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Monday Media Watch: The Grey Lady Strikes Again

Categories: monday media watch, really, ross douthat: what's he know, your rda of misogyny

Greetings, ducks! Today, on Monday Media Watch, a special double-hit from our favorite source of all the news the establishment deems worthy to print, the New York Times!

First, let’s talk the economy! I’ll wait while you finish crying. There, there.

It’s bad, right? I myself am an underemployed computer worker, which is why I have so much time to write internet screeds. But do you know who has it worse than me? Did you guess men? Because the Times sure did!

We’ve pointed out before that that recession has disproportionately hurt men, who are more likely to work in cyclically sensitive industries like manufacturing and construction. Women, on the other hand, are overrepresented in more downturn-resistant sectors like education and health care.

Casey B. Mulligan noted, for example, that for the first time in American history women are coming close to representing the majority of the national workforce. It would of course be a bittersweet milestone, given that it comes primarily as a result of men’s layoffs.

The data is actually very interesting–it is in fact true that men are getting laid off more than women. The article linked in the quote has some ideas on why:

Women tend to be employed in areas like education and health care, which are less sensitive to economic ups and downs, and in jobs that allow more time for child care and other domestic work.

But is that the only reason? Or is it also that, well, women make a lot less?

 ________________________________________________________________________
                      Male                         Female
          _____________________________ _____________________________
             Number     Mean income        Number     Mean income
Age and year      with ___________________      with ___________________
             income   Current      2007    income   Current      2007
           (thous.)   dollars   dollars  (thous.)   dollars   dollars
________________________________________________________________________
15 YEARS OLD AND OVER
2007           104,789   $47,137   $47,137   105,230   $29,249   $29,249
2006           103,909    46,677    48,001   104,582    28,416    29,222
2005           102,986    44,850    47,635   104,245    26,261    27,891

CY 2007 data

Even when you factor out women working part-time jobs, the median wage gap between full-time male and full-time female employees was still almost $10,000 a year. (see page 14 of the pdf.)

So maybe that’s another reason that women aren’t losing their jobs as fast–they’re cheaper to keep on.

Of course, some things never change:

When women are unemployed and looking for a job, the time they spend daily taking care of children nearly doubles. Unemployed men’s child care duties, by contrast, are virtually identical to those of their working counterparts, and they instead spend more time sleeping, watching TV and looking for a job, along with other domestic activities.

Speaking of things that don’t change: Ross Douthat is still kind of a tool! Today he bewails the fact that nobody likes Judd Apatow’s new movie–not because it’s not that good, but because it’s too conservative:

Don’t laugh. No contemporary figure has done more than Apatow, the 41-year-old auteur of gross-out comedies, to rebrand social conservatism for a younger generation that associates it primarily with priggishness and puritanism. No recent movie has made the case for abortion look as self-evidently awful as “Knocked Up,” Apatow’s 2007 keep-the-baby farce. No movie has made saving — and saving, and saving — your virginity seem as enviable as “The 40-Year Old Virgin,” whose closing segue into connubial bliss played like an infomercial for True Love Waits.

Oh yeah, Knocked Up sure makes keeping your baby look glamorous and wonderful–plus you get to be the reason a 30-year old man finally decides to grow up! And The 40-Year Old Virgin tells us that woman can be the reason a…40-year old man finally grows up. Which is a great deal, if you’re not the one who’s the lady.

Somehow I don’t think that ever crossed Ross’s mind.

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Lies the Internet Told Me

Categories: double bound, teh tranz

Sady at Tiger Beatdown, who is having an awesome week, wrote an amazing post about the (false) rumors that Lady Gaga is intersex:

So, yeah. It will always puzzle me when cisgendered people don’t see how the marginalization and oppression of trans people affects them. Because the fact is that there are a ton of trans people in the world, and you don’t necessarily know who they are, and they’re not required to tell you. But when people get a case of the Deceptive Tranny Fever, nothing – not decency, not tolerance, not basic fact-checking, not even Google – will get in their way.

