This comic by mamamantis sums up the entire “friend zone” and NiceGuy™ phenomena beautifully (h/t Jason):
This is but a sample. Click the image to see all.
I also have an infrequently-updated Tumblr blog exploring the concept of the NiceGuy™.
See also, girlfriendzoning.
An Imgur user going by the handle LittleQueenTrashMouth (probably not their real name) posted a two-part FAQ (part 1, part 2) about the actual business and experience of stripping, and it actually shed light on a job that people tend to either mythologize or severely denigrate. It offers one person’s perspective, but from a viewpoint rarely seen in most media. It focuses exclusively on female strippers serving male clientele, which I suppose constitutes most people’s image of how stripping works. Here are a few highlights (it gets pretty PG-13 from here on, plus a trigger warning for mention of rape and sexual harassment):
How often do the strip poles get cleaned? Continue reading
(The following was my response to a comment on Facebook about how people calling themselves pro-life view abortion as murder, the same as if a woman shot and killed her husband. I disagree with that analogy on many levels. I owe some hat-tips to a few people for some of the ideas expressed here. I’ll try to update if I can find those posts.)
Except that, in your hypothetical, it’s probably safe to assume that the woman’s husband was not physically occupying space inside her abdomen (no sex jokes, please). I understand that people think abortion is murder–I think they’re wrong, and I don’t think that simply calling it murder ends the conversation. The problem with calling it murder in a way that makes it equivalent to killing a separate, autonomous human being for whatever reason is this: if you are experiencing kidney failure, and I am the only known person on earth who is a match to you, no one can legally force me to give you one of my kidneys, whatever the medical consequences for you or the social consequences for me. The same goes for a blood transfusion or any other use of any part of my body. If I am brain-dead, but my kidney is viable for organ donation, no one can take my kidney unless I consented to be an organ donor. In short, I have complete and utter legal authority and control over how to use my body, even if it means that someone else dies. The alternative is that I could be forcibly anesthetized for kidney removal, resulting in a possible lifetime of medical complications against my will. From a legal standpoint, it doesn’t matter why I refuse to consent to organ donation. Calling abortion murder as though it is merely a decision to end the life of another person (and I disagree that an embryo or fetus is a person in that sense, but that’s a slightly different topic) ignores completely the fact that said embryo or fetus is occupying space inside another person’s body. No one can be compelled to donate a kidney, and no one can be compelled to give up their body for an embryo or fetus. Otherwise, a corpse has more bodily autonomy than a living pregnant person.
Now, at this point, the conversation usually (not always) turns to the circumstances of the pregnancy–i.e. the woman (or transgender man, or genderfluid person, and so forth) had sex, knowing that pregnancy is a possible result, etc. etc. The problem there is that you don’t know, unless you investigate the circumstances of the pregnancy, whether it was the result of willful sexual conduct or not, and even if it were not the result of voluntary behavior (e.g. rape), so what? You already said that you believe a fetus is a person with the right to life and so forth, so it shouldn’t make a difference how the pregnancy occurred. It’s just that telling a rape victim that they have to endure the multitude of difficulties presented by pregnancy seems morally abhorrent to many people. That shouldn’t matter if you truly believe what you originally said–so we come back to the beginning, and still have to contend with the fact that the pregnant person has bodily autonomy that still has not been recognized.
There are other arguments too, such as a right of self-defense if a pregnancy threatens someone’s health, but it still comes down to the right to bodily autonomy. Whatever you believe about an embryo’s or fetus’ rights, a separate, living, breathing human being–who was viewed as such up until the moment their pregnancy was discovered–is sitting right there, being ignored.
One of the most difficult concepts for me in coming to understand my own privilege (PDF file) is the idea that you can have privilege in society and still be miserable. I don’t even have much of anything to complain about from society’s standpoint—I was born a white, mid-to-upper-middle-class, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied, reasonably-conventionally-attractive male. (I had never even heard the word “cisgender” until about two years ago, and my iPhone autocorrect still doesn’t seem to know it.) The only areas where I might lack privilege (atheism and mental health) are not immediately apparent to people who don’t know me, and haven’t seriously impacted my life (mostly because of the areas where I am privileged).
Whatever struggles I have had in my life, I’ve always had the benefit of financial support, access to good health care, and everything else that comes with the various categories I listed above. I’m not saying this to brag, but rather to say that I’m very, very lucky, and to illustrate that the challenge for me and others like me, when it comes to privilege, is understanding and acknowledging all the ways it has helped me while doing what I can to make things better (or at least not make them worse.) This mostly involves shutting up and listening.
