By now I’m sure we’ve all heard that the Republican campaign spent $150,000 on new clothes for Sarah Palin on her being named as McCain’s running mate. Here’s the LA Times commenting on it (link via It’s All One Thing).
I’m more surprised people are surprised by this. By Republican standards, $150,000 is an absolute bargain, considering it’s roughly half what Cindy McCain’s RNC outfit cost.
It’s become apparently newsworthy enough that the GOP is issuing statements concerning it. McCain says she needed new clothing, I guess either because she didn’t have enough, as governor of Alaska, or because everything she owned was maternity wear. They also claim all the clothes will be donated back to charity, by which I suppose they mean PUMA for Hockey Moms or somesuchlike.
To be honest, I don’t care, though I do so enjoy the fact that during the midst of an economic crisis verging on absolute collapse, John McCain can’t keep track of how many homes he earns and Sarah Palin spends very nearly more in a few weeks on clothing than I have so far earned during my entire professional career (and I’m 30. Which probably says a lot about my professional career, or sometimes lack thereof). The only thing I care about is that she’s a total hypocrite. Because here’s the Yahoo! news story in which she denies the rumors and then says that:
It’s kind of painful to be criticized for something when all the facts are not out there and are not reported.
Which reminded me a lot of this video:
From back in March when she “offered Hillary Clinton advice on how to campaign” by criticizing Clinton for a “perceived whine.”
Please may this woman disappear just as quickly as she appeared in the first place.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go early vote. And by ‘early vote,’ I mean cast my ballot for “that one.” And by “that one,” I mean Barack Obama.
Right now, Colorado is split right down the middle between Obama and McCain. It’s a dead heat at 44% of voters each, which is why Palin was in Englewood the other day accusing Barack Obama of “pallin’ around with terrorists,” the best evidence she has of which is the fistbump Obama once gave his wife and the fact that Obama barely knows some guy who did something when Obama was, like, 8 years old.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and all, of course, and right now I’m not sure there’s anyone in America more desperate than the two people on the GOP ticket.
I get people who support John McCain, though, I’ll admit. I did once, too, long, long ago before he let Bush win the GOP primary back in 1999. Before then, I would have said he seemed like a good guy, and I’d like to see him come along after Bill Clinton. The world would be a much different place if we were currently ending a McCain administration instead of a Bush administration, and I’d wager, in fact, that alternate history wouldn’t have led us to such a bleak and very real present, with its economic crises, illegal espionage, and unjust wars. Back in 1999, McCain seemed like the kind of guy who would have told the world on September 12th, 2001, that we had been struck by terrorists and would respond swiftly and surely, and then, you know, responded to the right country.
But that’s not who John McCain is anymore. He’s erratic. He seems to want to believe that America can restores its international image simply by bombing more countries. He doesn’t understand the economic crisis, not in any real way; no one who would lose track of the number of houses his family owns could really grok the mortgage crisis.
So I get people who support him, I think, because they’re supporting who he used to be rather than what he’s done since and what he’s running on, now, and really, who wouldn’t like to go back to 1999? Well. Okay, I wouldn’t, but 2000-2001 would be nice, certainly. I’d dig it.
Houghton-Mifflin, purveyors of the textbook of said statistics. Who decided that even though I spent nearly $150 purchasing their textbook, I could only download it once, and then only to one computer, and only then using Adobe Digital Editions. Who the hell uses Adobe Digital Editions? And seriously, I get the new Coldplay, I rip it to my computer, I can listen on any device I want, but I spend nearly ten times as much and you lock me in? It’s a statistics textbook for a business course, and that business model makes me question just how damned authoritative you actually are. Business is about relationships and transactions with your customers. I am your customer, and you totally and completely failed me.
PUMA supporters. Which, apparently, stands for “Party Unity My Ass.” Have you heard of this? All the sad supporters of Hillary who are upset she lost and decided that Obama is the antichrist, and that McCain/Palin is a good choice because Palin is, like, a chick? God, I’m so tired of everyone backhanding Obama and treating McCain/Palin like they wouldn’t be 8 more years of the same. Dear female PUMA supporters; take your heads out of your collective twats long enough to acknowledge that feminism is about more than simply voting for anyone in a skirt.
