Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
Sarah Palin’s daughter is 17 and pregnant.
I’m not sure if that’s funny or tragically, tragically funny. Or, as our friend The Lazy Cartoonist put it, Bristol Palin is apparently open for drilling.
Feministing did a fine job of making the political hay that’s there to be made.
Is anyone else annoyed by the ongoing media silliness about Clinton’s voters? Either they’re on board, or they’re not. Clinton has said her piece about as articulately as anyone could, & it’s very apparent that if they don’t back Obama, they’re going against her wishes, which is one hell of a way to “support” a candidate.
Still, even for those who won’t vote for him, I do hope they vote. Ah, the stupidity of a woman not voting in a year where we had our first female candidate for president… don’t get me started. & All those other Dems running for the other umpteen offices will need supporting as well.
Eighty-eight years ago today women were given the right to vote in the U.S. Here’s a cool timeline of all of the events that lead up to it, which is vital to understand in the context of fighting for other rights. It took about 70 years from the first Seneca Falls convention to the ratification of the law.
& Tonight, Hillary Clinton will be speaking at the DNC convention. I’m waiting to hear what she’s got to say now that it’s all said & done (but I do hope she’s writing a book about the experience, too).
There is nothing, but nothing, that pisses me off more than women who don’t vote. So get registered, if you’re not.
Rachel Maddow will have her own show on MSNBC starting September 8th, 2008. It’ll be at 9PM, after Keith Olbermann. We’re both big fans of hers, and are very very pleased that all her guest hosting for Olbermann panned out.
My only sign of aging this week is that anti-wrinkle commercials have really started to piss me off. Especially that one with Andie McDowell, who weighs all of 12 lbs., talking about how hard it is to lose a dress size & how easy to lose your wrinkles.
You get wrinkles when you’re not young anymore. Deal.
I was reading over at feministing.com about casual sex, & read a recent bulletin from GenderPAC about the increase in Purity Balls, & then was mourning over the loss of another trans woman who got beaten to death by a guy who she’d previously given a blowjob to, & it got me thinking.
See, I wasn’t comfortable being a nubile when I was younger. I wasn’t comfortable ever being a nubile, & am still only wont to dress in sexier ways in very safe spaces – like DO, or certain queer/drag/fetish events, or the like. As much as I know it’s never a woman’s fault if she is hurt because of the way she’s dressed, I also had enough contact with non-sexual street violence to be twice as cautious about leaving myself open to any kind of sexual abuse or harassment, much less violence.
Which probably makes me painfully Second Wave, but there you go. I just don’t get it, & I’m never going to get it. I never had good sex that was casual; a long-standing “booty call” type relationship was a little closer to my experience of having good, non-committed sex, and maybe here we’re just defining “casual” in different ways, and the folks over at feministing are talking about the same kind of relationship. Continue reading “Me, Victorian Prude”
Has everyone seen the ad for the Fisher & Paykel Dishdrawer? A woman is putting dishes away, from the dishwasher into the cupboard drawers. As she bends over the dishwasher, and then the drawer, again and again, her husband, sitting nearby on a comfy chair, is saying “Dish” and then “Drawer” which becomes “Dishdrawer” & voila, he’s invented this genius new thing.
& All I can think watching it is, He should get off his genius ass & help her.
But on a more serious note, I wonder sometimes if the reason women aren’t known to have invented as many things is precisely because they’re usually busy doing stuff while the guy is sitting there watch them.
For my sister, who has put away more than her fair share of dishes in her life, a very very happy birthday.
Dubya & Co. have been in power long enough to pretty much devastate the economy, and in response, women are reporting that they had abortions in the past year precisely because of the bad economy. Women, being imminently practical, and carrying the burden of most childcare, and being the first and hardest hit by dropping wages, can’t afford to have their babies.
An interesting dilemma for Republicans, no? So if you want to prevent abortions, maybe it would be a good idea to quit funding tax cuts for the rich.
RH Reality Check has put together a nice website of pro-choice information for the 2008 Election.
(via Feministe)