So true. The whole “deceptive tranny” thing is the old double-bind in action as well, ergo: if you’re trans, and you don’t tell the whole wide world, aaaand you sleep with some cisgendered dude or lady, aaaand they find out, then you are a deceiver and deserve to die or at least have your CDs thrown out; but if you’re trans, aaand you tell the whole world, then people call you a thing or refuse to use your correct gender, aaaand you deserve to die or at least have your CDs thrown out.

That is, you get it both ways: you’re punished for both telling and not telling, because the culture punishes “deception” without rewarding “honesty.”

Go read the post, because like most things Sady, it is awesome.

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It’s a Crime

Categories: invasive kyriarchy, the patriarchy: you can't live with it....that is all, Your RDA of Outrage

Richard Cohen, writing on Tuesday, had this to say about James von Brunn, the man who attacked the Holocaust museum earlier this year:

He also proves the stupidity of hate-crime laws. A prime justification for such laws is that some crimes really affect a class of people. The hate-crimes bill recently passed by the Senate puts it this way: “A prominent characteristic of a violent crime motivated by bias is that it devastates not just the actual victim . . . but frequently savages the community sharing the traits that caused the victim to be selected.” No doubt. But how is this crime different from most other crimes?

First, let us consider the question of which “community” von Brunn was allegedly attempting to devastate. He rushed the Holocaust museum, which memorializes the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis and their enablers. There could be no more poignant symbol for the Jewish community. Yet von Brunn killed not a Jew but an African American — security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns.

So which community was affected by this weird, virtually suicidal act? Was it the Jewish community or the black community? Since von Brunn hated both, you could argue that it does not matter. But since I would guess that neither community now gives the incident much thought, the answer might well be “neither one.” So what is the point of piling on hate crimes to what von Brunn has allegedly done? Beats me. He already faces — at age 89, remember — a life sentence and, possibly, the death penalty.

The real purpose of hate-crime laws is to reassure politically significant groups — blacks, Hispanics, Jews, gays, etc. — that someone cares about them and takes their fears seriously. That’s nice. It does not change the fact, though, that what’s being punished is thought or speech.

Actually, the real purpose of hate crime laws is to punish terrorism.

Yes, I used the t-word. A hate crime is one where the victim was a target only because of membership in some group (frequently a disprivileged or discriminated against group.) Hate crimes have the effect (even if the intention is not always so far-reaching) of terrorizing that group; of reminding them that they are in danger by virtue of who they are; of reminding them that violence remains the prerogative of the powerful.

Cohen sarcastically asks, “which group was terrorized?” which seems so disingenuous coming from a Jewish person. Can he not see that one of the effects of von Brunn’s attack was to remind people that just being at a Jewish cultural institution is dangerous? If even one person decides not to go to the Holocaust Museum because of von Brunn’s actions, doesn’t that make what he did terrorism?

People forget, I think, what the purpose of terrorism is: it’s not to kill people. September 11th remains the worst terrorist act in history, and the casualty count would barely make the list of interesting battles of the American Civil War. No. The point of terrorism is terror: the use of asymnetric violence to break the morale of a militarily superior society; to make all people, not just soldiers in combat, afraid of violent death; to cause people to change they way they live, to bring the battle home to them.

Cohen understands this, even if he doesn’t seem to appreciate it–maybe because he doesn’t think his example affects him:

If there’s a murder in a park, I’ll stay out of it for months. If there’s a rape, women will stay out of the park. If there’s another and another, women will know that a real hater is loose. Rape, though, is not a hate crime. Why not?

Indeed, why not? as Liss at Shakesville ponders. Especially in light of a story like this:

Four people are confirmed dead and nine others were wounded when a gunman opened fire inside the L.A. Fitness in Collier Township Tuesday night.

The shooting happened shortly after 8 p.m.

