Cute, cuddly, lifelike, wholesome, and for boys. Here is the girl’s version:

That sexed-up little number doesn’t look anything like a lion. “This little lion has the cutest roar!” reads the description. The boy’s description says, “This little lion makes a really loud roar in this look.” Girls are coy while boys are ferocious. The girl version is less than half the price of the boy version, probably because it’s made of half as much material.

There is no reason there should be two radically different versions of a toddler animal costume. The lion is far from the only example (look at the leopard!). Of course, one can buy the “boy” costume for a girl — which is what I would do for my hypothetical daughter — but it’s upsetting that there is a demand for separate girlie (i.e. sexy & skimpy) animal costumes at all. Guess they have to be prepared for the day they’ll wear this:

Look familiar?

The notion that Playboy turns women into sex objects is ridiculous. Women are sex objects. If women weren’t sex objects, there wouldn’t be another generation. It’s the attraction between the sexes that makes the world go ‘round. That’s why women wear lipstick and short skirts.

I read about the interview soon after it happened, but I thought of it yesterday when I saw one of Ampersand’s great cartoons at Alas, A Blog.

Objectification is not necessary to create the next generation. It’s not necessary for sex. And yet, when Hugh Hefner said “women are sex objects,” as though it’s a law of nature rather than a law of patriarchy, plenty of folks agreed with him, arguing that being a sex object is not so bad. As the last panel of the cartoon makes clear, sexual objectification is not the same thing as sexual attraction.

It is fallacious to argue that just because you are a sex object that doesn’t mean sex is all you’re good for. That is what it means. It means thinking of and treating a person as though they have no inner life, no emotions, no desires, no purpose besides providing sexual gratification. It is not “objectification” to be hot for your partner (or any person). A sexual person who is multi-faceted is not a sex object; zie is a sex subject. Sex can be life-affirming, but sexual objectification is dehumanizing.

Via solarnu @ Flickr.

It never fails. The formula must be set in stone somewhere. Never appeal to men when selling anything that’s used to tidy a house! And I get it; I do. Men and women are not equal on the home-front. Women do more housework than men, and are still responsible for most domestic chores when they live with a man. It’s understandable why a company would market directly to those people who are most likely to use their product in the first place. But it doesn’t have to be so fucking insulting. They aggressively push the wife/mother = maid narrative, and the actresses in the commercials are always ecstatic when they get the opportunity to do laundry.

One Lysol commercial is particularly egregious. Mom arrives home to find dad and the kids turning the family kitchen into a salmonella lab. Unacceptable. Dad turns around and shrugs his stupid shoulders. Cut to mom wiping all kinds of nasty substances off various kitchen surfaces. Everyone has a good laugh. The end. Why couldn’t dad clean that mess up?! They could just as easily have shown him reaching for the Lysol after a fun afternoon of culinary experimentation.

Men cleaning house are presented as a fantasy. I would be loyal for life to any company that presented them as a reality in its advertising.

Via Save the Children @ Flickr. Photo Credit: Jason Tanner

The government in Islamabad has admitted that cannot cope with such a catastrophe, but the international response has been lukewarm. … Radical Islamic groups are jockeying to fill the vacuum left by government incompetence and relative international indifference.

The disaster has destroyed roads, infrastructure, homes, crops and livestock. Women and girls face a cultural shock as they live in camps amongst unrelated men for the first time in their lives. Shmyalla Jawad visited a government camp with no bathing facility and was appalled by the horrific conditions she found there.

Many are wearing what they left home in and without being able to wash and women’s hygiene in particular has deteriorated. The situation is even worse for menstruating and pregnant women.

The people of Pakistan urgently need help to rebuild their lives and their health. If you are willing and able to contribute, here is a list of agencies that plan to provide relief.

:cue pants-shitting:

Patriarchy defenders are understandably terrified in the wake of Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision to overturn California’s Proposition 8. Ross Douthat cloaks his bigotry in a transparent sheet of pseudo-intellectual blather. He concedes that so-called “traditional marriage” is not traditional, nor is lifelong heterosexual monogamy natural. But, it is a Western, Judeo-Christian ideal, and should remain the ideal, according to Douthat.

[L]ifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.

If you say so.
Douthat concludes that gay marriage threatens to shake “traditional marriage” off its pedestal, and that’s a bad thing because “traditional marriage” deserves its pedestal, because [return to the beginning and continue 'round and 'round].

But brace yourselves! Because Douthat’s column is nothing compared to Sam Schulman’s opinion in the Christian Science Monitor.

If the purpose of marriage was for the exclusive benefit of couples in love, who wanted to share a life and a household, it would be a clear affront to justice to keep this state benefit from other couples who happen to possess a different kind of sexuality from the majority.

