OD (who I have been entertaining via chat because she’s stuck in Japan)want to come up with mad libs as a new fun troll baiting game. Bingo is soooooooo 2008 (as the Black Eyed Peas say). Feed the troll mad libs!

For the abelist concern troll dismissing your disease (I left this at OD’s place- so I am stealing it back):

But have you tried (insert bizzare treatment here). My (insert distant relative or friend of a friend here) tried it for (insert totally unrelated illness here) and it totally worked!

does not in fact make you stronger.

I have been thinking, as have many many people in the blogosphere, about Melissa McEwan’s amazing piece The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck.

To say my mother was hard on me would be an understatement, but she didn’t have to be that way. She wasn’t hard on my brother, not in any way close to how she was on me. In those rare moments of clarity, when I could ask her why without triggering a giant fight about how I was just “overly dramatic, blah blah blah” she said it was because the world wasn’t going to be nice to me, and I should learn to deal with it cause I’m a girl.

She thought that she was making me stronger. I will give her that. But years of therapy, bouts of depression and agoraphobia and an inability to finish things that might actually make my life easier, like school, and I know that what she did didn’t prepare me for the world. Each new cruelty, each little bit of unfairness, left a crack, a tiny fissure of pain and insecurity. I am a road map of scares and breaks and bruises.

That’s what our terrible bargain does to us. It’s not just “eat shit or spoil the afternoon”. Those “jokes” about women drivers or pms or rape, leave a crack. Each cat call, or scary moment with a boy who may not take no for an answer, or ass grab, leaves a little fissure. Every dude who refuses to acknowledge our right to control our own bodies cause real, not theoretical, damage to real women.

It is a testament to our strength that so many of us carry on, cracks and all.

So when confronted with the daily hurt, we can choose to shut up, or we can choose to fight. But choosing one or the other doesn’t actually lessen the damage. Either way we are going to get hurt. I’m a fighter by nature, but lemme tell you that after a while I feel like curling up in a ball and crying. When good guys, like one of my roommates decides to go on a screed about his (admittedly) awful ex by using every horrible sexist name in the book, it hurts me. He’s not just insulting his ex- he’s insulting every woman on the planet. So I ask, in nice terms, cause this is a person i like most of the time, if he can try using different insults. I explain- nicely- why. But but but he says, trying to justify why in this one instance misogyny is not just ok, but justified, required even.

Those kinds of things cause cracks. Roommate and I used to cook dinner together fairly regularly, now i don’t even want to be in the kitchen. I don’t want to be around someone who, when the chips are down, will hate on people like me and not see a problem with it.

And after what seems like ages of troll battling with yet another dude who thinks his (poorly reasoned) intellectual arguments and refusal to actually hear the stories of real, living breathing women are his god given mission, I am tired and hurt and still more damaged.

And any man, who claims to love women, or who claims not to hate them, should try not to hurt them, and should listen when we tell you that you are hurting us. It’s not an intellectual game, it matters and it hurts.

that feminist moms have sons?

Only daughters sometimes.

I mean- hello- feminist here. According to the trolls I’m a man hating, hairy legged, shrill feminazi.

And I am raising a boy. But not just a boy, a boy who will grow up with feminist values and ideals.

But apparently feminists can only give birth to female children or something.

1) Renee is dead right. Savage is more than a twee bit of a racist.

2) Savage pretty much thinks women are ewwwwwwwwwwe grody. Look, I get it, he’s gay and girl parts gross him out and he thinks he is being cutesy by describing them as canned hams dropped out of windows. But his description of female anatomy is in the exact same vein as homophobes descriptions of the dirty gay sex. So in his efforts to be satirical, he just comes off using standard misogyny against a group who has no power in order to make himself feel better. Way to go- Dan.

3) The fat hatred just oozes out of him. Thank god he has a son instead of a daughter- she’d be looking at an eating disorder before she was out of diapers.

Savage is also the editor om my town’s local alternative-weekly. And they have some damn fine writers on their staff. Charles Muedede, Lindy West, and Erica C. Barnett all make pretty words. But Savages hate for all things not white, attractive and male make reading the rest of the paper a chore. I can’t even sift through SLOG anymore without getting bitch slapped by one of Savage’s fat hating posts. It’s really old, it’s really tiresome, and how nice that he’s getting a tv show so he can be the bitchiest gay on the tubes.

Though Savage might want to check his exceptionalism. They are only tolerating you cause you say shit they like to hear about the rest of us bad Others. Do you think he’d be as popular with straight white dudes if he wasn’t so quick to hate the same things they hate?

for my friend who is STILL stuck in Japan, and probably will be for another week

While bashing troll logic certainly has it’s merits, I need a fun post.