The county coroner’s office has identified the gunman as 48-year-old George Sodini from Scott Township. […] Sodini was keeping an online diary where it appears as if he was planning the shooting for about nine months. He also detailed on the site how he attempted to carry out the shooting once before, but backed out.

Right now, there’s at least one woman worried about going to the gym because she might be cornered there and shot simply because she’s a woman. (I know that for sure, because she is me.) This isn’t a random crime, or an act of desperation by a criminal: this is a cold-blooded act of mass murder, an act of “revenge” for a mythical wrong, a crime designed to make a whole group of people feel afraid.

It’s terrorism. And we shouldn’t stand for it.

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Adventures in Transition: Definitely not Fast as Lightening Edition

Categories: adventures in transition, all about me, This Was My Life

Last night I took an aikido class for the first time in three years.

I first started doing aikido about ten years ago, during the summer when I finally started to treat my depression. I stayed for about two years at a very, very tough dojo, then quit for a variety of reasons (including my desire to quit my lousy job and go freelance.) About three years ago I found another dojo in my nabe and was there for maybe seven months, before the instructor moved to California.

The points being a) I’m not a complete beginner and b) all of this took place before my transition.

These are relavant because last night, for the first time ever, I had to leave the mat while class was in session. Twice.

Now, there are some decent reasons for that: it was hot and muggy yesterday. I didn’t eat a big lunch (my usual onsite gourmet meal of yogurt and a buttered roll, with a peanut butter granola bar thrown in for good measure.) I’ve gained a lot of weight recently. And of course, I did have major surgery five months ago.

I think there was more to it than all that. The fact of the matter is, I’m not the same person I used to be.

One of the things that shocked me about starting hormones was just how much muscle mass I lost in a relatively short time. I never needed to worry about binding my breasts (Not that there was a lot to bind. Then, I mean.) because my suits and dress shirts suddenly got huge on me. And I also stopped doing a lot of physical activity after a few months on HRT, so I wasn’t really keeping track of how much I was changing. (I dropped my gym membership after about six months because I couldn’t stand using the men’s locker room anymore, which meant that I stopped biking into work–about a 6.5 mile ride each way; in any case, I wasn’t pushing myself anywhere close to what I had done before hormones.)

So I think that a lot of what I learned once before I’m going to have to unlearn, because the strength (and endurance, until I get my wind back) just isn’t there anymore; a big part of my “failures” yesterday was trying to do things as if nothing had changed. But it has.

This isn’t really a bad thing, because one of the reasons I decided to go back to aikido is that it is the only martial art I know of with a philosophy against domination–and as you may have gleaned, my current project is to find ways to live without dominating other human beings. My first dojo had a definite macho air about it, and I learned to use my strength–not that I was Conan or something–in ways that let me blow past a lot of the deeper philosophical lessons of aikido, like blending with your partner or using her energy against her instead of using your own.

So like everything else related to my transition, this is a learning moment. And I hope I can really learn from it–maybe I’ll even be able to survive the whole class tomorrow.

I hope so–I have a peanut butter Twix bar waiting for me when I do.

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Blog note: I had wanted to start another new weekly feature, “Evil Willow’s Weekly Web Round Up,” which will have some snark–er, witty–commentary on the dreck that Google Reader finds for me, but for once there’s a paucity of teh stoopid on the nets right now–and a surfeit of actual, horrifying evil. So it can wait til next week.

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And the Lightbulb Goes On

Categories: all about me, don't get your panties in a bunch, invasive kyriarchy, privilege stories

So I’m reading this post at Shakesville about a full-of-FAIL article by Satoshi Kanazawa about how feminism is evil and unneccesary because women are HAWT and only need shoes (or something; his logic is hard to follow, mostly because there doesn’t seem to be any.) And there’s a comments thread that is in the best tradition of Shakesville comments threads. Which means, among other things, that there’s a discussion of why a common epithet turns out to be far nastier than you thought.*

In this case, it turns out the word “maroon” really is a racist term**, even though I (and the original commentator) seem to have always associated it with Bugs Bunny’s joking mispronunciation of “moron.” (Which is also not cool, because it makes fun of people with mental disabilities.)

