Advice to the ladies re: ED

Researchers have found a new reason to blame women for being women in a study directed by sociologists at Cornell University and University of Chicago.

A wife who gets too chummy with her husband's best friends undermines his "autonomy and privacy," and may inadvertently be causing hubby's erectile dysfunction.

"Men who experience partner betweenness in their joint relationships are more likely to have trouble getting or maintaining an erection and are also more likely to experience difficulty achieving orgasm during sex," the lead authors write in the study, published in the current issue of the American Journal of Sociology.

From here.

One does wonder what that might suggest about Boiling Cat Piss in the bedroom - given the chummy connections Five Feet of Feces grooms with his RWNJ blogging buddies.

The Queen Of Rage™

There are some who are crying foul over the photo Newsweek chose for its cover feature on Michele Bachmann.

Her supporters claim that by making her look like a RWNJ, the magazine is treating her with less respect than her male opponents, who have not allegedly been depicted at RWNJs.

The New Yorker also has a long piece about her campaign to secure the Republican Party nomination for the 2012 presidential race, here.

[...]Bachmann and her campaign staff know that––like Sarah Palin and like Mitt Romney—her image depends on a carefully groomed glamour. As Stewart was spelling out the rules of the plane, a flight attendant solemnly carried a full-length white garment bag from Nordstrom down the aisle, as if she were carrying the nuclear codes. Close behind followed two more aides––Bachmann’s personal assistant, Tera Dahl, and the makeup artist Tamara Robertson, who had been asked to join the team because Bachmann so admired her work at Fox News.

Oh look! Another Newsweek cover, this one with Mitt Romney.

So, Bachmann supporters and other RightWing NutJobs - listen up. Although Naomi Wolf would gladly let you shrieeek "Sexism!" about the Newsweek cover, and play the victim card which you keep accusing the women's movement of doing, feminists who support social justice are not buying your crap, nor your candidate's crap either.

We're still waiting, Tim

Wellie-well-well. Way back on July 14, DJ! posted the link to Tim Hudak's 2009 abortion position. He said he was in favour of defunding it. We thought Ontario voters needed to know that.

Various bloggers, like partisans gritchik and Warren Kinsella, as well as others picked up on it.

Then, mirabile dictu, the MSM asked him about it. He waffled and weaseled. And when pressed, he skedaddled.

When the Star repeatedly asked Hudak if he is “pro-life” he refused to answer the question and walked away from the microphone.

Which was an extremely stooopid thing to do.

It just provoked more questions with ensuing weaselling.

On July 25, the Star published this bit of drivel by the guy whose organization published the 2009 information.

DJ! wanted space to rebut it but the Star won't print stuff by pseudonymous contributors.

So, we posted our rebutal here. Which got the progressive blogosphere's panties twisted into a grand show of solidarity (lotsa links in comments on that post).

On July 31, Heather Mallick weighed in.

Somewhere in there, a website called Say No to Hudak, complete with Twitter account, sprang up. (And no, that's is ^NOT DJ!'s doing.)

The story seemed to have, as they say, legs.

And still does. Today, nearly a month later, the Spec offered an editorial titled 'Straight Talk, Mr. Hudak'.

DJ! is delighted to note that the Spec writer gets it, as so many other pundits and commenters do not.

Yes, health care is a federal responsibility, but that isn’t stopping provincial governments in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island from discouraging abortion service provision by refusing to fund training and cutting funding to clinics that perform abortion. Could the same thing happen in a Conservative-led Ontario?

Tim Hudak opened the door to these questions. He’d be wise to offer a credible response sooner rather than later.

Also today, another rabid partisan blogger posted a paternalist projection, titled 'Progressive Women Across Ontario Seem to be Getting Ready to Back Andrea Horwath and the ONDP', referring to the Say No to Hudak site.

When I commented that it was perfectly possible to be anti-Conservative without being a 'Liberal shill' (fuck, I'm sick of that phrase), the schmuck condescended to tell me:

Second, to the extent that progressive women against Hudak will/ should endorse any political party, the obvious choice is the ONDP; for not only is the ONDP authentically committed to progressive values of social justice, democratic reform, economic and environmental justice, but also the Liberals are not a “progressive” party.

(Note to Dippers: It is exactly this tone used by the anointed on us benighted souls that PISSES us right off.)

So, some good news, some bad news on a day when everyone has gone nuts. Good news: Hudak is still twisting in the wind on this. Bad news: NDP shills are just as obnoxious as any other flavour.

