Category Archives: Media

The Wrongest

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Oh, you guys. For a minute there, I was so excited to see this David H. Freedman piece in the Columbia Journalism Review on the problems with personal-health journalism–a topic about which I’ve written a gazillion blog posts and part of a book. (The link came via my science-writer friend Robin Marantz Henig, who prefaced it on Twitter with, “Lots to disagree w here, but lots to chew on, too. Should get science journos talking for a long time.” I probably should have braced myself better.)

When I saw that Freedman started off with a recent Tara Parker-Pope article in The New York Times about the futility of dieting, I was even more excited. That subject, in particular, is what gave rise to my own strong feelings about the sorry state of health journalism. How lovely to see someone else take it seriously as an example of research gone wrong, time and again!

Then I kept reading. And fuck me if I wasn’t suddenly motivated to sit down and start fisking like it’s 2008.

Freedman:

There’s really just one problem with Parker-Pope’s piece: Many, if not most, researchers and experts who work closely with the overweight and obese would pronounce its main thesis—that sustaining weight loss is nearly impossible—dead wrong, and misleading in a way that could seriously, if indirectly, damage the health of millions of people.

“Many, if not most.” Well, that sure clears up which researchers you’re talking about, what their conclusions are, and how they arrived at them! And “experts who work closely with the overweight and obese” obviously implies unbiased people of science, rather than folks whose primary income is derived from weight loss-related products and services!

What else have you got?

…the fact that many programs and studies routinely record sustained weight-loss success rates in the 30-percent range…

Again, would it kill you to cite this? And to specify things like how long those studies followed their subjects, or how much weight the average person lost, and whether they regained some percentage of it? Because when you start to look at those details, you find things like–I’m making this up rather than finding you an example, because I never claimed to be a proper science journalist, but trust, it’s not pulled completely out of my ass–”a third of participants maintained a 5% reduction in body weight over one year.” Which could mean that someone like me–5’2″ and 215 lbs.; the scientific term is “obese as fuck”–lost 20 pounds (a nearly 10 % reduction!), gained back 10 in the first year, and ended the study at 5’2″ and 205 lbs. SUCCESS! (And never mind if 5 years later, I weigh 225. That’s way beyond the scope of the study.)

Seriously, that is what the typical weight-loss-study “success story” looks like when you read past the press release, folks.

Freedman again:

…most experts have insisted for some time now that successful, long-term weight loss requires permanent, sustainable, satisfying lifestyle changes, bolstered by enlisting social support and reducing the temptations and triggers in our environments…

Again, who are these experts? I mean, do you need some help here? Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health is one example of an obesity researcher who strongly resists the notion that permanent weight loss is unsustainable for the vast majority of people who attempt it. That’s off the top of my head. Maybe you could just use Google Scholar to search for some of his work, if you wanted to include a citation anywhere in these claims?

And hey, can you clarify what you mean by “permanent, sustainable, satisfying lifestyle changes”? Oh, wait, you did: ”…the so-called ‘behavioral modification’ approach typified by Weight Watchers.”

Blink.

Blink blink.

To recap: in your critique of someone else’s scientific research on weight loss, the very first name you drop is Weight Watchers. How’s your weight, by the way, sir? I imagine it’s difficult to exercise with brass balls.

People, in case you don’t have time to read a whole other post, let me just point this out: the “sustainable, satisfying lifestyle change” Weight Watchers put me on the last time I used their services was a 1200-1300-calorie diet. Of course, Weight Watchers deals in healthy, sustainable “POINTS,” and not evil, failure-inducing calories. So what if POINTS are derived by counting calories (50 = 1) and adjusting slightly for fat and fiber intake (>5 grams of fat= +1; >5 grams of fiber = -1)? And so what if staying on Weight Watchers permanently would qualify me to hang out with people who practice extreme calorie restriction in hopes of living, literally, forever? IT IS NOT A DIET SHUT UP.

Where was I?

Echoing the sentiments of many experts, Barbara Berkeley, a physician who has long specialized in weight loss…

Sweet Jesus, it’s a source! A source who makes a living promoting weight loss. And who “wants you to know that she practices the principles laid out in Refuse to Regain as a method for controlling her own weight, and has successfully maintained a 20 pound weight loss for approximately 8 years.”

Impressive! And I mean that sincerely, because very fucking few people manage to do that much. But do you recall what BMI category I’d be in if I lost 20 lbs.? Obese! And you know who else that’s true of? Most obese people!

