Let's talk about the degree to which it's currently considered acceptable to ascribe lawyerly skills to gender.
Is the NYT being sexist? Is it okay because it's kind of subtle? Is it okay because if there's a special goodness in femininity, it lends momentum to the progressive trend of including more and more women in the legal profession?
If the answer to the last question is yes, imagine a similar statement made about a male lawyer, suggesting that his maleness brought extra value to his lawyering: Would that not be okay? If not, is that because you can say (in so many words) that it's better to be female, but it's retrograde to say (subtly as well as unsubtly) that it's better to be male?
If you've bought into the notion that it is acceptable to say (with some subtlety) that it's better to be female, because that seems progressive, why is it progressive to promote women using the traditional stereotype of women as maternal and nurturing? Why isn't that precisely what is sexist?
Do you think, in the long run, it is helpful to the success of women in the legal profession to portray them as good at mothering and being sensitive to other people's feelings?
... was never named Rosie, nor was she a riveter. All along it was Mrs. Doyle, who after graduating from high school in Ann Arbor, Mich., took a job at a metal factory, her family said.
In early 1942, the Westinghouse Corp. commissioned artist J. Howard Miller to produce several morale-boosting posters to be displayed inside its buildings. The project was funded by the government as a way to motivate workers and perhaps recruit new ones for the war effort.
Smitten with the UPI photo, Miller reportedly was said to have decided to base one of his posters on the anonymous, slender metal worker - Mrs. Doyle.
For four decades, this fact escaped Mrs. Doyle, who shortly after the photo was taken left her job at the factory. She barely lasted two weeks.
A cellist, Mrs. Doyle was horrified to learn that a previous worker at the factory had badly injured her hands working at the machines. She found safer employment at a soda fountain and bookshop in Ann Arbor, where she wooed a young dental school student and later became his wife.
Oh, the irony! She couldn't do it. But she could inspire others to do it. And she could do other things, like play the cello and rear 6 children. "We" can do it, each in our own way. You work the machines, I'll help people find the right books.
Here's the Norman Rockwell version of Rosie, who's not nearly so glamorous and is clearly not based on Mrs. Doyle:
The 52-by-40-inch oil on canvas depicts "Rosie" on lunch break, her riveting gun on her lap as she uses a dog-eared copy of Mein Kampf as a foot stool.
Great symbolism, Norman. And I don't mean the book. I mean the manly power tool.
Rockwell's Rosie is posed as an homage to Michelangelo's frescoed depiction of the prophet Isaiah from the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
[Kanazawa's study] showed that young adults who identified themselves as "very liberal" had an average IQ of 106 while those who identified themselves as "very conservative" had an average IQ of 95.
"The ability to think and reason endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions. As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognise and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles," Dr Kanazawa said.
Humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends. Being liberal and caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.
Evolutionary psychologists certainly have a lot of leeway to explain anything that they see in the data and to pick the explanation that pleases them the most.
The study is of young adults. Intelligent young adults might be liberal because they are going to better schools, and schools promote the liberal world view. What happens when these intelligent folks — and they're not that intelligent! — get a little older?
"... Not London. Not even New York. This is a weird place. You're lucky that mental defective at the motel didn't jerk a pistol out of the cash register and blow a big hole in you.... Just pretend you're visiting a huge outdoor loony bin... If the inmates get out of control we'll soak them down with Mace."
That reminds me. The Rally to Restore Sanity is happening today. Are you there? Are you watching it on C-SPAN? Sanity. Are you up for sanity today? I've got the sanity rally recording on the DVR and I'm going to scroll through it — I say "scroll through" these days, not "fast-forward" — later. Meanwhile, remember when the smart reaction to politics was insanity, back when we read Hunter S. Thompson essays?
A radio news bulletin says the National Guard is massacring students at Kent State and Nixon is still bombing Cambodia. The journalist is driving, ignoring his passenger who is now nearly naked after taking off most of his clothing, which he holds out the window, trying to wind-wash the Mace out of it. His eyes are bright red and his face and chest are soaked with beer he's been using to rinse the awful chemical off his flesh. The front of his woolen trousers is soaked with vomit; his body is racked with fits of coughing and wild chocking sobs. The journalist rams the big car through traffic and into a spot in front of the terminal, then he reaches over to open the door on the passenger's side and shoves the Englishman out, snarling: "Bug off, you worthless [censored]! You twisted pigfucker! [Crazed laughter.] If I weren't sick I'd kick your ass all the way to Bowling Green--you scumsucking foreign geek. Mace is too good for you...We can do without your kind in Kentucky."
