Originally a comment by iknklast on She said people should be embraced for who they are authentically.

In an office where I used to work (as an intern), there was one man who couldn’t quite get hired because he wasn’t quite high enough on the list (it was a state job – he had to reach a standard of merit). The office couldn’t hire him because there were several women who had tested higher than he had, and even without the one point they got for being women, he couldn’t get near their scores. So, they worked and worked until they found some trace somewhere of a Native American ancestor, way back in his background, got him the 10 affirmative action points a Native American could get, and jumped him over enough women on the list to get him the job. So this white male, who had experienced nothing in the way of the crap that Native Americans experience, and nothing in the way of the crap women experience, managed to utilize a law written to maximize the ability of white males to benefit from something intended to assist a different group, and jumped over the bodies of the fallen to seize the job. Smugly, I might add. And the office was totally proud of what they had done.

He had not lived the experience, but he reaped benefits as though he had. And could claim oppression, because now he was “Native American”, having never lived that way, having never lived anything but white male privilege.

Meanwhile, my internship was never converted to full time; in fact, the convolutions they went through to avoid hiring a woman full time (me) were even more impressive than the maneuvers they used to hire a white male and claim him as a minority hire.

Sigh.

A Daily Mail front page picturing Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon and asking “who won Legs-it” has been condemned as “moronic” sexism.

The tabloid was scorned for focusing on the prime minister’s and first minister’s legs during talks on Brexit and on a second Scottish referendum.

Former equalities minister Nicky Morgan said it was “deliberately demeaning”.

The Daily Mail responded to the criticism in a statement which said: “For goodness sake, get a life!”

Of course it did. The Daily Mail lives in Trumpworld, where “jokes” that reduce even heads of state, if they have the bad taste to be female, to tits and bums and legs are normal and appropriate. Yeah sure she’s the PM but LOOK SHE HAS LEGS. The Daily Mail lives in Trumpworld, where “jokes” of that kind are hilarious and also a good way to make sure women don’t run away with the idea that they’re fully human and conscious and capable of thought. The Daily Mail lives in Trumpworld, where “jokes” of that kind keep women from getting too confident and above themselves. The Daily Mail lives in Trumpworld, where “jokes” of that kind take women down a peg many times every day.

Under the headline, “Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it!” (sic) and alongside a photo of the two leaders sitting down for talks at a Glasgow hotel, the paper wrote: “It wasn’t quite stilettos at dawn…”

In her sketch, [Sarah] Vine wrote: “What stands out here are the legs – and the vast expanse on show.

“There is no doubt that both these women consider their pins to be the finest weapon in their physical arsenal.”

May’s are “demurely arranged in her customary finishing-school stance”, she observes.

Sturgeon’s “shorter, but undeniably more shapely shanks are altogether more flirty, tantalisingly crossed, with the dominant leg pointing towards her audience”.

She says the Scottish leader’s pose – at a meeting to discuss topics of state including the triggering of Article 50 on Wednesday – is “a direct attempt at seduction”.

Haw haw haw that’s a good one. Sturgeon is trying to seduce…erm…Theresa May? England and Wales? Nigel Farage? I’m a bit lost.

The New York Times talked to Rachel Dolezal earlier this month.

In a New York Times report chronicling reactions to the discovery of Ms. Dolezal’s deception, blacks and liberals accused her of an offensive impersonation, part of a long history in which whites appropriated black heritage when it suited them.

Almost 1,500 Times readers responded in comments on that article:

So, if a white person claims to be black to get into Harvard (just like the 1980s movie Soul Man), h/she should be left alone and allowed to continue enjoying the fruits of the deception? — Lanier Y. Chapman, New York

Portraying oneself as black when they’re not is not a crime. However, if one isn’t truthful about one’s ethnicity, what other things may they not be truthful about? — Kurt Pickard, Murfreesboro, Tenn.

In an opinion column, Charles M. Blow of The Times wrote that Ms. Dolezal’s deception was “a spectacular exercise in hubris, narcissism and deflection.”

In an essay on the Op-Ed page, Tamara Winfrey Harris wrote: “Racial identity cannot be fluid as long as the definition of whiteness is fixed. And historically, the path to whiteness has been extremely narrow.”

So race-fluid isn’t and can’t be a thing, it seems.

The Seattle Times reports on a Facebook live she did yesterday:

“Nothing about whiteness describes me,” she said during the half-hour interview.

As she answered questions posed by viewers, her message remained focused and unapologetic.

Race, as understood in Western cultures, is a largely social construct, she said. Yet from the time she was a child, she felt more aligned with black people.