After hearing the absolutely weird-o story about Sarah Palin, her daughter Bristol, and Trig, I just had to do some more digging. Yesterday was a grading day for the most part, so I only managed to squeeze a bit in, but I did still manage to. Because it’s the sort of story that sticks, isn’t it? Here’s the second woman in history to run for vice-president, and she brings with her what might be a surreal familial scandal.
For anyone who hasn’t heard, the official story is that Palin, while in Texas to deliver some speech or other, realized at some point during the night/early hours of the morning (back in April), that she had begun to leak amniotic fluid, indicating her water broke. She called her doctor for advice and was told she was mostly okay, and so she did what any late-term mother would do; she went and delivered her speech in the morning, and then got on a plane to fly back to the town of which she had been the mayor to deliver the child, Trig, who was born at 6:30 am.
Which sounds like it was more than 24 hours after her water broke.
This, apparently, is highly unusual for a fifth child; the general trend is that labor time goes down as women have more children. So a first child might take a day and a half (I’m pretty sure I did), while a fifth might take a third that much time (I think my sister’s labor took, like, six or eight hours. I’d have to find out).
There’s something else that bothers me, too; isn’t the official story that she knew her child was going to have Down’s syndrome? I thought she knew that ahead of time. So rather than seek medical attention right away, she delayed for nearly 24 hours. To fly.
Curioser and curioser.
The fact that Trig has Down’s syndrome might play into this as well; it is rather well known that women over forty are at statistically greater risk to both conceive/bring to term a child with Down’s syndrome, but so are exceptionally younger mothers. Say, those who are 16 or so.
Also, there is the question of media and a sudden paucity of pictures. The Alaskan State Government removed from its website nearly all photos of Palin and her family.
However, here’s a video of her chastising Hillary Clinton in March. In this video, according to the official story, she is 6 or 7 months pregnant:
I don’t know; maybe she’s just hiding it well.
Trig was born a month later.
And I’ll admit: I can be like a pitbull with lockjaw, and when I get focused on something, watch out. And yesterday, I was focused. So I employed some good ole’-fashioned Google fu.
My gut reaction was, in fact, what on Earth is she wearing? Is that periwinkle with a chartreuse scarf? Both those colors are words I generally use just because they’re funny; I don’t think I’ve ever expected to use them both literally and in context. But that jacket’s got to be something one wouldn’t wear for form so much as function.
Looking at those pictures, I can’t decide either way. My first thought on seeing either is not that that woman is 7 months pregnant (my first thought is the aforementioned gut reaction), but neither would I disbelieve you if you told me she was. I’d think, wow, hey, hiding it well.
But that jacket? She’s either trying to disguise that she’s pregnant or trying to disguise that she’s not.
Or then again: maybe she just likes the jacket.
After I saw the pictures, I wrote to Todercan. I figured the pictures had to have been taken around April, and that’s him in the picture with her, so I thought hey, dude might know. Few better ways to find out the answer to a question than to ask.
The pictures that I posted on my blog in a this post (April 3rd) had been taken on March 11th, so the governess was in her 7th month of pregnancy. I’ll have to admit that she doesn’t look very pregnant in those pictures (here is a large resolution version of one), but that doesn’t mean that she was lying. Simply because a woman (and a public figure) can and wants to keep her pregnancy secret, for different reasons (and there are tons of them that don’t involve her daughter’s sexual life) doesn’t mean that she is an incapable leader. It is her capabilities as a governor and a politician that should be tested.
Which I’ll return to in just a second.
Because there’s another image I found. It was originally on Alaska’s state website, and though it came up in a Google image search, the actual page would not. Meaning, I got to access the picture, but couldn’t get to the site. V. Fishy. Fishier, in fact, than tuna, as one reader’s mother said.
Here’s the picture:
It’s from the 2008 Iditarod. March 1st, it seems? Again, Palin would be at least in her 6th month of pregnancy. At this point, it’s worth noting that women who have already had children begin to show signs of pregnancy earlier, not later.
The problem is, Palin is damned if she was and damned if she wasn’t. Either her water broke early in the morning but she gave a speech anyway and then flew for 8 hours to deliver said child at a hospital where the care simply couldn’t have compared to that available in other places even despite knowing that her baby already had health problems, or
She lied about the whole thing to cover up her daughter’s pregnancy, because it’s a matter of shame that should be concealed.