Freedman also links to a HuffPo blog post by David Katz, M.D., director of Yale’s Prevention Resource Center, author of multiple weight loss books, and founder of the Turn the Tide Foundation, which aims to “develop, evaluate, and disseminate creative, yet practical programs to empower individuals and families to achieve sustainable weight control and robust good health.” So clearly, that’s a dude with a wide open mind about whether long-term weight loss is possible for most people.

What other evidence does Freedman offer that sustained, substantial weight loss is possible for even 30 percent of people?

Most of us know people—friends, family members, colleagues—who have lost weight and kept it off for years by changing the way they eat and boosting their physical activity. They can’t all be freaks of biology, as Parker-Pope’s article implies.

Well! There’s some bulletproof science!

In fact, I do know two people in my very own gene pool who lost a great deal of weight and kept it off. The first was my mom, who controlled her Type 2 diabetes with diet alone for over a decade (i.e., “reversed it” in the wishful language of current weight loss boosters), and never needed insulin injections–right up until she died of a heart attack at 64 anyway, after many years of declining health. The second is my cousin, who had a big chunk of stomach and esophagus removed. I mean, it’s true that starting out obese probably helped her not die from esophageal cancer (she’s an 8- or 9-year survivor now), but the point is: She lost weight and kept it off! So can you!

Never mind that all three of my siblings and I have lost and gained back the equivalent of at least four more obese adults; that our father has yo-yoed for much of his 77 years; that both of our grandmothers and one grandfather were obese, and all lived into their eighties or nineties. (The other grandfather died of heart disease in his thirties.) And never mind all of the friends I have in my real life, plus all the readers I had when I was blogging at Shapely Prose, who have lost weight and gained it back, usually more than once. Usually much more than once. In the world of responsible personal health journalism David H. Freedman envisions, anecdotes about the futility of dieting are lazy substitutes for research, but anecdotes about long-term weight loss totally count.

To be fair, Freedman does eventually link to a 2007 study from the Journal of the American Medical Association, one I’ve linked to many times myself, and cited in my own book.** Hooray for actual science that doesn’t come from a HuffPo blog or one called “Refuse to Regain!”

Of course, Freedman uses that study to support the statement that “more than one in 20 deaths in the US is a premature death related to obesity.” I usually use it because that study found that overweight BMI is associated with significantly decreased mortality, and although obesity is associated with significantly increased mortality from cardiovascular disease (so with my family history, I’m quite possibly screwed; the question is whether I can magically make the weight disappear), it’s “not associated with cancer mortality or with non-cancer, non-CVD mortality.” In other words, the big picture is significantly more complicated than “overweight and obesity kill,” but whatever. [Update: That very study was just updated, and the new version released this week. This time, they broke obesity down into 3 grades, and found the lowest grade--i.e., the category most obese Americans fall into--is not associated with higher mortality.]

All right, I’m already bored with this, so I can only imagine how you, dear reader, are feeling. Before I go, though, let me reiterate that the reason I’m so incensed by this piece is because I completely agree with Freedman’s original premise: that science journalism is easily messed up, and both journalists and researchers need to do better at conveying accurate information to the public. I REALLY WANTED TO LOVE THIS FUCKING ARTICLE, YOU GUYS. (I still do love the graphics!)

But Freedman’s decision to hang an argument about journalistic and scientific integrity on “many” unnamed researchers, a couple of blog posts fisking a New York Times article, the premise that “most of us know” someone who disproves theory X, and motherfucking WEIGHT WATCHERS, is equally baffling and infuriating–unless this is a really high-concept piece and his whole point was to personally demonstrate the problem he describes.

Finally, Freedman slams Parker-Pope for highlighting a small, inconclusive study–which she fully acknowledges as such–but a UCLA meta-analysis of diet outcome studies, published in 2007, concluded basically the same thing: “The benefits of dieting are simply too small and the potential harms of dieting are too large for it to be recommended as a safe and effective treatment for obesity.”

And no, that study does not distinguish between “dieting” and “permanent lifestyle changes.” If someone wants to point me toward even one study that shows “permanent lifestyle changes” working for obese people–and by that, I mean a study involving a large number of formerly obese people who lost weight and kept it off for the rest of their lives, because otherwise, we’re just guessing about the “permanent” thing, aren’t we?–I will seriously reconsider the conclusions I’ve drawn from the research I’ve done on the topic.

Until then, I’m going to stick with the considered opinion that “permanent lifestyle changes,” as distinct from “permanent dieting,” are little more than a marketing gimmick and a myth that allows obesity researchers–who frequently have ties to commercial weight loss programs and/or pharmaceutical companies developing diet drugs–to continue blaming their many failed attempts to create long-term weight loss on the desperate people who keep coming to them for help.