She said people should be embraced for “who they are authentically, and ultimately the quest for self-definition and self-determination is really part of the pursuit of happiness and freedom for us all.”

Nevertheless, the reaction from readers in the newspaper’s online-comments section was fierce and unforgiving.

Because race-fluid is not a thing.

“If black men start identifying as white then they will stop getting shot by police right? No, so transracial is something only white people can do…” with 1,502 likes.

That seems like a fair point.

Barry Duke at the Freethinker tells us that Haredi Jews in Bnei Brak in Israel have been spared the horror of seeing a female cartoon character on billboards.

Here’s the safe, innocent, not-smutty billboard:

Here’s the filthy lascivious lewd one:

Aaaaaaaaaaaaah! Yellow hair, eyelashes, googly eyes, a small nose! A female! FILTH!!!

According to this report, the original poster for Smurfs: The Lost Village, shows four of the tiny blue humanoids – but one one, a blonde Smurfette, was cropped from the ads in the district by the PR company Mirka’im – Hutzot Zahav.

The company distributing the movie, Forum Film, said that the PR company decided not to hang the original posters in Bnei Brak in order not to harm residents’ sensibilities, adding that it is not accepted practice for images of women to appear on the city’s billboards.

Well…if you say so, but…*cough*…that’s not an image of a woman.

Katha Pollitt in 1991:

Take a look at the kids’ section of your local video store. You’ll find that features starring boys, and usually aimed at them, account for 9 out of 10 offerings. Clicking the television dial one recent week — admittedly not an encyclopedic study — I came across not a single network cartoon or puppet show starring a female. (Nickelodeon, the children’s cable channel, has one of each.) Except for the crudity of the animation and the general air of witlessness and hype, I might as well have been back in my own 1950’s childhood, nibbling Frosted Flakes in front of Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and the rest of the all-male Warner Brothers lineup.

Contemporary shows are either essentially all-male, like “Garfield,” or are organized on what I call the Smurfette principle: a group of male buddies will be accented by a lone female, stereotypically defined. In the worst cartoons — the ones that blend seamlessly into the animated cereal commercials — the female is usually a little-sister type, a bunny in a pink dress and hair ribbons who tags along with the adventurous bears and badgers. But the Smurfette principle rules the more carefully made shows, too. Thus, Kanga, the only female in “Winnie-the-Pooh,” is a mother. Piggy, of “Muppet Babies,” is a pint-size version of Miss Piggy, the camp glamour queen of the Muppet movies. April, of the wildly popular “Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles,” functions as a girl Friday to a quartet of male superheroes. The message is clear. Boys are the norm, girls the variation; boys are central, girls peripheral; boys are individuals, girls types. Boys define the group, its story and its code of values. Girls exist only in relation to boys.

1991. Very little has changed.

Ah the typing wife. I remember those.

Bruce Holsinger is a novelist and English professor at the University of Virginia.

Holsinger and some colleagues were recently discussing how often the wives of male academics do significant work for which they are rarely given proper credit.

This reminded Holsinger of all the times he has read male authors thanking their wives for typing up manuscripts in the acknowledgments of their books. Curious to see how widespread the practice was, Holsinger did a quick search on Google Books and found dozens of “eye-opening” examples that he started sharing on Twitter with the hashtag #ThanksForTyping.

“The response was immediate and overwhelming,” Holsinger said. “It’s turned into a lively and mind-bending exchange.”

The article includes many examples.

Holsinger said many people have engaged in the hashtag to discuss “the politics of academic labor, the crucial role of women as collaborators and unacknowledged co-authors of academic work.”

Holsinger noted that many people have studied and written about this phenomenon already, but the hashtag kicked off a big public conversation.

I remember the jolt of fury I felt on reading one example of this years ago, in a collection of essays on I’m not sure what – the decline of reading, the invasion of technology, some such thing. The essay, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” was by Wendell Berry. It gets right to the point.

Like almost everybody else, I am hooked to the energy corporations, which I do not admire. I hope to become less hooked to them. In my work, I try to be as little hooked to them as possible. As a farmer, I do almost all of my work with horses. As a writer, I work with a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper.

My wife types my work on a Royal standard typewriter bought new in 1956 and as good now as it was then. As she types, she sees things that are wrong and marks them with small checks in the margins. She is my best critic because she is the one most familiar with my habitual errors and weaknesses. She also understands, sometimes better than I do, what ought to be said. We have, I think, a literary cottage industry that works well and pleasantly. I do not see anything wrong with it.