Drudge is — I think — implicitly asking with this alignment of photographs:
What drives intelligent women to that hairstyle? Are they thinking something like I don't want those feathery bangs...
... or the classic Louise Brooks straight-across look...
... but I can't have my forehead just out there to be gazed at!
What's wrong with foreheads? Is it that the forehead symbolizes the mind, and a woman can't have you looking straight at that? The intelligence must be filtered. There must be a buffer zone of femininity, so there must be some hair veiling the forehead — the theory seems to be. But why the bumper look that we see in the Drudge trio of Angela Merkel, Condoleezza Rice, and Maureen Dowd?
I'm sure that, being a political comedian, Maher is perfectly happy that he was capable of generating, alternately, anger and mirth. And good for him for making himself relevant again. I actually love comedy riffs that go to weird stream-of-consciousness places and connect things outrageously, especially when the comedian is hitting the hot buttons of people who don't have an easygoing and big sense of humor. Maher does all that. Of course, he falls way short of the ultimate comedy hero — Lenny Bruce* — because he's not challenging people in his own audience. In fact, he's stroking those people and encouraging a desire they already have: to laugh at someone they want to marginalize.
And by "someone" there, I mean Sarah Palin, not Brett Favre. No one needs much help laughing at Favre at this point. Just tell us what he did and stop and wait for the laughs. Maher's main comedy idea was to connect Favre's sext to Sarah Palin:
To me this story really isn't about sports or sex or how necessary caller ID is. It's about how pathetic and clueless white American males have become because the kind of guy who thinks there are women out there who just cold want to see your cock is the same kind of guy who thinks Sarah Palin is swell and tax cuts pay for themselves....
And if Brett Favre's penis could talk, what would it say? Well, other than no photos please, I think it would say, I'm not a witch. I'm you. Because for hundreds of years, white penises were America. White penises found America. They made the rules and they called the shots, in the workplace, in the home and at the ballot box. But now the unthinkable is happening. White penises are becoming the minority. 2010 was the first year in which more minority babies were born than white babies. This is what conservatives are really upset about.
And this is what lefties are really upset about: American history is the story of greedy white pricks who need to be cut down.
That the president is black, and the Secretary of State is a woman, and every shortstop is Latino, and every daytime talk show host is a lesbian. And suddenly this country is way off track and needs some serious restoring.
He's working the old meme about the Tea Party that distracted liberals in 2009. But it's 2010, the election is breathing down your neck, and tarring the Tea Party as angry racists did not work.
If penises could cry, and I believe they can...
That made me laugh, even though he'd lost me with the trite evil white man stuff.
... then white penises are crying all over America. And that's where this crew comes in. The lovely MILFs of the new rank. And their little secret is that their popularity comes exclusively from white men. Look at the polling. Minorities hate them. Women hate them. Only white men like them.
The only truth I'm hearing ring in that — and I haven't looked at the polling — is that liberals (quite rightly) loathe the strong, attractive women who have emerged on the right. And minorities and women have for many years tended to go for the Democrats. So those minorities and women, polled, will say they oppose Palin. But some minorities and plenty of women lean toward conservatism. If they feel repelled by conservative women like Sarah Palin, wouldn't that be evidence of sexism? By contrast, the white males who love Palin should for being open to women stepping up to political power. If these men only saw the women as sexual beings, they would tear down the political aspirations. They would scoff at and mock them... the way Bill Maher does. I think Maher was aware of that flaw in his comic rant. Here's how he tries to flip it the way he wants to go:
I'm no psychiatrist but I do own a couch.
This is a concession that he thinks women exist for sexual purposes.
And my theory is that these women represent something those men miss dearly: the traditional idiot housewife.
Maybe you have that theory because that's what you want in a woman. The housewife is a woman who stays home, and conceptualizing women as idiots is something men do when they want to block their aspirations outside of the home. This is what Maher is trying to do to Palin and the other conservative women. How can he pin that mindset on the men who support the women's ascension to power? No one wants an idiot to represent them in government.