Whose Affray: Of Naomi Wolf and other horrors.

For someone so enamoured of anecdotal mythologies and cultural archetypes, Naomi seems unfamiliar with the fable of the child who cried "Wolf!" once too often.

Though she attempted to walk back from her impetuous condemnation of the two women who stated that Julian Assange had non-consensual unprotected sex with them, Wolf demonstrates once more that, whatever her purported political orientation, her inerrant allegiance is to Naomi and to unrelenting self-promotion.

DrDawg at his Blawg deconstructs Wolf's screed, neatly using the tendentious hyperbole she exploits in The End of America.

Meanwhile, in California. . .

It seems that the ReThuglican Party recognizes it is on the brink of extinction.

Conservative Republicans flexed their newfound muscle in Capitol Hill's chaotic debt showdown, but in left-leaning California, moderates are trying to push the party toward the center on immigration, guns and gay rights as the 2012 elections come into view.

The latest friction in a long tussle between conservatives and centrists in California comes as leaders search for ways to make their candidates more competitive in a state where Democrats control the Legislature, hold every statewide office and enjoy a growing registration advantage. It also mirrors tensions playing out nationally as presidential contenders maneuver in advance of next year's primary season.

A proposed rewrite of the California Republican Party platform retreats from opposition to same-sex adoption, domestic partner benefits and child custody, avoids any mention of overturning Roe v. Wade and drops a demand to end virtually all federal and state benefits for illegal immigrants.

But they're still pandering to the fetus fetishists, right?

Er, no so much.

A detailed section titled "The Right to Life" vanishes, including a call to reverse the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. It would be replaced with a single sentence on the protection of innocent human life, and the word "abortion" never appears.

So, just how extinctable are they?

In 2010, when Republicans scored big victories in Congress and statehouses around the nation, California Democrats made a clean sweep of eight statewide contests.

Despite a booming population, California counted more registered Republicans in 1988 than it does today. The party is in danger of slipping under 30 percent of registered voters statewide — Democrats hold 44 percent, or an edge of 2.3 million voters. Independents outnumber Republicans in 14 of the state's 53 congressional districts.

Hispanics could eclipse non-Hispanics and comprise the largest racial or ethnic group in the state by 2020, and they tend to vote Democratic. Independents — about 2 of 10 voters — generally tilt left in California, too.

The last Republican to carry the state in a presidential election was George H.W. Bush, in 1988.

And you have to go even further back to find that Great Uniter, St. Ronnie.

"It's possible to have a broadly conservative party that doesn't agree on every specific," said [political scientist] Pitney, who teaches at Claremont McKenna College. "The guy who was able to thread the needle on this was Reagan — he was able to include the moderates."

Great Uniter, my ass. According to Michael Moore, we can blame Ronnie for everything. (Well, I always have.)

Beginning on this date, 30 years ago, Big Business and the Right Wing decided to "go for it" -- to see if they could actually destroy the middle class so that they could become richer themselves.

And they've succeeded.

On August 5, 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired every member of the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) who'd defied his order to return to work and declared their union illegal. They had been on strike for just two days.

It was a bold and brash move. No one had ever tried it. What made it even bolder was that PATCO was one of only two unions that had endorsed Reagan for president! It sent a shock wave through workers across the country. If he would do this to the people who were with him, what would he do to us?

Looking back, I remember thinking when the US barracks in Beirut were bombed, killing 299 USian and French soldiers and Teflon Ronnie suffered no recriminations for it: 'That's it. We've lost'.

Because of course when a Democrat is president and something goes really bad -- like the Iranian hostage crisis -- the Dem wears it and loses.

Unlike ReThuglicans.

I have a serious question. Now, with more information available than ever before, unprecedented ease of consultation and networking -- WHY ARE HUMANS SO FUCKING STUPID?

Sorry for shouting. . .

Enriching the gene pool and other freaky fetus fetishist antics

I keep thinking: 'OK. Have we had enough crazy yet? Are we done?'

But no. There's no end to the insane, hateful, murderous crap happening around the world.

Then I saw this story from San Francisco. Progressives there are pushing back against the lying liars who run fake clinics.

Supervisor Malia Cohen and City Attorney Dennis Herrera today announced a joint effort to combat what they view as deceptive marketing at crisis pregnancy centers - and were peppered with questions from pro-life activists who attended the press conference."

