Western civilization scheduled to end in November of this year

There isn’t much that makes me laugh these days, but today I laughed. First I laughed at this: The right drops a bomb on Newt. I’m not crazy about linking to Politico, but their summary of today’s Republican self-destruct sequence is apt:

It’s as if the conservative media over the past 24 hours decided Gingrich is for real, and they need to come clean about the man they really know before it’s too late.

It’s true, of course, that Gingrich is an impossible candidate. Yes, of course he’s absurd. Yes, of course he’s unelectable. Bring on Mitt!

But the voters aren’t going to come out for Mitt in November either. He’s a Mormon. He’s the wrong religion. There is an entire swath of the country that is simply never, ever going to vote for him. Barack Obama could be the anti-Christ—hell, the people in South Carolina and Florida already think he is the anti-Christ—but that still won’t bring them out to vote for the Mormon.

So Obama will slide to re-election in November, at which point Western civilization will end. That’s the second thing that made me laugh today. Newt and the fundies had a conference call in Florida and talked about what will happen if Obama wins. It’s bad, folks, it’s bad:

Jim Garlow: At the risk of sounding melodramatic, the United States as we know her will cease to exist as will, then, Western Civilization. Those who are discerning, those who are intuitive to what is happening morally and economically in our nation understand the truth.

Don Wildmon: This is not a typical election. This is an election unlike any ever held in our country. We’re not just voting for a president; we’re voting for the continuation of Western Civilization. If those who are listening think that what we enjoy, the freedoms we enjoy, the right to practice our Christan faith, is merely an accident and is there, it’s not, people paid for it. And we can lose it, and we will lose it, if we lose this next election. What’s at stake is everything that the human race, Western Civilization, has fought for for the last two thousand years.

On the other hand, maybe this could be a good thing. What did Gandhi say about Western civilization? “I think it would be a very good idea.”

The ease with which men imagine women as prostitutes

Prostitution is serious business. Women tend to understand that. I’ve never known a woman (a real woman, as opposed to some online twit-bot) who didn’t regard prostitution as a very serious and dangerous line of work. Certainly it’s not something you’d do if you had other options. It’s scary as hell, since johns are insane and god knows what they might do to you. It’s physically repellent, since human beings are designed to have sex with people they’re sexually attracted to, not with unattractive strangers in exchange for cash. It’s probably painful a lot of the time, and emotionally traumatic. So: dangerous, scary, unnatural, repellent, painful, traumatic. And that’s not even factoring in the pimps, those ubiquitous parasites who terrorize prostitutes in exchange for “protection.” Of course there are exceptions to all this, but as a general rule I think we (women at least) can agree that prostitution is a largely unappealing line of work.

Men, on the other hand, don’t seem to get this. At least not in our society; at least not in a patriarchy. There’s this thing that men do where they imagine women becoming prostitutes for fun, or for some easy extra money, or because the brothel has an opening coming up sooner than that assistant manager spot at Barnes and Noble. Three examples:

1. The Freakonomics book. If you don’t know about it, google it. Asshole economists use prostitution as an example of how any woman can make a fine living if she puts her mind to it, and conclude that the only reason a woman wouldn’t become a prostitute and make said fine living is if she doesn’t like men. This makes sense only if you, like the authors of Freakonomics, are unaware that women are human beings.

2. A short story on the internet I read ages ago, title and author’s name both forgotten. It was about a ballerina with the New York City Ballet who—get this—turns tricks on the side for fun. I kid you not. Because of course that’s exactly what a highly trained artist at the top of her profession would secretly want to do. I knew nothing about the author when I started reading, but when I got to the prostitution part I knew one thing for sure: he was a man. He was no doubt inspired by all those idiot movies (also written by men) where glamorous women become prostitutes for thrills or a change of pace or whatever. It’s like a whole parallel universe in men’s heads.

3. A book about Bonnie and Clyde which I just started reading, and which I have now stopped reading in order to write this post: Go Down Together, by Jeff Guinn. It claims to be the “True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde.” To which I say: horseshit. I’m thinking it’s more like the true untold story of the inside of Jeff Guinn’s head. He has decided, on the basis of absolutely no evidence whatsoever, that Bonnie Parker was probably a prostitute before she hooked up with Clyde. Why? Because she could have been. It was theoretically possible for a poor girl in Dallas to become a prostitute, so that’s probably what happened. In Jeff Guinn’s mind.

Here’s the story: teenage Bonnie Parker gets a job working as a waitress in a cafe, where she’s popular and successful with the customers. She makes friends with the other women, including the laundry workers next door, and helps out the homeless street people with food. She dresses nicely, even though she’s only pulling a waitress’s pay. Guinn:

“Her wardrobe might have reflected income from occasional prostitution. If so, she wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary for working-class girls from the Dallas slums. If they were cute—and Bonnie was—they had to at least consider the option. Hargrave’s was in a much more affluent neighborhood than the greasy spoons of Cement City and West Dallas. As a waitress there, Bonnie would have been in position to judge prospects among Hargrave’s patrons. If they were friendly and tipped generously, why not?”