A blog post by Gina Crosley-Corcoran entitled “Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person…” (h/t Elizabeth) captures the seeming conflict between white privilege and actual lived experience: Continue reading
![By Ludovic Bertron from New York City, Usa (Nottoway Plantation Uploaded by russavia) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/800px-Nottoway_Plantation_3964493172-300x199.jpg "By Ludovic Bertron from New York City, Usa (Nottoway Plantation Uploaded by russavia) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons")
I’ve been sick for all of 2014 up to this point, so missed several stories I thought to blog about but lacked the energy—so I’ll blog about them now. Probably everyone with any interest in the topic has seen or heard about Ani DiFranco’s now-cancelled retreat at a refurbished slave plantation in Louisiana. There isn’t much I can say about it that hasn’t been said by people with far greater wisdom than experience than I, and that’s really the point. The only advice I can give to anyone in this sort of situation is to stop talking and listen.
Once it became clear that this was an epic f***up, Ani Difranco offered a notpology on Facebook, followed by a somewhat better apology, but by then the damage was done. There is literally nothing anyone can say about a spruced-up concentration camp on the banks of the Mississippi that would make it anything other than a spruced-up concentration camp. Multiple commentators have drawn a comparison to Dachau—say what you will about the historical parallels, but at least Dachau is honest about its past.
To learn more about the Nottoway Plantation and exactly why this was all such a terrible idea, read Ani DiFranco’s Epic Fail: Reflections on Nottoway Plantation by Adele M. Stan. Stan also tweeted an excellent question:
The #AniDiFranco #FAIL calls this question: Why isn't slavery a primary area of study for feminists? http://t.co/c2aA3oMObE
— Adele Stan (@addiestan) January 6, 2014
To learn more about the legacy of slavery in Louisiana, read Lamar White, Jr.’s Why “12 Years a Slave” Will Always Matter to Louisiana.
For a broader understanding of racial issues in feminism, read Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color (JSTOR registration required) by Kimberle Crenshaw, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6 (Jul., 1991).
Here are other posts I’ve found dealing with the issue: Continue reading
And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love…
A county clerk and chief deputy clerk in New Mexico resigned from their positions after the state’s Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage last week.
Roosevelt County Clerk Donna Carpenter and Deputy Clerk Janet Collins resigned from their posts early Friday morning, one day after the state’s Supreme Court ruled that barring same-sex couples from marrying violates the state’s constitutional right to equal protection.
Although an official reason for the clerks’ resignation has not been provided, county commissioners have told the Associated Press and other media outlets that both Collins and Carpenter made their intention of quitting clear, should same-sex marriage be legalized in the state.
Roosevelt County Commissioner Bill Cathey told AP that the two had made it apparent that they would quit “rather than be associated with that … she told us in the past that’s what she would do,” he said. “… I am personally very disappointed in the decision of the judges, and I don’t blame our clerk for doing what she did.”
***
Commissioner Jake Lopez, a Democrat, added to the ABQ Journal that the clerk and her deputy also told him their personal values interfered with their distributing of same-sex marriage licenses. “[Carpenter] said she would rather resign because she wasn’t going to provide any licenses to people who marry like that.”
***
Although gay activist groups in the state lauded the [Utah] Supreme Court’s decision, supporters of traditional marriage have vowed to continue fighting for a ban on same-sex marriage. Following last week’s court ruling, State Sen. Bill Sharer (R-Farmington) said that when the legislature reconvenes in January he will propose a constitutional amendment defining marriage as being between one man and one woman, and if the amendment is adopted by state legislature it will then be voted on by New Mexico’s residents.
“We shall continue the debate,” Sharer said in a statement following the ruling. “Until the people accept it, it is not settled.” Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican, also said in a statement that she would prefer the issue of same-sex marriage be left to the voters, not the courts.
…Yes they’ll know we are Christians by our love.
Still, better that they quit than demand special religious exemptions to their job duties.
UPDATE (12/26/2013): Via my alert and fair-minded friend Ethan:
OK, you need to be fair; I’ve read stories of other county clerks there working through lunches and making extra efforts to process the large number of marriage license applications that were coming through.
UPDATE (12/30/2013): As of December 30, all of Utah’s county clerks have agreed to follow the court’s ruling, i.e. follow the law, i.e. do their jobs.
The problem many women have with access to accurate, professional reproductive health care is not because of the doctors, other hospital staff, or even annoying protesters, but rather the administrators and ideologues that employ the medical professionals. It is therefore refreshing to see some pushback on that front.
The ACLU is suing the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops over its hospital directives that allegedly led a Michigan hospital to give inaccurate medical information to a woman in order to avoid discussing abortion with her. The woman, according to the ACLU, was only in the 18th week of pregnancy when her water broke. The hospital kept sending her home, even though she was in terrible pain, the pregnancy had almost no chance of surviving, and the delay in treating her put her at ever-greater risk. Note that the lawsuit is not against the hospital or the doctors who allegedly denied her adequate care, but rather the religious organization that pulls the hospital’s strings.
You can have whatever religious beliefs you want, but you cannot force those beliefs onto others, especially when their life is at risk. Seriously, what is so hard to understand about that???