*My actual weight loss history, for those who are new here, includes a 65-lb. loss in 1997, and a 45-lb. loss in 2002-3, both of which I maintained for about two years before the regain began. And both times, I ended up fatter than I started.
**It’s arguably hypocritical of me to point out people’s weight loss books as a reason for skepticism, when I’m the co-author of a book subtitled “Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce with Your Body.” But in my defense–aside from the fact that I’m about as up-front with my biases as I can possibly be–my book made no fucking money.

How Thick Is Your Bubble?

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“As the new upper class increasingly consists of people who were born into upper-middle-class families and have never lived outside the upper-middle-class bubble, the danger increases that the people who have so much influence on the course of the nation have little direct experience with the lives of ordinary Americans, and make their judgments about what’s good for other people based on their own highly atypical lives.” -Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

I found that quote—from chapter four of Murray’s book, which is titled “How Thick Is Your Bubble”—via a New York Times blog, and I found that via How to Be Black author Baratunde Thurston’s Twitter feed, so I guess I’m already off to a rather bad start, bubble-wise.

I am one of the people Murray speaks about—born, raised, and lucky to have remained upper-middle-class, with zero lived experience of poverty, rural America, or hand-roughening work. I’ve eaten at an Applebee’s recently only because my sister has kids and lives in the suburbs; I’ve walked a factory floor only because my dad was the boss; I score no points for living in an economically and educationally mixed neighborhood because I am one of the white gentrifiers. I’m friends with a few people who were raised in evangelical Christian families and communities, but they’re all atheists now. (Wait! I was just reminded that one is now a Reform Jew.) I lettered in yearbook, and the only uniform I’ve ever worn was a teal polyester skirt suit required by the bank where I worked for six weeks in 1993, before I quit in tears and admitted to my wealthy, supportive parents that yes, fine, I wanted to go back to college. I have a master’s degree, a professional husband, no kids, and a sense of entitlement a mile wide.

Still, while my Murray-defined bubble is indeed quite thick in some areas (Nascar and military knowledge; “close friendships with people who don’t share my politics,” seeing as how my politics are firmly grounded in how I believe human beings should treat each other), it’s more porous in others (I’ve watched a whole lot of Oprah and Judge Judy, and I walked in my public high school homecoming parade—albeit as a member of Russian Club)—and still more porous in many areas Murray completely ignores in his efforts to paint a picture of “ordinary Americans.”

Murray writes as though being rural, white, Christian, and poor is not its own sort of bubble, as though everyone else in this country is living on the fringes of that center (and voting to spite it). And that’s a load of bullshit even when applied to admittedly privileged and sheltered people like me. Everyday city life, for instance (at least outside the most exclusive enclaves, which tend to be populated by straight-up 1 percenters, not upper-middle-class professionals) comes with a ton of exposure to other people–in good, bad, and chronically irritating ways–and opportunities that simply can’t exist without a certain number of people around to make them worthwhile.

Don’t get me wrong: I am privileged beyond belief, in both the academic and colloquial senses of the word. If I wanted to, I could choose to live in a neighborhood that’s significantly safer, wealthier, and whiter overall than the one I do live in, and I already choose to live in a safer, wealthier, whiter part of this one. My life actually is “highly atypical,” and I am grateful for that.

Nevertheless, here are 25 more questions for Murray and the “ordinary Americans” he speaks for. I can answer “yes” to all of them. If you can’t, how thick is your bubble?

1. Have you ever lived for at least a year in a city with a population greater than 1 million?
2. Have you ever lived without a car for longer than a year?
3. Have you ever lived for at least a year in a municipal area in which more than 10 percent of the population was not white?
4. Have you ever had a close friend of a different race?
5. Have you ever had a close friend who is openly atheist?
6. Have you ever been to a gay wedding?
7. Are any of your close friends gay couples with children?
8. Do you or any of your close friends have more than $50,000 in student loan debt?
9. To your knowledge, have you ever met a transgender person?
10. During the last year, have you attended a free public lecture, reading, performance, or movie screening in your community?
11. Would you and, if applicable, your partner and/or children be able to attend a different free public festival every weekend between Memorial Day and Labor Day, without traveling more than fifteen miles from home?
12. Have you or, if applicable, your partner and/or children ever been to a Planned Parenthood or similar non-profit clinic for affordable contraception, preventative health care, and/or STI testing?
13. Have there been one or more homicides in your neighborhood in the last month?
14. Have you lived for at least a year in a community with a visible homeless population?
15. Do you have a YMCA or YWCA within five miles of your home?
16. If, as an adult, you wanted to play a sport, take a dance class, or learn or a foreign language, would you be able to in your community? Would you have more than one option?
17. In the past five years, have you seen homeless people fishing in your neighborhood?
18. Have you ever patronized a fast food drive-thru that had a revolving window of bullet-proof glass?
19. Do you live within five miles of a mosque?
20. In the last year, have there been one or more newsworthy acts of violence at your local public high school?
21. Is there a public playground within easy walking distance of your home?
22. Can you travel a mile from your home on foot or by wheelchair or mobility scooter without running out of sidewalk?
23. Can you get from your home to a public library without using a car or spending more than $3? (How about an art museum? A sporting event? A beach? A fireworks display?)
24. Choose one. Who was Jane Addams? Or: Have you ever bought a tamale from a man who came by your local bar at 1 a.m.?
25. Does your state receive fewer tax dollars than it contributes?

