Re Michelle Obama: I think a lot of this is overthinking the issue. To me it's really simple, many people start out as racist asshats and work to justify those feelings from there. This is the entire reason why pundits like O'Reily, Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc are popular. These jerks find ways to mask racism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc. behind logical-sounding facades. It allows the intellectually lazy to lie to themselves about how racist they actually are because they won't ever practice any introspection which would inevitably remove the veil of self-delusion from their eyes. Hence when anyone to the right of Shrub makes a criticism of national policy or past acts they "hate America", but when homophobic racist preachers say Katrina and 9/11 are just "expressing themselves".

RE "Gropers": I would really like to see the construct for how they arrive at their numbers for this. I'm not against changing the ads if there was evidence to suggest the pervs were being enticed by them or their phrasing, or if it was just the fact the more people were aware of how to report the issue not actually more incidents.

Re Cops:: Big surprise. I don't automatically trust or respect them and neither should anyone else. Too many incidents of so called "good cops" covering for violent thugs. Even if a cop isn't a thug chances are they will cover for one. Check out http://www.badcopnews.com/ (a lot of trigger warning go with that page)

: Moonie newspaper. Nuff said.

Whups!

Meant to say

RE Washington Times: Moonie newspaper.

As a potential addition to the list, there's an article in Time Magazine this week about purity balls called "The Pursuit of Teen Girl Purity." Pretty much exactly what you'd expect. I wrote a letter of complaint; if other's are interested, the e-mail address is letters@time.com.

Good god, even if she were carrying a condom, how can that possibly matter? I always have a condom on me - you never know, after all, and it's better to have it and not need it than vice-versa. I thought the whole "carrying a condom = prostitute" thing went out with the 70s.

For that matter, what is the relevance of any previous arrest, true or not? It's not illegal to walk down the street with a condom, no matter how many previous arrests you've had.

Great round up. Can I add a "hooray!" to Rachel Maddow being on the short list for a show on MSNBC? She is brilliant! I have been a fan since she was on Unfiltered.

First of all, sluts don't need to read Cosmo, all that stuff is old news to them :P (and to anybody who watches TV, or has Internet access, etc...)

Also, it wouldn't matter if the woman was circling the block in fishnets, hot pants, and five-inch tip jar platforms filled with condoms. If she didn't have sex with someone for money, you don't arrest her for prostitution. Is it really that complicated?

Also, it wouldn't matter if the woman was circling the block in fishnets, hot pants, and five-inch tip jar platforms filled with condoms. If she didn't have sex with someone for money, you don't arrest her for prostitution. Is it really that complicated?

In New York, and probably elsewhere, people can also be arrested for "loitering for the purposes of prostitution." In practice, this means that women are arrested for their dress and appearance, for being in an area frequented by prostitutes, and even for their gender identity/expression and/or ethnicity. Women can also be arrested for being "known prostitutes," which means that, yes, women with previous arrests for prostitution (whether they still work in the sex industry or not) can be and are arrested for walking down the street.

I only learned this recently...it is horrible.

Oh yeah, and the police use condoms as evidence of prostitution all the time. That's standard (and also horrible).

The wage gap gets constantly talked about... whether it's 74 cents, 76 cents, 77 cents, etc. to the dollar. Everybody has a different number. Even the AAUW quotes 77 cents on their website yet on their mailer they quote 76 cents and in an online report they show 88 cents and in another group 95 cents.

The point that the Washington Times is making is that virtually nobody uses the numbers that are adjusted based on statistical regression analysis which control for various factors in the "wage gap". People instead use unadjusted numbers (the 74-77 cents numbers).

Anyone that believes a number like 75c or 77c has been misled. I wonder when people will start talking about the real wage gap. Control for experience, industry, education, etc.

Robin, thanks for clarifying some of the practices/laws surrounding prostitution. I didn't know those things *at all*, and you're right, that's horrendous. So upsetting.

This week's feminist reader has a lot of great and also really horrible stuff in it. I have really enjoyed looking into all these different articles and events.

Sometimes I don't feel like I have enough time in my life to check all this stuff out on my own, and I am so thankful that Feministing bloggers take the time to point out all of it to me in one place so I can do my best to stay informed. Thanks for everything!

