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.

Correction:  I shouldn’t expect much more than consternation and forehead-slapping.  Because that’s exactly what I got.

This article, Does a man’s salary matter?, is barely worth reading, let alone shredding, but the topic is worth discussing in a feminist space.  I’ll admit that money is a sensitive topic for me (that happens when you don’t have much), and one that is looming larger than usual these days, given my underemployed state.  Love and money are often fraught, even when they’re not all mixed up together.  And when they are?  Hoo-doggie.

I have multiple specialized degrees, and currently am unable to support myself in the field of my training.  (Or, it seems, any other field.)  The Dude has one specialized degree (a BFA), and has been consistently employed, and consistently better paid than me, in a small number of jobs that have absolutely nothing to do with his training.

While I’m mostly pissed that I a) was horribly duped about my prospects or b) am utterly worthless, professionally speaking, I’m also really troubled about being dead weight to this guy who threw in his lot with me lo these many years ago, when we both thought that at some point in the not-too-distant future I would be the steady one, earning enough that he could go and pursue his risky dream profession.  I appear to be, most unhappily, unable to make good on my plans.  We used to split everything 50-50, now I am in growing debt to him.  He doesn’t complain, but we can’t live in New York without a second income.

Even as I am deeply grateful to the Dude for supporting me with health insurance, and now subsidizing my very existence, I fucking.hate.it.   I’m not going anywhere, but having my own money is crucial to my sense of well-being, and not being self-sufficient is doing a serious number on my ego, if not my relationship.  I want to be cared for, sure, but not “taken care of.”  So I guess I don’t understand the bean-counting stuff the article mentions,  or any major concern with how much a prospective partner (regardless of hir gender) earns.  I mean, I get that you can’t eat love (boy do I), and that money does buy comforts.  And I know that partnering with someone who can’t hold a job, budget, or live within hir means is inviting grief.

But straight women not accepting a partner because he doesn’t pull down more than they  do?  The more I think about it, the more I think that’s some kind of weird, internalized misogyny.  If a man doesn’t earn more than a woman, he must be some kind of failure?  If he works in a field that isn’t well-remunerated (keeping in mind that many such jobs in the caring professions and the service industry are/were considered “women’s work”), he’s not attractive or sufficiently manly?

Of course, if you want kids, and you plan to take a break from paid work to do focus on them for whatever length of time, these considerations get a bit more complicated, but I think the point remains:  if earning power is one way we assess gender-compliance, and if women don’t buck the find-a-man-who-can-support-you bullshit they’re fed with their zweiback, it seems like we’re adding to the inequities that are built into our heartless, fucked-up,  kyriarchal-capitalist system, rather than questioning the system itself.  (Poverty is radicalizing me, yo!)

So, commenters, tell me about your experiences.  When dating, how much do/did you take your honeypie’s earning power into consideration?  (Do/did you even think about it?  I never did, although that could have been because I was young and idealistic.)  Do you expect–or even hope–that he’ll outearn you?  And if so:  why?  Because you’re a public school teacher, or a freelancer, or are some other ill-paid or financially risky job?  Or is there something else?   If you out-earn your partner, how do you think that affects your relationship?  What’s the financial dynamic in your household?

I’ve been with with the Dude for most of my adult life, and I only know what I know. Please explode my brain with your anecdata.

Europe’s southern fringe, indebted and uncompetitive, has long been the euro zone’s weak link. But besides a sunny climate and shaky economic fundamentals, it also shares a long-entrenched machismo that is costing it dearly. As it turns out, the share of adult women in the paid workforce in the region lags men by almost 20 percentage points, compared with 12 points across the European Union, 9 in the United States and only 4 in Sweden.

Sexism, of course, is not the cause for Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, and in the short term, the euro’s prospects depend more on the right mixture of fiscal austerity and monetary stimulus than on sisterhood. But in the longer term, women could well hold the key to overcoming a fundamental economic weakness that plagues not just Southern Europe but much of the rest of the Continent as well: An aging population and a shrinking workforce that is threatening to explode pension and health care budgets.