I still remember my feeling of disbelief. It was long before blogging was a thing, let alone Facebook, so I had no way to tell an eager world about my disbelief. But now I do! With apparently total lack of self-consciousness, the guy congratulates himself on writing with a pen, and then says his wife soils herself with the beast technology in order to put his writing into a medium acceptable to editors.

What would a computer cost me? More money, for one thing, than I can afford, and more than I wish to pay to people whom I do not admire. But the cost would not be just monetary. It is well understood that technological innovation always requires the discarding of the “old model”—the “old model” in this case being not just our old Royal standard. but my wife, my critic, closest reader, my fellow worker. Thus (and I think this is typical of present-day technological innovation). what would be superseded would be not only something, but somebody. In order to be technologically up-to-date as a writer, I would have to sacrifice an association that I am dependent upon and that I treasure.

Did his wife get credit as his co-author? Of course not. Does he even bother to name her? Of course not. Did he really treat her as his “fellow worker” as opposed to his secretary? Of course not.

Fortunately this happened:

After the foregoing essay, first published in the New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, was reprinted in Harper’s, the Harper’s editors published the following letters in response and permitted me a reply. W.B.

I wasn’t the only one who saw it.

Wendell Berry provides writers enslaved by the computer with a handy alternative: Wife—a low-tech energy-saving device. Drop a pile of handwritten notes on Wife and you get back a finished manuscript, edited while it was typed. What computer can do that? Wife meets all of Berry’s uncompromising standards for technological innovation: she’s cheap, repairable near home, and good for the family structure.
Best of all, Wife is politically correct because she breaks a writer’s “direct dependence on strip-mined coal.”
History teaches us that Wife can also be used to beat rugs and wash clothes by hand, thus eliminating the need for the vacuum cleaner and washing machine, two more nasty machines that threaten the act of writing.

Gordon Inkeles Miranda, Calif.

The value of a computer to a writer is that it is a tool not for generating ideas but for typing and editing words. It is cheaper than a secretary (or a wife!) and arguably more fuel-efficient. And it enables spouses who are not inclined to provide free labor more time to concentrate on their own work.
We should support alternatives both to coal-generated electricity and to IBM-style technocracy. But I am reluctant to entertain alternatives that presuppose the traditional subservience of one class to another. Let the PCs come and the wives and servants go seek more meaningful work.

Toby Koosman Knoxville, Tenn.

Berry was indignant.

I am also surprised by the meanness with which two of these writers refer to my wife. In order to imply that I am a tyrant, they suggest by both direct statement and innuendo that she is subservient, characterless, and stupid—a mere “device” easily forced to provide meaningless “free labor.” I understand that it is impossible to make an adequate public defense of one’s private life, and so l will only point out that there are a number of kinder possibilities that my critics have disdained to imagine: that my wife may do this work because she wants to and likes to; that she may find some use and some meaning in it; that she may not work for nothing. These gentlemen obviously think themselves feminists of the most correct and principled sort, and yet they do not hesitate to stereotype and insult, on the basis of one fact, a woman they do not know. They are audacious and irresponsible gossips .

Zoooom – the point goes rocketing by. They weren’t saying any of that about his wife, they were saying it about the way Berry wrote about her – the clueless, entitled, smug way he wrote about her.

They’ve delivered the letter.

Theresa May has signed the letter that will formally begin the UK’s departure from the European Union.

Giving official notice under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, it will be delivered to European Council president Donald Tusk later.

In a statement in the Commons, the prime minister will then tell MPs this marks “the moment for the country to come together”.

And pretend it wasn’t a huge mistake.

Trump administration PR:

White House press secretary Sean Spicer got into a heated exchange with American Urban Radio Networks White House correspondent April Ryan during Tuesday’s press briefing, telling the reporter to “stop shaking your head” and to “report the facts.”

Well hey! At least he didn’t ask her to set up a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus for him.

She asked him what the admin was doing to repair its image, and he had a meltdown.

“If the president puts Russian salad dressing on his salad tonight, somehow that’s a Russian connection,” he continued.

“I appreciate your agenda here,” he added. “Hold on. At some point, report the facts!”

Spicer said Republicans and Democrats alike have claimed there is not evidence that points to the Trump team’s collusion with Russia in election meddling.

“I’m sorry that that disgusts you,” Spicer said to Ryan. “You’re shaking your head.”

“Understand this, at some point, the facts are what they are,” he said. “And every single person who’s been briefed on this situation have all come to the same conclusion. At some point, April, you’re going to have to take ‘no’ for an answer with respect to whether or not there was collusion.”

