PunkAssBlog.com

More of McBoing’s required reading list.

Bagels Yesterday, Burritos Today: The only difference between the anti-immigrant sentiment of our grandparents’ time and the sentiment now is that, today, people occasionally feel stirred to preface their comments with a disclaimer about how racist they aren’t.

Taking Care of Kids Is Real Work: A full-time stay-at-home mother would earn $134,121 a year if paid for all her work, according to a study released Wednesday by Waltham, Mass.-based compensation experts Salary.com… A mother who works outside the home would earn an extra $85,876 annually on top of her actual wages for the work she does at home, the study says.

And even more below the fold…

Make contraception as normal as mascara: It’s a shame that people are more worried about protecting our illusions about teenagers and sex than we are about protecting their health and future. 31% of sexually active teenage girls–think about what’s going to happen to them when abortion is banned. Don’t think that the right wing’s anti-sex agenda is aimed at reversing women’s achievements? Then why are they setting it up so a quarter to a third of girls have their dreams derailed by giving birth when they’re teenagers?

Finally: The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that anti-choicers who created “wanted” posters to identify doctors who perform abortions should pay $5 million in damages. It’s about time–this court battle has been a decade in the making.

Snow Advisory: Tony Snow is a man of conscience who genuinely cares about solving the tough problems of poverty, bad schools and sour race relations. Look again at that list: David Duke was talking about high taxes, crummy schools, crime-ridden streets, welfare dependency, equal opportunity. A lot of you kids out there in Blog-o-land won’t remember this, but politicians in 1991 had never mentioned these things! Yes, all five are code words for black people, who crummy up our schools and crime-ride our streets with their welfare dependency, thus causing high taxes and eroding equal opportunity with their government-handout “affirmative action” programs. But until David Duke came along, no mainstream American politician had ever talked about crime or schools or affirmative action or welfare or taxes!

The IWF Attack On Rape Statistics: We should also ask, what does evidence say? Anti-feminists have been repeating this criticism of Koss’ survey for at least 15 years, but I’ve never seen one provide a speck of evidence that the question, in the context of a survey about rape and sexual coercion, is actually misunderstood by respondents to mean “have you ever had sex while drunk and regretted it in the morning?” In fact, evidence shows that Lukas is wrong.

Clear as Day: The problem with this statement is that it is empirically denied, rather harshly, by the facts of the last two centuries. I don’t even need to make the radical claim that the War on Terrorism is just Western imperialism run amok (because I believe the exact opposite in fact). Let me just run through the list that nobody denies: Slavery, colonialism, lynching, Jim Crow, the Holocaust, the slave trade (which, given its likely 8-figure death toll, deserves independent recognition from slavery), communism, the My Lai massacre, fascism, anti-semitism, misogyny, spousal rape exemptions, segregation, the Native American genocide, reservations, the Dreyfuss affair, the eugenics movement, Japanese internment, and child labor. I could go on. All had relatively prominent roles in Western civilization at points in the last 200 years.

A Failure to Think: It’s true, the nurses and the gym employee weren’t archetypal evil monsters. But just because they weren’t wearing white hoods or forming lynch mobs or spewing hateful invective, and just because they were probably guided by the proverbial best of intentions, it doesn’t mean that nothing significant or damaging or dreadfully wrong occurred. Nor does it alleviate the effect that a lifetime of this sort of “mundane stress” has had on Bobby, the way he lives and the way he sees himself and the way he feels as he moves through the world and its ubiquitous domineering whiteness.

On Gang Bangs and Proving It: The thrill of the gang bang — or gang rape, which is different — is not the sex: it’s the audience. Pardon the vulgarity: but the real payoff is not to fuck, but to be seen fucking. Homosociality (the overwhelming need to prove oneself in the eyes of one’s own sex) all too often trumps authentic sexual desire, or becomes so hopelessly entangled with innate sexual desire that many men have trouble distinguishing what they a priori want and enjoy from what behavior will bring them the pleasure of greater status in the eyes of men.

Trans Responses to Feminist Myths: I have never been masculine, and probably will never be masculine. Moving through the world as male is undoubtedly bringing pressure to bear in one direction as opposed to the other. I don’t have any interest in conforming to that pressure, so I have developed a studied obliviousness to the ways in which I did and did not read masculine. I still display behaviors that are not masculine–things like inflection, smiling too much, eye contact, for example. As I slowly internalize the reality that people read me as gay or effeminate or feminine or different but still as male, it’s much easier for me to discard whatever residual self-consciousness I had about it. I make a lousy dude, but I have no problem with that, and neither do the ftms I know and love. I wouldn’t feel comfortable any other way.