Check out this awesome YouTube video about the wage gap between men and women.  (The language in this may not be safe for work…unless you’re trying to send a point to your boss!)

I liked Jessica Valenti’s take at Feministing: “the wage gap is like a big F*!% you to women.”  We love how the woman in the video is called bitch, cunt and a slut  –  yet smiles like a good girl all the while.
takepart with the National Organization for Women and their NO EXCUSES campaign.

Ew. Software engineer Le Trung made an Asian-looking female robot named Aiko who calls him “Master.”  Oh, if she only looked like Rosie from The Jetsons!  But no, she looks like a barely legal Asian girl.

His $25,000 “fembot” is offensive on so many levels.  A robot who calls him “Master” would be one thing. But a feminine robot who looks (as a NY Daily News commenter put it) like one of those 10-year-old Chinese gymnasts who calls him “Masters” taps into all kinds of stereotypes about submissive Asian women. (Not that the fembot would be any less gross if she were a different ethnicity.) Even creepier?  Her name means “love child” in Japanese.

We’ve got a grade-A creep on our hands.

Aiko speaks 13,000 sentences in English, but something tells us men don’t create robots what look prepubescent to discuss the world’s big ideas with them.

Gross, gross, gross….

I never thought I’d see the day where I stand up for The View’s resident conservative, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, but I just can’t keep quiet when a woman is branded with sexist slurs.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, called Hasselbeck “dumb broad” and a “dizzy blonde” in a sermon at Trinity United Church of Christ.  Although he did not refer to her by name, the Sun-Times reports that it was clear he was referring to the View co-host as he criticized the media.

Shame on you, Rev. Wright.  Maybe he thought it was OK to call a woman who has criticized him in the past any name he liked.  (Which we learned from the incident where Obama’s young speechwriter, Jon Favreau, was photographed next to a life-size cut-out of Sen. Clinton, fake-fondling her boob!)  So shameful progressive some men can’t understand this: sexism doesn’t suddenly become excusable when two people don’t see eye to eye.

As the leader of a ministry, Wright can and should lead his church better than that.  What kind of lesson is that to teach his congregants?

With a vocabulary like “dumb broad” and “dizzy blonde,” maybe he should take some time off from Jesus-ing and write 1940’s era mad-cap comedies.

She’s the former head writer of Saturday Night Live.  She wrote and co-starred in the smash hit, Mean Girls.  She’s writing and starring in 30 Rock, one of the most critically acclaimed shows on television.  And we quite possibly have her to thank for a McCain-Pallin loss.

But Maureen Dowd’s breezy cover story (does MoDo have a setting other than “breezy”?) in Vanity Fair can’t get over Tina Fey’s makeover.

From the desk: “the author reports on how a tweezer, cream rinse, a diet, and a Teutonic will transformed a mousy brain into a brainy glamour-puss.” I admit, Fey-as-former-fat-girl is perhaps worth a few sentences in the piece.  But not the whole article.

Here’s SNL’s Lorne Michaels: ““When she got here she was kind of goofy-looking, but everyone had a crush on her because she was so funny and bitingly mean. How did she go from ugly duckling into swan?”

Why is it that every successful woman needs a makeover story?  Why is it that a woman needs to ditch her old self — whether it’s her hairdo, her weight or her politics, or often all three in tandem — in order to be taken seriously the second (time around? Fey, Oprah, Hillary Clinton, even my former boss, Arianna Huffington — each is a model of “before” and “after” lore.

I hate to be a broken record, but it’s all part of the problem that a woman’s looks are just as, if not more important, than her talent.

To that end, here’s a section that’ll make you barf:

The Hollywood agent Sue Mengers warned her pal Lorne Michaels that he simply could not bring Fey out of the writers’ room and put her on-air for “Weekend Update.”

“She doesn’t have the looks,” Mengers told him.

“Lorne brought her over to my house when she was head writer,” Mengers recalls. “She was very mousy. I thought, Well, they gotta be having an affair. But they weren’t. He just appreciated her talent. And now, suddenly, she’s become this sexy, showing-tit, hot-looking woman. I said to Lorne, ‘What the fuck did she do?”’

They must be having an affair! What a rude friggin’ assumption that is to make.

What kind of message does this send to women, especially young women?  It’s lookism, is what it is. We want you to be smart, we want you to be witty, we want you to be accomplished, it’s even cool if you’re a feminist — but you still have to be hot, too.