The Return of the Petite Prick: Could small cocks make a comeback?

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(Title stolen from Jessica Valenti. Most of the non-penis-related words below stolen from Simon Doonan, because COME ON.) 

The larger dick became the norm around the turn of the century, and it shows no signs of deflating. Radical cock augmentation is now ubiquitous, according to me, and to hell with the consequences. So what if you bruise your abdomen while running to catch the bus? So what if you can’t fit into any trendy clothes because your waist is a 34 but your rod is the size of a Shake Weight? It’s worth it to be the focus of female and gay male attention. Right?

A non-existent trend in restaurants—I like to imagine foodie insiders would call them pricketerias—would, if it existed, justify my desire to write phrases like “leviathan love muscles” and get paid for it, even though I’m basically making shit up. Examples might include Seattle-based Peckerheads, where the waiters are dressed as firefighters, football players and racecar drivers–but you know, slutty ones–and The Open Fly, which could have more than fifty—count ‘em!—locations nationwide, plus one in Canada, if we lived in a culture that regarded the male body as an object for consumption, like tasty hot wings. And then there’s the Back Door … But let’s not get distracted by asstaurants. Let’s stick with the topic at hand: With their phalanxes of liberally endowed, Speedo-clad serving drudges, these phallus palaces are poised to make even old-school Jumbo Johnson’s (that’s what I assume the old school version would have been called) appear tentative, restrained, and genteel, to mention nothing of causing my (similarly non-existent) insecure MRA brother to have a seizure.

Despite the worldwide embrace of enormous artificial dongs that I just made up, I remain convinced that the pendulous pendulum will, at some point, begin to swing in the other direction. Style is, after all, cyclical in nature. I know what you are thinking: Only a feminist could seriously posit the notion that big dicks might “go out of fashion.” However, being d’un certain age, I am old enough to remember when teeny peenies roamed the Earth.

Wobbly screen. Let’s go back.

It’s the early 1990s. I am at the movie theater with a bunch of my ladyfriends, none of whom are any more penis-obsessed than I am. We are here to see The Piano, a trendy, arty film starring Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, and Anna Paquin as I don’t even remember what, but also: Harvey Keitel’s cock. Apart from Jaye Davidson’s, I cannot remember an onscreen ween receiving more attention during my college years. The Piano and The Crying Game were kind of a long time ago, and I don’t actually remember how big either ballyhooed tallywhacker was, so it’s not a very good story. This concludes my paragraph about movie wangs of my youth.

Memories of the hype around Harvey Keitel’s flapping flute came flooding back when people started talking about the recent movie Shame. Shame is intermittently enlivened with– as someone who, unlike me, has seen it wrote– “hookers, pornography, masturbation and casual sex, all pursued with a resolve that can only be called grim.” Whenever the narrative starts flagging, I hear, off come the clothes, and here comes Michael Fassbender’s well-shaped natural manhood.

Not having seen it (except wait, I did see A Dangerous Method, and that might also have full frontal Fassbender? With all due respect to the very fine actor and his junk, I can’t recall that, either), I can only speculate as to whether the ferociously compelling Mister Fassbender, with his uninflated organ, might possess the power to usher out the era of the porno-wang. Can he put the natural wiener back up where it belongs? Might Shame repopularize the smaller shaft, or Hampton Wick, as it is known in the Cockney rhyming slang of Simon Doonan’s homeland? (It’s rhyming slang. Use your imagination, or Google “Cockney rhyming slang penis” like I did.)

My optimistic speculations fizzled—a bit like the elastic in vintage Calvin Klein tighty-whities—when a movie buff pal apprised me of the following fact: Fassbender’s dick is big! So much for the trend I made up to counterbalance the other trend I made up. Poop.

