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In my reading I come across plenty of things that are sound and commendable. Too many things that are mindlessly banal and/or just awful. Occasionally something that’s novel and thought-provoking. And then once in a while, I encounter something that can really be categorized only as “wha-huh?”

Such is the case with “Smart Girls Wear Short Skirts, Too,” posted by Amanda Marcotte at slate.com’s XX Factor blog. This, apparently, is a response to a NY Times item by Lisa Belkin in which, according to Marcotte, the author “conflates women having sex with men and actual social inequalities between college men and women” and generally bemoans female participation in juvenile sexual antics, or at any rate the nature of that participation.

Having read Belkin’s item at the Times, I generally agree with Marcotte’s criticisms. e.g.

To Belkin, the fact that women dance in their underwear at parties is part of the same pattern that caused a fraternity to circulate an email explaining that women aren’t actually people, as if women could get their people status back by putting more clothes on.  But I think that men are perfectly capable of being turned on by a woman dancing in her underwear while never forgetting that said woman has a family that loves her, a mind of her own, and ambitions that are equal to his.

Quite. Nothing amiss, here; I consider myself a modern and committed feminist and believe in equal opportunity for men, women, and every other category of person to comport themselves how they like and still be treated like human beings. You shouldn’t be leered at or exploited just because you dress like a slut. Just as you shouldn’t be sniggered at or assumed to be somehow “repressed” or “incomplete” because you’re celibate, either. Go with yourself.

So naturally I’m neither troubled nor puzzled by Marcotte promoting a similar standard. Where she loses me is, instead, when she allows that “Belkin is quite right to be upset that men still exert total control over the college social scene, and that young women feel they have to suck up to men or they won’t have a social life at all.” Marcotte ends her post by revisiting this issue, in further but still-confounding detail:

I do think Belkin makes some interesting points about how unfair campus life is to women, who don’t get to share power over orchestrating campus social life.  That women’s relationships with each other are eroded by competing for male attention is a problem, as is that men get to make all the decisions about what to do for fun and the women are just expected to tag along.  But these problems are complicated, and solutions aren’t immediately evident. Plus, the solutions to them would require asking something of men, that they share power and treat women with respect.

What the fuck is she talking about, here? (more…)

Too Big to Succeed
or
A Geography-based Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of What the Fuck is Wrong with America

Just a few days, now, until this Hell known as the 2010 general election is over. (And the resulting new Hell begins, of course, but at least it will be a different kind of Hell.)

We’re effectively in cloud-cuckoo land at this point, in terms of pretty much everything related to American politics, whether predictions, pre-emptive post-mortems, strategizing, attempts to interpret “the popular mood,” etc. Uncle Paul has basically sounded the trump of doom, while others are constructing various fantasy scenarios in which a Republican takeover of congress benefits Obama, the country or both.

One can probably just about ignore all of it. I’ve already voted, of course, and of those who haven’t and are still “undecided,” I imagine it’s safe to assume that such people are so lost in a fog that they aren’t going to find their way out in the next few days, whatever they do.

I feel obligated to compose some kind of statement just now, though. And I really feel like, at this point, it may be best to just brush aside all of specifics, the details, the individuals, etc., etc., which are by no means insignificant but have, as noted, been absolutely fucking worried over to death and then some. And to ask, instead, the real fundamental question which in some way seems to preoccupy much of the country on some level or other, i.e.:

Just what the Hell is wrong with America?

(more…)

i haven’t been paying enough attention to be able to make intelligent predictions about the results of today’s senate primaries, but i can confidently predict how they will be covered (i’d say ‘spun,’ but that phrasing implies the active manipulation of coverage by political operatives, as opposed to the much more depressing reality that the art of spin is more or less obsolete because beltway hack framing is already the operating system that the brains of political reporters run on).

if halter and/or sestak win, we’ll hear about how lincoln and specter are honorable ‘moderates’ who were hounded off the ticket by out-of-state liberal pressure groups & bloggers funding attack ads. this will be presented as the perfectly symmetrical equivalent to the purges and purity tests being carried out against moderate republicans. they will point to this exquisitely balanced rorshach inkblot of hyerpartisanship, and they will bemoan the loss of civility and the extreme ideological rancor as universal and uniform ills of our political discourse across the spectrum. the WH will have very little to say about it, but if pressed for comment they’ll say more or less the same thing.

if lincoln and/or specter win, it will be read as a move to the center as the democratic party recalibrates for the inevitable walloping in november, and a signal that the public is clamoring for their elected officials to work together toward bipartisan solutions. robert gibbs will shout it from the rooftops of pennsylvania avenue. (this will not stop the same commentators five months from now from repeating and implicitly validating GOP assertions to the effect that these moderate democrats are effectively — by virtue of the D after their names — liberals poised to reap the just anger of an electorate in the throes of anti-incumbent fever. it may or may not stop the WH from saying more or less the same thing either before or after the general election.)

just watch, it can only go one of two ways. smart reporters already have two versions ready to file for either contingency. tell me tomorrow whether i’m right.