Right on!

But providing benefits to couples is not the whole purpose of marriage. It’s not even its primary purpose. And that’s what’s wrong with Mr. Walker’s ruling, and the arguments on both sides of Perry vs. Schwarzenegger. They’ve been arguing over marriage’s benefits. Instead, we need to be thinking about marriage’s role in sustaining the existence of the human species.

Oh, fuck the human species. The human species is not in danger of extinction and if it is, we’ll be destroyed by our disregard for the planet, not by gay marriage. People have been procreating out of wedlock since people came into existence.

Marriage is a necessary defense of a woman’s sexuality and her human liberty from determined assault by men who would turn her into a slave, a concubine – something less than fully human. Human communities need to give women some additional degree of protection – through law, custom, religious decree, or sacrament – generally some combination of all three, neatly summarized by the plaintiffs, who demanded the sacred and the eternal from the state of California. Of course, marriage’s power to protect women is far from perfect, but no human institution is. Parents, too, sometimes do awful things to their children.

I see what you did there, Schulman. Protect a child woman from all men by binding her to one specific man. He goes on to argue that homosexual relationships are not inferior to heterosexual relationships; instead:

Heterosexual relationships need marriage because of inferiority: the physical inferiority of sexual defenders to sexual attackers and the moral inferiority of male sexual attackers.

How Victorian. But feminists hate men, amirite? How are male sexual attackers identified? Are we to presume they are not entering into marriages that allegedly protect the female partners? Or is a lifetime of abuse from one’s husband preferable to the abuse from boogeymen? So many questions.

When a woman’s sexuality is involved, human communities must deal with a malign force that an individual woman and her family cannot control or protect.

What is this I don’t even.

Modern marriage is only the least worst version of marriage that has emerged from all this – but it is still necessary for women. What protects women, ultimately, is that marriage laws and customs confer upon her independence something extra – dignity, protection, sacredness – that others must respect. And if this quality can be bestowed upon anyone, even those not in intersexual relationships – it reduces, even dissolves its force.

Gay marriage is wrong because it leaves women in same-sex partnerships vulnerable to male sexual predators? Because marriages between men distract those men from their woman-protecting duties? Gay marriage is Kryptonite to hetero superheros? If Schulman’s claims are true, it would make more sense to advocate forcing all people into hetero marriages at a certain age, not denying equal marriage rights to homosexuals.

If marriage becomes a legislative courtesy available to everyone, like a key to the city, it will be women who will lose.

The insincere concern-trolling is repulsive. Nowhere does he explain how, exactly, the human species will die out as a result of gay marriage. He barely even mentions gay people. He’s shitting his pants because he rightly believes gay marriage will further push open the door to different understandings of what marriage can be. More specifically, he thinks women need to be controlled by men. For our own good, of course.

A little girl. I can almost hear the venom in his voice. The hatred. The disgust. A little girl: subhuman, vile.

He told reporters he didn’t mean to do it. “I never struck that kid that hard before. A one-time mistake, and I am going to do 20 years.” He never struck him that hard before. I can only imagine what little Roy endured over the course of his short life. Gender non-conforming children and youth experience an extremely high level of harassment, alienation, violence and murder. The perception that one is gay or trans can make that person a vulnerable target. Something about Roy struck Pedro as insufficiently masculine, and Pedro made him pay with his life.

This is why I wasn’t amused when my co-worker told me her husband removed their toddler son from a park after he became interested in playing with a pink toy. Of course that’s not the same thing as murder, but it’s a difference in degree rather than kind. They exist on the same bigoted spectrum. The gender policing of little boys, especially, happens constantly, all around us. If masculinity is inborn, why must it be beat into a child? Rest in peace, baby.

Jane Doe was 20 when she was filmed by a Girls Gone Wild video photographer in a bar in St. Louis, Missouri. Someone pulled the woman’s top down without her consent whilst the photographer was taping. The assault appears on “Girls Gone Wild Sorority Orgy.” Doe sued the company in 2008 after a friend of her husband’s reported seeing her in the video.

Stephen Evans of St. Louis, her lawyer, argued Thursday that Doe never gave consent — and even could be heard in original footage saying “no” when asked to show her breasts shortly before another woman suddenly pulled Doe’s top down. Evans said the company usually gets women to sign consent forms or give verbal consent with cameras rolling.

Patrick O’Brien, the jury foreman, told a reporter that an 11-member majority decided that Doe had de facto consented by being in the bar and dancing for the photographer.

“Through her actions, she gave implied consent,” O’Brien said. “She was really playing to the camera. She knew what she was doing.”

Patrick O’Brien’s job title must be Rape Culture Spokesman. Jane Doe’s presence canceled out her “no.” Women still do not have exclusive rights to their own bodies.