I realize that, as far as most people are concerned, there is no issue here. Most people are too busy enjoying the current era of well-rounded male characters and very little schlong in their mainstream cinema to give a thought to any alternative. In this regard, they are most selfish. After all, practically every movie has a pair of naked tits on a two-dimensional lady character in it these days, and if I know anything about equality, that means we should all be clamoring for more wooden male characters, if you get my drift. We are tired of seeing no motherfuckin’ trouser snakes on these motherfuckin’ screens, is what I’m saying! (I ask you: Who needs current jokes when you have a gift for humorous wordplay?)

They’d best be natural-looking, smaller trouser snakes, though. At the end of the day, health concerns may well cut the cackle, which I assume is Cockney rhyming slang for something that makes sense here. After all, MayoClinic.com says that penile implants carry numerous risks, including that “in some semirigid devices, internal parts can break down over time. In inflatable devices, fluid can leak or the pump device can fail.” Yikes! More horrifying still: “In some cases, an implant may stick to the skin inside the penis or wear away the skin from inside the penis. Rarely, an implant breaks through the skin.” And since my tacky, played-out dick jokes mostly don’t work unless you accept the premise that all large penises were made so artificially by their (shallow and vain, though of course you won’t hear me say it!) owners, it follows that a wee willy is better for one’s health and thus the only fashionable choice in a rational world.

But let’s not end on such a downer. I simply couldn’t carry myself with an erect bearing if I left it there. With that in mind, I give you my current fave imaginary pricketeria chain name: Joysticks. Feel free to one-up me in the comments with a well-monikered pricketeria from your own imagination, since there is obviously not an actual one in your neighborhood because LOL, I mean really.

Bon appétit!

 

The Media’s Groping Problem

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Regarding the news that Arnold Schwarzenegger is getting divorced, in part because he fathered a child with a woman not his wife, Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic writes, “I’ve yet to encounter anyone surprised by the news. It’s because we remember. Eight years ago, on the eve of the special election that won him the statehouse, the Los Angeles Times published a scathing story about his groping problem.”

I didn’t remember, actually, since I was living in Canada at the time, not yet engaged with the feminist blogosphere and, as always, completely uninterested in Schwarzenegger news. So this morning was the first time I learned that, as James Rainey recalled in the L.A. Times earlier this week, “Eventually, a total of 16 women, 11 of them giving their names, described physical humiliations suffered at the hands of [Arnold Schwarzenegger].”

How did the public react to this news–apart from electing him anyway, right after they learned about the first six women to come forward? “Some accused the paper of a politically motivated attack, meant to hurt Schwarzenegger and prop up the struggling Davis,” writes Rainey. “They complained with particular vehemence about the timing of the story, published five days before the recall vote. At least 10,000 subscribers cancelled the paper, according to executives who were with the paper at the time.”

Of course they did.

Hey, here’s a bizarre thought that just popped into my head: Could folks maybe quit writing and/or publishing articles suggesting that Dominique Strauss-Kahn has historically gotten a pass on sexually assaulting women because that’s just how the French say howdy, but uptight, puritanical Americans would totally never let a powerful man get away with a pattern of unwanted groping? Because I’m pretty sure Schwarzenegger is a perfect example of uptight, puritanical Americans doing the exact same thing.

And since every bad thing he’s ever done will be news for the next cycle or two, alongside the Strauss-Kahn news, now is a really good time for a refresher course in the difference between consensual sex and assault.

  • Consensual sex involves all parties agreeing that this promises to be fun, so we should go ahead. Sometimes it is not as fun as hoped, but oh well.
  • Assault involves one party feeling entitled to take liberties with another party’s body, in the absence of consent.

So, whether Strauss-Kahn is “the great seducer,” for instance, has very little to do with whether he might also be “the great rapist,” because rape is not actually seduction gone pear-shaped. It’s a whole different thing! Similarly, any consensual affairs Schwarzenegger had over the years have very little to do with his “groping problem,” which would probably be better described as “a problem with giving a tiny rat’s ass about consent.”

That’s not to say these things are entirely unrelated, mind you. There are certainly points of overlap between being a cad and being a criminal: An overblown sense of entitlement, an apparent lack of empathy for anyone you might hurt, an erection. But cheating on your wife is not a gateway drug to sexual assault. They are two different things, one of them a crime. If you’re a journalist, please take a moment now to repeat that to yourself a few times.

And then please consider this: A man who’s known for grabbing women’s breasts and asses without their consent (a crime) is not just some amusing, slightly pathetic Pepe Le Pew cartoon until the day someone accuses him of non-consensual penetration. He was actually already a sexual predator! And yet, inevitably, as soon as someone does accuse him of rape, friends who are familiar with his history of non-consensual groping will rush to tell the press that the accusations are absurd, insulting, inconceivable! Sure, everyone knew the lion liked to chase gazelles and pin them down and bat them around a bit for fun, but he would never eat one. That’s just not in his nature.