Reading that, you would be forgiven for thinking that Guinn must have some other evidence for Bonnie’s turning to prostitution. But he doesn’t. There’s nothing. Nothing in her life, nothing in her family, nothing. His chain of logic is just: poor girls sometimes became prostitutes, Bonnie was a poor girl, thus Bonnie became a prostitute. After all, nice clothes. (This will be news to my entire family of poor but well-dressed women who always looked great on a shoestring. Seriously: the women in my grandmother’s family were always sharp dressers, even as dirt-poor farmers and mill workers in the South in the Twenties and Thirties.)

It’s the “why not?” in Guinn’s reasoning that kills me. Why not, indeed? Gee, Jeff, how about: dangerous, scary, unnatural, repellent, painful, traumatic. Also: Bonnie already has a good job waitressing! She’s making good tips, she’s popular with the customers, things are going well. Most women with a safe job making adequate money are not going to be drawn into prostitution. Of course to understand that you’d have to know that women are human, which appears to be a problem for Jeff.

Two pages later, Bonnie’s “might have” has now become fact:

“Early in 1929, Bonnie changed jobs. She began working at Marco’s, a restaurant in downtown Dallas near the courthouse and post office. The tips were undoubtedly better, since Marco’s customers included lawyers, judges, and bankers…If she was still turning occasional tricks, the move from Hargrave’s to Marco’s meant a more well-to-do clientele.” (emphasis added)

Nice rhetorical sleight-of-hand. See how Bonnie-as-prostitute has become fact? First it was a conjecture; now it’s part of Bonnie’s established past, and we can speculate on whether she’s “still” doing it. Jesus.

At this point I stopped reading the stupid book and went online. That’s how I know that there is no evidence anywhere for Guinn’s remarkable assumption that Bonnie Parker ever worked as a prostitute. It seems the “Bonnie and Clyde historical community” (yeah, such a thing) is as irritated about it as I am. Not because they’re feminists fighting the patriarchy, I imagine, but because it’s just asinine and unfounded on any evidence.

Oh, wait, Guinn claims there is some indirect evidence: years later, after Bonnie and Clyde were outlaws and Bonnie had spent time in jail, she wrote a couple of poems mentioning prostitutes. Understand, Bonnie wrote lots of poems. She wrote poems all her life, about the people she’d met and the things she’d seen, all mixed up with stuff from the movies. After she started running with Clyde she incorporated the gangster lingo she’d picked up; after her time in the slammer she wrote about the women she’d encountered in jail. One of her poems (actually the authorship is disputed) is about prostitutes using heroin. Another is about a woman who leaves a Nebraska farm for the big city, becomes a chorus girl, falls for an opium addict, becomes addicted herself, and ends up working in a Chinese brothel/opium den. (In case you’re wondering, Bonnie wasn’t from Nebraska, never worked as a chorus girl, was never involved with a drug fiend, and never worked in a Chinese opium den.) It’s easy to see where this material came from; it’s hard to see why any of it means that Bonnie herself ever worked as a prostitute. Do we think that Joni Mitchell was really a free man in Paris?

But never mind all that. Jeff Guinn’s patriarchal fantasy of Bonnie-as-prostitute has struck a chord in our patriarchal society. It’s so appealing, so compelling, so natural-seeming (and why would that be, Chet?) that it’s rapidly becoming part of the Bonnie and Clyde lore. Potted biographies include it, book reviewers refer to it as the “reality” behind the myth. And now a movie based on Guinn’s book is in the works, which means that Bonnie-as-prostitute will be enshrined in the public imagination as fact.

And so it goes.

You can’t even read about dogs without the goddamn patriarchy getting all up in your face

A 33,000 year old dog skull is discovered in Siberia. Here’s how it’s reported:

Man’s best friend for over 33,000 years

God how I hate that shit. Shut up.

And here’s the first sentence of the article:

He’s been man’s best friend for generations.

Gah. He, he, he. Man, man, man. Shut up.

Question of the day

Q: Could we possibly be any more disgusted with the Republican candidates for president?
A: No.

Okay, we’re done.

Newt Gingrich, natural woman?

Does anybody understand this piece?

Newt Gingrich, natural woman: I know just what the fading candidate feels like. By S.E. Cupp, whoever the hell she is.

Obviously, I get that it’s snark, and that she’s making fun of Gingrich using female stereotypes. Got it. But…why? I’m not asking from a feminist perspective, as it were; I think we could all do the analytical rundown on this in our sleep. I just feel like I’ve missed some kind of setup for the joke. Is there already a meme that Gingrich is effeminate? Is this already in the water? Or is this essay just straight out of the blue?

