So...

There's a bunch of half-naked women in cages in front of the hotel next door to my office building. Apparently, PETA wants to make a point that "chicks suffer for eggs." I'll simply note that this is another chapter in PETA's blatantly misogynistic PR campaign and go smugly about my business knowing I eat only tasty cage-free eggs.

So... any caged half-naked women in your neck of the woods?

If I may spew

What bullshit. Two and a half assumptions here drive me especially fucking crazy.

1a: Women are sexual sirens who must minimize their seductive capabilities lest they drive one-half the population mad and to depravity.
1b: Men, once captivated by the siren's song, will stop at nothing to sate their most base desires.

Ergo, women who don't shield their sexuality are responsible for whatever ill befalls them. Granted I'm a sample of one, but sufficed to say, whatever you women are doing to get me to notice you, it works. Also sufficed to say, uh... it's never driven me to sate my most base desires by force.

2: Women don't know the difference between "regret" and "assault."

Profiles in douchebaggery

It's been a long time coming in adding Glenn Beck's name to our not-so-venerable list of world-class douchebags. I ignored his questioning the loyalty of an elected U.S. representative based on the Congressman's religion. I rolled my eyes at his smearings of Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. I've even kept mum on his stupid, ill-informed racism. Not because his on-air statements weren't egregious enough for inclusion in the first place (they certainly are), but because, quite frankly, Beck isn't that great of a douchebag. Let's face it, in a media-world filled with shrieking right-wing outrage-aholics, you've got to really step up your game to be noticed by this little-read left-wing blog!

Well Mr. Beck, your time is now!

On the February 28 edition of his CNN Headline News program, Glenn Beck once again made sexually suggestive comments toward a woman when he hosted US Weekly's Dina Sansing to discuss racy photographs of American Idol contestant Antonella Barba. After Beck claimed that "[y]ou can't take stupid photos and expect those to be ... locked away forever," Sansing responded that it was "possibly" true and that "it depends." As the weblog Crooks and Liars noted, Beck then asked: "Dina, I've got some time and a camera. Why don't you stop by?" Sansing did not respond and, after several seconds of silence, Beck stated: "No? OK." As Media Matters for America has noted (here, here, and here), in each of the first three episodes of his CNN Headline News show in May 2006, Beck made sexually suggestive comments to CNN Headline News anchor Erica Hill, who was then giving daily news updates on Beck's show. Hill no longer appears on Beck's program.

You'd think that in the latter half of the first decade of the twenty-first century, "journalists" wouldn't be stooping to making sexually degrading remarks to their on-air guests. You, of course, would be wrong. Congratulations, Glenn - you're a certified, grade A, sexist douchebag.

All they needed was a scarlet letter

Inside Higher Ed reports on a humiliating permutation of the flash mob at UNC Chapel Hill:

Ryan Burke, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, invites his girlfriend from North Carolina State University to meet him at the Pit, a central meeting point on his campus, for a Valentine’s Day surprise. She arrives and finds hundreds of students (some estimates top 1,000) whom he had invited via Facebook. Her boyfriend starts by introducing an a cappella group — not to sing some romantic melody, but the Dixie Chicks’ defiant hit “I’m Not Ready to Make Nice.”

When the song is done, Burke tells his girlfriend that she has been unfaithful and that he’s dumping her. They exchange harsh words — several of them four-letter epithets — while the audience watches, laughs and jeers. At one point, the crowd starts chanting “slut, slut, slut” at the woman. She fights back (verbally), telling her by-then-ex that if he needs an audience to break up with her, he must have the problem.

YouTube video of the event is here.

The article tries to suss out whether this event was real or staged, and several people interviewed for the article are rightly disturbed that so many who observed the event seem to be revelling in the public humiliation of a woman. I found this little statement towards the end of the piece to be interesting:

She also said that there were positive factors to consider. “I’m a journalism and public relations major,” Legacki said. “I was impressed by the word of mouth that catalyzed this and how it’s grown completely. To me it’s more amazing how it got to where it is than the fact that Ryan publicly humiliated Mindy,” she said. “Any time you can get a group of college students that big in one place is impressive,” Legacki said, adding that she did agree that it would be good “to figure out how to use that for better causes.”