Do you see the difference? One guy treats women rather shabbily, and he should be ashamed of himself. The other guy treats women like inanimate objects he is entitled to do whatever the fuck he wants to, and he should be ashamed of himself and also held legally responsible for his crimes. The line between the two is really not all that fine or blurry, you guys! It’s actually pretty recognizable!

But when you have a man who is known for both cheating repeatedly and taking a handful of another human being whenever he sees fit, the reporting inevitably becomes a horrifying clusterfuck of conflation, rationalization and misinformation. So banging someone other than your wife becomes the moral equivalent of sticking your hand down someone’s pants without her consent–both filed under the rubric of “sexual indiscretions” or “regrettable pecadilloes,” while “rape” remains this whole other thing that only monsters far outside the general population would ever do–and then of course people start saying it’s ridiculous, puritanical bullshit to assume that just because someone would cheat on his wife, he’s probably also capable of rape, because THAT IS ACTUALLY TRUE.

It’s somewhat less ridiculous, however, to assume that just because someone would commit non-penetrative sexual assaults, he might also be capable of committing penetrative ones. In fact, that’s not very ridiculous at all. You follow?

This is not–NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT, not that this disclaimer will matter to the contingent who stopped reading after the first line and are now blogging furiously about my Dworkinian extremism–to say I think Strauss-Kahn doesn’t deserve a fair trial, or that anyone who gropes will go on to rape. It’s just a friendly reminder that groping is, in fact, a real crime defined by a lack of consent, which makes it substantially more similar to rape than it is to ill-advised yet consensual flirting, petting, or sex.

And if that’s still too confusing, then ask yourself this: How the fuck did a habit of grabbing fistfuls of boob become the hallmark of a “great seducer”?

Sweet Jesus, Again?

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I actually thought I was done publicly complaining about Dan Savage’s intractable bigotry, but here I am again.

Why? Because, instead of giving any real thought to the points raised by his fucking badass colleague Lindy West last week, he has simply quoted and linked to a post he wrote after I said the same basic shit three years ago. A post titled “Sweet Jesus, Kate Harding is Such a Dishonest, Paranoid Douchebag,”* and in which he A) accuses me of scrubbing a post by way of fake-complimenting my integrity (in reality, he didn’t find it because the post in question was published at Shakesville, not my site, and not long after that, a DDOS attack took Shakesville down, and when it went back up, a bunch of shit was lost) and B) delivers the delightful closing line, “And you are, of course, not allowed to say [that eating and exercise have any impact on weight]—lest the codependent thought police, in the guise of Ms. Harding, jump down your throat.”

Since that was published, I have had one (1) reasonably cordial e-mail exchange with Dan Savage on an unrelated matter, and he even said something nice about me in public once. So I sort of figured we had put that thing where he called me a dishonest, paranoid douchebag behind us? GUESS NOT.

And three years later, he still apparently cannot understand what people like Lindy West and I–and Marilyn Wann, who had the same conversation with him before Lindy was even born, I think–are saying here. I will try one more time to make the crucial point as simply as possible before I give up forever.

Dear Dan,

We are not asking for your approval of our choices.

We are not asking you to find us attractive.

We are not asking for your scientific opinion.

We are not asking you to stop secretly judging death fats or being vigilant about everything that goes into your mouth.

We are asking you to stop being a fucking bigoted dick in public.

And you keep saying no.

*To be fair, I’ll note that this was in response to a post of mine titled, “Sweet Jesus, I Hate Dan Savage” (which was a riff on “Sweet Jesus, I Hate Chris Matthews,” a blog that started up around the same time).  And if he had actually responded in kind, or even just gone with “Such a Douchebag,” I wouldn’t still be pissed in 2011. But “dishonest” is a fightin’ word, and he’s just made it an issue again.

Guest Post: Slacktivist Uprising

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By my friend Jess, aka @electricpenguin.

In 2004, my mom and I attended the March for Women’s Lives in DC. According to NOW, the organizers of the march, its aim was to “demand political and social justice for women and girls regardless of their age, race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, economic status, sexual orientation or ability.” We’re big fans of political and social justice and women’s lives and nondiscrimination, but all the same, we weren’t really sure what we were doing there. Women’s lives weren’t being actively threatened on a legislative level — no proposals on the table to outlaw abortion, no pending legislation about domestic violence or equal pay or rape or reproductive freedom or support for mothers. Women were there in force, chanting and waving signs, and we knew that things needed to change — but “What do we want? To live in a culture where women’s body autonomy is considered a paramount right, where women’s voices are taken seriously, where misogyny is given no quarter, and where women are treated in all things as fully equal and valuable members of society! When do we want it? Now!” isn’t much of a rallying cry.