A Mormon, a fascist, and another Mormon walk into a bar in New Hampshire…

…and the first Mormon wins. Which everybody knew he would. The fascist comes in second and the second Mormon comes in third. There is an Abbot and Costello routine in there somewhere.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Romney will be the nominee and he will lose the general election to Obama and can we please just fast forward through this whole stupid year.

Dog/human duet

More dog vocalization, this time with human participation:

We’re all humans here, so we all know what the baby is doing. But what is the dog doing?

I’ve watched this video several times, studying the dog’s body language, and I’m just not sure what she’s thinking. I’ve never lived with a Siberian Husky, so I don’t know what all that stuff means. Is this a chorus howl? It looks to me like she’s focused on Mom and Dad, and she’s obviously echoing the baby. But why?

One thing is clear: this video is, I think, conclusive evidence that Siberian Huskies are part parrot. So much for cladistics.

The wolf within

A Pomeranian puppy listening to wolf howls on the computer:

This reminds me of Katie, my first Sheltie. When she was a puppy I would hold her in my lap while I sat at the computer so I could play things for her — YouTube videos, Jacquie Lawson cards from my Mom, etc. I played wolf howls for her, and she would cock her head and listen intently, just like this little Pom. But she never howled. In fact, I never heard Katie or Molly howl, not once. Maybe Shelties don’t usually do that. Barking they can do; they’ve got barking down. We’re good on the barking. But howling? Not so much.

And here’s a German Shepherd doing the same thing:

It’s wonderful to me that German Shepherds and Pomeranians are the same species. I guess it’s not quite the level of variation as broccoli and Brussels sprouts, but still.

---

P.S. The top comment on the Pom video at YouTube is hilarious and spot-on:

Guess the wolves howling means:

1. Go to your basket.

2. Listen carefully.

3. Howl like us.

4. Good job!

Thank you, President Obama

This is what happens when you restrict Plan B:

CVS Refuses To Sell Texas Man Emergency Contraception For His Wife.

I just want to remind everyone that the FDA was on the brink of ending this crap once and for all, when the Obama Administration unilaterally stepped in to keep the restrictions on Plan B. Because it’s just “common sense,” according to President Obama Who Is A Goddamn Republican.

Anybody wanna explain to me what the hell is going on with online feminism?

So here’s the deal: I don’t read other feminist blogs unless they’re in my blogroll feed thingy and the article looks interesting. Which means I occasionally read something at Twisty’s or Echidne’s or Egalia’s — you get the drift. But I don’t keep up with the general feminist blogowhateverthefuck because, People’s Front of Judea.

Anyway, today I’m looking at my WordPress Dashboard and notice unusual trackbacks to my blog. One is from a guy named Angus Johnson; turns out he linked to me in the course of analyzing some unbelievably godawful shit Hugo Schwyzer has got up to. And I do mean godawful. The turtleneck-wearing youth pastor thing has always creeped me the fuck out, but you gotta read this post by Angus to appreciate the extent to which every bad vibe anybody ever got from Hugo has been validated.

That’s not the reason for my question though. There was another unusual trackback today, and this one was from Feministe. This surprised me because I stopped linking to Feministe around the time they started featuring acknowledged anti-feminists as guest bloggers, and they stopped linking to me at the same time. So I was curious to see what prompted the trackback. I go to the thread, and whaddya know, it’s more on this godawful Hugo Schwyzer thing; one of the commenters had linked to the same old Reclusive Leftist post about Hugo that Angus linked to. Clearly the Hugo Situation is the topic du jour. But here’s the weird part: I start reading through this comment thread at Feministe, wondering who these people are (Clarisse? not that Clarisse, some other freaky Clarisse), and before long the thread has stopped being about Hugo and is about how evil radical feminists are. This is a feminist blog, and they’re talking about how feminism is a blight on civilization. Like this:

Radical feminists give cover to rapists of transwomen; they give cover to bashers of transwomen; I would argue that they give cover to rapists of sex workers by refusing to let those women make their own distinctions between rape and sex-for-money.

And more on that theme, with many people “cosigning” (snort) and agreeing that radical feminists are simply the worst threat to womankind on earth. What the hell? I could have fucking SWORN it was patriarchy that was killing women and that radical feminism was the movement to OPPOSE that shit, but what do I know. I’m just an old radical feminist.

Now, look, I realize that pro-pornography/pro-prostitution feminists can get upset with radicals who challenge that shit, but talking about radfems as if they’re actually the ones doing the oppressing and raping? As for the trans issue, for chrissake, people. Radical feminism does not equal transphobia. Being “anti-trans” is not some built-in feature or policy position of radical feminism. The first time I saw that meme it was in a bullshit cartoon by Barry the Pornographer (Ampersand), apparently deciding in his manly wisdom to redefine the whole of radical feminism in light of some online assholes. And now this shit has migrated. What the fuck, people, what the fuck?