Misogyny and Sexism in the News

[Allison W]

Originally Posted by Kobi

Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) is an awful person who says awful things

Deceit at its finest. More children born into poverty is beneficial for the people he serves, which is to say, wealthy corporate masters and not the people at large. More poor workers creates more competition for what few jobs exist, thereby creating a race to the bottom in which jobs increasingly are awarded to the lowest bidder. Lather, rinse, and repeat until 99% of America lives in poverty and the 1% has all of their money.

So he's killing two birds with one stone: he's trying to simultaneously subjugate women for being women and poor people for not being rich. I cannot think of many fates he could suffer that would be as horrible as he deserves.

[Kobi]

Originally Posted by Allison W

Deceit at its finest. More children born into poverty is beneficial for the people he serves, which is to say, wealthy corporate masters and not the people at large. More poor workers creates more competition for what few jobs exist, thereby creating a race to the bottom in which jobs increasingly are awarded to the lowest bidder. Lather, rinse, and repeat until 99% of America lives in poverty and the 1% has all of their money.

So he's killing two birds with one stone: he's trying to simultaneously subjugate women for being women and poor people for not being rich. I cannot think of many fates he could suffer that would be as horrible as he deserves.

Originally Posted by Kobi View Post
Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) is a fuckie fuck face



Kobi never called Bob Goodlatte a fuckie fuck face. Kobi is much better with words and would never resort to such childishness.

I have enough issues with the stuff I DO say. Let's not put words in my mouth.

[Allison W]

Originally Posted by Kobi

Originally Posted by Kobi View Post
Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) is a fuckie fuck face



Kobi never called Bob Goodlatte a fuckie fuck face. Kobi is much better with words and would never resort to such childishness.

I have enough issues with the stuff I DO say. Let's not put words in my mouth.

All right all right I fixed it

[Soon]

After historic tennis win, Eugenie Bouchard answers the most sexist question in post game interview

Who cares that Eugenie Bouchard became the first Canadian to advance to the semi-finals of the Australian Open last night? Apparently the most important thing is that she would like to date Justin Bieber.

Moments after knocking out Ana Ivanovic in a hard-fought three-set upset, Bouchard faced the double standard of the sports world head-on as the courtside interviewer Samantha Smith pointed up at a clutch of men in the stadium known as the Genie Army.

“You’re getting a lot of fans here,” noted Smith, a former British tennis champ. “A lot of them are male, and they want to know: If you could date anyone in the world of sport, of movies – I’m sorry, they asked me to say this – who would you date?”

Blushing like the teenager she is, Bouchard giggled and replied: “Justin Bieber.” As members of the Genie Army booed their displeasure, Bouchard looked at the camera and added: “Justin, if you’re watching … um: Hey!”

While Bouchard took the question good-naturedly, plenty of fans were offended on her behalf, venting their displeasure over Twitter.

“RIDICULOUS,” declared Katarina Williams, a sports reporter based in New Zealand. “Was there nothing tennis-related she could’ve actually asked instead?” Rick VanSickle, an Ontario wine writer declared: “Bizarre question to ask an athlete after historic tennis win.”

(Meanwhile, plenty of fans – primarily men – also took to Twitter to criticize Bouchard for her choice in men.)

If Bouchard was offended by the question, she didn’t show it. In a postmatch interview with the New York Times on Tuesday, she elaborated on her desire to meet Bieber.

“Don’t worry, it’s going to happen,” she told reporter Ben Rothenberg. “Yes. But I think I need to do something bigger to get his attention, like win a Slam, something like that. I won’t even have to do anything, and maybe he’ll just reach out, and we’ll tweet or something like that.”

[Soon]

Parents Hope Their Sons Are Geniuses and Their Daughters Aren't Fat

Another reason to feel bad for today's little girls: one day, the straight ones will grow up to face a dating selection consisting of doted upon nightmare boys raised by parents who used the power of the internet to validate their sneaking suspicion that their lil' All Star might be a genius. Meanwhile, the girls' parents used Google to determine whether or not their little princesses were fat. If the children are the future, the future is fucked.

According to Google analytics examined by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz at the New York Times, parents are two and a half times more likely to Google "Is my son gifted?" than they were to search for "Is my daughter gifted?" This despite the fact that, across the country, young girls do better in school than boys. They weren't particularly worried if their daughter was stupid, either; although parents tended to seek out confirmation that their son was the Alpha Boy, the One, the Luke Skywalker or the Harry Potter or the Jen from The Dark Crystal or whatever, they also were more likely to turn to Google to discover if their son was stupid, or slow, or behind in school than they were for their daughters. But they were still much more likely to think he was a genius.

Not that parents weren't worried about their little sugar/spice/everything nice concoctions; Stephens-Davidowitz notes that when it comes to daughters, parents are quite concerned that they might be — Quelle horreur! — fat or ugly. In fact, people were twice as likely to search for "Is my daughter overweight" than "Is my son overweight," despite the fact that childhood obesity is more prevalent in boys than it is in girls. They were also more likely to ask Google if their daughter was ugly, because that's a thing that Google knows. (Googling "Is my daughter ugly?" should automatically send an alert out to local child protective services, tbh.)

