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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
melthough
Published Letters: 1346 Editor's Choice: 103
I hope these lollies are actually shaped like vulvas and not vaginas. Otherwise, it would be hard to distinguish them from esophago-pops and recto-pops.
Also, vagina pops wouldn't actually teach freshmen any oral sex skills.
cosmicmojo claims, "[M]ost bottle feeders don't give a darn what other mothers do."
Try breastfeeding in public sometime and see if you still believe that. I have had people smoke cigarettes in my face while giving me a dirty look because I am nursing my baby. It doesn't matter if you're showing skin: it's the principle of public nursing that people don't like.
And, like it or not, our culture attempts to sharply segregate men and women as the most basic human category from the moment of birth and prescribe certain behaviors and desires to each. (I can't tell you how many times I have explained to a stranger that my baby, wearing her brothers' blue hand-me-downs, is - SHOCKINGLY- a GIRL!) I am in an equitable relationship with my husband and we are attempting to raise our children without prescribing conventional cultural behaviors and desires; still, even without a TV or much exposure to popular culture, my four-year-old is well aware that the our society believes boys' "issues" are very different from girls'. While I don't think a "Women's" or "Men's" section of a newspaper would be appropriate - with news and features, I think much narrower categories are better, even if the society section has more female readers and the sports section has more male ones - a blog like Broadsheet or a chat thread celebrating the men in one's life seem totally appropriate to me. I see Broadsheet not as a "women's interests" section about how to best remain barefoot and pregnant or keep my nails in good shape or whatever you might find in a "women's" section of a newspaper, but often as more of a meta-commentary on what actually constitutes a women's issue and how mainstream society is dealing with such issues. I'll be happy to do without Broadsheet when our culture is eqally happy to do without that sharp-segregation-from-birth thing.
And if you don't think features like Braodsheet are appropriate, what exactly brings you to this blog anyway?
Both of the oppositional posts above assume the science in this study - despite the incredibly small sample - is sound. A lot of the point of Broadsheet stories about scientific studies is to ask, "Why do they keep spending money on this stuff?" Why are we so obsessed with whether men are "objectively" more empathetic than women? Why do we even TRY to measure something like empathy? There is so much we don't know about brains. Maybe men's brains register empathy in a place where scientists don't know to look. Maybe women really are more empathetic, on average. Who cares?
The worst thing about most of these men vs. women studies (as pointed out during the flap over that men vs. women in Internet usage study) is that the results always ignore the huge overlap between men's and women's responses, focus very heavily on statistically significant but practically insignificant differences, and then grossly generalize with statements like "Women use the Internet to communicate with friends," which implies that men don't use it for that, when a more accurate statment would be, "Women are slightly more likely to use the Internet to communicate with friends."
For the most part, humans have a huge capacity for empathy. As a mother, I can tell you that a person's natural capacity for empathy needs to be developed: we also have a huge natural capacity to hit or bite anything that pisses us off. And empathy is not even necessarily a NICE thing. You use "empathy" to stalk prey.
And I will ask just one more time. If you hate feminism, why do you read Broadsheet? I think celebrity gossip is a lot of crap, so I have never even looked at The Fix, even though I like most of the rest of Salon. Why would I bother going there to read a lot of what I consider crap? Just so I can write hateful letters to rile people up? What a pathetic waste of energy.
If you actually read the piece, it seems fairly clear that she was just meditating on the concept of patriotism and attempting to deconstruct it rather than ... carpet bomb it. So I agree (and I don't think Sheehan would disagree) that "matriot" isn't viable household terminology - just an interesting idea to contemplate for a few minutes.
And, despite the "Dissent Is Patriotic" button I sometimes wear, I don't think it's possible to truly reclaim the word 'patriotism' to suggest that we shouldn't kill foreigners. That's almost as ridiculous as trying to reclaim Jesus to suggest that women are just as human as men (ahem, Naomi?). The institutions that mass-package Jesus and patriotism always attempt to preserve themselves in favor any abstract ethical Good. (cf. Party, Democratic)
I find it shocking that so few people think warrantless spying on American citizens is wrong. Calling that a "bad poll" for Bush is incredibly optimistic.
Maybe the other 49 percent were just afraid the NSA was listening in.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The Maine fight was supposed to be the dress rehearsal for repealing California's Prop. 8 -- but gay marriage lost
Once one obtains Seriousness credentials in the Washington media, they are irrevocable no matter one's conduct.
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