Several organizations have filed a complaint against the government of El Salvador with the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, claiming that the government’s refusal to allow a woman to undergo a life-saving abortion violated her human rights. The woman, identified as Beatriz, was 26 weeks pregnant with a “nonviable, anencephalic fetus.” Her prior health problems made it unlikely that she could survive the pregnancy, according to her doctors, but the Supreme Court of El Salvador denied her request for an emergency abortion in May 2013.
In June, the court reportedly allowed her doctors to perform an “emergency cesarian” that was pretty much a glorified hysterectomy. It saved her life, but the 22 year-old woman obviously will not be having any more children. All of this was apparently in the cause of maintaining the country’s absolute ban on abortion because of reasons.
Feminist organizations assert that Beatriz’s story reflects the consequences of the absolute criminalization of abortion and the institutional violence that is exercised against Salvadoran girls, adolescents, and adult women. According to data gathered by the Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion, between 2000 and 2011, a total of 129 women in El Salvador have been charged with abortion or aggravated homicide, with sentences ranging between two and 40 years in prison. Currently there are at least 30 women serving prison such sentences, the majority having suffered the loss of their pregnancies for various obstetric complications.
I don’t get it.
UPDATE (12/10/2013): Astute reader Kathleen directed my attention to a 1987 court case, In re A.C., 573 A.2d 1235 (D.C. Cir. 1990), in which the USCCB was one of only two organizations (along with Americans United for Life) to defend a hospital’s decision to perform a C-section on a terminally-ill cancer patient without her consent. The fetus survived about two hours after the procedure, and the mother survived a few more days. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the lower court ruling that allowed the procedure, finding that the woman had the right to make decisions regarding her own and the fetus’ health care. A report from the ACLU written ten years after oral arguments in the case recounted:
When an attorney for the hospital argued that it was appropriate to sacrifice a dying woman for her fetus, one judge replied incredulously, “Are you urging this court to find that you can handcuff a woman to a bed and force her to give birth?” Instead, the court resoundingly concluded that in virtually all circumstances a woman — not doctors or a judge — should make medical decisions on behalf of herself and her fetus. The opinion emphasized an argument made in the American Public Health Association’s friend-of-the court brief, that court-ordered intervention “drives women at high risk of complications during pregnancy and childbirth out of the health care system to avoid coerced treatment.”
Photo credit: By dbking (Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
I’m unclear on how someone who seems to have such a low opinion of living, breathing women (or “females,” as he might call them) came to found a successful company that sells yoga clothing to women. Lululemon’s CEO and founder has been in the news here and there for saying this or that inane (at best), sexist (at worst) drivel, but it doesn’t appear to be anything new. He wrote a blog post on the company’s blog dated March 30, 2009, that details the company’s origins through a, shall we say, creative interpretation of the last forty years of history—starting with “the pill” and culminating in a surge of breast cancer among “cigarette-smoking Power Women who were on the pill.” Here is his conclusion, and you can decide if it piques your interest enough to learn how the events of the 1970’s through the 1990’s shaped the company:
Ultimately, lululemon was formed because female education levels, breast cancer, yoga/athletics and the desire to dress feminine came together all at one time. lululemon saw the opportunity to make the best technologically advanced components for the Super Girl market.
I, uh, um…..ugh. Continue reading
It’s so hard to be a man these days, right, fellas? Everything in the world is getting so dang….well, I don’t quite want to say girly, but it’s something…. As we all know, manhood is the epitome of strength and courage, yet at the same time it is so fragile that the mere sight of the color pink, let alone an inappropriately long hug between two dudes, might send the entire edifice of manhood crashing down in a cascade of testosterony chaos.
“Femininity is depicted as weakness, the sapping of strength, yet masculinity is so fragile that apparently even the slightest brush with the feminine destroys it.” –Gwen Sharp (via unfocus)
There is hope, though. Consumer culture has made a heroic effort to help us hold on to our fleeting masculinity. We have specially-formulated (I assume) manly calories in our low-carb soft drinks. We have the guyet, a masculine alternative to girly diets. And whatever would we do without brogurt, which is totally a real thing.
At least one huge, glaring hole in our defensive edifices remains, though, and it yawns mockingly before us, almost as though it were laughing at our feeble efforts to kindle the dying embers of our manhood. Obviously, I’m talking about internet password generators, but you need cower in the shadows no more!
Web developer John Polacek, working with the Draftcb Open Source Project, has created Passwords for the Manly Man (h/t Jeff). Its passwords are “so strong and secure they breach the gates of hell.” I tried it, and was in fact able to log on to Hell’s servers. (It was disappointing. The porn was pretty meh.)
So crack open a Dr. Pepper Ten, help yourself to some brogurt, and enjoy a manly internet experience with a manly password. Just don’t try to hug me, dude.