Sweethearts make better mommas

I always naively think that the British Times is above your common-level misogyny, but it seems I’m wrong again. A piece today on Sandra Bullock’s legal battle to secure her husband’s custody of his daughter is misogyny-laden from start to finish. You see, Bullock is ‘America’s Sweetheart’. The mother of said daughter is a porn star. Ergo, Bullock would be a good mother, and the porn star – the whore, the slut – must be a bad mother. Dammit, the Times author didn’t even try to cover up his blatant bias. Observe:

America’s sweetheart, the actress Sandra Bullock, is being dragged into an unpleasant legal battle to prove that she is a better parent than her husband’s former wife, the star of more than 100 pornographic movies.

…

His ex-wife Janine Lindemulder, 40, star of such video titles as Mrs Behavin’, Sleeping Booty and Dyke Diner, disagrees. She has just been released from a six-month prison sentence for tax evasion.

…

The tattooed blonde remains in a halfway house in Los Angeles until the end of this year when she can seek custody of her daughter.

Now, it has to be noted that the rest of the piece does not paint Bullock’s husband in a favourable light, but none of what he has done previously (even leaving his seven-month pregnant wife) means that he could possibly be a bad parent. You see, boys will be boys! But women who enjoy sex, who have sex because it’s their choice to do so, or who are involved in the sex industry are, de facto, bad people. You didn’t hear it here first.

A Brief History of Corporate Whining

Via Alas, a blog.

It’s funny ’cause it’s true.

South African rape survey (BBC)

I don’t think there is one word I could add to this story to make its message any plainer or any more disturbing. These are the cruel realities of life in South Africa.

Some key statements:

• One in four South African men questioned in a survey said they had raped someone and nearly half admitted having attacked more than one victim.
• … practices such as gang rape were common because they were considered a form of male bonding.
• A recent trade union report said a child was being raped in South Africa every three minutes with the vast majority of those cases going unreported.

What?! How long has this been going on, and why has there been no outrage about this before? And why?!

The researcher suggested that:

“… it’s partly rooted in our incredibly disturbed past and the way that South African men over the centuries have been socialised into forms of masculinity that are predicated on the idea of being strong and tough and the use of force to assert dominance and control over women, as well as other men.

Really? Can this adequately be attributed to a patriarchal society and the on-going prevalence of negative attitudes towards women, or do these statistics require a phenomenon all of their own? I can certainly see her point, but this theory still doesn’t explain these staggering statistics when men all over the world have been socialised into those very same forms of masculinity. (And I question, by the way, what a ‘form of masculinity’ is in the first place.) No, there’s something much more sinister afoot here, and I wish I understood what it was. But more than that, and infinitely more importantly, I wish that somebody, somewhere was doing something about it. The responses in this piece indicate to me a complacency about these crimes and an acceptance that this is just how things are in South Africa. I cannot get my head around this at all. And I’m fucking disgusted.

Full piece behind the cut.

In brief: yer all savages

I’m not one to defend the general British public (see forthcoming entry on culture when it, erm, forthcomes) but I feel that I should get my spake in, albeit briefly, about this.

BBC Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman has described the British public as “barbarians” who are too busy working to find time to appreciate art.

I’m not a huge fan of Paxman’s, it has to be said, for I find him more much more offensive and condescending than I do challenging and interesting, and the above strikes me as a typical statement of his.

Here are a few simple sums for you Mr. Paxman: earnings of £XX,000 per year, X children, £XXX,000 mortgage, and £XX,000 in car loans/ student loans/ credit card and other debts don’t leave many of us with whole lot of Xs to play around with. We work all the time, just to make our ends meet. And you wonder why we plebeians spend all of our time working and little of our time perusing art galleries? We’re flipping exhausted!

I would have thought it was f-ing obvious, even to a snob like you who makes considerably more Xs than the rest of us put together, and who doesn’t have to worry at all about where his next paycheck comes from or goes to.

Doctor Woefully Awful

It’s not often I break out the old blog these days, although I certainly have a few things in mind that I want to blog about. Let’s start with Saturday night’s Doctor Who. Oh dear God, yes, let’s start there.

I was excited for Doctor Who’s return at the weekend for, with all its faults, it’s a damn good show. And the good outweighs the bad. There’s been lots of coverage, of course, about the new Doctor and about David Tennant’s departure from the role, but I’m rather more interested in changes in the writing team. Now, all due credit to Russell T Davies (RTD) for resurrecting Who after its 15 year break, but my respect for him largely ends there. RTD cannot write. He’s the head writer of a major television production, and he just cannot write. Something isn’t right. Yes, many will argue that if he’s given the time to think through his stories, and he takes the time to scribe coherent ideas, he’ll manage to come up with the goods. But I disagree. I’ve seldom enjoyed an episode penned by RTD, and Saturday night was no exception. Let’s summarise what happened. We had a wooden companion who we were presumably supposed to like, a handful of vacant and pointless characters who served no purpose other than filling out the numbers, and a sloppy story premise which involved – as it always does in RTD’s episodes – the end of the world. Again. Groan. The first ten minutes were wholly derivative of Midnight (another RTD story), while the remaining 50 were a mix of unimpressive special effects and RTD’s trademark ‘cryptic’ prophecies. There was little discernible story arc and there was even less to engage the viewer and make them care. So the world was going to end again or something. Isn’t it always Russell? The whole thing was just embarrassing. I was bored out of my mind.