But the thing is, either way, I still think it’s moot. I wouldn’t think she’s fit for the position either way. And those smug, arrogant PUMA supporters can call me an Obamatron all they like, but I don’t care; at this point, I can’t see a way to justify electing a guy who firmly believes in the war and a woman who believes so firmly in family values she believes in subjugating women’s rights to get there. Either way, I don’t think anyone who believes in a literal interpretation of the Bible that should be taught alongside evolution in schools is fit to hold any public office, whether mayor of a town of 5,000 or vice-president of a country exponentially larger.
Either way, Sarah Palin is not the woman this country needs. The woman this country can use has already pledged her support to Obama, and PUMA supporters should stop pledging their support to anyone in a skirt and start voting with their heads and hearts, because otherwise they, like Sarah Palin, are just the sort of women who give feminism a bad name.
Aroundabouts his junior year of high school, my brother got really into Christianity. I don’t know when he was ‘born again,’ (as if my mother didn’t do a good enough job the first time around) but I think it occurred at some point when I was in college.
Back then, I was premed and fairly set to be a doctor. I had studied biology, chemistry, and physics. My feelings toward religion, back then, could probably be best described as a backlash. Which meant that there was often some tension between my brother and me; we were both young and set enough in our respective ways to believe the other was wrong and it was our job to convince him of the truth. He would argue that Jesus is the only answer and belief in him as one, true savior the only way to ‘eternal life,’ while I would argue that was closed-minded. We would discuss creation versus evolution, historicity versus mythology, and when I say discuss, of course, I mean the sort of heated diatribes that might only occur between siblings.
During those conversations, my brother would become noticeably anxious. His voice would take on a higher timbre, like his throat had tightened. That’s what I remember most about them, actually.
That, and the Bible.
Whenever he needed it, he’d pull out the Bible. It must be so because the Bible says.
And how, I ask, does one argue then?
The past few weeks, I’ve been reading here and there about the kerfuffle with the Orange prize, and heated discussion from both sides. And I’ve noticed a term I don’t know if I’ve encountered before:
“Privilege.”
I had to look it up on Wikipedia, and I think I generally get the idea, which is that there are divisions in society, and one side holds some position of power/dominance, not necessarily over the other so much as, it seems, compared to. An example would be in terms of race: someone who is white has ‘privilege,’ compared to, say, someone who is black. Here’s an html of something called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, by Peggy McIntosh. McIntosh writes:
I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize
male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have
come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in
each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible
weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank
checks.
And you know, that’s fine. If Peggy McIntosh feels that she hasn’t actually earned her assets, that she has cashed in, that’s on her.
I’d really like to know more about these maps, passports, and other miscellany. Especially that “blank check.” I never got a blank check, and totally for seriously, I could really use it right now (so if anyone has my blank check, send a note to willentrekin at yahoo dot com, so I can tell you where to send it. That’d be awesome). As for ‘unearned assets’ . . . I can understand McIntosh believing that, given her honorary degrees, but I’ve worked too damned hard to let her say anything in my life is unearned.
That document I linked to includes a list of 50 examples of what makes one privileged. Stuff like “I am treated neutrally when I move into a new neighborhood” and:
12. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket
and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find
someone who can cut my hair.
Because, of course, privilege is a function of shopping.
But there’s a more important point, which is that the idea of privilege seems to me to shift the ‘blame’ for any such favoritism away from the people who propagate it and toward the people who ‘benefit’ from it. In other words, it makes it sounds like the music of the shop is the customer’s fault. Nevermind the fact that, living in a society truly moving toward globalism, such distinctions are becoming quaint and outmoded. McIntosh’s ‘privilege’ cites white people as the benefactors, but last time I checked, Billboard charts are as likely to be populated by hiphop acts as, say, pop, or punk. In fact, here’s some hard evidence it’s bullshit. Top selling CDs and singles for 2007. CDs themselves are full of Nickelback, Hinder, and Rascall Flatts, but it notes that the year’s previous were Mariah Carey, 50 Cent, and The Game. The singles are a pretty eclectic lot (and, I’d wager, artists make more off those, anyway).