Re. prostitution: not to debate the moral, ethical or implications in terms of 'the patriarchy' of prostitution, but I do wonder -- how can anti-prostitution laws be enforced in a manner that is consistent with our constitutional rights?

How does the state, without a massive invasion of privacy, actually "prove beyond a reasonable doubt" that someone actually received money for sex? And how can "well, you looked funny so we can arrest you on 'suspicion of prostitution'" pass any legal muster?

It seems to me that, however we may feel about prostitution, laws against prostitution simply cannot be enforced in a constitutional manner, thus making these laws themselves constitutionally suspect.

Re: early puberty -- the article seems to blame it all on plasticizers. But is this fair? If xeno-estrogens are an issue, why not phyto-estrogens? Should I be careful about giving my daughter soy milk? And maybe my use of soy milk is why I'm "in touch with my feminine side"? Certainly, we have evolved to deal with plants trying to poison us but not with the toxins we make from petrochemicals, so maybe there is a difference in our metabolism of xeno-estrogens vs. phyto-estrogens. Still, as a biochemist, knowing that plants are constantly trying to poison us, yet we survive, I tend to be somewhat skeptical of "oh noes, plastics are poisoning us" arguments when plants have pretty much been trying to poison us in the same way for millennia. It's especially funny when people get excited about phyto-estrogens then get worked up about xeno-estrogens ...

Re: Michelle Obama -- within the article is the idea of the "first lady as the first mother" is part of the dynamic here ... adults looking for a mother figure are thinking of "my mother" rather than "me"/"mother of my children". And for many of us, Michelle Obama who is young, vibrant (and if you'll pardon my straight male gaze here, super-duper hawt) is more Jackie Kennedy or HRC than either of the Bush presidential spouses. This does make a lot of people uneasy for various reasons, which do probably interact with race but would be at issue even if Michelle Obama were white (c.f. the response to HRC when she was "first lady").

OTOH, pace the article, if she was from the projects or something like that, you'd hear a lot of complaints from people about the nature of her upbringing ... so some of this is just pure racism plain and simple without the need to invoke the very real "threatening comfortable stereotypes" phenomenon (which was, e.g., IMHO, part of Kerry's problem -- when JFK was elected, people wanted to be sure that he wouldn't take orders from the Pope as per their fears of Catholics. Now, people want to be comforted by their stereotype of a "Papist" and Kerry didn't fit the mold, which hurt him).

Re: The Art of Kissing: I guess I'm revealing my Nice Guy(TM) former self here, but part of the reason why attitudes like those expressed in The Art of Kissing still hold sway is that they "work". You see a lot of relationships where the man, essentially, woos the woman until she relents and goes out with him. Aggressive males are generally successful, at least in establishing dating/romantic/sexual relationships and more passive males generally are not. And so long as all the Nice Guys(TM) out there perceive that aggressive males are the successful ones in dating, they, missing the point about what's actually working for the aggressive males (being assertive, confident and not being a passive-aggressive jerk with a sense of entitlement), will be receptive to this sort of "advice", and so it goes ...

@DAS You have to admit though that there's a big difference between "wooing the woman until she relents and goes out with you" and strategically pinning a girl to a sofa and forcing yourself upon her physically until/unless she she pulls away, yells and starts clawing at your face (at which point you should write her off as an ignorant prude) as described in The Art of Kissing.

If Nice Guys(TM) can't perceive the difference between confidence/assertiveness and aggressiveness/stalking whose fault is that? I sure know it's not mine...

billdiamond, that doesn't seem like what the Washington Times is saying at all. They seem to be saying that 1. the wage gap is not actually a problem because women want to be paid less, and 2. liberals lie.
As the Media Matters article shows, they are also wrong.

DAS: so, not touching the rest of it, even assuming everything the police said to be true, is it evidence that you're a prostitute, if you've been arrested in the past and you have a condom on you? Because then I'm apparently one arrest away from whoredom, and god help any woman who wants to be safe - because why else would you have a condom on you??