This week I participated in #mooreandme, a Twitter campaign spearheaded by Sady Doyle. Our aims there were smaller: to make Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann acknowledge and apologize for misrepresenting rape claims, mocking the alleged victims, and massively boosting the signal on a false article that lied about the allegations and publicized the victims’ names. Just a quick apology, just two men, just supposed progressives who were supposedly on our side — it wasn’t exactly “political and social justice for all women.” And we didn’t march, and we didn’t chant, and we didn’t shout and raise our fists. We just asked, over and over, for them to acknowledge what they did wrong and apologize. Acknowledge and apologize. Acknowledge, please, and apologize. Don’t give us justice, don’t solve “women’s lives,” don’t even promise to respect us in the future — just acknowledge what you did wrong, and apologize. It was small, and quiet, and hopeless, and exhausting. And in the end it was much more meaningful and much more successful than that march six years ago.

People like science fiction writer Will Shetterly, late of Racefail ’09, disagree. They have accused #mooreandme of being “slacktivism,” zero-accountability faux activism that risks nothing and gets nothing done. “I’ve [been] beaten in the fight against racism,” Shetterly tweeted yesterday. “We were willing to march & speak out in public & risk being beaten because the cause mattered.” Activism in online spaces, where activists only risk being the target of ugly words, is thus both cowardly and meaningless — the risk is not enough so the cause doesn’t matter. If you don’t risk being physically assaulted or arrested, Shetterly said, you are a slacker. (Words, of course, are terrible when they hurt Keith Olbermann’s — or Will Shetterly’s — fee-fees, but a trivial danger when it comes to justifying online activism by women.)

Malcolm Gladwell aside, this is a wildly outdated objection. Dismissing online activism because nobody’s getting punched is like complaining that people aren’t printing and distributing political pamphlets, so nobody does REAL activism anymore. (As others have pointed out, #mooreandme is secondarily about inability to understand how the internet works — Keith Olbermann’s tantrum and huffy sortapology in particular show a misunderstanding about what it means to retweet something, who sees a retweet, and who sees an individual @ reply.) Dismissing all internet activism out of hand requires misunderstanding of either activism or the internet. Slacktivism is a great portmanteau word and a real thing — I’m not going to dispute that posting your bra color on Facebook, purportedly to “raise awareness of breast cancer” without saying the words “breast cancer” or “breast” or even for that matter “bra,” is inane. (A friend invented a brilliant ploy, in which activists start an offensively stupid and facile campaign in order to get people to donate to real causes out of exasperation and rage. I named it “smacktivism.”) But that doesn’t discredit a campaign like #mooreandme, any more than the existence of “Selleck Waterfall Sandwich” discredits Daily Kos. The internet, she contains multitudes.

Nor is activism a monolith. For one thing, though Will Shetterly has regularly proved himself unable to handle this concept, it isn’t limited to white cissexual men working oh-so-generously on behalf of the oppressed. Shetterly brags about endangering himself for the cause of civil rights, and hooray for that; as a white guy, he got to make that choice. If he’d been black, he would have been endangered every day by his lack of civil rights – and he would still be endangered by racism today, just as women are endangered by misogyny and gay people are endangered by homophobia and trans people are endangered by transphobia and disabled people are endangered by ableism. They – to risk speaking for others, we – don’t need to put our safety on the line. We live on the line. It’s pretty rich for Shetterly to call himself the better activist because he chose, at one time, to take on a portion of the danger involved in not being a white cis male.

But enough about that, because if I kept talking about who was or wasn’t a gigantic butthorn in all this I’d never get to stop. I do have an additional point, though, which is this: There is more than one job, and more than one tool. Many oppressed groups, including women, still face bias that’s engendered in (or at least not counteracted by) the law. But law is at least starting to catch up to justice, while social discourse, including among progressives, lags behind. It is thanks to people who were willing to risk physical harm and arrest that we’ve been able to make the advances we have made. Civil rights protesters shed blood to change laws — nobody disputes that the risks were more immediate and the eventual results more monumental than when people type words to change a conversation. But those broad advances, while critical, were also crude. For the finishing work — for lifting tenacious ugliness to the light, for uncovering the frameworks of privilege, for crafting a progressive movement that truly values everyone it represents – we need different tools. To continue the work using only marches and sit-ins, because they are the only tools we’ve deemed to be valid, would be like hacking away at a topiary with a scythe.