One poor episode I could forgive, of course – God knows we’re used to them by now with RTD – but my concern is for David Tennant. He’s been the best Doctor, in my opinion (and he’s had some hard acts to follow) and I feel bad for him that this – this inconsequential, lazy rubbish – will be how he finishes out his days in Who. Tennant acts his little socks off every single time he’s on camera, and he himself must feel dejected that he has this nonsense to work with. I look forward to Steven Moffat taking over the writing team shortly, for he is very talented and he never fails to please, but it will be too late for David Tennant, alas. He’s just going to have to put up with these horrendous stories in the meantime and hope that his fans know that he’s better than them. This fan certainly does.

TfTd

I always listen to Radio 4 in the mornings on my way to work. I’m in that demographic now, don’t you know. I’m nearly always leaving as ‘Thought for the Day‘ begins. For those of you unfamiliar with Thought for the Day it is, as the link says, ‘reflections from a faith perspective on issues and people in the news’. I think it would be more accurately described as patronising and sanctimonious reflections from God-bothers full of their own self-importance, but anyway. I find it insufferable.

This morning the Reverend Doctor Middle Class and Vaguely Disgruntled was doing his piece. He started off by recounting a tale of how he tried to help a young lady with her suitcase onto the bus. She declined his offer, and brushed his hand away when he offered again. This reaction, he blamed, on women’s constant quest for equality. If it wasn’t for the equality gained so far, he implied, women wouldn’t think twice about accepting help from a man. He tried to redeem himself, of course, by talking then about the disparities in earnings of men and women – and in doing so ‘approved’ of our pesky feminism – and then came back to the quandary of women not allowing men to help them when they clearly need it.

Seriously, Reverend Doctor Middle Class and Vaguely Disgruntled? Really? If I give you the benefit of the doubt for a moment, and believe that you genuinely thought that telling a story about a woman ‘in need’ would be a good introduction to a discussion about equal pay rights, I have to tell you that you’re a little naive. I know a lot of women – and I’m one myself – and I’m pretty sure that most of us don’t spend our time declining offers of help from men because we’re obsessed with equality. If you really need to know, I rather think that we women feel that it’s intrusive to be approached by strange men offering help (or anything else), that it can often be intimidating to be approached in such a manner, and that we decline because we feel uncomfortable and we would rather not have you near us or our suitcases. Is that unfortunate? Of course it is. In an ideal world, we would all be helping each other carry our butterflies and rainbows around; in a realistic world, we react as we do because we’re conditioned to do so by what we see around us. It’s got nothing to do with equality, or its lack.

But I’m not going to give you the benefit of the doubt. I think that for all your talk of equal pay for the sexes and of narrowing the employment gap, you think we women have got too much equality already. You gave your game away when you mentioned that ungrateful young woman twice in three minutes. You’re thinking, I’m sure, that she should have been happy to take help from you, the Big Man, instead of trying to assert her independence when she was so clearly in need. But the world, thankfully, doesn’t work your way any more. Perhaps the next time you pipe up on Thought for the Day, you’ll remember that it’s not all about you, and that women don’t spend  their waking moments trying to figure out how to get their equality points higher at the expense of people like you.

All dem Oirish sing lovely so dey do

Some people are horribly naive. And they clearly have no idea that they’re being offensive. Take Rose McGowan for example.

Hollywood actress Rose McGowan has said she would have joined the IRA if she lived in Belfast during the Troubles.

McGowan stars in Fifty Dead Men Walking, an adaptation of IRA informer Martin McGartland’s autobiography.

“My heart just broke for the cause,” she told a news conference ahead of the film’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Ach, her wee heart just broke for the cause (so it did). She ‘would have joined the IRA’ had she lived in Belfast during the Troubles (so she would). Well ain’t that just lovely!

Has this woman ever read a newspaper in her life? Has she any idea what ‘the cause’ was even about? Did she ever even set foot on Irish soil during the Troubles she romanticises so much? What does she think we Catholics in Northern Ireland were doing? Sitting around, signing our Irish tunes, drinking our cups of tea, and smacking the odd Protestant around the head? For ‘the cause’. No, we were hearing every single day of yet another bombing or shooting, we were being stopped by the army every time we left our homes, we were checking under our cars for bombs, we were being evacuated from our homes and schools, and we were wondering when the hell it was all going to end. And if it would end before one of our loved ones got killed. That’s what it was like in Northern Ireland, Miss McGowan. That’s what ‘the cause’ meant to most of us. And the Republican terrorists were no better or worse than the Loyalist terrorists. So why don’t you just take your ridiculous romantic Hollywood notions of the cute wee Oirish and their sweet wee passions and grow the fuck up.

