Nostalgia

This could be the Elizabitchez theme song, if we had one. (Well maybe also Kristy Maccoll’s In These Shoes)

And this Princess Superstar cover of April March’s Chick Habit is made of awesomesauce

If Katie Roiphe writes about Caitlin Flanagan- does the whole faux-feminist world implode?

Is this two wrongs don’t make a right? If we throw Camile Paglia in with them, could we have a 3-way shitface death battle? Cause I’d pay money to see that.

Seriously, real money. I’d pay it. But it has to be actual death and not the winner gets to show mercy instead of treppaning her opponent with a stiletto. Treppaning will be done!

Guys Like Hugo

So there’s been a bit of a dustup in the feminist blogosphere of late. Hugo Schwyzer, attempted murder of his girlfriend, the prof who fucks his students, the “feminist professor” who doesn’t know the basic rules of language reclamation (you either have one, or you are one, or you don’t fucking get to use the word) who likened his participation in Slut Walk as “Herding sluts”.

Dude is a douchecanoe, or as a friend taught me recently, “a shit-whistling douchenozzle”. For a little background read this.

His past crimes (literal, attempted murder) I don’t wish to debate. He’s a shit face. If you want to argue that he’s been redeemed, I’m about to give you all the proof you’ll ever need that Schwyzer is still a shithead who shouldn’t be allowed to teach anything, but especially not Feminism 101.

Maya Angelou has said (and it’s been a touchstone for me)”The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.” I remember him from my first toe in the feminist blogosphere time. Maybe because I have been the girl who fucks the professor(s), letters after some guy’s name no longer make me quiver. I know that spending any more time than your average lecture takes with them is an energy-suck.

So I went on my merry way. I’d rather hear women’s views on oppression than some guy who uses a feminist label to get his dick wet spout bullshit.

Let’s Play Connect The Fucking Dots!

Recently, a study was published that showed that marriage equality had significant health benefits for gay and bi men.

In the 12 months following the 2003 legalization of same sex marriage in Massachusetts, gay and bisexual men had a significant decrease in medical care visits, mental health care visits, and mental health care costs, compared with the 12 months before the law change. This amounted to a 13 percent reduction in health care visits and a 14 percent reduction in health care costs.

14% cost reduction- DAYUM! These results hold true even for men who had no plans to marry.

Color me shocked, SHOCKED, that removing (one, major) form of institutional oppression results in improved health for oppressed people. Shocked! (Of course by shocked I mean not surprised at fucking all.)

Now lemme extrapolate a little. Women experience depression at twice the frequency of men. Twice. Double. I can’t imagine why living in a world full of fucking gender based violence and oppression might cause women to be more at risk of depression as men are, can you? Nope, must be that us ladies are weak or hysterical or something. I don’t know. I have a lady brain and have to pause while I cry over a video of baby kittens.

Lemme extrapolate again. 41% Blacks suffer hypertension, while only 27% of Whites do. And when Black people are more likely to have hypertension at a younger age and with more severe effects than whites. Hypertension is known to be caused by stress. You don’t think it might be the fucking stress of racism? Nooooooooooooooo that would be silly. It must be because Black folks don’t know how to eat healthy and exercise like good white folks do.

Oppression is hard on the body and hard on the brain. And it turns out that even people who benefit from oppression in highly stratified societies have poorer health than those in less oppressed societies, i/e the rich in the U.S. aren’t as well off health-wise as the rich in somewhere like Finland.

So the next time some douchecanoe wants to whinge on about poor people on medicaid using up all the resources, smack that person in the head and tell (most likely) him to shut his pie hole. If he wants oppressed people to be more healthy he can stop fucking benefiting from undeserved privilege.

Tomato, Tomahto, Abortion, Life Saving Treatment, Blah Blah Blah

So there’s soul-wearying debate over if Mrs. Frothy Mix had an abortion or not.

Here’s the thing kids, if the Forced-Birthers, I’m sorry the Personhood folks have their way, the only good, sick, pregnant woman is a dead, sick, pregnant woman. It’s god’s will blah blah blah. If a fetus is a full person (with oddly more rights than the actual full person whose body it’s using rent-free) and a pregnant woman has say, oh I don’t know- let’s pick one I’m really fucking familiar with and say Early Onset Pre-eclampsia with HELLP syndrome. Fun huh? Yeah I got to spend months on bed-rest.