When faced with unfair laws, it makes sense to disobey those laws and face legal consequences like arrest. But when faced with an unfair culture, it makes sense to disobey that culture — to refuse to make the assumptions you’re expected to make, to refuse to play by rotten rules. You can’t root out the privilege and bigotry festering at the heart of society by chaining yourself to a fence. You need to engage where the wrong is being done — which is now not just in the laws, but in the discourse. And much of that discourse takes place online. It’s not the only possible locus of activism, which is lucky since many don’t have reliable access to the internet and that in itself is something to be taken on. But it’s a valid locus.

#Mooreandme is not a slacker protest. It’s a different form of civil disobedience. We’re not flouting the law — there’s no specific unjust law, in this case, to flout. We’re not marching, because marching is meaningless here; our issue is not with the writ-large, protest-sign, bumper-sticker policies of progressivism, but with the misogyny that comes out when so-called progressives wink and nudge at each other in private, which Keith Olbermann and Michael Moore demonstrated and legitimized in public. We object to the conversation, and we object with conversation. We disobey the rules that say women should not engage powerful men. We disobey the rules that say women and allies should not demand accountability from powerful men for the harm they do. We disobey the rules that say women must not band together, that we must make ourselves small and solitary and vulnerable. We disobey the rules that say a threatened woman must back down.

That’s not slacking — that’s hard, and it’s powerful, and it can be (and has been, and will be) used not only against misogyny but against racism, transphobia, ableism, you name it. When people are made invisible by the progressive movement, when we are trivialized or marginalized by those who claim to support social justice, when we are not heard, the solution is to make ourselves heard. The solution is to make ourselves impossible to ignore. They won’t arrest us for it — they’re not the law. They probably won’t beat us for it, though they might, not because we’re nobly martyring ourselves for the cause but simply because there’s always danger in speaking when you’re not a white cis man. But they will flail and shout and complain in the tide of our voices, in the force of our indisputable presence. They will notice and acknowledge us, and that’s the fight we’re fighting now. It’s not a fight Will Shetterly wants to allow. It’s not a fight that makes him feel comfortable, or that makes Keith Olbermann feel comfortable in his magnanimous superiority. But isn’t that sort of the point? Those who decry internet activism as “too easy” need to wonder: Am I upset that it’s easy? Or am I upset that it’s possible, now, for people who aren’t me?

In which I rant about Assange support giving way to victim-blaming and rape apology

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For Salon.

As of today, even Naomi Wolf – Naomi Effin’ Wolf! — has taken a public swipe at Assange’s accusers, using her status as a “longtime feminist” to underscore the absurdity of “the alleged victims … using feminist-inspired rhetoric and law to assuage what appears to be personal injured feelings.”

Wow. Admittedly, I don’t have as much experience being a feminist as Wolf has, but when I see a swarm of people with exactly zero direct access to the facts of a rape case loudly insisting that the accusation has no merit, I usually start to wonder about their credibility. And their sources.

 

I wrote another thing!

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On Sarah Palin’s new reality show, for the L.A. Times online:

The claim that “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” is a wholly apolitical travelogue-cum-family tableau, meant only to showcase the rugged beauty of our largest state and the just-folksiness of its former governor, lasts about five minutes into the first episode.

That’s the point at which we learn that Sarah’s enjoyment of working on the “cement slab” outside (naturally the Palins would have nothing so fancy-pants as a “patio”) is hampered by the presence of a new neighbor, the writer Joe McGinniss, who’s rented the house next door while researching what Todd Palin describes as a “hit piece” on his wife. Sarah explains that Todd’s reaction to McGinniss’ arrival was to get out there with his buddies and erect a 14-foot-high fence between the properties (as you do), and before I can finish writing “immigration analogy?” in my notes, she clarifies: “By the way, I thought that was a good example, what we just did, others could look at and say, ‘Oh, this is what we need to do to secure our nation’s border.’”

 

Whew!

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I just sat down at the internet, thinking I wanted to write a blog post to keep my momentum going, but I really did not want to spend too much time on it or get myself too riled up. Easier said than done. I was just about to admit defeat — everything I might want to blog about would take me at least 3 hours and 85 “fuck”s — but then Jezebel came through for me.

Yesterday in Central Park, the world’s smallest dog met the world’s tallest dog. And somebody took a picture.

That’s exactly my blogging speed right now.

Oh, but before I go, I also want to plug Rebecca Traister’s liveblog tonight, 7:30 ET at Pam’s House Blend. I started reading Big Girls Don’t Cry today, and so far,  it is everything I hoped for — which was a lot, because Rebecca is pretty fucking awesome.

That’s all I got.