And I write about this because I think it’s wrong. I’m a white heterosexual male, each descriptor of which should create new benefits of ‘privilege,’ but they haven’t, at least so far in my experience. One point of feminism and other movements predicated toward equality has always seemed to be that generalities are bad and, very often, people can’t share the same experiences as others. I.e., that because I’m white, I can’t understand the perspective of someone who is black (I think this idea, too, is bullshit). But what I don’t get is that many ‘feminists’ seem quick to argue that the male experience, or, for McIntosh, the white experience, is universal. That all men, and especially all white men, must think and feel and behave the same way. That there are certain benefits to being white in society (n.b., is this global society? American society? Manhattan society?) shared by all white people.
And now the idea of privilege is even being applied to the body. Not only am I white, heterosexual, and male, but I’m also thin, and even that has privilege, too. Apparently, it’s now privilege not to take up two seats on an airplane. One I loved: “11. I don’t pay extra for my clothes because of my size.”
Because it’s, you know, privilege that smaller clothing requires less material to manufacture. Makes me want to state something very simple, which I would’ve thought was obvious, but is, apparently, not: I don’t have ‘privilege’ just because some people in the world are fat. Maybe I should be more ‘body positive,’ or then again maybe the so-called ‘fatosphere’ (and no, I’m not making that up) could, you know, lose some weight.
Reminds me of this bit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
The whole idea, in fact (and here’s where I bring it back to the Bible), reminds me of the way my brother used to argue. When his best argument is that it’s the Bible, it effectively shuts down discussion in much the same way that this idea of ‘privilege’ does. When engaged in any discussion about gender or race or class or identity, the moment I start to disagree is the moment someone says I ‘have privilege’ I can’t see through or, worse, ‘suffer from poor little white boy syndrome.’
Because the sad thing is that I’m not arguing that society isn’t messed up, that inequality doesn’t exist, that things must change, and for the better, and soon. The sad fact is that these sort of ideas shift the blame of the real problems to those who don’t really deserve it and often have nothing to do with it, which is made doubly worse because they’re the very people who could most effectively help ameliorate the problems in the first place. Feminists who truly believe in ‘male privilege’ should seek to work with, rather than against, the men they believe have that privilege in the first place.
Yesterday’s post concerning the Orange prize was just the start, and the nice thing is that a couple of comments segue directly into what I’d planned to address next.
Lisa said:
they shout: “Hey ladies, if you wear my perfume or eat my yogurt you’ll look like me; a size one beauty queen with airbrushed skin and perky breasts.”
concerning half-naked (or fully naked) women on billboards.
Alma noted:
What kills me, though, is how women try to demonize men for things that women do. Don’t get me wrong…sexism *is* alive and well–just like racism. And, yes, women *have* been oppressed. But, I wonder, how much of that oppression–both then and now–has come from women themselves.
I think both are very apt, and I’m also very glad that two spectacular women made the point before I did, because I think part of the problem with discussion about feminism is that demonization of men, when a lot of men don’t really deserve it. Though some say that one can’t draw analogs between sexism and racism, there is, I think, some connection there. Black people cannot simply blame white people for millennia of oppression, because you can’t blame people for something it’s impossible for them to have had anything to do with. We all, together, as a society can try to ameliorate past injustice, but trying to place blame is not the way to do it. Slavery sucked, but fuck, I didn’t have anything to do with it, and I don’t think any of my ancestors did, either; why blame me for something other people’s great-great-grandfathers did? Oppression of women sucks, and is awful, but why blame me for something previous generations created when I’m actively trying to help further equality in the world?
The thing those two comments bears out, though, is that men sometimes have little to do with it. The demographic of half-naked women billboards is not men–it’s women. I’ll admit, I think this is a troublesome spot, mainly because I think that marketing is a completely different question all together, but I do think they cater to women’s perceived needs, as women perceive them. Walking down the aisles in my mental Target–how many different kinds of shampoo/conditioner/hair styling products can really be necessary?