I was treated with IV magnesium sulfate. It sucks. It makes your veins burn. It’s like being pumped full of liquid fire and every time your IV gets giggled you get another wave of burning fun times. It also delays labor and your milk coming in if you breastfeed. Kid was smallish (7lbs) so they let me go past my due date. Trust- if I had half the tough bitchiness I have now as when I was an unwed, pregnant 19 year-old, I would have scheduled the c-section earlier and kid’s birthday would be Valentine’s day.

Now in personhood-land, I wouldn’t get the option of an early c-section. It might hurt the baby to be born early, and if I die because I have a never-ending seizure or my liver just straight up explodes- it’s god’s will. And there’s a good possibility they could pull the baby out of my still warm corpse. (True fact- the week I gave birth to the kid is the week ER had a storyline of a woman who dies of Eclampsia and the baby is saved with a c-section.)

So Mrs. Frothy Mix had intro-uterine surgery to try and save her baby. She got to choose that. She got to make the decision knowing the risk was possible death for both of them. How nice she got to choose that. Personhood-land means no choosing. Baby’s life comes first.

Eye of the needle and all that shit

Boyfriend and I keep having bits of this discussion but never quite get around to hashing it out because a)neither of us really enjoys disagree or debating with each other (or at least I don’t- I don’t think he does either, but I don’t speak for him) and b)dude is just too dead fucking sexy and I find myself all unable to form coherent sentences on the regular around him.

So what is this discussion that we keep not having about? Does being rich automatically make you a bad person. I say yes (EAT THE RICH!!!!!!!!!!!) and he says no.

Now, the act of having money doesn’t necessarily make someone bad. Instead it is the actions required to get, keep and increase one’s wealth that make someone bad, or more properly, amoral.

For example, if you were the CEO of a company and you needed to increase your company’s profit margin then you would need a certain lack of empathy to rationalize laying off a large number of employees. You would have to either not have, or be able to ignore any pangs of conscience over the welfare of your soon to be ex employees and their families.

And what do you know, science actually backs up the idea that wealthy people are less empathetic than poor people.

It also turns out that the rich aren’t quite as charitable as they are made out to be. Turns out the bottom 20% gives away one and a half times more than those in the top 20% do.

That all goes to the getting, keeping, and increasing of their income that I mentioned before.

Of course there are companies that start out with the idea that they can be the ethical exception to the rule. But again when greater profit margins are in competition with those ethics, the profit margin will win. See Google’s Don’t Be Evil mission statement versus China’s censorship laws or even Google’s own giant clusterfuck of privacy issues regarding Buzz. See Amazon fuck every one over again and again. and again

Hell, even the do-gooder Gates Foundation has issues because it is funded with monies made by creating the problems that the foundation is trying to ameliorate.

Now we could go around all night with the chicken/egg question of does capitalism make people amoral or did amoral people make capitalism, but I think that’s a red herring. Because I am a structuralist (yes how out-dated and 70’s of me, and yes like Foucault I am veering more and more post-modern by the day. Problem for another day folks) I don’t really give a flying fuck about that and prefer to look at how the system reinforces and encourages the behavior that perpetuate the status quot of the system. Capitalism is an amoral system that ALWAYS breaks down to profits over people. It is amoral. It has no ethics. Ethics of any sort would interfere wit the one mail goal of the system – profit.

But capitalism isn’t a mechanical system. There are no gears or levers or belts or buttons. There is no invisible hand. It is a system comprised entirely of the actions of the people involved in it. But we obscure that with passive voice and theoretical discussion instead of looking at the people who control the system and benefit most from it. We are committing the cardinal sin of removing agency from those lofty individuals. The system is amoral because its operators are amoral. Just read what they have to say about current grievances from the bottom 99. The rich are very, very different from us. And they really don’t give a flying fuck. They don’t have to.