San Francisco is the latest city to take up NARAL's strategy to regulate the liars at the municipal level. The good guys have been successful in a few places, only to suffer set-backs in the courts on the basis of freedom of lies speech. In New York, city officials are appealing such a ruling.

What caught my eye in that story was this:

Several pro-life activists in the audience pressed Herrera on the subject, including Audrey Richter of Oakland who held her 2-year-old son, Exodus, in her arms.

Really? Exodus? Does he have an older sibling named Genesis? Is she pregnant with Leviticus?

That reminded me that I'd collected some recent linkies demonstrating the general all-round crazy and/or creepiness of fetus fetishists.

Remember the MASSIVE FAIL in Ohio when a fetus was going to 'testify' by means of live ultrasound? Except, the testimony was pretty much undetectable.

Recently, nutbars in Florida went that stunt one better. Convicted stalker Flip Benham came up with this one during a week-long anti-abortion campaign in Orlando.

Flip Benham and a group of anti-abortion activists are staging an Orlando “memorial” this morning at which an “aborted baby girl” will answer questions.

I couldn't find out how that went. No clinics were shut down during the campaign, however.

The Personhood (aka Humpty-Dumpty) Initiative folks are also getting creative. In Mississippi, they're getting the 'Conceived in Rape' tour on the road.

A woman named Rebecca Kiessling makes a living playing victim by broadcasting her mother's rape.

The very existence of a scumbucket like Becky is a very strong argument NOT to force women to carry their rapist's sperm to term. Sure, enrich the gene pool with lotsa rapist DNA. That should go well.

**********

'Leviticus' reminded me of this. Best smack-down ever.



Ah, Josiah Bartlet, the best president the US never had.

ROC media dancing to Contempt Party tune.

As it so happens, I'm Franco-Ontarian and while I understand, intellectually and emotionally, the premise of the sovereignty movement in Québec, I didn't feel personally engaged.

Until now.

This is the famous *firewall* letter King Stevie Spiteful the First and his cronies addressed to the premier of Alberta; it was published in the NatPo in January 2001.

The leader of the Contempt Party has bragged about the ways that he will oversee the destruction of Canada as we know it. Federalism? Phooey. SHithead came to Ottawa to reduce our government to something small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Twenty or perhaps even ten years from now, when the country formerly known as Canada has been fragmented into a number of US states, political historians and theorists will compare the respective goals and strategies of ethical sovereignists in Québec - people like Françoise David, Gilles Duceppe and Amir Khadir - versus greedy survivalists in Alberta such as Ezra Levant.

Moving to Montréal is quite appealing, at the moment. If I still feel this way this time next year ...

In the Sweet Bly and Bly

As a sidenote to the Bly blather, I was once employed by a company that decided to hold/partake of a 'retreat' for its staff. I missed it because I'd lock-booked off for vacation before management had this bright idea, but everyone else was dutifully packed off to have their productivity improved. Or so it was touted beforehand.

I was treated to an official debriefing when I returned so I would benefit anyway. I nearly choked on my drink when I heard the deathly phrase 'Iron John' drop, but managed to keep a polite face. I was well acquainted with the psycho-pop quackery and its fellow travellers since its start a decade before, but it was obvious it was all new to the men fresh from its throes. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad as I'd read. It had been allegedly co-ed.

By the time the debriefing got to psycho-babble archetypes for men that should be used as integral role models for the gender, I snapped like a dry twig. The retreat had to use film examples so most of the audience would have some context of the concepts. Two were Wizard and King, so it was Merlin from "Excalibur" and King David (ala Richard Gere's performance). The persons tagged to get me up to speed repeated pretty much rote to me about the astrology-like positive aspect manly man memes that had been appropriated for the archetypes. I felt like I was back in adolescence listening to the Bible college Friday night teen outreach group proselytizing to their captive audience.

I started pointing out, among other things, that...

a/ Merlin in "Excalibur" was a character that used literal magic that worked and the character was presented as someone that used magic to enable a King(who just couldn't restrain himself) rape a woman and then the magician made off with the subsequent child as his price, all the while being comedy relief *and* the Voice of Spiritual Authority.

b/ the biblical David was a character brought to a throne by literal magic that worked and thought nothing of commanding a man to certain death so David the King could bed the man's wife(because David just couldn't restrain himself).