Ryan went back to her original question, which was how does the administration hope to change the perception of the White House. Spicer said it would keep “doing everything we are doing” with regards to carrying out the Trump agenda.

The reporter then followed up with a question about the president meeting with former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, whom she pointed out Trump called a “b[itch]” in 2006 and did not support Trump in the run up to the general election.

Spicer, dismayed, went back to lambasting Ryan.

“April, hold on, it seems like you’re hell bent on trying to make sure that whatever image you want to tell about this White House stays,” he said, later adding, “Stop shaking your head.”

Well hey! At least he didn’t call her a bitch.

Apparently groping schoolgirls is a big thing on Tokyo subway trains.

Tamaka Ogawa was about 10 years old when she was sexually assaulted for the first time. It was a public holiday and she was on the subway. A man standing behind her pulled down the band of her culottes and underwear, touched her bare bottom, then pressed himself against her. She recalls feeling shocked and physically sickened. When she reached home, she repeatedly washed the spot where he had pressed himself against her, although she was conscious of not spending too long in the toilet, in case her family noticed that something was wrong.

Apparently she didn’t feel able to tell her family it had happened, which is sad.

A few years later it became a regular thing.

the groping and sexual assaults – men would often stick their hands inside her underwear – became a regular occurrence as she made her way to or from school in her uniform. Each time, she would run away, unsure of what to do.

“I thought of myself as a child,” she reflects. “I could not understand that adults were excited by touching me.”

It would be improper to express anger towards an adult, she thought, and she worried about attracting attention. Besides, her parents had never spoken to her about such things and how she ought to handle them.

She recalls one incident particularly clearly. She was about 15 and on her way to school. A man began to touch her, putting his hand inside her underwear. He was aggressive and it hurt, she remembers. When the train stopped, she got off. But he grabbed her hand and told her: “Follow me.” Ogawa ran away. She believes that people saw what was going on, but nobody helped.

How do people – men – manage to give themselves permission to do things like that? Shoving your hand into the underwear of a child on the subway? The very thought of it makes me flinch.

[E]xperts say Japanese society remains willfully oblivious or unaware of how widespread this problem is and how often girls are assaulted.

Hiroko Goto, a feminist, professor of criminal law at Chiba University and vice president of Japan-headquartered NGO Human Rights Now, believes many people do not consider groping to be a crime. “[For] society at large, it’s not a big problem; that’s the kind of double standard [between] the victims’ viewpoint and the social viewpoint.”

In Ogawa’s opinion, society normalises groping as something that just happens.

That’s interesting, given the strong emphasis on politeness and formality in Japanese culture. There are elaborate rules on how to address people, but grown men assaulting girls on the subway is just ho hum, everybody does it.

According to Ogawa, groping-related violations are too often downplayed by society as a “nuisance”. It was only when she started writing about these crimes, she says, that she discovered that what she had experienced was sexual assault. “What was shocking me the most is that I didn’t realise that I was experiencing indecent assault,” Ogawa says.

Japanese society focuses on telling women to be careful, how to dress and to travel in women-only carriages – which are mainly available during peak hours on weekday mornings – Ogawa says. “They are telling women to protect themselves, to be careful, but no one tells the men not to do it,” she says.

Even the rail authorities’ anti-groping posters are too cute and miss the point, Ogawa argues.

Yeah cuteness isn’t the right response.

Photos like this?

Appreciated joining @POTUS for meeting with the Freedom Caucus again today. This is it. #PassTheBill pic.twitter.com/XG6lQIy5a6

— Vice President Pence (@VP) March 23, 2017

They’re not “gaffes.” They’re “suck it up, buttercup.”

Jill Filipovic comments:

For liberals, the photo seemed like an inadvertent insight into the current Republican psyche: Powerful men plotting to leave vulnerable women up a creek, so ensconced in their misogynistic world they don’t even notice the bad optics (not to mention the irony of the “pro-life” party making it harder for women to afford to have babies). Political analysts treated the photo as a gaffe, the kind of rookie mistake we’re used to seeing from the Trump White House.

Ah no. They’re just restoring the world to the way it’s supposed to be.

This isn’t the first celebratory photo the White House has released of men cutting health care for women. When Mr. Trump signed the global “gag rule,” which pulls United States funding from organizations abroad that so much as mention the word “abortion” (even organizations that don’t provide abortions), he did it flanked by a half-dozen white men in suits. The rule is an order that primarily affects women in developing countries, who will see their access to contraception and even basic services like malaria treatment constrained by funding cuts that politicize global health. That image was similar to one of President George W. Bush surrounded entirely by grinning men as he signed a ban on a rare abortion procedure.

