This week I received many Facebook messages urging me to tell my friends “where I like it” in my Facebook status. I’ve seen my friends post such mysterious statuses as “I like it on the chandelier” and “I like it on my car seat.” This morning I posted, “I like mine without pinkwashing.” Many people didn’t understand my status or why the meme makes me so angry. I have two simple answers: 1. I hate pinkwashing. 2. This is nothing but Facebook slactivism. Put differently, I do not believe that if I post an “I like it…” status on Facebook, I have done something significantRead More →

Over Thanksgiving I had a conversation with my mother-in-law about women doctors. She explained that she had to see a woman eye doctor because her regular doctor was unavailable and that this made her uncomfortable. Some people are uncomfortable with women doctors even today. Comfort with a doctor is an emotional thing, not something you can necessarily address rationally. With each generation this discomfort will lessen. Still, when I play the very old doctor riddle with students in class, most can’t solve it. Here’s the riddle: A man and his son were in a car and had an accident on the highway. The boy wasRead More →

Google doesn’t allow abortion providers to advertise. Fair or not, that’s beside the point. The result, unfortunately, is that the google metrics or whatever it’s called elevates Christian pro-life clinics. Today, I was looking up examples of arguments for pro-choice and pro-life positions to bring to class. I Googled “pro-choice+arguments” and got an astounding number of hits that were Christian, anti-choice sites providing counter-arguments. Then I Googled “pro-life+arguments,” and I got the same thing. There were some pro-choice sites, but overall the hits favored the pro-life position. Certainly, the recursivity of Google’s search engine, combined with their choice about advertising, has caused this depressing result.

I have always loved kd lang. I liked her country-punk performance-art style back from Angel with a Lariat. She caught my eye in the 80s with her spiky hair, Buddy Holly glasses, and country-western wear; she was a genre-bending artist as much as a gender-bending one. Somewhere in my Texas life, where I was raised by a family of genuwine wannabe cowboy poets, I developed a secret, half-assed appreciation for the older fiddle-and-banjo country sound. Probably at the roller rink. I didn’t pay much attention to Lang’s music until Shadowland, though. I played the heck out of that CD because it harkened back to aRead More →

Today I visited the gynecologist’s office for my annual exam. The visit reminded me intimately of why I’m a feminist, and why feminism is still necessary today. Times have changed since the emergence of the women’s health movement in the 1960s (see Into Our Own Hands by Sandra Morgen), and since I read and studied Mary Daly’s Gyn/ecology and the early versions of the Boston Women’s Health Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves. Or, perhaps not. My visit was utterly..well…disheartening – even if you pretend all the problems about women’s reproductive freedom, the medicalization of women’s bodies, and women’s health were off the table. I waited anRead More →

According to a new report from the government, teenage birthrates are rising. Bloomberg.com points out that this is the first increase in fifteen years. Although the article doesn’t make any sort of reference to sex education, I’m afraid that the information will be used to increase support for the Bush administration’s abstinence only programs, even though studies have shown that these programs are dismal failures. See, for instance, this Fox news article for a “fair and balanced” report. For a humorous look at this failure, see Susie Bright’s take on it. She ends her commentary with the following: Clearly, more needs to be done toRead More →

I’m grateful that I even -have- insurance but they are really annoying businesses. I decided to see a nutritionist. I found one in Baton Rouge who is also a therapist. Just what I need, right? A food therapist. So I called the insurance company, and they won’t pay for a nutritionist unless it is for either A) a protein deficiency or B) diabetes. The customer service representative said the company definitely won’t cover a nutritionist for weight loss. That makes no sense. According to BlueCross/BlueShield, Louisiana ranks 4th in the country for obesity, and obesity-related diseases account for nearly half of Louisiana’s state health careRead More →

Ever since I saw Jon Stewart’s spiel about emboldening the enemy on the Daily Show, I’ve been hyper-conscious of the word. Here’s this nifty entry on emboldening the enemy at Source Watch. When I saw a headline at MSNBC, it consequently caught my attention: Abortion ruling emboldens opponents. “Emboldening” is a word I associate so closely with “terrorists,” so that it’s not hard to interpret “Abortion ruling emboldens opponents” as “Abortion ruling emboldens terrorists.” Surely that wasn’t the implication. Or not…? Maybe it’s just a vast liberal conspiracy. I wish there were such a thing.

It is in this juvenile ecstasy of the modern that we must locate the progeny of the future and initially ponder why a man, who just wants to be a boy, is apparently powerless to profess his innocence and relinquish his sexuality, despite assurances everywhere that he can and must.

– Slavoj Zizek in CTHEORY