If you are not a feminist, male or female, you are looking at the world with one eye open. You need to open both eyes and see the whole world to solve almost any problem. -- Gloria Steinem
A few weeks ago my checking acount balance plummeted to like minus 10 cents or something. Anyhoo, I fixed the problem and then, weirdly, this showed up in my mail.
I've been denied an ETB (foodstamp card) because I "make too much money" on Unemployment Insurance.
Then, bizarrely, Washington Social Services sends me this check for a whopping one dollar. Don't know if my balance had anything to do with this or if it's part of the first stimulus that Bush signed right before he left?
Also it might be a new annual WA state thing for low-income renters. Once again living in CHHIP housing has helped me just enough to annoy me ... but not really help.
Amanda Marcotte hits point after point when discussing hetero women's sex drives (or the lack of) but this one really stood out:
To add to it, sexual desire in our culture is almost solely contextualized as something straight males have and not anyone else. Images of nubile (presumably straight) women with no clothes on still signify "sex" in our culture. Half-dressed women greet straight men everywhere they turn with beckoning smiles and lidded eyes, titillating men and inspiring men to think about sex constantly. Straight women don't get near the provocation on a daily basis -- is it any wonder that 60% of the men who answered the Consumer Reports survey thought about sex once a day, but only 19% of women?
On slow nights (we unemployed have a few) I've watched Wife Swap. It's this over-the-top reality show that doesn't just press the offensive button, it leans on it for 54 minutes once a week.
One episode had a white supremacist family swapping moms with an African American family. There's been a lot of so-rural-we-say-shucks families mixing it up with city slickers. And Wife Swap has done the Pagan-Punk-Rocker Mom vs. the Bible-thumping-hillbilly family to DEATH.
Now, weirdly, America is offended by the latest installment. (This after several seasons of offensive?!!!) Yes, the lethargic ire of white trash America has been roused by a Brit Twit in San Francisco, a city that's actively cultivated snobbery since about 1979.
Apparently what's got everybody's Wall-Mart undies in a twist is the fact that the twit was A) un-apologetically rude, B) brazenly proud of his (apparently upper) class and C) he's a foreigner, dagnabit!
So after multiple seasons of paranoid, controlling, psychotic husbands forbidding their families to watch 'sinful TV', dine in restaurants that serve 'murdered animals' or fail to clean their rooms ala boot camp style with a toothbrush -- they're upset because some Brit Twit talked trash about ATVs?!
I wonder how much of this ire is about the Twit verbally lashing out at the redneck wife and hurting her feelings vs. his attack on 'Merkica and the slothful, stupid pastimes so heavily promoted in some parts of the country (Missouri, anyone?).
ATVs are stupid and they do promote laziness, just like the American car or SUV. And paintball is great if you live in a trailer in Tennessee and you've run out of cows to tip, but promoting it as a way to get your gap-toothed spawn into college? PA-LEASSSE!
The Twit is right if it only takes some Toff asshat like him to get under America's skin. We are inbred, stupid and lazy if that's all it takes.