It seems to me that if it's such a priority to prosecute prostitution (as opposed to, you know, making life harder for women in general), that someone might, sometime, somewhere, focus on the dudes involved, instead of women walking to the damn hospital who happen to have a condom in their pocket.

That was a very impressive story on environmental hormones. I have been interested in the issue of environmental hormones since the 1990s, when findings about dioxins (and the highest recorded dioxin levels in the world) caused a media panic in Japan. It resulted in e.g., a ban on incineration of trash at public schools. As this was a task delegated to students during daily clean up duty, it could have made an impact on their health.

In the US, I see the issue has gone a step further, to concern about these plastics around the home and chemicals in health and beauty products. The issues regarding ethnicity were also interesting. I do not know the long term health effects of exposure to these chemicals, but people should be more aware of these issues. Try looking into these email forwarded claims that people e.g., should not put plastics or styrofoam into the microwave due to alleged cancer risks, environmental hormonal effects, etc.

I have nothing to say but [roll eyes] at the misogynistic stories. Keep on pressing a girl until she starts to scratch you, eh?

Those rules on prostitution sounds like the ones we had in Stockholm in the 19th century, and was held up as how horrible it could be, when the law is used so blatantly to control women's freedom of movement. They were a bit harsher, though, basically having some streets where they couldn't be at all, and a curfew after 10 pm, as I recall.
But the whole "loitering with intent" sounds like straight out of the book.

DAS, from my understanding (I'm not a biochemist, but my mom had estrogen-dependent breast cancer), xeno-estrogens and phyto-estrogens do act differently in the body. While all types of estrogens take up the same amount of estrogen receptors in the body, phyto-estrogens' effects are much weaker than the body's own estrogen; the effects of xeno-estrogen are much stronger. In this way, the phyto-estrogens damp down the body's estrogenic reaction, while xeno-estrogens intensify it.

As you point out, plants have been trying to poison us forever; we've developed fermentation and other food-processing techniques to deal with plant poisons, but it's only been the last generation or so that we've been microwaving our food in plastic containers and feeding babies formula from plastic bottles. We probably won't know the effects of these practices for many years. I personally wouldn't want my (nonexistent) child to be a part of that experiment.

Re: Cosmo, that's kind of hilarious since the only years I read Cosmo were the ones in which I had absolutely no sexual experience whatsoever. Who knew that I was secretly a teenage slut? Awesome.

Oh yeah, and the police use condoms as evidence of prostitution all the time. That's standard (and also horrible).

And on top of all the other layers of why this is a horrible practice, I can easily see it leading to some people (including both prostitutes and people who are not) to think, "If I carry a condom, I can be arrested....so it's best if I don't carry one."

Instead of stopping prostitition and underage sex, it will only help to spread STDs/STIs and unwanted pregnancies.

The 'Cosmo is for sluts' thing from National Review is actually a response to a previous entry on the site which links to a National Review Online article all about Jessica's He's a Stud, She's a Slut.

It's here and then here.

The author's argument is that rather than listen to someone like Jessica when it comes to sex, birth control, and respecting women, we should listen instead to...the pope. Yeah, okay.

Mona "like the banshee" Charen is a pure whack job. After the Truth Commission in El Salvador made their report stating what everyone who wasn't a groupie for the Nazi death squads already knew (that the Reagan-backed government, army and death squads committed almost all the murder, torture and rape in the civil war), Charen was still trying to blame it all on the rebels.

She and National Review hinted that four American nuns who were abducted, raped and hacked apart with machetes by the death squads had it coming to them. So it's only natural she would think that girls who read Cosmo are "sluts". They always have it coming to them, right?

I feel obliged to point out that this: "All Black Transwomen AREN'T Hookers," is the same thing as saying that there are absolutely no black transwomen who work as prostitutes. That seems like an overly broad statement.

That jumped out at me too, keshmeshi.

keshmeshi commented at July 22, 2008 2:42 PM: "I feel obliged to point out that this: 'All Black Transwomen AREN'T Hookers,' is the same thing as saying that there are absolutely no black transwomen who work as prostitutes. That seems like an overly broad statement."

Yeah, my guess is that it should have been "NOT All Black Transwomen Are Hookers"