Her caveat at the end of the quote notwithstanding, I'm struck by the speaker's lack of empathy. The need to publically humiliate a woman, and the mob enjoying the spectacle is the story (although, let's be honest, misogyny - public or otherwise - is widely tolerated in our society and is seldom "news"). At the risk of invoking Godwin, the comment seems to me to be different only by a matter of degrees from admiring how efficiently the Nazis handled that whole Holocaust deal. But I'm sure I'm an over-sensitive jerk who's too old to get the "joke."

One step forward, two steps back

Many on the left look at the nations of Latin America for inspiration and hope, given the general leftward tilt of the region over the last six years. However, it also remains a profoundly patriarchal culture...:

With the exception of Cuba, every nation in this predominantly Catholic region either totally prohibits abortion or limits it to extreme circumstances. And while the global trend over the past decade has been to liberalize abortion laws, efforts to do so in Latin America have been met by an equally determined campaign to strengthen them further.

... and such a culture has consequences:

Jazmina Bojorge arrived at Managua's Fernando Vélez Paiz Hospital on a Tuesday evening, nearly five months pregnant and racked with fever and abdominal pain. By the following Thursday morning, both the pretty 18-year-old and the female fetus in her womb were dead.

The mystery of what happened during the intervening 36 hours might not ordinarily have catapulted Bojorge into the headlines of a nation with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the Western Hemisphere.

But a week before her death on Nov. 2, Nicaragua's legislature had voted to ban all abortions, eliminating long-standing exceptions for rape, malformation of the fetus and risk to the life or health of the mother. Now, outraged opponents of the legislation have declared Bojorge its first victim.

"It's clear that fear of punishment kept the doctors from doing what they needed to do to save her -- which was to abort the pregnancy immediately," said Juanita Jiménez of the Women's Autonomous Movement, an advocacy group that is leading the campaign to reverse the ban. "This is exactly what we warned would happen if this law was passed. We've been taken back to the Middle Ages."

Trafficking in inadequacy

The Guardian reports on Argentina's thriving medical tourism industry, centered around a plenitude of highly-trained and cheaply-priced plastic surgeons. It's not a fact that shocks me too terribly, but I was struck by this passage:

Argentinian plastic surgeons have good reason to be so skilled: domestic demand for breast implants, laser surgery and nip-and-tuck treatments is sky high in this style-obsessed country.

One in 30 Argentinians is estimated to have gone under the plastic surgeon's knife, making the population the most operated on in the world after the US and Mexico. Boob jobs are a popular birthday present from Argentinian parents stuck as to what to buy their teenage daughters.

I've heard tell that a certain young scholar we know gets criticized for drawing connections between female circumcision and breast augmentation. While those connections certainly don't exist in every context, I think they might be valid here. That last graf tells me that there's a cultural imperative towards body modification, that boob jobs are seen as a "rite of passage" for young Argentinian women, and that radically invasive body modifications are performed with little regard towards the long term health consequences.

I'm certainly not suggesting these women are coerced into receiving breast augmentation, just as I'm told that West African women aren't necessarily forced into circumcision. But they certainly exist in an environment where the hegemonic ideals dictate a certain self-objectification in order to achieve personal perfection.

A world leader for all to admire

Troglodytes run large swaths of our world:

Vladimir Putin's international image was tainted today after it emerged he had let slip another of his infamous remarks - this time praising the president of Israel for alleged sex offences.

"He turned out to be a strong man, raped 10 women," the Russian president was quoted by Russian media as saying at a meeting in Moscow with Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. "I never would have expected it of him. He has surprised us all, we all envy him!"

As if being an authoritarian asshole wasn't enough.