely low cost. These efforts have only been discouraged by anti-choicers, who refuse to make the connection that more contraception means fewer abortions because they aren’t just anti-abortion, they are anti-contraception. The anti-choicers know that the anti-contraception stance is an extremely unpopular one in America, which is why very few of them publicize it. But if you look at their motives and their rhetoric, it’s very clear: they are against contraception, abortion, and sex for any purpose other than reproductive.

As Bill put it:

“We disagree with you. You want to criminalize women and their doctors and we disagree. I reduced abortion. Tell the truth! Tell the truth! If you were really pro-life, if you were really pro-life, you would want to put every doctor and every mother, as an accessory to murder, in prison, and you won’t say you wanna do that, because you know that you wouldn’t have a lick of political support. Now, the issue is, you can’t name me anybody presently in politics that did more to introduce policies that reduce the number of real abortions, instead of the hot air putting out to tear people up and make votes by dividing America. This is not your rally.”

My favorite part, of course, has been bolded for your reading pleasure. For those dying to see the video, click here.

[Via every feminist blog I’ve read today.]

By now I’m sure everyone knows about Amy Winehouse being asked by the Grammy Awards producers to cover up her tattoo’s nipples for her performance, but can we just pause a moment and reflect on how this is being reported to media outlets?

Every article I’ve read says the Grammy producers “expressed concern” over her tattoo’s nipples. I highly doubt that was what actually happened between the producers and Winehouse’s camp. Of course the producers have concerns, but I doubt they are for the good of the American public, especially since the FCC just slammed ABC for a partial nude butt shot on a show that aired five years ago and is no longer even on TV.

But the thing is, the Grammy producers didn’t “express concern”: they told Amy to cover it or she would lose her spot on the awards show. Of course, they couldn’t afford to have Amy back out at the last second, so they were hoping she’d realize this was her moment to prove herself to those who have doubted her and she’d lay down like a dog and cover up the nipples. Can you blame her? With all the negative press she’s been getting lately she had to find some way to refocus everyone’s attention on her talent as a singer rather than her talent as a burn out druggie.

I mean, it’s a topless woman tattooed on her arm. Was it really necessary for her to cover up for the Grammy Awards when almost every picture of Amy has it visible to the naked (no pun intended) eye?

Ultimately, I am a feminist because I believe in two things: equality and choice. Equality for all people, regardless of what labels are applied to them by themselves and society, and choice for all people, so they are able to live their lives as close to their dream as possible. That also includes to the choice to reject equality and remain oppressed or inferior if that is what you truly desire. This includes the choice to be anti-choice (or pro-life, if you will), as long as your opinion on the matter does not infringe upon my choice - and legal right - to obtain an abortion. I don’t expect everyone to be feminists, but I do believe that feminism can benefit the world as a whole. I openly admit that this is a very idealistic belief, and I’m fine with that. So you can imagine my disgust when people try to tell me that feminism isn’t about equality and choice for all people - that it’s about women having power over men.

I was innocently browsing through flickr today when I found this atrocity. It appears as though this woman (whose only interest listed is: My man is the most important thing in the world. As it should be for every woman. I’m luck y that he lets me use his computer to share my views, I’m even more lucky that he approves of them, and that he allows me to not only have them..but share them.) hates feminists because instead of continuing with the original mantra of feminism (equality, aka my mantra, which belongs to the majority of the movement), she believes that feminism’s main goal is to obtain power over men.

Feminism doesn’t wish for equality amongst the sexes…no not any more. Like I said, feminists today have pissed over that ideology; they now want POWER over men.

So why did feminism fail? The failure of feminism was assured the moment it took its name. I do not have anything against the original goals of feminism, namely the equality amongst the sexes; I simply oppose modern feminism as a METHOD of attaining such goals. The method is suggested by its NAME and DEFENITION [sic], namely the elevation of the females. Its not called ‘equalism’ or ‘egalitarianism’ its called ‘feminism’ and there-fore [sic] tries very hard to argue the ‘greatness of the female’ in an extremely defensive fashion, in the hope of bringing females up to male levels of respect and cultural treatment- something that we supposedly don’t have. You may ATTEMPT to rebut this statement by arguing that the goal of feminism to simply promote equality. The name infers an emphasis on the female, and there-fore [sic] the female becomes the focus and the greatest element of the movement. Equality is apparently the preferred by product and goal of feminism but it sought though through an emphasis of the ‘greater female’.

Of course the name of the movement is “feminism”. That’s because the movement began in an effort to obtain equal rights for women. While the early feminist movement may have been flawed, it was coined feminism (and not equalism or egalitarianism) because men already had the rights women were fighting very hard to have. Since then, the feminist movement has evolved beyond rights for women. Almost every single feminist I know is also in support of gay rights and equal rights for all people, regardless of ethnicity, race, religion, etc. The feminist movement is not just trying to win legal rights, it is also trying to remove sexism from our society. Where’s the harm in that?