Most depressingly, Stephens-Davidowitz noted that there was no correlation between geographic distribution and tendency for internet users to want their sons to be geniuses and their daughters to be beauty queens; both the reddest of the red states and the crunchiest of the granola states took to Google to ask the same things for their offspring.

As Amanda Marcotte notes at Slate, this might not just be because parents are Part Of The Problem; it may be because parents understand the reality of the world where we live. And parents, for the most part, just want what's best for their kids; they want them to succeed, to be happy, and to be treated with respect by their peers. Men can achieve that by being intelligent. Women have an easier time if they're hot. Overweight women, or women who aren't conventionally attractive, are much less likely to be given a leg up in work (or in life) than women who are thin or conventionally attractive. Men, on the other hand, can get away with looking a lot sloppier. It's just like that episode of Tyra where she walked around in a fat suit secretly filming people be mean to her.

There's also the possibility that parents have a narcissistic stake in their children's social success. Asking Google "Is my son gifted?" can easily be a query with its own projected self-assurance, and corresponding confirmation bias. Kids, after all, are the result of parents combining their genes, and there must be nothing more disturbing to a person convinced that they're awesome than having to face their totally unremarkable DNA staring them back in the face, rocking their world with bland averageness, or worse, below averageness. Or maybe I'm just biased myself for having spent too much time dodging Brooklyn's herd of McLaren strollers.

But this also hints that as much as self-proclaimed progressives wantto exist in a world where looks don't matter to the point where they can be ignored, they still matter. None of us exist outside of the context of the society where we live, which is why the concept of being "color blind" or "gender blind" is false to the point of silliness. We're not individual entities free of baggage; we are baggage. No matter who we are, and where we live, it's impossible to escape the pervasive message that women are more valuable when they're more decorative and men are more valuable when they're the ones doing the thinking and deciding. And we don't need Google to tell us that.

[Kobi]

Mike Huckabee says Democrats make women feel helpless to control their libido by offering government-sponsored birth control.

The onetime presidential candidate and former Arkansas governor told the Republican National Committee during a speech Thursday that they can’t allow liberals to frame the debate any longer.

“I think it’s time Republicans no longer accept listening to the Democrats talk about a ‘war on women,’” Huckabee said. “Because the fact is, the Republicans don’t have a war on women. They have a war for women.”

He said Democrats convinced women they were victims, but Republicans wanted to empower them.

“Women I know are outraged that Democrats think that women are nothing more than helpless or hopeless creatures whose only goal in life is to have a government provide for them
birth control medication,” Huckabee said. “Women I know are smart, educated, intelligent, capable of doing anything anyone else can do.”

Huckabee made similar remarks Sunday during his Fox News program.

He said the Republican Party, which kicked off its annual winter conference by sending participants to the March for Life, stands for the equality of women.

“If Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing them for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government, then so be it,” Huckabee said.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/2...m-uncle-sugar/

-------------------------------------



I see the GOP has been advised to reframe the war on women to the war for women.

Allison, you might be clairvoyant. I am a leetle closer to calling someone a fuckie fuck face.

[Kobi]

Conservatives are attacking Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis (D) for misrepresenting her background, in particular the hardships she faced as a young single mother. But one Texas Republican is defending Davis' record, saying the gubernatorial candidate wouldn't be subject to the same criticism if she were male.

On Sunday, a Dallas Morning News article pointed out some discrepancies in the stories Davis has told -- including when she was divorced from her first husband, how long she lived in a trailer and how she paid for law school. In response, conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh have labeled her a "genuine head case" and claimed she had a "sugar daddy."

Some pundits have even suggested that Davis was a negligent parent for leaving her children with her second husband while she attended Harvard Law School in the early 1990s.

Becky Haskins, a Republican who served with Wendy Davis on the Fort Worth City Council, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram on Tuesday that Davis was a hard worker who did what she needed to do for her daughters.

“If this involved a man running for office, none of this would ever come up,” Haskins told the Star-Telegram. “It’s so sad. Every time I ran, somebody said I needed to be home with my kids. Nobody ever talks about men being responsible parents.”

“They wouldn’t be talking about Wendy if she weren’t a threat," Haskins added.

Davis' main Republican opponent in the Texas governor's race, state Attorney General Greg Abbott, accused her of “systematically, intentionally and repeatedly deceiv[ing] Texans for years about her background."

Davis has admitted that she was 21 when she divorced her first husband, not 19 as previously stated. (She was 19 with a baby when the two were separated.) She has also acknowledged that her second husband paid for a portion of her education.

In a Monday release from her campaign, Davis responded to Abbott's attacks with defiance.

"[The attacks] won’t work, because my story is the story of millions of Texas women who know the strength it takes when you’re young, alone and a mother," Davis said in the release. "I’ve always been open about my life not because my story is unique, but because it isn’t."

And in an email to her supporters sent Tuesday, Davis said, "You’re damn right it’s a true story."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0...n_4645187.html