Now, being what I am–a human being caught in the invisible web of the kyriarchy–I couldn’t help for a second thinking, “great, another word I’ll have to be careful about using.” (Just for a second, ducks, we take checking privilege seriously around here.) And then it occurred to me: oh yes, how terrible it would be to end up living in a world where a person’s thoughts would have to be actually addressed, instead of just dismissed by a senseless epithet that lets you turn off your brain. How truly awful that would be for everyone.

But I never claimed to be quick on the uptake.

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*That’s not snark; one of the great things about Shakesville is that you continually get your assumptions challenged there.

**The people the term applied to were actually pretty amazing–fleeing slavery to forge an existence out of almost nothing.

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Big Tent

Categories: Uncategorized

I finally got around to doing something I’ve wante to do for a while–expand the blog list and categorize it. So we now have feminism, queer pride, and, of course, Teh Tranz links to the right.

I’ve also started a category called Friends of the Blog to express my appreciation to anyone who follows the blog or has contributed with their comments in a productive way. If I’ve missed you or screwed up your link or something, please drop me an email.

And thank you again for dropping by!

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Monday Media Watch

Categories: douchebaggery, media tool kit, monday media watch

Greetings, ducks! This week here at TSA we’re going to try something new and different–recurring theme columns! Today will be the inaugural Monday Media Watch.

Over the weekend, in between writing SQL specifications, I managed to actually watch some TV (other than Buffy DVDs, that is.) In fact, I caught Mike Judge’s 2006 internet cult fave Idiocracy.

I’m mostly confused by Mike Judge–I was in college when Beavis and Butthead first came out and was never really impressed by watching a couple of barely-articulate slackers make fun of music videos. (I mean, I wasn’t even a fan of that in real life.) But after that came King of the Hill which might as well be a modern-day Leave it to Beaver–Hank Hill’s solidly middle-of-the-road conservative values always win out in the end. In some ways it’s similar to Parker and Stone’s “common sense” values on South Park, although without that show’s audacitous offensiveness and sometimes spot-on satire. But both are similar in the way that the “common sense” approach that always manages to win out looks suspciously like the point-of-view of middle class white privilege.

(With some caveats: I liked Judge’s Office Space for its gleeful and accurate satire of the mindlessness of modern corporate existence, and the South Park movie’s general gleeful destruction.)

Idiocracy probably had visions of being a satire, and its vision hits some easy but satisfying targets: a Costco the size of a city, every conceivable surface–clothing, furniture, even the flag–covered with advertising slogans, cable TV hitting the lowest possible common denominator (the Violence channel has a show called “Ow! My Balls!” consisting of an hour of a guy getting hit in the crotch.) Much of this is chuckle-inducing, greatly enhanced byLuke Wilson in another of his startled shlub turns.

Other jokes, however, have a cringe factor. Judge ferociously attacks the pornification of American advertising by showing us a world of franchise sex: Starbucks gives hand jobs, H & R Block offers “gentleman’s tax planning” and there’s even fried chicken with “full release.” All of which might have gone off better had not the other main character (played by Maya Rudolph) been–a prostitute.

And that leads us into some other troubling matters. The English language, we are told, now resembles a mix of “hillbilly and Valley Girl slang,” but there seem to be a preponderence of hispanic names and “accents” around to demonstrate how much stupider America is in the 26th century. And yes, there’s a black president–but one who comes off as just another bunch of 21st century stereotypes: he’s a former wrestler and porn star. (In fact, the three main African-American characters are: a porn star, a prostitute, and a pimp.)

Not surprisingly, the movie ends up validating a white male slacker as the only reasonable character–and hey, given that Mike Judge is a white male slacker who made very good, I guess I can’t blame him. But Idiocracy has developed some kind of hip-cult status on the Internets, and I have news for you guys: it ain’t as transgressive as you think.

