My new favorite song.
(Larry) Summers and Science in the Kitchen
Women and Children First: Yesterday the NYT announced that the Bush administration plans to cut funding for uninsured children, and the WaPo let us know that the FDA intends to appropriate 30% of the money dedicated to the Office of Women’s Health for general use instead. (The Office of Women’s Health, by the way, also funds research into children’s health, so it’s a double whammy.) But don’t worry, the Bush administration has an answer for everything: “children do not have a legal entitlement to benefits.”
The Quick Brown Fox: If a woman with an unwanted pregancy also has a low income and/or other disadvantages, how is she helped by outlawing abortion and emergency contraception? If we make abortion illegal, or more restricted, what class of person is still going to get a safe hospital abortion, and has always done so? That’s right - a privileged rich woman.
Are New Parents Utterly Insane?
Medical Privacy? Have an Abortion and Kiss It Good-Bye: The national push to collect detailed information from women who seek abortion care originated with the 95-10 Initiative of Democrats for Life (DFLA), a group with deep ties to the Christian right and various militant anti-choice organizations. (One of these groups, Life Dynamics International, also began another intrusive anti-choice campaign being furthered by Rep. Robert Talton, author of a current bill requiring doctors to collect and preserve tissue from the bodies of girls who have abortions before age 14, and turn that tissue over to the state police for DNA analysis.) 95-10 is currently awaiting action by Congress in the guise of the Pregnant Women Support Act (PWSA) introduced by Rep. Lincoln Davis.
Let’s put it this way : If Rudy Giuliani were a woman, it would matter he is such a bad parent.
Why We Don’t Have National Health Insurance
Hi, I’m Jill, and scummy law school sleazebags have gone after me, too.
I Thought You Said That Sensitivity Island Was Just a Name!: If these appear dated, it’s because I basically gave up on trying to mock and shame reactionary asswipes about a year ago. On the plus side, I once actually had a thread about a Michelle Malkin column where the contents and the comments veered not once into forbidden territory (it helps that I have no readers), except when one of my more feminist commenters called her a “stupid mean bitch” via a fictitious T-shirt. I’m further happy to say that the terms “retarded,” “lardass” and “cunt” don’t appear anywhere on the site except in clinical descriptions or movie quotes. Please at least be aware that I spared you the academic man-of-letters approach.
Teaching “yes”, “no”, and more on the tired old lie about male weakness: The myth of male weakness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy just as myths about female weakness do. If you tell a young woman that “girls can’t lift weights”, she might end up believing it. She might never pick up a barbell, never discover her very real physical strength. Her belief in the myth ended up making the myth real for her. And if you tell a young man, explicitly or implicitly, that his sexual urges are uncontrollable and that women are the ones who ought to set boundaries and limits, he’ll accept it. It will become true for him. He won’t do what he is capable of doing, what he is morally responsible for doing, simply because he chooses to believe that it’s not his job, his role.
Early Registration: It took me awhile to get over my initial freakout at finding out Kathie was One Of Those. Initially, figuring I had to go along to get along, I mentally substituted “boyfriend” whenever she said “girlfriend;” but after awhile, even my dumb ass realized this was a pointless substitution, because it made no damn difference. Relationship problems are relationship problems. Her girlfriend wouldn’t ever clean the cat box?–My boyfriend wouldn’t ever clean the cat box! Her girlfriend was emotionally abusive?–My boyfriend was emotionally abusive! (And then some!) In fact, we were basically dating the same person, except Kathie’s girlfriend looked better in men’s dress shirts than my boyfriend did.
What Women Want: A More Nuanced, Well-Rounded Approach to Female Sexuality
Focusing on the Important Shit, Part I and Part II
Savaging Gay Families: But the problem is that Savage and his audience put me and the hubby — and all gay & lesbian parents — in the same category as the parents above; child abusers. And not because we do anything to our kids like the parents above did to theirs, or would ever do anything like that. In our case, the very act of parenting together — doing things much like the things my family did this weekend — qualifies as abuse.
Deconstructing the veil: Impromptu Version: Part of being under an authoritarian regime is that there are litanies of sometimes arbitrary, ridiculous rules. And surely, part of having ridiculous rules is that governments often find it difficult or impossible to enforce them uniformly, so they are enforced only capriciously. This notion, that the rules can be broken, is something that is part of the Egyptian psyche. They are used to hearing no, used to fighting, slipping people baksheesh, using connections to get the most mundane of tasks accomplished, using persuasion.
A collection of writings by feminists of color.
The horse raced past the barn fell: Because English strongly relies on word order for parsing purposes, and because it permits null-complementizer relative clauses, there’s no way to know that `raced’ isn’t the main verb, so you’re led to contently analyze the sentence one way, which by the time you get to the end is completely wrong. This is, in short, what garden-pathing is all about.
Nice set of links. I particularly liked “Are new parents insane?” and “Deconstructing the veil: Impromptu Version”, but you picked a lot of good ones.