Could you imagine trying to change the name of the feminist movement as a whole? It would be like trying to rename “Catholicism” to “Jesusism”. People simply wouldn’t go for it. Feminism, the name, the word, the verb, inspires a particular image in people’s minds. For some, like this person, it is a negatively skewed image. But for others, like myself, it inspires solidarity and confidence that someday I will be able to be a bridesmaid in a wedding for a gay couple from Alabama who just adopted their first child. Changing the name of a social movement won’t really do much to shed any negative images: the haters and the nay-sayers will still be there.

Potentially my favorite:

An equality movement for all those suffering, oppressed, silenced, forgotten and hurt regardless of race, colour, creed or sex. Not just those with ovaries. It is time to forget about feminism for in the rapidly unifying world culture we have run out of time to make a difference. Feminism has to be forgotten NOW for EGALITARINISM [sic] to survive.

Which, really, if she paid any attention to the majority of the feminist movement and not just the extremist fringe, she would that is what feminism is about. Of course, every major social group has its extremist fringe - take Mormons for example. They’ll never live down their past of polygamy and no one will let them forget that some fundamentalist Mormons still practice polygamy today. The same goes for sexuality and sexual object choice. Almost every person on this earth will, at one point in their life, have sex. Some people choose to take that sex without permission, others prefer sex with people (or… things) that either cannot consent (because they’re goats) or they are haven’t even hit puberty. We do not condemn the act of sex in its entirety simple because of an extremist fringe. Even the fundamentalist Christians still revere sex, if only for reproductive purposes to create a “quiverfull” of children.

While it is fun to giggle about fringe “feminazi” feminists, it doesn’t make any progress for women, and it certainly does not make promise for the feminists who aren’t women, or who are women, but identify as lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, black, African, Asian, etc first, rather than as woman first. Even I have, from time to time, enjoyed a laugh at the expense of so-called feminazis. However, I have also enjoyed a laugh at the expense of fundamentalist Christians and Mormons; cults; individuals fulfilling the stereotype of their particular gender and/or race without a concern for how ridiculous they look; extremist men’s rights groups; Neo-Nazis; and many other extremist groups. Of course, when I think of the scary fundamentalist Christians who burn down abortion clinics, I do not associate them with all of Christianity. They are a separate group entirely from my nice Christian friends who respect my right to choose as much as they respect their right to not have an abortion.

This is the problem ~Clair~ has run into: she has chosen to associate all of feminism with the fringe man-hating movement. It’s a choice she made, albeit a pretty poor one.

I think if she read these words said by Ani Difranco, she’d have a better understanding on the modern feminist movement and its intentions and goals. Feminism isn’t just for women anymore. Feminism is for everybody.

I think what we need to do is to understand feminism as a prerequisite to saving the environment, to ending war, to ending racism. We need to understand that feminism is not for women, it’s for humanity. Patriarchy does not work for men - they go and get killed in wars. Patriarchy hurts all of us. Either you are a feminist or you are a sexist/misogynist. There is no box marked ‘other’.

I don’t want power over men. I don’t want power over anyone else. I want power over myself, my thoughts, and my body. I want the ability and the legal right to marry whomever I wish and have as many abortions or as much sex as I’d like, with any consenting adult I wish. I want to be able to make the choice of whether or not I submit to my husband and have 12 children and remain a stay at home wife. Feminism is letting me make these choices.

From Alternet/Huffington Post:

Obama, grave-faced and sympathetic in tone, opined that when Senator Clinton was ‘feeling down,’ she went on the attack to make herself feel better; that is, she committed an error in judgment because she was in a bad mood. That was the moment when I, and other women of a certain age, all over the country, winced.

The change candidate had embraced one of the oldest clichés in the book — that women are held hostage by emotion, that we can’t be trusted with the big decisions because, depending on our age, we’re either on the rag or having a hot flash. The overtly sexist position used to be that you didn’t want to entrust the red phone to a woman because women are unpredictable and irrational; a fit of hormonal pique and kaboom, we all glow in the radioactive dark. The ones who aren’t instantly vaporized, that is.

The kinder, gentler version? A soft-spoken observation about what a female candidate does when she’s “feeling down,” the implication being that Hillary’s distress over the delegate count had impaired her judgment, and that someone who loses her way like that is not strong enough to withstand the rigors of the presidency. If you think that I and the indignant gal friends I’ve polled are overreacting, try the acid test: Imagine any major candidate making that kind of subtle put-down about a man’s psychological fortitude. In 1972, Thomas Eagleton had to have shock treatment to get us to raise a national eyebrow about his mental health, ending his brief tenure as George McGovern’s running mate. Short of that, we tend to assume that the boys are steady enough to handle the job.

[…] If it wasn’t a spontaneous comment — if someone in Senator Obama’s camp thinks it’s wise to use code to address and exploit our primitive fears about whether women can cope — then whoever came up with it ought to be ashamed of himself, and the man who uttered it needs to rethink the strength of his opponent and her supporters. Beat her on better ideas, or oratory, beat her with passion and energy, but beat her fair and square, if you can. Don’t talk about change and then quote from a 1950s playbook on the battle between the sexes. (Emphasis mine)

Now I’m sure everyone has heard about this but now, but I couldn’t agree more. It was a ridiculous comment to make. While it is not my goal to analyze every single thing that comes out of someone’s mouth in regards to Clinton, this is pretty ridiculous. Relying on the accepted idea that women are out of control and can’t be trusted to make sane decisions, especially if they’re upset. Heaven forbid the leader of our country get emotional or have a menstrual cycle! Maybe, just maybe emotions are what our country needs to fix all of its ridiculous problems.