I can’t believe I’m writing this after the episode of Real Housewives of Orange County that I watched last night, but yes, blonde jokes still are not funny.

Allow me to introduce you to the Keyboard For Blondes.  It’s pink!  The caps lock key says “Warning! XXL size letters!”  And a cash register sounds rings if you hit the $ key.

Write the manufacturer to complain about their derogatory, sexist gag gift:

Contact Information:
Phone: 561-237-5337 (M-F 10AM - 5PM EST) or Contact [at ] KeyboardforBlondes.com

Just waiting for Hillary, Amy Poehler, Lauren Bacall, Chelsea Handler, Madonna, Reese Witherspoon, and other great blondes to open a big hair spray-sized can of whoop-ass.

I’ve been thinking about Michelle Obama’s butt lately.

Well, sort of.

Last week I blogged about the recent Salon.com article by Erin Aubrey Kaplan about Michelle Obama’s booty.  Focusing on this Princeton-and-Harvard grad’s rear attributes offended me, and so I wrote:

Objectifying the female half of the soon-to-be-most-prominent black couple in American culture so uncomfortable in a lot of ways.  I point you towards Amanda Fortini’s wonderfully thorough piece in New York magazine about female stereotypes this past election, specifically “Bitch” Clinton and “Ditz” Palin. She touches on how Michelle struggled with the “angry black woman” stereotype earlier in the campaign, before becoming an easier-to-swallow “mom-in-chief” — cute daughters and puppy in tow.  What will happen if we turn our attention to her bootylicious ass?

Other writers agreed with me.  Dodai from Jezebel asked “Are we really having a conversation about the future First Lady’s bottom?”  Even Salon.com’s feminist blog, Broadsheet, questioned whether the article was a good idea. (Disclosure: I’ve blogged for Broadsheet before.)  But then an interesting thing happened.  But as we chattered away, a chorus of voices came to Erin Aubrey Kaplan’s defense.

Actually, I sense they had more appreciation for Michelle Obama than they did for Kaplan, but nevertheless, these women thought we should *not* not have discussions about the First Lady’s booty.  I honestly been oblivious to Michelle’s body type, but some women see the President elect’s wife — with her height and curves — as a breath of fresh air from the Mamie Eisenhower mold.  Finally a woman with curves!  Who isn’t a size 2!  Who looks like she’s been told to diet in her life!  Michelle Obama, it seems, is being imbued with the power to change the tone of body image discussion in America away from Eurocentric thinness.

Thank God someone’s talking about her normal-sized butt, these women said.  How empowering for us real women. Where I saw rudeness, they say a new, high visability role model.  And where I saw racial stereotyping, they saw racial pride.

I’m from a rather buttoned-up, WASPy part of Connecticut, where it’s “impolite” to talk about a person’s body, let alone a public figure’s body, this way.  I would freak out of someone talked about MY booty, for example.  Which is not to say that other people in other parts of the country are impolite, but to point out that different people have ingrained perspectives. My knee-jerk reaction to the Michelle Obama story was to think it was tasteless, because that’s how I’d feel if it happened to me.

I still mostly feel the same way about Kaplan’s article as I did when it first came out.  But my eyes have been opened a bit more and I know realize that talking about Michelle Obama’s butt…well, it might just be liberating.

I don’t know why I expected anything less from a man who once signed his name to a list of leaders who believe wives should submit to their husbands because of God-given male “headship” of families.

But Mike Huckabee stuck a big ol’ stiletto in his mouth when he forgot that making reference to the governor of Alaska’s appearance is offensive.

According to Politico, The New Yorker reports this week that when he first heard John McCain had chosen Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee, he “was scratching my head, saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute. She’s wonderful, but the only difference was she looks better in stilettos than I do, and she has better hair.’”

In other words, he’s implying McCain only picked Sarah Palin because she’s eye candy.

I understand that this is Huckabee’s idea of cracking a joke, and he doesn’t realize how lame — let alone sexist — it is.

Of course, Huckabee’s lucky that a lot of people who think it’s just fine to laud attractive female politicians won’t see his comments that way.  Sarah Palin in stilettos….mmmmm….

(p.s. I just checked out 30 Ways of Looking at Hillary from the library — I think someone should do a book of essays called 30 Ways of Looking at Sarah.)