“Gender equality is no longer just a human rights issue, but an economic necessity,” said Maria Stratigaki, who is in charge of gender equality in the Greek government. She is using the budget crunch in her country to lobby for more “gender-budgeting” — rules that ensure men receive no more resources from the state than women.

There’s a lesson in this for the US, too, with its stingy maternity leaves and lousy daycare options:

Even generous subsidies for child care pay off: A 2002 study by the German Bundesbank found that public investment in day care in Germany on balance increased government revenues as more mothers returned to work.

Not only do women working outside the home strengthen the economy with their taxable income and GDP contributions, they also are more likely to contribute to long-term economic health by choosing to create more future workers:

And perhaps surprisingly, encouraging women to work out of the home also encourages them to have more babies, thus yielding more future taxpayers. Decades of experience in the Nordic countries show that once women are no longer forced to choose between employment and children, both go up.

Sweden, at the forefront of women’s liberation, boasts a female employment rate of 70 percent and a birthrate of about two children per woman, the highest in Europe along with Norway and France.

The US is just barely hitting that two-child-per-woman goal—the much-desired population replacement rate—but only because of birthright citizenship and higher birth rates among immigrants, not because we have culture that values work-family balance. In other countries—Japan is a oft-mentioned example—chronic workplace and cultural discrimination force many women to choose between having a career (and economic self-sufficiency) and having children. When forced to vote with their uteruses—so to speak—Japanese women have chosen careers, causing Japan’s birth rate to drop so low it’s precipitated a demographic crisis.

Not only are working women—and working mothers—not returning to the kitchen anytime soon; it’s probably in everyone’s best interests to empower even more of them leave the kitchen for the workforce.

Looking good, Madam Secretary! Photo by Mark Wilson.

Clinton’s hair, now creeping toward below-the-shoulders territory, is practically radical for Washington’s seasoned female power elite. Good for her.

In our cultural vocabulary, long hair signifies youth, femininity and sex appeal. By contrast, shorter hair is serious, sophisticated, strong.

Cultural pressure to submit to the scissors after a certain age seems rife with an unkind and unspoken subtext that because long locks are a sign of vibrancy and sexiness, it’s a social contradiction to see such styles on women who have wrinkles and crow’s-feet.

When I was 15, I cut my long hair because I wanted to look serious, sophisticated and strong. I wore it that way for almost 20 years, sometimes in a cut so short that even my lesbian boss referred to it as “butchy.” Then I dated a man who loved long, Barbie-style hair. He encouraged me to grow out my chin-length bob. Unfortunately, his campaign for longer hair felt controlling, so I rebelled by keeping it short.  When our relationship crashed and I started dating again, I grew it long. (Why yes, there was an element of “fuck you” to that decision. How’d you guess?). Now, it’s halfway down my back. But will I have to cut it short again someday to conform to society’s stereotype of middle-aged women?

Judging by this week’s FFT, we’re all quite proud of our glorious manes.  Feel free to weigh in on long vs. short and whether “age-appropriate” applies to hairstyles.