OD and I were chatting last night about how we like Rachel Ray. She’s not a virtuous foodie, she appeals to the everywoman (you know- the people that actually do most of the cooking in society rather than the holier than thou males cheflebrities).

And then we got to talking about embarrassing food loves, those things you can only eat when no one is watching.

And I’ve got a doozy.

I love vienna sausages. I love those salty little meat phaluses. I make the Kid buy them though, cause I don’t want anyone to know that the Queen of the Dinner Party likes processed meat in a can.

I also love cup of noodles.

And industrial ranch dressing, the watery kind that you used to get with school lunches.

It’s easier than you think.

Ouyang Dan sent me this lovely (and by lovely I mean nausea inducing) post about the difference between “Octomom” and Michelle Duggar.

First, the author, a bright shining beacon of illiteracy and class privilege, can’t manage to use Nadya Suleman’s name, not even once, in the entire piece. She can’t, for even half a second, imagine Nadya Suleman as a human being and instead turns her into some kind of sad cartoon monster.

Then there the whole class privilege shit. The author would be fine is Suleman had money and her kids weren’t going to require assistance to grow up.

But here’s a little secret that Mom’s Logic Julie may not know- most children in this world are born to poor parents. If we followed Julie’s logic, most of us would never have been born. Only rich people are virtuous enough to have sex and risk childbirth.

Oh course Julie thinks that the Duggars are a perfect example of unfettered breeding, no debt, blah blah blah. But the Duggars have used their magic ability to reproduce in order to finance their lifestyle. Diapers are donated (and with 19 kids- that’s no small cost) houses, vehicles, and they get money for being on tv. These things didn’t happen before they decided to have endless numbers of children- but after.

But Nadya Suleman isn’t married. She has a not quite American sounding name. She has, from most reports, a horrible mother. She has a couple of kids with disabilities. She has, by all accounts, a difficult life.

So she did what she thought would make her lovable. She did what we’ve all been told. She embraced motherhood. Not just embraced it, but clung to it long after she should have. Perhaps she was looking for that ultimate meaning that motherhood is supposed to give you, that boundless joy or whatever it is the fetus fetishists think all women have for tiny babies. She was following the rules that society set up- be a mother, be fulfilled. And she kept trying to find that, through each pregnancy.

She doesn’t get the donations that the Duggars do. As a poor, unmarried mother, she is not virtuous enough to shill the products. She doesn’t get a tv series, but a trashy expose’. She doesn’t get the loving letters and beaming press pics, she gets death threats and judgment.

I would not trade places with her for a million dollars and she’s made choices I never would have, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have some mercy for her. I also wouldn’t trade places with Michelle Duggar, but there are enough people willing to offer her kindness.

So I wake up this morning to someone’s toddler screaming bloody murder outside my bedroom window. “IIIIIIIIIIIIIII WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANT AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOKIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”.

And this is not the first time it has happened.

But I live across the street from a park. And Kids are part of society. They exist,yes they do. And just like beer bellied rednecks in wife beaters, the fact that I don’t like them much (except for my own kid and the kids of my friends) doesn’t mean that they can or should be shut away until sometime when they are less annoying.

So I refrain from screaming obscenities at the screaming child’s parent, because screaming children are fun for no one and I’m sure the parent is already having a lousy morning. Much the same way that I refrain from screaming obscenities when the local university’s football fans take over the public transport system.

But kids don’t vote, or pay taxes. They are needy little bastards, each and every one. So many people who find tiny, gooey, filth covered hands and snot covered faces distasteful feel the need to bitch at already harried mothers for LEAVING THE HOUSE WITH CHILDREN IN TOW.

Children should be kept under lock and key until they are full of the appropriate amount of teenage angst and eyerolling. (At least according to the child-haters)

So when an idiot politician makes a crappy remark to a single mom with her kid who is asking about health insurance, surely the real matter is “How dare that woman bring her child into a public space”

and not “How dare that politician be such an retching ass nuggett”

Amirite?

Telling kids to wait to have sex, without explaining they whys or hows, is like telling a kid not to cross a street. Sure, we grown ups know that you have to look both ways for cars, etc. But kids don’t.

So I am immensely pissed about Obama’s abstinence commercials. You don’t have to tell me about the icky parts- just tell me to wait.

Nope. Not going to work. Abstinence is a pipe dream. It doesn’t work and the myth of perpetual virginity until marriage has never existed. Not a 100 years ago, not in the glorious Leave it to Beaver 50s, and not now.

So I am super grateful when I get to read this bit of awesomeness from Ouyang Dan about sex ed and kids.

(and for your juicy piece of gossip for the day- I am in her piece somewhere. Bonus points to anyone who can guess what line is about me)