Does makeup make a difference to a man, or do women wear it because they fear judgement from other women? Because I’ll be honest, I’ve seen lots of ads for mascara but have never, even once, looked at a woman and thought, “Wow, now those’re some eyelashes” (that’s what mascara’s for, right?), and most of my friends will tell you I’m just the sort of aesthetics-driven man that would notice something like that. Concerning heels: I was talking, last week, to someone going on interviews who was lamenting the idea of wearing heels. When I suggested she not, she called it “unprofessional” not to. Mind you, this is a girl who firmly believes in separating herself from others based on her talents and qualifications; that she worried her shoes might make her unprofessional was a revelation. My thought was: to whom? If I were a guy conducting an interview (and the old argument is still that men run corporate America and have all the power positions, except the fact that I’ve only ever been interviewed by women, ever [and I've worked in advertising, education, personal training, and publishing]), I’d never hire-or-not an applicant based on her shoes.
In fact, when I worked at a publishing company, I worked in a department as the only man among 12 women, all of whom were the executive or managing editors of their publications. Or editorial director was a woman. And the VP positions in the company were split pretty evenly male/female.
I’m not saying biases don’t still exist. I’m not trying to make the argument that we live in shiny happy utopia with no racism or sexism. I’m just asking questions about that gender bias, and wondering, who’s really against women?
I read a post the other week on Book Addiction, in which the blogger posted a review of Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminsim. Now, I was interested in the book, at first; I studied gender when I was in college, even took a Women & Literature course in which I did a term paper on insanity as an escape in Victorian women’s literatures, and made the argument that insanity was actually sane considering the ‘normal’ conventions the female protagonists were rejecting. However, I clicked through to Valenti’s book, and read the first two pages, and found lots of weirdo stuff.
Her opening sentence is “What’s the worst thing you can call a woman? Don’t hold back now.” She enumerates several possibilities, among them ‘skank,’ ‘whore,’ and ‘cunt.’ Then she asks about men, and enumerates again: “Fag, girl, bitch, pussy,” because her argument is that the worst thing you can call a girl is a girl, and the worst thing you can call a guy is a girl. Which strikes me as a little inane, mainly because I’ve heard a lot of guys called assholes, and those are pretty gender non-specific. I’ve also heard men and women alike call guys ‘dicks,’ ‘cocks,’ and ‘pricks,’ and not just as metonymy.
The paragraph I really hated, though? Here:
Do you think it’s fair that a guy will make more money doing the same job as you? Does it piss you off and scare you when you find out about your friends getting raped? Do you ever feel like shit about your body? Do you ever feel like something is wrong with you because you don’t fit into this bizarre ideal of what girls are supposed to look like?
To answer all her questions: it’s not fair, of course it pisses me off, of course I’ve felt lie shit about my body, and I do sometimes feel like something is wrong with me because I sometimes don’t fit into this bizarre ideal of what [men are supposed to be like].
Of course, I question her: does she think only women get raped? (They don’t. Men get raped to. And sometimes not even by other men. Women can coerce men into sex they don’t want to have every bit so much as men can. Not all men are the sexually-starved slavering drool-fools we are made out to be.) Don’t we all have days when we dislike our body, or our hair? Aren’t men driven to some ideal to billboards and magazine advertisements? Just because the ideal is to play golf and have great hair and watch NFL on Sundays from the La-Z Boy doesn’t mean it’s not an ideal. We are inundated with airbrushed models in Calvin Kleins every bit as much as women are. What man ever had Marky Mark’s abs? Not even Marky Mark has Marky Mark’s abs anymore.
Valenti’s new book, out next month, is called He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Women Need to Know, but she’s wrong, of course. Because men who indulge in casual sexual promiscuity are no longer held up to some ‘bizarre ideal’; that idea is as quaint and rooted to the 50s as the whole ‘slut’ thing; the men who grease their hair and permatan and use the tactics in The Game are “players,” and are called assholes or douchebags by pretty much everyone who knows better.
I’ve read a bit over the past week about the Orange Prize, which is a literary prize awarded to a woman and judged by a panel comprised exclusively of women, as a response to the literary subjugation of women in the literary world. There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle; A.S. Byatt (author of Possession) denounced it as a sexist prize, with which Tim Lott agrees. So one side of the camp (and the award’s organization) claims that it needs a prize because women have not received their proper due, whereas the other side of the camp argues it’s unnecessary. Various heated arguments have ensued, if by ‘heated’ we mean ‘various bloggers have contributed their free two cents.’
