Archive for the 'Misogyny' Category

Batman: conservative feminist

As it turns out, conservative feminists in Australia are a lot like conservative feminists in the United States. That is to say, they’re not very feminist at all:

A senior Liberal advisor has been forced to resign, after complaints were made about him allegedly sexually harassing six women, at the Federal Parliament’s Midwinter Ball last night. Anthony Scrinis, an electorate officer working for Sophie Mirabella, who is the opposition spokeswoman for women, handed in his resignation late today.

Six women claim Mr Scrinis sexually harassed them - two say he grabbed their breasts on the dance floor while at the Midwinter Ball at Parliament House on Wednesday night. It’s alleged he also approached four other women during the evening asking to fondle their breasts.

One woman who observed Mr Scrinis’s behaviour at the ball said he appeared to be under the weather. “He appeared to be drunk and was approaching various women on the dance floor,” the woman, who did not want to be named, told AAP. “He was pretty sleazy and kept trying it on, he wouldn’t go away.”

Note that because Australia is on the upside-down half of the world, the Liberal Party is actually the conservative party.

So there you have it: an aide for the conservative party’s “spokeswoman for women” likes to run around grabbing women’s breasts without their consent. What a surprise that conservatives, who fought against equality for women at every step, are unable to find enough genuine feminists among their ranks, and so have to staff their nominally feminist agencies with sexist louts.

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By the way, another headline from Australia has to qualify as the most misleading of the week:

Paedophile’s son jailed for child sex.

No, it’s not a story about how the victim of pedophilia was jailed for child sex. The man arrested is the 23-year-old son of a notorious pedophile.

UPDATE: Headlined changed to “Son follows in paedophile father’s footsteps”.

In a remarkably hateful and sexist article that appeared in Playboy Guy Cimbalo listed ten conservative women that he’d like to “hate fuck”. Folks on the left were predictably outraged, and many conservatives took time off from their own rape fantasies to condemn the indefensible.

But this is the American conservative movement we’re talking about, so it was inevitable that someone would respond by saying, “there aren’t any liberal women I’d like to hate fuck, because those bitches are just too damn ugly! Ha ha!”

We can only pity such people. They’re wingnuts, so they just can’t help it when stupidly vile things spill out of them.

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Terminally clueless Susannah Breslin thought that the article was “provocative”, and took feminists to task for demanding a retraction:

Apparently, free speech is so over when the masses rule the media: “It’s only OK if I think it’s funny. It’s only OK if it fits my politics. It’s only OK if I say it is.” I wish Playboy hadn’t pulled it. Censoring the piece doesn’t make it any less real, any less politically incorrect, any less true. Attempting to police human nature is the real joke here.

Pulling the piece doesn’t make it “less real” or “less true”? What is “real” and “true” about saying that fucking Michelle Malkin is “worse than fucking Eva Braun”? As Megan Carpentier points out, this is nothing more than a list of sexist insults.

If the government stepped in and forced Playboy to withdraw the article, then Breslin would have a point. But there’s nothing wrong with a magazine publisher coming to his senses and pulling an offensive, sophomoric article that never should have been greenlighted in the first place.

(via Pandagon)

The common cardinal (L) and the rare refuses-to-protect-child-molesters cardinal (R)

The misogyny of Catholic leaders keeps driving them to ever-lower depths of hypocrisy:

“Nearly 5,000 Catholic priests [in the U.S.] have sexually abused over 12,000 Catholic children…but they were not excommunicated,” says Father Roy Bourgeois, who faced the latter scenario after helping celebrate what the Vatican considers to be an illegitimate ordination mass in August 2008. Bourgeois, a Vietnam veteran with a Purple Heart who became a prominent peace activist, stood with the trailblazers of the female ordination movement in Lexington, Ky., to make Janice Sevre-Duszynska a Catholic priest.

For thumbing his nose at one of the most sacred tenets of the conservative hierarchy — that only men are worthy of the priesthood — Bourgeois was swiftly rebuked by the Vatican in a letter two months later, telling him he had 30 days to renounce his actions or face excommunication.

“The church believes that the intent of Jesus’ founding of the priesthood is that it was reserved for men,” explained Sister Mary Anne Walsh, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. But, speaking for the group Roman Catholic Womenpriests, Bridget Mary Meehan, herself ordained in 2006 and subsequently excommunicated, disputes that teaching. “Jesus never ordained anyone,” says Meehan. “And in the tradition, women were ordained deacons, priests and bishops for the first 1,200 years.”

The Vatican’s strong response to Bourgeois’ action stands in stark contrast to its overwhelming failure to punish molesters. Even a homicidal priest, Father Gerald Robinson, who was convicted in 2006 of the satanicritualistic murder of a 71-year-old nun in an Ohio chapel (see “The Nun’s Story,” Summer 2006), has not been excommunicated. Though Robinson to date has spent more than two and a half years in prison and lost an appeal, he still remains a priest, albeit one quietly retired by his bishop.