Re: The title of this post is part of an oft quoted bit of Jesus speak. It is no coincidence that most religions have strongly worded bits about kindness and generosity towards the poor. If you were trying to get a whole bunch of people to follow you, you aim your message at the masses. It’s much easier to convert people who are suffering than it is to convert the comfortable. Not that there is anything wrong with those messages. I just don’t need a sky fairy telling me I’ll be rewarded when I’m dead so what injustices that happen to me now don’t need to be rectified.

cough*ovaries*cough

“[A] one-term president with some balls who actually got stuff done would have been, in the long run of this country, much better. . . People are literally without any focus or leadership, just wandering out into the streets to yell right now because they are so pissed off. Imagine if they had a leader.”
— Matt Damon

Matt Damon, I love you. I really do. But we had an option for a president with, well for the sake of equality let’s call it spine or gumption or hutzpah or any name you can think of for gutsy fearlessness in the face of Republican fuckery. But you liberaldoodz couldn’t bring yourselves to vote for the bitch (in the best sense of the word) in the pantsuit.

Now would Hills have been much different? Well we’d have a better healthcare plan, us ladies wouldn’t need extra insurance in case of unwanted parasites, and that brief window when Dems had the Senate and the House would have be a magic hour of Bitches Getting Shit Done.

We’d still have multi-wars and drones and a good deal of corporate fuckery. But I’m realistic in who runs shit. The Obama fanboys are less so.

via Tennessee Guerrilla Women

Christmas Music!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Are y’all ready for some fucking Christmas cheer? Are your eggs nogged? Gifts wrapped? Do you need some inspiration because you have 9 dozen cookies to bake and wrap into adorable gift baskets in the next 32 hours and they have to look and taste fucking awesome because their for your boyfriend’s family who you haven’t met yet? And OMG you still have presents to wrap and laundry to do and packing and a real job and and and and and.

What you (I) need is some inspiration ( or a nice Valium Adderal cocktail) so here is some music to get through the holidays with.

My favorite all time Christmas song (it has nothing to do with my dysfunctional childhood at all. NOOOOOOOO. It has absolutely nothing to do with the screaming tantrums thrown by the only adult member of the family when holiday pressures inevitably got to be too much. NOOOOOOO. Stop head shrinking)is The Ramones- Merry Christmas (I don’t want to fight tonight with you)

It’s just not Christmas without the Waitresses

Or the Kinks

Or Erasure

Or XTC

I used to include the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York in this list. I mean common, Kristy MacColl sings on it. But there is a homophobic slur right in the middle of the song that jolts me every time I hear it. And if I won’t let people make excuses for the stupid racism in Breakfast at Tiffany’s then I really can’t let homophobia slide even if I love the dead singer of the song super hard. So no more.

Now the worst Christmas song ever, hands down, is Do They Know It’s Christmas. That colonial sack of bullshit- ugh. Boyfriend and I were in the grocery store last night and I pointed out that song was playing. His response was “Oh is that why I suddenly feel sad and angry all at once?” (That dear readers, is one of the reasons why I love him.) Anyways- enjoy this hilarious line by line take down of the song.

Your turn- hit me with your Christmas songs, best and worst.

Oh it’s the minimum wage whingers

Or where I remember that Seattle Weekly is truly a piece of shit.

Lemme just remind the douchecanoe author that part of the reason Washington is better than North Carolina is that the minimum wage law puts us closest to(but not nearly equal to)an actual living wage, even for restaurant servers. And with tips, serving actual becomes a living wage at 22 bucks an hour average (though there’s usually no benefits or paid sick days- another thing that restaurant owners were whinging about having to provide not so long ago). That minimum wage with mandatory cost of living increases means that more people in the state can afford to eat out. That means more money for restaurant owners and servers alike.

I’ve seen the 2 buck an hour plus tips servers in the south. I haven’t seen better service because the workers have less income guarantee. Actually I’ve seen worse. I’ve sent back a bad meal and complained to a manager exactly once in my 36 years. It was in a horrid chain restaurant whose name I won’t even mention in a state where servers get $2.13 an hour plus tips. In all my years in Seattle, I’ve had good and bad service. But I’ve never had consistently bad service.

Tips are not wages and should never be counted as them. A server should be able to budget based on their hourly wage and not on the kindness of strangers who may be pissy cause it took an extra 3 minutes to get a glass of water in the middle of a busy shift.