Lott makes a few good points, opening with:
Here is a selection of groups that have been consistently under-represented among the winners of the UK’s two major book prizes, the Booker and the Costa/Whitbread: the white working class (0); West Indians (1); black Africans (0); disabled writers (0).
No one has funded a prize for these groups. However the Orange Prize was set up in 1996 to give women their own prize – because of perceived under-representation in the Booker. Despite 12 years of consciousness-raising by the Orange, the Booker still doesn’t give women their just mathematical due – a 3:10 ratio remains. But given that women have won five out of the last six Whitbread/Costas, does the level of injustice remain enough to justify the Orange?
Although the idea of applying ‘mathematical dues’ and ‘ratios’ to anything concerning writing hurts my head.
It’s a post both The Girl Detective and We are in debt took umbrage with and argued with, to various degrees of efficacy. My students would be quick to point out that calling anyone “Neanderthals” outside of an anthropoligical/taxonomical context is immediately ad hominem (a phrase meaning “against the man,” which may be particularly appropriate in this context).
Which also probably describes my own thoughts on this, as well as the probable argument that I am not entitled to them. I should not think about such issues because, as an average white male, I have no right. That Debt blog notes that “there’s no such thing as a reverse -ism,” but I’d disagree with that, especially in consideration of a phrase later used: “Leave it to a man.” Right. Because all we white males believe precisely the same thing and act precisely the same way, and we’ve all subjugated and oppressed every woman we’ve ever met because to do otherwise threatens our alpha-supremacy in the world.
The author later notes “The author of this silly piece seems to think that women are a “dominant” group, like “whites” (wrong)” but I wonder if that’s truly the case. First, a quibble: technically, women are more numerous, as a gender, than men–isn’t the population split still, like, 52% to 55% (versus, wait, I can do this–48% and 45%, respectively) in favor of women? I get that the trouble spot is in the definition of “dominant,” and that to be more populous does not necessarily equate to dominance, but still it isn’t technically wrong to state that women are a dominant group, for most definitions of the term. Not to mention that simply calling an argument ‘silly,’ or ‘wrong-headed’ or whatever doesn’t actually forward any real argument, and, indeed, if nothing else, brings the debate down.
The argument seems to be whether the Orange prize is necessary, but I have to admit I have trouble believing any literary prize is actually necessary. I don’t really get them, any more than I really get the whole Oscars thing; what, exactly, is a best picture, and on what level was No Country for Old Men better than Zodiac (I can think of many ways it was worse, but few better)? Given a real ballot with nominees (of any medium or genre) of any actual merit, terms like “better” actually cease to exist, I think. And does it really denote anything? Looking over Wikipedia’s list of nominees and winners, the only book on it I’ve ever read is Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which I thought was overrated. I’ve picked up books by the usual suspects (Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, etc.), but have felt the same way toward theirs; nothing to inspire me to read beyond the first ten pages.
Maybe bad writers need awards to get recognition in a marketplace of books by people who know how to tell stories? Who’s Booker, and why does their list matter so much? There was a recent blogbate over Zadie’s Smith’s decision, as judge and jury for the Willesden (sp?) Herald’s award, to not award anything because it wasn’t good enough; who, besides WH, decided Zadie Smith is some arbiter of quality? More important, one of the members of the Orange jury is Lily Allen. Of MySpace fame.
Has Lily Allen ever even read a book? Her comments on Radiohead’s ‘devaluation of art’ seem to demonstrate she is perfectly content to argue based on superficial preconception with neither basis nor experience to bear them up.
One of Girl Detective’s arguments is:
I’d love to see a society in which women’s needs are catered to in the marketplace – where, say, every billboard has a picture of a naked man on it – and products for men just don’t exist. I wouldn’t want to live there – I’d just like to poke around a bit.
Does this mean that products for women, in the current marketplace, “just don’t exist,” whereas men’s every need is catered to? Also, I wonder where GD lives; I live in Hollywood, and there are plenty of naked men on billboards. Plenty of giant images of sharply chiseled jaws like none of us really have, washboard abs like none of us will ever really manage to get… etc. What female needs aren’t catered to, exactly?
No, really, I’d love to know, because as I’ve learned in my marketing class, built-in need-based target markets are a fucking gold mine, and I’d love to not be a broke-ass grad student anymore.
