am not ignoring you. am at demicon for the weekend. in our room, we are throwing the bacon party. to support this, toad is napping up a storm, and explaining about bacon in between naps, i am being decorative and friendly and trying to encourage people to come to our party, and lt is cooking bacon and waffles and more bacon and more waffles. whew.

twisty gets it just right. she talks about "choice feminism", and her particular bugbear, sexpositive feminism.[1]

She Blames the Spice Girls at I Blame The Patriarchy:

I assert that we're choosing the path of least resistance. It's much easier to acquiesce to a set of established conventions-social, aesthetic, political, sexual, sartorial-for which the rewards (dudely approval, other women's satisfying jealousy) dangle brightly ahead, than it is to blaze forth in a fury of white-hot anti-feminine iconoclasm and risk ridicule, ostracism, and male reproach. Life's rich pageant is much more accessible when you go with the flow. Patriarchy, as the Spice Girls and Paris Hilton can attest, rewards conformity.

[1] i think i may no longer be calling myself a sex positive feminist, thanks to twisty. i'm not saying i don't like sex. (did i mention my parents read my blog? hi mom! hi dad!) because i do. but just because a feminist likes a particular thing in bed/leading to bed does not make that particular thing feminist. there are things that i like and that other feminists like are at best, carefully negotiated forays into finding eroticism in the patriarchy.

i'm not saying that we should all go out, become political lesbians, and lie in bed holding each others hands and thinking of trees. if that's your kink, go for it. but i am going to continue doing the things that i actually like in bed, with people who i trust to respect me as a person, and i am going to critically examine the hell out of what i do and what i like, how i got here, and how the patriarchy contributes to the whole thing.

wow. this is an amazing article. it is not sugarcoated, and it's hard to read, especially if some of the women in your life are or were stay at home feminist moms. (hi mom! i love you!)

but this is words for why i never considered staying at home. this is words for why whenever someone tells me they are a stay at home mom i smile politely, chat about it some, change the subject, and am either sad or angry for them.

i used to be married, and i wanted kids. i was married to a sweet pro-feminist man who loved me. but for various reasons, i did most of the second shift work in the relationship. and i wasn't expecting that to get any better, for him to do any more of the second shift work if we did have kids. that was just the way it was.

i'd like it if my kid ended up with a better set of expectations than that, and a better reality, too.

American Prospect Online - Homeward Bound:

Great as liberal feminism was, once it retreated to choice the movement had no language to use on the gendered ideology of the family. Feminists could not say, 'Housekeeping and child-rearing in the nuclear family is not interesting and not socially validated. Justice requires that it not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender and at the sacrifice of their access to money, power, and honor.'
The 50 percent of census answerers and the 62 percent of Harvard MBAs and the 85 percent of my brides of the Times all think they are "choosing" their gendered lives. They don't know that feminism, in collusion with traditional society, just passed the gendered family on to them to choose. Even with all the day care in the world, the personal is still political. Much of the rest is the opt-out revolution.

III. What Is to Be Done?

Here's the feminist moral analysis that choice avoided: The family -- with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks -- is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government. This less-flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally unjust. To paraphrase, as Mark Twain said, 'A man who chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man who cannot read.'

i'm not only going to point you at this, i'm going to totally steal one of the comments, because not only does the post say what i want to say, the comment says what i want to say about the post. this other people having my brain thing is both handy and weird, sometimes.

Official Shrub.com Blog -- Blog Archive -- How to be a Real Nice Guy

Tekanji has written a wonderful post: How to Be a Real Nice Guy. I'm not going to pull out quotes because I highly recommend my male visitors (because I know you are all well intentioned and I hope do consider yourselves nice guys) read the entire post.

it's also cross applicable to other sorts of privilege. so really, good for nearly everyone to go read.

if you are an unrepentant sf geek (like me) and you like movies (which sometimes i do), this list will make you cry. or at least sniffle.

The Top Ten Sci-Fi Films That Never Existed

i really want to see that matrix sequel. the aliens one i could do without. and starcraft? as a movie? rock on!

dear creepy creepy jerk who happens to be president of my country:

ask before you give someone a backrub. *always*.

especially if they are the head of a foreign nation.

no love,
me.

it seems unlikely that this will cause lasting (longer than the next two years, anyhow) issues between germany and the united states. but it besmirches the already so tarnished it's hard to tell what it used to look like international reputation of the united states that our president thinks that casual sexual harassment of other national leaders is okay.

work has been busy and life has been busy and my brain has been busy, but pretty much it's all either been tedious or i haven't felt like writing about it.

convergence was good. i spent nearly all the time i was awake in the bacon room party. we had a good time and served a lot of bacon, waffles, and fuzzy astronauts.

the dogs went off to silver dog while i was at convergence, and they had a good time. sadly, an expensive good time. does anyone local have a kennel that they love love love and that can't remember their names but knows that they are the owners of their dogs, whose names and habits they can recite? i have fine recommendations for lt and toad's kennel, but they're booked the next time i need to board my girls. (also, they're an hour north of me!) my little tiny itsy bitsy full of luv and also licking girls. so they must get loving and they must be protected from bigger dogs being mean to them.

um. what else is going on with me. prepping for demicon at the end of the month, and am currently installing things on a server at work. (yes, right now, 942pm at night on saturday.) (i was hoping to go to parties tonight, but a minor break out of my stomach hating me seems to have put a kibosh on that plan. foo.)

oh! and go buy t-shirts from my friend james. here! i just set up the store for him.

Bitch Ph.D., over at her pseudonymous blog, says, in regards to her hesitance to blogging about this case,

And, god help me, I thought, 'it'll just fuel the stupid idea that liberals hate Christians, blah blah blah.'

yeah.

Which led me to realize that holy shit, this isn't so atypical after all. If political discourse is so fucked up that I'm hesitant to call Christian anti-Semitism what it is (I considered putting "Christian" in scare quotes, I considered qualifying it with some phrase like "and right-wing whackos," and then I thought, no: it's Christian anti-Semitism), then we're in a pretty bad way.

the referenced case of christian anti-semitism, the jewish family that was driven out of the town they live in in delaware? you can read about it here at jews on first, a jewish first amendment site. (they've got a lot of other good links there; they have a good quick roundup of dominionism, for those not familiar.)

things i hate about my body, part nine thousand eight hundred and forty two:

my bangs are too long, and they were driving me crazy. so i put a headband on. the headband is too small for my giant mutant head. so now i have a headache. then, i found a news article about new, minimally invasive knee replacement surgery. so i read it.

now i have a headache and want to throw up.

bleh, i say. bleh!