While I was watching Idiocracy, I got treated to the usual series of ads catering to the doucheoisie that Comedy Central routinely runs. (It’s much worse on both CC and Adult Swim late at night, when the ads for the local stripper clubs run.) One of those included the newest Burger King Late Night series, in which their “King” character plays a prank on a sleeping person–in the spirit of this:

Except this one apparently was set in a woman’s dorm (or at least a house with female roomates.) Sadly, the video isn’t up yet, but what happens is that they do the old “shaving cream on the hand, tickle the face” gag–the woman wakes up and slaps her face to brush away the “bug,” only to smear shaving cream all over her self.

But here’s the part that makes this ad even douchier than normal–she wakes up and sees a strange man wearing a bizarre mask on his face. And screams. Well, no shit! I mean, this is the start of a slasher/rape nightmare, and I’d scream too. And I know that makes me a Humorless FeministTM, but give me a break–it’s bad enough that this forms the plot of every cop show on TV, do we really need it to sell burgers?

There was, however, one ad I did like:

I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the Progressive ads–I don’t own a car, so I’m largely indifferent to them–but I love how she totally rocked this guy back on his stereotypes. Rock on, Flo!

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The Varieties of Transphobic Experience

Categories: kyriarchy, the transsexual empire strikes back, Your RDA of Outrage

Let’s wade once again, ducks (good thing you can float!) into the wonderful world of…transphobia.

Let us consider the case of Lily McBeth.*

In 2006, after her transition, she beat back protests and bigotry to keep her job as a substitute teacher in New Jersey. It was widely and rightfully hailed as an important victory for tolerance.

That, of course, was then.

Recently she announced that she was retiring, frustrated at not getting many assignments. There is the appearance of transphobia, although the article cites other possible explanations. Explanations that make perfect sense.

The thing is, they always do. There’s always some excuse when a disprivileged person tries to call people out on their privilege.

There was a nice column about the situation by Joseph Wardy that concludes with this uplifting paragraph:

What is the reason for the opposition of transsexuals in the workplace or in society? A person born black has no choice. Neither is a transsexual who was also born that way. The range of bias from rejection to physical violence is punishing these people for their condition and not their behavior. A transsexual is a person equal to the rest of society who happened through no fault of their own to be born in the wrong body. What don’t we get about this reality?

Of course, the comments are something else entirely.

I have to tell you, in my 60 plus years, I have never heard a transsexual being bashed. It just never happened in my presence. Is this really a serious societal issue or a one in 100 million type problem? I feel sorry for anyone that is born so far out of the mainstream that it requires surgery, but there is a fix apparently, so why can’t we leave it at that?

This stuff makes me want to puke. Transgender is a made up word about nothing. You are a man or a woman. You either have a penis or a vagina. There is NO other option. If you have a penis, then you are a man. If you have a vagina, then you are a women. THAT’S IT. This I am a man, but feel like a women crap is disgusting. What the eff is wrong with these people. My kids are not going anywhere near these perverts. Forget having them be my kid’s teacher.

Cutting off your wang voluntarily is just wrong. And no, I don’t want that freak teaching my children.

So far, your garden-variety hate. But then there’s this:

You have done a great job of differentiating between homosexuality and transsexuality, so now would be a great opportunity to differentiate between classic transsexuality and trangenderism; there is a huge, huge difference.

Most transsexuals abhor the term transgender…

Well, now, whoa there. Most? Is there a survey on that? I personally know a bunch of transsexual women who gladly use the name transgendered.

..When Mara Keisling says:

“A survey her group helped to conduct this year of 6,500 transgendered Americans found 91 percent had faced bias at work.”

I don’t doubt it, but most transgendered are crossdressers, transvestites, gender queer, and every other conceivable form of gender variance on the planet…transsexuals are simply female, nothing more or less. The vast majority of that group transition, have their surgery, and then blend into the mainstream leading exceedingly normal lives, suffering no more discrimination than the next person.