Speaking of mines, I’m sure this is probably one, and I expect debate/discussion (though not all together much, because who really reads this blog yet?), but if we can refrain from calling me a whiny Neanderthal, that’d be awesome.
Because, I mean, come on, it’s kind of the obvious strategy, isn’t it?
Yesterday, I posted about the viability of a McCain/Clinton ticket versus an Obama/Edwards ticket. Which shows you just about how I feel about their ideologies; Clinton, to me, does not feel like change–she feels like more of the same-old, same-old that has tirelessly run this country into the ground.
But to be serious about it:
What I’m tired of is Clinton’s attacking people, because it seems to me more a sign of weakness than her crying gimmick (which is what I believe her tears are). I don’t know any of her issues, nor her platforms, because it seems like she spends all her time talking about what terrible shape this country is in, how much she cares about it, and how everyone else would suck at fixing it. What the hell does her hypothetical phone call at 3 in the morning have to do with any valid current issue?
Nothing. Because it’s silly. It’s an appeal to the pathos of the red phone in the Oval office (does that even exist any more?).
She calls Obama inexperienced. I don’t know, maybe my math is off, but it looks for every intent and purpose like she only has four more years experience as a senator (Obama ran and won in 2004; Clinton ran and won in 2000). I don’t think that’s a great deal of time. Sure, she had some experience as a First Lady, but last time I checked, First Lady is not an elected office. That she spearheaded a failed reform to healthcare in 1994 doesn’t impress me, though her child insurance work does.
Really, while First Lady, she only ever had the power her husband (who stepped out on her numerous times [and I note that because doesn't seem a particularly strong or assertive thing for a woman to do]) gave her. While senator, her record speaks for itself: vote yes for authorizing invasion of Iraq, vote yes for the PATRIOT Act, etc.
But in enumerating, I’m very nearly engaging in the very thing I’m speaking against, while avoiding what I mean to speak to, which is that Obama, to me, signifies change. Obama, to me, signifies that something important in this country can turn toward hope, and peace. Obama has worked with Republicans to effect change: this, to me, signifies that he’s willing to work far and wide across party lines (he’s even sponsored one particular bill with McCain). Obama, to me, signifies that we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore, and we’re going to do something about it, dammit, to really make a difference.
Obama, to me, is part of the change I want to see in the world.
The big news (besides that Bush endorsed McCain) today seems that Clinton broke Obama’s winning streak. By this I might be more impressed had she won any decisively, as the media seems to be saying, but she did not; the only place she won by more than 10% was Rhode Island, and what’s 10% of Rhode Island? Like, 3 people, or something? Seriously, it’s smaller than Delaware, isn’t it? Texas was a squeaker of a primary, 51% to 48%.
The problem, though, is that McCain clinched his nom while the Dems are now still petty-bickering about who voted how when. Obama says he’s the man to beat McCain, but he’s got to get there first.
Personally, I think Obama should invite Edwards onto his ticket now, solidifying his stance. Because if Edwards were still in the race, he’d have diverted votes away from Clinton, I think, and Obama would have won all the primaries yesterday.
There are so many interesting ways this could all go, though. Clinton could lose the democratic nomination, but what if McCain invited her to be his vice president? I could see McCain doing something like that. On the off chance Clinton wins the Dem nom, though, I’m betting she’d go with Bill Richardson for her VP. But in which case, I’d love to see Obama and Edwards run an independent ticket.
They probably mightn’t get enough electoral votes to actually win election, but I’d bet they’d completely fuck up the system hard enough that nobody would know what was happening.
Anarchy rules!
No, but seriously, I really do think the division between Obama and Clinton is doing more harm than good. Not for the Democratic party, mind, because I think the Democratic party does enough harm to itself without having to seek external blame, but because the fact that the two leading candidates for nomination are a black man and a woman is being overshadowed by the woman’s constantly attacking said black man. Clinton is doing more to set feminism back several decades than Howard Stern ever managed.
And the truth of the matter is, I’ve never minded McCain. I wish he’d beaten Bush’s underhanded tactics and won in 2000, because there are few men I could see leading our country through 9/11 better than I think McCain would have.
Entries (RSS)