The Lovers of the Poor

arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies’ Betterment League
Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting
In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag
Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting
Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,
The pink paint on the innocence of fear;
Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall.
Cutting with knives served by their softest care,
Served by their love, so barbarously fair.
Whose mothers taught: You’d better not be cruel!
You had better not throw stones upon the wrens!
Herein they kiss and coddle and assault
Anew and dearly in the innocence
With which they baffle nature. Who are full,
Sleek, tender-clad, fit, fiftyish, a-glow, all
Sweetly abortive, hinting at fat fruit,
Judge it high time that fiftyish fingers felt
Beneath the lovelier planes of enterprise.
To resurrect. To moisten with milky chill.
To be a random hitching-post or plush.
To be, for wet eyes, random and handy hem.
Their guild is giving money to the poor.
The worthy poor. The very very worthy
And beautiful poor. Perhaps just not too swarthy?
perhaps just not too dirty nor too dim
Nor—passionate. In truth, what they could wish
Is—something less than derelict or dull.
Not staunch enough to stab, though, gaze for gaze!
God shield them sharply from the beggar-bold!
The noxious needy ones whose battle’s bald
Nonetheless for being voiceless, hits one down.
But it’s all so bad! and entirely too much for them.
The stench; the urine, cabbage, and dead beans,
Dead porridges of assorted dusty grains,
The old smoke, heavy diapers, and, they’re told,
Something called chitterlings. The darkness. Drawn
Darkness, or dirty light. The soil that stirs.
The soil that looks the soil of centuries.
And for that matter the general oldness. Old
Wood. Old marble. Old tile. Old old old.
Not homekind Oldness! Not Lake Forest, Glencoe.
Nothing is sturdy, nothing is majestic,
There is no quiet drama, no rubbed glaze, no
Unkillable infirmity of such
A tasteful turn as lately they have left,
Glencoe, Lake Forest, and to which their cars
Must presently restore them. When they’re done
With dullards and distortions of this fistic
Patience of the poor and put-upon.
They’ve never seen such a make-do-ness as
Newspaper rugs before! In this, this “flat,”
Their hostess is gathering up the oozed, the rich
Rugs of the morning (tattered! the bespattered. . . .)
Readies to spread clean rugs for afternoon.
Here is a scene for you. The Ladies look,
In horror, behind a substantial citizeness
Whose trains clank out across her swollen heart.
Who, arms akimbo, almost fills a door.
All tumbling children, quilts dragged to the floor
And tortured thereover, potato peelings, soft-
Eyed kitten, hunched-up, haggard, to-be-hurt.
Their League is allotting largesse to the Lost.
But to put their clean, their pretty money, to put
Their money collected from delicate rose-fingers
Tipped with their hundred flawless rose-nails seems . . .
They own Spode, Lowestoft, candelabra,
Mantels, and hostess gowns, and sunburst clocks,
Turtle soup, Chippendale, red satin “hangings,”
Aubussons and Hattie Carnegie. They Winter
In Palm Beach; cross the Water in June; attend,
When suitable, the nice Art Institute;
Buy the right books in the best bindings; saunter
On Michigan, Easter mornings, in sun or wind.
Oh Squalor! This sick four-story hulk, this fibre
With fissures everywhere! Why, what are bringings
Of loathe-love largesse? What shall peril hungers
So old old, what shall flatter the desolate?
Tin can, blocked fire escape and chitterling
And swaggering seeking youth and the puzzled wreckage
Of the middle passage, and urine and stale shames
And, again, the porridges of the underslung
And children children children. Heavens! That
Was a rat, surely, off there, in the shadows? Long
And long-tailed? Gray? The Ladies from the Ladies’
Betterment League agree it will be better
To achieve the outer air that rights and steadies,
To hie to a house that does not holler, to ring
Bells elsetime, better presently to cater
To no more Possibilities, to get
Away. Perhaps the money can be posted.
Perhaps they two may choose another Slum!
Some serious sooty half-unhappy home!—
Where loathe-love likelier may be invested.
Keeping their scented bodies in the center
Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall,
They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall,
Are off at what they manage of a canter,
And, resuming all the clues of what they were,
Try to avoid inhaling the laden air.

Specifically, because it’s Friday, and vanity threads are pretty super in their fluffy, feel-good way, I would like for each of you to tell me what’s amazing and beautiful about yourself.  Not what you do that’s awesome, but about your amazing, wonderful bodies.  Tell me  about your beautifully freckled complexion or elegant hands or strong muscular legs or luxurious hair or amazing smile…or whatever you like to see when you look in the mirror.  Your smile lines.  Your scar.  The twinkle in your eye.

Ya gotta be careful though, no comments like “well, my bright blue eyes distract people from the dark circles underneath them,” or “My butt isn’t too bad, I guess.”  NO GOOD.  I’m talking unadulterated praise.  You can praise whatever you like, even (or especially?) if it doesn’t measure up to the Hollywood/ladymag standards.  What are your standards?