[Lazy blogging] McCain

From popbitch:

For anyone that didn’t know. John McCain was at the bottom of his military class at Annapolis, but still got to pilot a fighter plane due to his father’s connections. He is the son and the grandson of admirals. He finished 894 [out] of 899 in his graduating class. Despite crashing five aircraft, John McCain was never disciplined. And son-of-single-mother Obama is, of course, the privileged elitist.

Well of course. *rolls eyes*

Celebrity building spawnage

This has been on my mind ever since the newest celebrity babies (the Jolie-Pitt/ Pitt-Jolie twins) joined our sorry world. Children as accessories, then. I’m thinking of the adoptees from third-world countries, in the main.* I’m also thinking of the likes of the following (from popbitch of all places).

We thought in the West the days of child slavery were, thankfully, over. Yet for many of the children of celebrities, a life born into slavery even from the first weeks of life, beckons.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt waited barely three weeks before turning their twins into cash cows, putting them to work in front of the cameras for a multi-million pound fee. No matter that the fee was for a good cause, it was their children who had to earn it.

OK! magazine’s repost to Hello’s Brangelina exclusive this week was to bring out its big guns, in the shape of Jordan. Her daughter, Princess, got to celebrate her first birthday by helping her “uncle” Richard Desmond sell copies of his magazine. Jordan’s willingness to tell the world that her one-year old daughter never wears the same things twice and has a hundred pairs of shoes ensured OK! had as many column inches as Hello.

And in LA, the Beckhams’ continuing quest for even more fame saw David pick up an award at the Teen Choice Awards. And helping make sure he got the most coverage from the event, his three boys, in matching outfits (and haircuts just like their Dad, to ram the point home) also had to get up on stage and act up, like performing monkeys.

Surely as concerned, right-thinking citizens we should support the work of the anti-child slavery movement by shunning these harsh taskmasters?

Children there, building celebrity cred since 1998. And you all thought it was about shoes and handbags. Well it’s not. It’s about dressing your children up in finery that costs a small fortune, parading them in front of cameras looking cute and just that little bit precocious, and selling pictures of them to whoever bids the highest. It has a sort of pimping feel to it, frankly.

—-

* Imma gonna save them there little brown babies from sure peril for what would they do without us selfless and beautiful Americans! I don’t want an ugly one, mind. Or a fat one. Or one with eyes too far apart. Or one with too much hair. Or one with too little hair. Or one with strange eyes. Or one that’s too big. Or one that’s ugly. Have I mentioned that already?

Repost of another entitled ‘The Audacity of Bodily Autonomy’

I’m still all out of my own eloquence and inspiration for posting, so I’m going to utilise someone else’s again. This is a post from someone who has no end of eloquence. She’s right on the button.

Surgeon sued for giving anesthetized patient temporary tattoo. The tattoo was not at all medical in nature. She had surgery for a herniated disc and the next morning discovered a rose tattoo had been placed on her abdomen below her panty line. The doctor doesn’t deny doing it. In fact he claims he does this with all his patients to lift their spirits after surgery. Now, the really interesting (and disturbing) thing about this situation is how people have reacted to this woman’s decision to sue. The comments on this article are just the tip of the iceberg. Many people seem to be outraged by this woman being willing to sue this doctor for marking her (however temporarily) in her pelvic area without her permission.

We’ve all gone the rounds about the politics of choice as it applies to reproduction. But the idea that women’s bodies are public property doesn’t stop there. Catcalling, comments on weight, comments on hair or makeup from strangers are all just symptoms of a larger societal delusion that women’s bodies are a commodity first. Somehow we’ve gotten stuck in this idea that a woman’s valuing of her body as a part of her self comes second because her first role is to belong to the world at large. Women who refuse to accept that paradigm and insist on being recognized as people first whether it be by yelling back at catcallers, refusing to let strangers touch them, or filing suit when they feel they’ve been violated are then castigated for having the temerity to think that they can dictate what happens to their bodies. Apparently we’re just supposed accept these ‘lesser’ intrusions and not take steps to reclaim that sense of safety because nice girls know their place and don’t delude themselves that they have a right to feel safe and comfortable.

Well, I’m with the women who yell back, who walk away, who press charges and file lawsuits. Because it is past time we got past this idea that being nice = being a willing victim that never complains. I don’t want to live in a reality where people think marking an unconscious woman without her permission is a-okay because it’s temporary, or he didn’t mean any harm, or there’s no proof that he ‘actually molested her’ so she shouldn’t seek legal recourse. I know I’m talking crazy, but wouldn’t be nice to live in a world where women were viewed as people first? Where people didn’t blame the victim, but instead celebrated her willingness to fight back?

Well said.

The comments on the original piece are, well, typical.