I bet I blogged about that at the time too. I’ve been doing this since 1835.

Filipovic says maybe it’s not a gaffe but a message to their right-wing buddies. Well of course it is; that’s who they are. Not necessarily in the sense that they go out of their way to make sure there are no women in the frame, but in the sense that if you reminded them they were telling women what to do with their bodies without consulting any women at all, they would tell you to stop being so PC.

President Trump ran a campaign of aggrieved masculinity, appealing to men who felt their rightful place in society has been taken from them by a stream of immigrants stealing their jobs, women who don’t need husbands to support them, and members of minority groups who don’t work as hard but still get special treatment.

Also appealing to men who think women are sluts and bitches. That’s a very large constituency.

Mr. Trump oozes male entitlement, from his brash insistence that he’s the best at everything despite knowing very little about anything to his history of crass sexism…

Mr. Trump promised he would make America great again, a slogan that included the implicit pledge to return white men to their place of historic supremacy. And that is precisely what these photos show. The same kind of men who have been in charge of the United States since its founding, so very proud of themselves for trying to ax the rights that make it possible for women to chart their own futures — and to compete with men.

The more women forced to remain pregnant when they don’t want to, the less competition for men.

Guest post by Natasha Chart.

“How liberal feminism became all about the D, and therefore not any kind of feminism.”

“Why narcissists aren’t oppressed, and why you should dislike them harder if you have any sense.”

“The left never stopped hating women, they’re just trying to get into your votes.”

“Perverts and abusers feel no shame: learn to spot and reject their open-air mendacity.”

“Women are male, biology is fiction, and other stupid things I got told on social media.”

“How the sex industry bought mainstream feminism while liberal men cheered.”

“Rich men buy poor men by giving them women: you shouldn’t stand for it.”

“The Lexus and the Knowledge Tree: How feminism got replaced by pastiche and no one noticed.”

“Is ‘this’ feminist? No. Go take over your city government.”

“I identify as a Sequoia: A beginner’s guide to securing Forest Service protection.”

More skulduggery:

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee was on his way to an event in Washington late Tuesday when the evening’s plans abruptly changed. After taking a brief phone call, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) swapped cars and slipped away from his staff, congressional officials said. He appears to have used that unaccounted-for stretch of time to review classified intelligence files brought to his attention by sources he has said he will not name.

The next morning, Nunes stepped up to a set of microphones in the Capitol complex to declare that he had learned that U.S. spy agencies had “incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition.”

Trump promptly burst into tweets about how right he was when he said Obama wiretapped him.

Last year, Nunes repeatedly skirmished with intelligence leaders over assessments that Russia sought to help Trump win. He has sought to help the White House knock down news stories alleging close ties between Trump associates and the Kremlin. And Nunes has pushed his panel to focus on lines of inquiry — including hunting the sources of damaging news leaks — that seem more favorable to Trump.

Nunes’s latest move came Friday, when he made a flurry of announcements that on the surface signaled promising new investigative paths, including an agreement to hear testimony from Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. But to Democrats, Nunes’s actions again seemed to show the hidden agenda of the White House.

Most immediately, Nunes canceled an open hearing that had been scheduled for Tuesday with former senior officials who have battled Trump. Among them is former acting attorney general Sally Q. Yates, who was fired by Trump; former director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., who publicly disputed Trump’s wiretapping claim; and former CIA director John Brennan, who has said that Trump should “be ashamed of himself” over his behavior toward U.S. spy agencies.

He didn’t postpone it, he canceled it – on his own, without consulting the committee. He’s an ally of Trump’s. You do the math.

Schiff also implied he suspects a White House hand in what he called Nunes’s “dead-of-night excursion” to view classified documents. Several congressional officials said they were told about the phone call and swapped cars by members of Nunes’s staff.

Jack Langer, a spokesman for Nunes, disputed the depiction. “That account is inaccurate,” Langer said. He declined to elaborate.

To review classified files without breaking the law, Nunes would have needed to do so at a secure facility. Congressional officials said that the director of National Intelligence, the FBI and National Security Agency had all indicated that they got no late-night visit from Nunes, a trip that probably would have been entered in security logs.

Nunes has repeatedly refused to say where he went or whether the documents were provided by the White House, including when confronted by committee members during a closed-door meeting on Thursday, officials said.

Is that sleazy and compromised enough yet?