Yes, we vote for idiots all the time, but it's because we project our hopes onto them and imagine them to be, in fact, brilliant:
________
*Here's Dustin Hoffman acting out the most striking example of Bruce challenging his own audience. Very offensive language.
1. Does this really work as an attack? I mean, as an attack on O'Donnell? Is it not instead or also an attack on the gaggle of liberals who gang up on and mock her? Maher brings on one woman — undoubtedly partly because she's pretty — and makes a punching bag out of her. They are so cocksure of themselves — both of their politics and of their funniness. It's really rather creepy and embarrassing for them.
2. O'Donnell is charming and game and she's stirring them up, that is, doing what she was brought on the show to do. She holds up bravely, while they have each other, and they knew when they went on that they'd have each other to make things easy for them. They'd even have the fun of bashing a pretty woman. Look at all these guys — ugly guys — getting ugly on her. That was the entertainment model, a turnaround from normal social life. She had her reasons for doing the show, but I want to give her credit for doing it bravely and well. The courage of the comedian-liberals was not tested. And the show was structured to guarantee that.
3. We should take note of who drives people on the other side nuts. That person has a special power. It's not witchcraft, but it is power that they are afraid of. The more they deride her, the more those who agree with her politics should notice how desperately they want you to reject her. Think about what that means. (As Rush Limbaugh loves to say: They will tell you who they are afraid of.)
4. Remember when it was oh-so-terrible to take a person's statements out of context? In particular, in the montage, we hear the author Clive Barker say "You have to tell me about the ex-homosexuals." But what does she say? Obviously, the notion of curing homosexuals is highly inflammatory, but why are we hearing Barker's words and not hers? Did she say sexual orientation can be changed by some sort of therapy or did she refer to the religious belief that homosexual behavior is sinful and say that it is possible to refrain from conduct? (I'm not suggesting that the idea that gay people should refrain from engaging in sexual activities isn't also a problem, but it is a belief widely shared by many people, especially religious people, and if they are not hypocrites, they will also reject all sexual conduct outside of a marriage.)
5. As Bill Maher admits, introducing this montage, he has no more clips that will be "earthshaking." He's reached the end of the treasure trove archive he bragged about a few weeks ago. So, he got a lot of publicity for himself, but in the end, pretty much all he had was her assertion that she "dabbled into" witchcraft when she was a kid. Ha. He made us look.
First, I can't believe he said "you look like a student" to a woman who identified herself as a member of a university faculty. That is an irrelevant and, I would say, sexist remark. Not only is it equivalent to saying "gee, you're pretty," but it's revealing that you have a picture of what professors are supposed to look like and you don't mind derailing the conversation to say she doesn't look like one. I know it's supposed to be a compliment, but it's really clueless. Believe me, I've had people say "you don't look like a law professor" or some such thing to me thousands of times over the last quarter century, and I remain superficially polite, but I can tell you it is not appropriate in a professional setting. Unless we are in a social context where it would be welcome for you to say "you look beautiful," then you should not say "you look like a student." Okay?
Now, to the substance: The woman, Bridget Todd, asks the President:
I know that you’ve mentioned that you want the Senate to repeal it before you do it yourself.
My question is — you as the President can sort of have an executive order that ends it once and for all as Harry Truman did for integration of the military in in '48. So I wonder, why don’t you do that if this is a policy that you are committed to ending?
Obama responds with a lot of words:
First of all, I haven’t “mentioned” that I’m against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
Oh, lord, he begins by getting all pedantic about words. I'll get pedantic back. She didn't say he mentioned that he was against DADT. She said he mentioned that he wanted the Senate to repeal it instead of doing something that he might be able to do on his own.
I have said very clearly, including in a State of the Union Address, that I am against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and that we’re going to end this policy.
Fine, so he's repeating the promise that some people feel very bad that he has not kept.
That’s point number one. Point number two, the difference between my position right now and Harry Truman’s, is that Congress explicitly passed a law that took away the power of the executive branch to end this policy unilaterally. So this is not a situation in which, with the stroke of a pen, I can simply end the policy.
Now having said that, what I have been able to do is for the first time get the Chairman of the Joint Chief’s of Staff, Mike Mullen, to say he thinks the policy should end. The Secretary of Defense has said he recognizes that the policy needs to change. And we, I believe, have enough votes in the Senate to remove to go ahead and remove this constraint on me as the House has already done so that I can go ahead and end it.