I don’t feel that this is a personal attack on Barack - although more than one person has told me that my past posts are “personal attacks” rather than legitimate questions regarding his politics and abilities. He said something, he made a mistake, and he’s being scrutinized for it. The same thing has happened time and time again with Hillary - the key difference being her getting “emotional” is suddenly described as a tear-fest and Barack’s words and actions being taken as they are and for what they mean.

How amazing would it be if I could yell at someone and not get the response “geeze, are you PMS-ing” or “it must be that time of the month”?! How delightfully wonderful would it be if I could cry, be in an irritable mood, or just be downright irritated and not have to answer questions regarding my menstrual cycle? I think it would be downright wonderful. But, apparently, Obama does not.

I love Ellen Page. I have a huge, gigantic, unreasonably large amount of love for her. In the words of Juno, “she is the macaroni to my cheese”. This only makes me love her more.

Is “Juno” a pro-life movie?

Not in the slightest, and if you knew me and if you knew the writer and the director, no one would ever say that. It happens to be a film about a girl who has a baby and gives it to a yuppie couple. That’s what the movie’s about. Like, I’m really sorry to everyone that she doesn’t have an abortion, but that’s not what the film is about. She goes to an abortion clinic and she completely examines all the opportunities and all the choices allowed her and that’s obviously the most crucial thing. It’s as simple as that.

I call myself a feminist when people ask me if I am, and of course I am ’cause it’s about equality, so I hope everyone is. You know you’re working in a patriarchal society when the word feminist has a weird connotation. “Hippie” has a weird connotation. “Liberal” has a weird connotation.

How sick are you of these questions?

Well, because I very much am pro-choice, I don’t really get it. People are always going to project. It’s kind of amazing, though, that a movie that’s caused this much controversy has done really well in America.

Yay!

Last weekend the boyfriend and I settled in for a nice and dull evening at my house. We curled up with the cats in my bed and popped a movie into my fabulous iMac as we eagerly awaited the beginning of the movie. I had just gotten 3:10 to Yuma from Netflix and the boyfriend really wanted to see it, even though he didn’t particularly care for westerns. I thought it looked decent, and I’d heard some okay things about it, so I didn’t have many objections.

It was one of those movies that was good, but terrible at the same time. I couldn’t really put my finger on what bothered me about the movie. From my perspective, it was a movie about people and their complex morals and personalities and all that… except, when you finished the movie, you didn’t feel like you knew much about anyone who was in it. It was a movie about character development that didn’t really spend much time on character development. And I thought about it some more, and the only thing my brain kept saying was “damn westerns”, and I blamed masculinity for the movie’s pathetic failure in my mind.

I spent a lot of time during my last quarter in college watching war movies, the Vietnam War and WWII in one class, and various wars in Latin America for another. I didn’t really understand what I had done to deserve so many war movies in one quarter, but I dealt with it best I could. Some were documentary style, and others were traditional movie-goer films. After that quarter, I never wanted to watch another war movie. In a less than one month period, we had watched the following:

Full Metal Jacket
Rambo
Green Berets
Platoon
Heaven and Earth

The scary part is the list of movies she wanted us to watch was twice as long, but we had to prioritize what we watched so the other TEN MOVIES were dropped off the list. The movies all had something in common: huge, raging, testosterone fueled MEN. Big, scary, hard, masculine, AMERICAN MEN fighting teeny, tiny, puny, worthless, impotent, Vietcong. Whether the American men failed at their masculinity or not, all of these war movies focused on the fact that yes, they are men, and yes, war is hard, but we can still be masculine, even if we lose. Heaven and Earth went so far as to show that when a man’s masculinity is taken away from him by the teeny, tiny, impotent Vietcong he suffers extreme psychological trauma, beats his wife, and subsequently kills himself in the nude in his hippie van. If that doesn’t warn men of the consequences of losing their masculinity then I don’t know what is.

It’s not just war movies, westerns are the same. Men riding around the unsettled west with big guns and stolen horses, doing dirty things to women and either being the best villain ever or taking out the best villain ever. Either way, westerns and war movies rely on one basic trait from which they grow from: masculinity. Now, the same can be said of femininity and romantic comedies, but I’d rather have the particular trait that is associated with my gender be used as an excuse for bad humor and tender moments than war, rape, domestic violence, suicide, murder, mayhem, and many other violent acts.

But the bottom line is, I’m calling a moratorium on war movies and westerns in my movie obsessed life. I just can’t handle it anymore, it’s too much, it’s too violent. The men are always fighting to prove one thing: that they are better than the other guy. And even if the director, screenwriter, whoever, claims that this is not what their protagonist is doing, it still looks like to me, the raging feminist. I embrace breaking stereotypes whenever possible, but I don’t think the movie industry will be doing that any time soon with westerns or war movies. I’m just glad that westerns have fallen out of popularity over the past decade or so.