One of his websites, Big Government, posted a portion of her remarks in a March 2010 speech to a Georgia chapter of the NAACP, in which she told of how she got past her prejudices when she worked for the Federation of Southern Cooperative/Land Assistance Fund 24 years ago. The selectively edited video shows Sherrod talking about her decision not to help a white farmer because she was “struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farm land.” That, according to Breitbart, is evidence that Sherrod keeps white farmers down and the NAACP and Obama administration are “racist” against whites. In fact, Sherrod ended up helping that farmer and he and his wife credit her with saving their farm. They consider her a friend to this day.

Sherrod told the story of overcoming prejudice and Breitbart cast her as a bigot. Keep in mind, this is the same outfit that destroyed ACORN last year with its deceptive videos. I think Breitbart and his ilk aim to do the same thing to the NAACP. Naturally, the non-story played on a continuous loop on Fox News. But no matter. Without waiting for context, or viewing the entire, unedited video, the administration took Breitbart’s word and pushed Shirley Sherrod out of her USDA job. The NAACP even condemned her before finally viewing and releasing the video in its entirety.

Now Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack are scrambling to save face and are reconsidering the decision to oust Sherrod. The woman deserves her job and an apology. But, Sherrod says she’s wary. “I’m just not sure how I would be treated,” she explained. And who can blame her? The NAACP, the USDA, and the White House threw her under the bus to comfort and reassure insecure white people. What a bunch of cowards.

The skeptic community exists within the wider community; it’s not immune from the patriarchal forces that result in disproportionate male representation in any other sphere (besides explicitly “female” ones). A lot of people in the skeptic community work in scientific fields, and most people working in the sciences are male. Women are punished more harshly than men for questioning religious dogma or coming out as disbelievers. They are entrusted with the religious indoctrination of their children, as well, and are considered bad mothers if they don’t at least take their kids to religious services.

Skeptifem posits that female skeptics are too busy.

They are disproportionately dealing with low pay and poverty, and with child and elder care. This means working more employment hours with less pay, and working for free much more often the rest of the time. They are volunteering. They typically don’t have time to sit around and ponder things like philosophy and science.

I think there’s something to that, of course. But crafting conventions are overflowing with women. And women participate in religious groups. Perhaps the tangible benefits women get from being active in the skeptic community are not great enough to make up for the sacrifices. I don’t know the precise answer(s).

But whilst perusing the comments on this post by the wonderful PZ Myers, I thought, “I don’t want to pay to hang out with (some of) these people either.” Skeptic men think of themselves as a highly enlightened bunch. They pat themselves on the back for not being sexist because god told them to be. No, they’re just sexist because science demands it. Having just finished reading The Mismeasure of Man, I’m even more, uh, skeptical, you might say, of claims regarding women’s alleged nature as compared to men’s. Maybe female skeptics don’t want to be treated like pieces of meat then lectured about powerful male hormones when they came to hear a lecture about atheism.

In nations where equal rights are legally mandated, women are nonetheless stymied by a lack of real progress. “Women in the United States and Europe are shouldering major responsibilities at home and at work simultaneously, and this makes for stress and a low quality of life,” said Professor Herminia Ibarra, who teaches organizational behavior at Insead, a business school in France.

The United States and Germany reported a large gap between the sexes on whether their nations have achieved equality. Of those who said they believe in equal rights, many more American and German men also believe their respective countries have made the right amount of changes for women, while many more women think more action is required.

Equal-rights supporters in China, India, Indonesia and Jordan think their countries have reached that goal. Nigeria was the only surveyed country where more than half (54 percent) said they oppose equality. Maybe Nigerians are just really honest! I think some countries have just absorbed the superficial idea that “equality” is good and one should support it. But the devil is in the details. It’s much easier to get folks to embrace the neutral-sounding and amorphous “equality” than the ideas it implies.

Male respondents in Britain and Japan were more likely than women to say they support equal rights. Interestingly, in Japan, 47 percent of respondents said women are better off than men, or that they are the same, but at least one-third said a university education is more important for a boy than a girl. A majority in several countries said men should have more right to jobs than women. In ten of the 22 countries surveyed, more than half of respondents said that when jobs are scarce, they should go to men. “If we think that it’s a growable pie, equality is fine,” Professor Ibarra commented. “If we think it’s a limited pie, it’s not.” That belief was most prevalent in India, Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia and China.

“We’re entering the next phase in many of these countries,” said Professor Jacqui True, an expert in gender relations and senior lecturer at the University of Auckland. “We’re going to see much more frustration with gender inequality among both women and men before we get institutional change in developing countries.” She said it often takes two generations before reality catches up with changes in attitudes.