But, as the linked blog post (by Jane Hamsher) indicates, he doesn't have the votes in the Senate and he hasn't put the weight of the presidency behind getting Senators to vote for repeal. He seems like he's using the statute as an excuse, so that he can play both sides on this issue. I understand the political motivation for that, but it amounts to breaking his promise to end DADT.
Now we recently had a Supreme Court — a district court case — that said DADT is unconstitutional. I agree with the basic principle that anybody who wants to serve in our armed forces, and make sacrifices on our behalf, on behalf of our national security, anybody should be able to serve. And they shouldn’t have to lie about who they are in order to serve.
So don't appeal the case! Say you think the court got it right! Or say that you think DADT isn't unconstitutional. It's just bad policy, and you object to the judiciary taking over in this area.
And so we are moving in the direction of ending this policy. It has to be done in a way that is orderly because we are involved in a war right now.
That's pretty much a cloaked statement that he thinks the court was wrong and that the policy is constitutional. It's not "orderly" for the court to strike it down. The judiciary shouldn't be supervising the military. I'm going to assert with confidence that that is his opinion.
But this is not a question of whether the policy will end. This policy will end, and it will end on my watch.
The arc of history is long! Keep waiting, oh captive voters. Who else are you going to vote for?
But I do have an obligation to make sure that I’m following some of the rules.
Some of the rules?! Man, if you are only following some of the rules, why not give gay people a break?
I can’t simply ignore laws that are out there. I have to work to make sure they are changed.
Although with soft lighting, the pair look like they were separated at birth, in fact, the baby-faced O'Donnell looks less like a twin than a daughter. Time is cruel to women, especially on HDTV. Your older man becomes a distinguished Old Lion and a woman just becomes old, aging in dog years. O'Donnell at 41 is five years younger than the 46-year-old Palin, who is a grandmother after all.
Though it's been more than nine months since she went under the knife, [Heidi] Montag says she is still in severe pain and her body has not acclimated to the over-the-top breast augmentation.
"I have major anxiety about it," she confides. "I was taking painkillers but they weren't working, so I stopped. It hurt either way,"
In addition to the physical pain, the busty blond reality star's new assets have prevented her from properly hugging her four dogs or wearing anything that isn't a custom-made design.
"I'm obsessed with fitness but it's impossible to work out with these boobs," Montag says. "It's heartbreaking. I can't live an everyday life."
Yet, on the plus side, there is all the publicity and reality show material entailed in this "realization" and subsequent additional surgery — and surgery is her only real basis for fame.
With the passing of her confidant Dr. Ryan, Montag fears that she will be stuck living in her cartoon-like figure forever.
"I feel trapped in my own body," she confesses. "There's just no fixing it. Dr. Ryan knows the work he did, he knows everything."
Because how could another doctor ever locate those implants?
... Montag was quick to squash the rumors....
Oh! The imagery!
Find a doctor to (find and) remove your implants, and find the decency to remove your "downgraded" self from the public stage.
That's a montage I happened upon while looking for something else. Make of it what you will, but there's some truly fabulous female (and male) beauty to be gawked at. Tallulah is the most beautiful, is she not? And there she was, in that least glamorous setting, the lifeboat, of Hitchcock's "Lifeboat," which is what I was Googling for, looking for that scene with William Bendix (as "Gus") drinking sea water, a propos of lemondog's comment in the "Irony pursues Barack Obama" post.
1. That's not just some guy's viral video, that's an official Republican group? Uh, speaking of "Who Let the Dogs Out," put a leash on those guys. They're not helping.
2. Did they pay royalties to appropriate "She's a Lady" and "Who Let the Dogs Out"?
3. There's a certain silliness to picking (what you think are) the prettiest pictures of one party's women and (what you think are) the ugliest pictures of the other party's women, which might be enjoyable if it was just some YouTube foolery.
4. I liked the natural look of some of the Democratic women who were supposed to be unattractive. Most of the ugliness had to do with making faces. Good for them if they can make faces. It means they aren't botoxed into expressionlessness. Too much of the supposed prettiness of the Republican women came in the form of glitzy TV makeup and hair. I got really tired of looking at them. Too much sameness.