Which, you know, can be quite a bit: that’s why there’s such things as feminism, the civil rights movement, gay pride…

The truth of the matter is that though there have been some attacks on gender variant people under the scenario you allude to, history has revealed that is an extremely small percentage of them. A review of the Transgender Day of Remembrance stie, which tracks deaths of anyone transgendered, (you can Google it if interested) shows that most of the attacks are on sex workers and others who put themselves at extreme risk. Most are not transsexual, but transgender. There is no excuse for murder or violence in society, regardless of who it is, where they are, or what the circumstances…nonetheless, it is prudent that one takes responsibility for their own safety and not put themselves in situations in which puts that safety at risk…many on the DOR site didn’t heed that warning.

“You see your honor, the bitch was asking for it!”

Now that’s a feminist defense! No privilege showing there, nope!

Of course, many people on the DOR website did identify as transsexual, or would have. If they’d only had time. (It’s tragic to see so many young faces there.)

I’ve run into this kind of transsexual separatism around the Net, and it always seems to be about division: I’m not like them, those awful crossdressers/transgenders/folks who don’t pass/whatever–I was born differently, I’m intersexed, I’m a classic transsexual, I have Harry Benjamin Syndrome. It’s a kind of sandcastling, building yourself up at the cost of others who are more or less like yourself: of stressing division instead of unity, of accomplishing the tasks of the kyriarchy, not resisting it.

Maybe it’s because I spent so much time as a crossdresser, but I just don’t get it; I’ve talked to a lot of different trans people in my life, and most of them were gender dysphoric, whether or not they were transsexual. And I’m not really convinced how pushing some people under the bus is going to help anyone–HRC did that to trans people in general (yeah, including you classic transsexuals) last year in the ENDA debacle, and look how well that worked out.

Plus it seems to me that the transsexual separatists seem perfectly content to let the umbrella-definition (i.e., transgender includes transsexuals, crossdressers, genderqueers, people who transition socially but not surgically, etc.) trangender people go out and do a lot of the activism, win rights for trans people (almost invariably favoring transsexuals, at least at first) without doing much activism of their own. (There are some exceptions.) And I think that’s ultimately what I don’t get about them: it’s this need to retrench privilege, rather than letting it go, to come through the crucible of transition and only want to build kyriachies-in-miniature.

But there’s one thing I know: separating yourself from people on the basis of accidents of birth has never really done a damn thing to help make people free.

*Here at TSA we will not mention the birth name of a trans person unless it is of vital interest to the story

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Teen Titans

Categories: beating them at their own game, let's hear it for the ladies, vive le feminisme

My inner cynic gets a lot of work. (In fact, I think she’s the only one who does get any work done here; at least, she always seems to be in the office.) I have a natural bent towards sarcasm and cynicism, the product of a German Catholic upbringing that my parents leavened with their social activism and wry humor.

So it shocked my inner cynic, bless her tiny, carbonized heart, to open up Google Reader–her favorite task, as it constantly spews out precisely the misguided bile that keeps her chortling with glee–to find a post from The F-Bomb.

And soon we were shoving my inner cynic out of the way, delving into the fabulous posts on this wonderful blog, written for, about, and by–teenagers.

Teenage feminists.

Is that not a delicious bagel of wonderfulness with a schmear of awesomesauce on top?

The place is indescribably cool. Check out this post on a screening of “The Secret,” and thrill as Julie calls “classism” about that piece of claptrap. Classism!

At this point, my inner idealist was hogging the mouse, clicking through the pages with an angelic sigh.

If you know a young woman in your life, point her to this site. If you know a young man, point him there as well. It is fantastic, and the only thing I regret is that there wasn’t something like this when I was a kid.

And I owe them: because I’m totally stealing the idea to show this interview with Joss Whedon, which is like getting a second bagel of wonderfulness, with awesomesauce and cream cheese. (Because sometimes awesomesauce isn’t enough.)

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