So I guess I should go first, if only to give you permission to be unapologetically self-loving.  What’s hot about me?  O. M. G. SO. MUCH.  I have a pretty slammin’ figure, and seriously, my ears are very pretty.  I admire my ears and I always wear earrings.  And my calves and ankles are shapely.

This isn’t the easiest thing to do, and it’s really hard to resist the urge to qualify, ameliorate , or take the edge off your crowing.  CROW, MY PRETTIES.  What’s hot about you?

Which brings us to the question of why praise does tend to aggregate around white men, still, in a way that it doesn’t for other kinds of people. I obviously don’t think that Tanenhaus, and Michiko Kakutani (not precisely a white guy herself) sit around their little cubicles by the atrium plotting how they’re gonna keep women and people of color (and trans people!) out of the halls of literary power. As in most cases where social prejudice is really firmly entrenched, there is no Man Behind the Curtain. Otherwise, this would be a simple issue to solve: we could just fire the people in cubicles like theirs, and sexism and racism, and transmisogyny and ableism and every kind of unfairness under the sun would be over.

But life isn’t like that. Instead of men in rooms we have timeworn, and as such unquestioned, ways of thinking and evaluating.

Feel free to discuss in the comments here, as always.

This is comedy fuckin’ GOLD.  I want to go though and hug individual lines and phrases (like “New York Times columnist and radical feminist Maureen Dowd”), and write little poems about each completely cracked idea:

• Feminists love the new Aniston-Bateman vehicle “The Switch” because it diminishes men’s role in reproduction!
• Feminist-controlled schools are leading our boys to sit down to piss!
• John Wayne was a real person, not a character played by an actor named John Wayne!

I really can’t stop grinning at how effectively the left-wing, gay-lovin’, feminist, socialist, baby eatin’ cabal (BOOGA BOOGA) is apparently destroying America.  It’s merely a matter of weeks before we enslave all the God-fearin’ Christians and force them to read Marx and have abortions.

For extra-super giggles, please click over to author Jane Gilvary’s personal blog, which aggregates her various op-eds from various Philly-area papers.  I’ve barely broken the seal, but already I’ve found delicious pieces telling me about some good black people she knows, the awful European-ness of soccer and the threat it poses to our American values, and how our college students will “slide into cultural depravity” due to the godless, “post-christian” ways on the nation’s campuses.

Once you’ve refreshed yourself, please join me in the star chamber for the latest plot for feminist global domination.  If you can’t make it, just leave your nefarious plans in comments and I’ll make sure to bring them up once we get to “New Business.”

This week, Jon Stewart sent up the New York bedbug epidemic (with a truly freaky-deaky appearance by Isabella Rossellini narrating the horror that is bedbug sex). The bedbug invasion has been lavishly covered in the press; long story short, they used to be commonplace, then people used tons of DDT and they went away, then we realized DDT was a Bad Idea and quit using it, so now they’re back. And unfortunately, these little nocturnal bloodsuckers have invaded two Harpy nests. Join Becky and PhDork as we tell our (not so) harrowing tale in this episode of Bedbug Confidential!

BeckySharper: Besides hanging out at our humble Brooklyn abodes, it turns out there are bedbugs at Elle magazine, Hachette Book Group (which publishes that other bloodsucker spectacular, the Twilight saga), at the Time-Warner offices, at hipster clothing stores in SoHo, at the AMC theater in Times Square. Bedbugs will rule the world!

PhDork: Yeah, this map makes it look like Midtown Manhattan is completely crawling with ‘em. And these are just the places where they’ve been reported.

BeckySharper: I bet that map’s just the tip of the iceberg. You know plenty of folks don’t report them, either because of the social stigma, or because they are flying under the landlord’s radar and don’t want to get kicked out.

PhDork: Considering the horrible feeling of DOOM and TERROR during the first 3-4 days after we figured it out, it hasn’t been too bad. Although it’s extra frustrating that they seem to prefer to feed on women and girls. Assholes.