Maybe if there were a few women in the hierarchy, the Church wouldn’t have such a permissive attitude toward crimes like forcible rape of a child.

(cross posted at This Old Brit)

The offending cover

The Southern Baptist Convention has deemed the cover of the current issue of Gospel Today magazine offensive, and has instructed its more than 100 Lifeway Christian Bookstores to take it off the shelves and sell it from behind the counter.

So what’s offensive about this magazine cover? According to the SBC, it’s offensive because it features women in church leadership roles:

Southern Baptist polity says that’s a role reserved for men.

Chris Turner, a spokesman for Lifeway Resources, which runs the stores for the Southern Baptist Convention, said, “It is contrary to what we believe.”

It bases those beliefs on their interpretation of New Testament Scriptures.

Southern Baptist representatives at national meetings have adopted statements saying women should not be pastors, but each church is independent. A few churches have selected women, such as Decatur First Baptist, where the Rev. Julie Pennington-Russell preaches each Sunday from the pulpit.

Southern Baptists are not the only ones to frown on women preachers. Catholics, the largest Christian denomination in the nation, do not allow women priests. And some conservative evangelical groups, such as the Presbyterian Church in America, do not ordain women.

Yes, there are a lot of denomination that either discourage the ordination of women or ban the practice outright. But I think you’re going a step further when you tuck a magazine behind the counter as though it were a copy of Juggs, simply because there’s a discussion of the issue inside. The fact that the leadership of the SBC is offended by the mere sight of women who preach the Gospel shows just how misogynist they really are.

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Of course, if this was a story about a Muslim organization, bigots like Michelle Malkin would be screaming about “Sharia creep” and telling us that this shows how Islam is a fundamentally misogynist religion. But the SBC gets a pass, either because they’re not Muslims or because Malkin was just too busy warning her readers about the evils of voter registration drives.

I think we’ll all be better off when a woman can achieve high office without being portrayed as a castrating dominatrix

When Sarah Palin got the Republican vice presidential nomination, I expected one of our allegedly liberal commentators to imply that she’s a ball-busting bitch. But I thought that the more explicitly sexist critiques would appear in fringe sources, not in a widely read mainstream publication. But today in Salon, we’re treated to an excretion by Gary Kamiya called “The Dominatrix“:

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Recently, there’s been a lot of news about Pharmacists for Life, who argue that pharmacists should be allowed to refuse to sell the abortion pill (RU-486) and prescribed birth control medications.

Now some paramedics are saying that they should not be forced to take women to the hospital if they believe that a doctor would perform an abortion in order to save a woman’s life.

What’s next? Policemen who refuse to arrest people who kill doctors and bomb clinics?

Harris County D.A. Chuck Rosenthal

Several emails found on the Harris County D.A.’s computer were racist and sexist in nature, and others proved that he had illegally done campaign work during office hours and using his office computer. Here’s a sample:

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Catholic schools: more sexist than Batman

From Sports Illustrated:

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The Republican Party plans to replace their original convention logo, depicting an elephant taking a crap, with the logo on the right

Gawker has a chart illustrating the popularity that various news personalities have among Democrats and Republicans. There are people that are generally liked by people of both parties, like Charles Gibson, Brian Williams, and Anderson Cooper. There are people that nobody seems to like much, like Nancy Grace, Larry King, and Alan Colmes. But there isn’t a single woman who is generally liked by Republicans. Here’s the chart:

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Bigotry is alive and well in America

Last month, I wrote about data indicating that blacks pay significantly more for auto loans than whites do, even when credit histories are taken into account. I also included data on job discrimination, school funding, and racial profiling, because I anticipated that some would assume that the higher cost of auto loans was due to some factor other than discrimination. To no avail. Several readers ignored the context and commented or emailed, telling me that none of this proved that blacks face significant discrimination in America.

Now we have even more evidence of discrimination, against African-Americans and against women:

The pay gap between men and women is apparent by the time workers are 24, before most women in the workforce have taken time off to have children. This is true even when collegiate field of study is taken into account.

Also, African-Americans are 6-29% more likely to pay more for home loans than whites with the same credit quality.

And of course, while certain bloggers were debating whether blacks or women face more bigotry in America, the Opus Dei wing of the Supreme Court severely limited the ability of both groups to sue for past discrimination.

So why do so many Americans persist in denying the fact that bigotry and discrimination still persist, and that programs like Affirmative Action don’t remedy past discrimination, but ongoing discrimination? I think one reason is the way that the media covers the issue of discrimination.

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