Any other female journalists ever interviewed a man who got unprofessional and inappropriate all of a sudden?

Then check out this Newsweek interview where actor Jean-Claude van Damme gets super-creepy with his interviewer:

I quote:

There ‘ s a monologue in the film about being a washed-up action star. Did you improvise that?
I like structure—like driving: go past the school on the street, stay on the right side, no hitting the car, go in right, you’ll see a big church, stop and take a left, and you’ll have it. By doing this I’m giving a structure of life, a path of light, and showing what happens between me and me, which is something very beautiful.

Beautiful? Why?
I really opened myself up in “JCVD.” I peeled back the skin of the fruit, cut the pulp and then took that very hard seed. In this film I cut that hard seed, and inside that seed was a kind of liquid cream substance of the man I am, or the woman you are.

OK —
It was like being naked—I would love to be naked in front of you.

Well, I —
Not being naked being naked. I say such things in Hong Kong and they thought I was being a crazy Frenchman. Being naked of protection.

So you ‘ ve no regrets at all?
Believe me—I’ve done very good stuff and very crazy stuff, and I don’t regret the crazy stuff. So are you in New York?

Yes, I am.
And are you 27, or 32?

I ‘ m 22.
Oh, f–––. That is very young. Will you come to the premiere?

I don ‘ t know. When is it?
I don’t know. You will wear all black, a black dress and high heels?

Uh —
You can come find me, I will be the one with the very broad shoulders, dark hair and a simple suit. We can have some champagne, you and me.

Why the hell do some men think it’s okay to talk to female reporters this way?

My personal creepy interview story involves a guy who, after I accidentally drove over his lawn ornament with my car when our interview was finished, sent me an email to my work address saying that if I had sex with him, he’d forgive me.  Ew.  I reported him to the police.

Incensed by those Hillary Clinton nutcrackers, the “Iron my shirt!” catcall, and Tucker Carlson’s claims that he involuntarily crosses his legs whenever he hears the junior senator from New York speak?

Still pissed-off when men gushed all over themselves that the Alaskan governor was one hot babe — and meanwhile, her handlers kept her from answering questions from the media?

Then Amanda Fortini’s recent New York magazine article, “How the Year of the Woman Actually Set Women Back,” is a must-read.

Fortini’s thesis is that feminists might have been concerned by what the media did to Hillary “Bitches Get Stuff Done” Clinton, but it proved to be nothing compared to the ditz-ification of Sarah “I’ll Have To Get Back to You on That One, Katie” Palin. It’s bad to be bitchy, but it’s worse to be an incompetent boob.  “Among the darker revelations of this election is the fact that the vice-grip of female stereotypes remains suffocatingly tight,” Fortini writes.

The author argues that how close Palin came to shattering that ultimate glass ceiling, she set women back  — women in power, especially — with her “dim beauty queen” ways, as “the kind of woman who floats along on a little luck and the favor of men.”  In other words, too ditzy to be Commander-In-Chief.

[Palin's] blithe ignorance extended from foreign policy to the symbolic value of her candidacy. By stepping into the spotlight unprepared, Palin reinforced some of the most damaging and sexist ideas of all: that women are undisciplined in their thinking; that we are distracted by domestic concerns or frivolous pursuits like shopping; that we are not smart enough, or not serious enough, for the important jobs.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, yes they did.

(Disclosure: I’ve written for Salon.com’s Broadsheet blog in the past.)

The author, a black woman named Erin Aubry Kaplan, begins:

…what really thrills me, what really feels liberating in a very personal way, is the official new prominence of Michelle Obama. Barack’s better half not only has stature but is statuesque. She has corruscating intelligence, beauty, style and — drumroll, please — a butt. (Yes, you read that right: I’m going to talk about the first lady’s butt.)

Objectifying the female half of the soon-to-be-most-prominent black couple in American culture so uncomfortable in a lot of ways.  I point you towards Amanda Fortini’s wonderfully thorough piece in New York magazine about female stereotypes this past election, specifically “Bitch” Clinton and “Ditz” Palin. She touches on how Michelle struggled with the “angry black woman” stereotype earlier in the campaign, before becoming an easier-to-swallow “mom-in-chief” — cute daughters and puppy in tow.  What will happen if we turn our attention to her bootylicious ass?

Read the rest of this entry »