It’s been hugely inconvenient, mostly. Getting the cats out for hours at a time during/after spraying was a huge PITA, and living out of plastic bags after drying everything in brutal heat in the midst of the summer also sucks, but I didn’t get bit after we sprayed and ditched the box spring.

BeckySharper: I got bitten once or twice, and had the sneaking suspicion that might be bedbugs because this most recent go-round with the little bite-y bastards is my second. Eight years ago when I lived in Queens. I got all these bites on my back that both my primary care doc and dermatologist could not identify. I wound up getting a punch biopsy (ouch!)  of the bites and the lab reported they were “unknown arthropod bites”. My bet is that if I showed up with the same symptoms today, the docs would be much more be much more likely to suspect bedbugs, because they’ve become so much more common.

That time, I got rid of the mattress and boxspring and that solved the problem. This time, I hired a bed-bug sniffing dog, a cute little 2-year old beagle bitch. She detected one bedbug hotspot—my boxspring—which was promptly treated and sheathed in a bedbug-proof casing. It was great to have the dog sniff out exactly where the bugs were so I knew I didn’t need to napalm my whole apartment, which is usually what’s recommended by exterminators. No bites since then.

On the plus side...it's an excuse to have beagles visit!

When I started talking about this with neighbors in my building, several freely confessed to having had major to minor bedbug infestations over the past couple years, which made me feel better. I think it’s important to talk about this in a routine way—the social stigma is still huge.

PhDork: Stigma, yes, that’s been a problem, too. We know people who had bugs more than a year ago, and I understand the first “ugh, eep, oy” response. It’s visceral and it’s something you can’t see. But when you stop to think for half a second, and you know that those people are not wallowing in filth. And I sure as shootin’ know I’m not.

So it’s creepy, they’re bloodsuckers, yuck, but you get over it. It’s like any other vermin in a city. Where there are people, there will be narsty little critters. If you live in the country or woods, it’ll be field mice, or snakes or spiders, and if you live in the city, you’re going to find roaches and rats and yes, bedbugs. C’est la vie.

BeckySharper: I was at a party last weekend where one of the guests said she couldn’t bring herself to hug a friend who’d had bedbugs in his apartment this past spring. I mean, really. Get the fuck over it. I might not want that friend to show up dragging a suitcase full of clothes from a freshly infested apartment, but still…a hug freaks you out? The bugs don’t live on your person. They’re not going to pounce on anyone.

PhDork: Something I’ve seen lately that has me ENRAGED—I mean so beyond the hassle of keeping my panties in ziploc bags—is comments to online articles (on crap/generic sites, not on anything BB-specific or in the progressive blogosphere) about this new wave of ‘bugs and how it parallels the waves of migration of various assholes’ least favorite brown people, usually Muslims or Mexicans.

BeckySharper: Yes, and there’s a nasty racist/classist notion that you get bedbugs in cities because of all the dirty non-whites who live there. Presumably, bedbugs don’t bite Real Americans…although a recent top-10 list of the bedbuggiest cities in the US had four Midwestern cities in the top five (to be fair, other news outlets give that dubious honor to NYC). I’ve definitely had people tell me to my face that they’re not surprised I got them because I live in a non-white neighborhood.

The bedbug beagle’s handler told me that they have been to plenty of very fancy (white-owned) Manhattan hotels and co-ops, but they have to bring the dogs in under cover of night in blacked out little carrying kennels in an unmarked van. It’s like a Secret Service mission so the rich people don’t freak out, and so the rest of us can’t gloat. And I just read there’s a bedbug beagle on staff at Bergdorf’s!

What’s funny is that I’ve stayed in some real cheap-ass fleabag hotels overseas and never got bedbugs (or fleas or lice or crabs). I’m sort of amazed, actually.

PhDork: Me too. I am a poor-ass mofo, I nearly always stay in hostels, so if this were a class thing, I would have had them long long ago.

BeckySharper: Agreed. We will have to make sure the Harpy Retirement House is bedbug free. Maybe SarahMC can provide extra beagles.

Are you buggin’ too? Anyone else lived the bedbug nightmare? Feel free to share…

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.