Being stunned garrulous, that wasn't the only fisking I did, but those examples of positive male icons are what stuck in my head, lo, these many years. I also mentioned Joseph Campbell's book on mythic archetyping "Hero with a Thousand Faces", as a better source to reference than Bly's version of Iron John, but you'd be surprised how hard it is for people to crack a magazine, let alone a book. Maybe you wouldn't.

Longtime geek, short fuse diplomat, that's me.


For-some-reason, my less than praiseful observations made the men that had attended uncomfortable. Part of it was them not wishing to speak against the company whose idea this was. Part of it was me questioning a Great IdeaTM that only incidentally ignored any workers that weren't male while insulting those that were. Part of it was I was younger than all of them, smaller than all of them and I'd already worked around being less physically strong by Making a strapping pack to handle the cargo I needed to shlep up stairs, although they all liked to complain about the strain on their backs. So, outlier was being outlier.

All I could think was how lucky I'd been to dodge a 'kill me now' bullet. I might have harmed someone at the retreat; likely myself, bashing my head against a tree.

I am biased. I didn't survive rural evangelical efforts (including 'talking in tongues' events) to have a great fondness for companies that decree Large Group Awareness 'training' (LGAT) for employees. I think most LGATs are psychologically risky if not harmful, because they seem to focus on variations of the "Secret" (ie: if you don't get what you want/need, you didn't try hard enough *Loser*) They're often genderized (Bly's stuff being some of the most blatant to go bigtime), expensive, authoritarianly 'religious' and often sold by groups masking other intents.

The internets abound with information sites such as Rick Ross's and the SkepDic that go into depth on the usual suspects, comparison of the core methods and the dangers. Vulnerable psyches can be stripped of defenses, privacy invaded, guilt burdens increased and bank accounts emptied. Women, by their socialization, are among the more vulnerable to such manipulative blaming.

Yet somehow, still, decades later, companies, both with and without HR departments, get sold on the idea that LGAT programs increase bottom lines or they check off a 'wellness' benefit (sometimes execs that attended one are responsible). Monies certainly increase for the-orgs-selling-the-'training', because the orgs, 'concern troll' style, go after attendees for more 'training'. Employees, having been softened up by the trust factor (however misplaced. Google: Efficiency WISE) that their employer wouldn't engage them in something harmful, and wanting to please and get ahead at work, are even easier marks.

Adding insult to injury in all this, we have the many 'sage advice' articles in big media about women *needing* to act in more socially masculine behaviours to reach the upper echelons of the workplace. So, women dutifully attend training on how to be more aggressive to succeed at corporate warfare and not be feminine losers...

even while...

... there are trainings like Bly's, also put on by professional organizations, that demand not only that men aggressively 'take' their daily environments without compromise, but that women as a whole should never get an even break, because that would emasculate all the men around them by destroying the gender caste system...sorry, Natural Law.

Women who 'act like men' are castigated in every corner of the same big media that offer the sage advice, told to their faces no matter how hard they might try to act like a man, they will-never-be-one so they're wasting their time and looking (stupid/bitchy/unbeddable/yourchoice). Better yet, the men engaging with women get to interpret what 'acting like a man' means because they are men and being aggressive is apparently not gender neutral.


Anecdotally, I know women (especially of colour) around me right now trying to express their internalized fear of asking for promotions and raises, well-meaning men unaware of their own privilege saying 'just do it it's no biggie', and women in senior positions expressing their own frustrations dealing with senior men in meetings while trying to explain there are good reasons for studies saying women prefer keeping their heads down because it's proven a greater survival strategy to keep a job rather than 'act like a man' and lose everything in harder economic times.


How much harder is it for individual women when trying to reason with company seniors or elected officials who have Iron John style machismo bonding on repeat in the back of their heads reinforcing an already pervasive privilege? And yet the cry for unions and women's movements are declared to be so last century...by the same privileged forces.

Interesting, that.

Update: August 05 11:33mst

I was searching for something else and came across a critique of the sources 'informing' that long gone retreat. This is chapter 6 of "The Masculinity Conspiracy" by James Gelfer. It's somewhat reassuring that my memory hung on to this with accuracy (or not, depending on your pov) but also interesting that my sputtering echoes a more informed opinion (or it's confirmation bias) His main blog seems interesting as well.

Back to the Fifties ...

where women were R.E.A.L.women and men were ... butt-sniffers?

Go read this post at Pushed To the Left And Loving It.

Hint: Robert Bly is a featured player; The Usual Con Suspects and the Contempt Party play a support role in this regressive and reactionary comedy.