Indexed of the Week

Video of the Day

I know, I know. It's from Noggin. But my daughter loves this video. And so do I.

2009 or 1889?

From Dear Prudence:

Dear Prudence,
I am a 16-year-old girl who works at a supermarket collecting shopping carts in the parking lot and lining them up near the entrance. Customers frequently express to me their disapproval of a girl pushing shopping carts. They've said: "Girls shouldn't be doing this," "Tell your boss he should be sending boys outside to do this," and "You're too cute to be doing this job." Some customers have tried to pry the shopping carts from my hands, and one man even threatened to talk to my boss. Surprisingly, the biggest perpetrators of sexist comments are women. By the end of the day, I feel awful. I want to tell the customers to stop when they say sexist things to me, but it's been my experience that adults get indignant when someone younger tries to set boundaries. Is there any way I can let people know to leave me alone and let me do my job?
—Leave the Girl Alone

Dear Leave,
You're right—you don't want to give lectures; you want to use your youthful charm to defuse the sexist commentary. You need to have several ready replies that you deliver with a disarming smile, such as, "With this job I get exercise and fresh air. Please don't complain to the manager, because then I might have to work the cash register!" "When I'm an adult, I'll have to do my own grocery shopping, so this is giving me plenty of training in pushing carts." "Someday we'll have a woman president. But for now, I'm blazing the trail for female shopping-cart
wranglers."

Because, ya know exerting too much energy can damage your womb and will sap your reproductive energies, virtually unsexing you. Oh wait, this isn't the Victorian era anymore. Silly me.

ETA:

h/t Meg'n

Giving Validity to Racism

This article, on Joe Wilson's outburst, and Jimmy Carter's claim that the outburst was "based on racism," and Wilson's son's defense of his father ("There is not a racist bone in my dad's body"), brings up an interesting point. And it's one that bears repeating. It may well be true that Carter is right, and that the words were racially motivated. It may also be true that Wilson's son is right. But the fact remains that, regardless of motive, behaving like this feeds racism. And if you're truly not a racist person, then you have an obligation to consider the impact your words will have regardless of what your motives are in the moment. That's just the way it works. As Dick Harpootlian (South Carolina's former Democratic Party chairman) notes:

"I think Joe's conduct was asinine, but I think it would be asinine no matter what the color of the president," said Dick Harpootlian, who has known Wilson for decades. "I don't think Joe's outburst was caused by President Obama being African-American. I think it was caused by no filter being between his brain and his mouth."
Harpootlian said he received scores of racial e-mails from outside South Carolina after he talked about the vote on Fox News.
"You have a bunch of folks out there looking for some comfort in their racial issues. They have a problem with an African-American president," he said. "But was he motivated by that? I don't think so. I respectfully disagree with President Carter, though it gives validity to racism." (Emphasis added)

And lending validity to racist views is something for which you do have to take responsibility. You just do.

Lies We Tell Our Kids, Part III

Click on the image to see it full-sized

Could this picture and story be endorsed by anyone that's ever actually been on a real farm? And children's books are full of these kinds of depictions of farms.

From

Also:

Clean Up is Fun! or Lies We Tell Our Kids and Lies We Tell Our Kids, Part II

ETA:

And while we're talking football...

This evening while I was simultaneously making dinner and entertaining a toddler and texting back and forth with my BFF about a Foucauldian critique of Mary Poppins, a segment came on NPR about the increased involvement of women in fantasy football. I obviously didn't catch the whole thing in detail, but from what I heard, there appeared to be two major claims. The first one was that women are more likely to be involved in fantasy football than previously because there are more tech options available. Like shiny pink electronic devices that allow them to track and control their fantasy teams on the go. Because everyone in the tech world knows that women will only be interested in techy objects that add convenience to their lives if they come in pepto-bismol pink. Right? OK, I actually added the part about the pink shiny objects. But still.

The second major theme I caught was that women don't approach fantasy football the way men do. Because men are all about winning when they play fantasy football, while women aren't. Women are just all about the pretty man-flesh. To illustrate this point they featured a couple of Sample Females™ faux-whisper-gushing about how hawt some player was, and then admitting in a confessorial tone that they generally don't choose their players based on the quality of their performance on the field. Or something like that. So here we have The Truth About Women and Men and Fantasy Football. All women. And all men. 'Cause all men are hetero and competitive and base all their choices on strategic reasoning alone. And women never behave this way and always behave in a frivolous, flighty manner. And they whisper and giggle while doing it. On their pretty pink mobile devices.

...deep breath...

Look, I'll agree that Brady Quinn is one of the finest examples of Man Candy out there. Mm-hmm. That boy is delicious. But there's no way he'd be my quarterback of choice if I actually had time to play fantasy football this year. And I'd bet the price of two Superbowl tickets that there are many other women out there playing fantasy football who aren't choosing their players based on how pretty they are either. But who wants to hear about women making smart, well-thought-out choices? Especially when it comes to such a manlyman sport? No, it's only newsworthy when they giggle and drool and type daintily on their pink mobile devices.

Gah! Damn the Patriots and their freakish good luck.



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What Make a "Birth Defect" a Defect?

Of the thousands of articles written on Caster Semenya, this one by Seth Borenstein takes a much more sensible approach - talk to medical experts who specialize in intersex conditions and former athletes who have been through the gender-testing circus. So far so good. But the title of the article: "The birth defect people don’t talk about" sort of brings me up short. In his defense, Borenstein uses the words of the experts he quotes when calling intersexuality a birth defect. And in their defense, the medical experts he consulted come from a discipline in which functionality is the measure of health and well-being. So in some regards it makes sense to refer to being intersexed as a defective condition. But I have a different sort of problem with this characterization.

It seems to me that intersexuality is a "defect" primarily because of our culture. If we weren't so insistent on forcing people to fit into one of two boxes, and if we didn't assume that childlessness is always a tragedy of epic proportions, then being born intersexed wouldn't be a defect. It seems like we could imagine a culture in which being intersexed was just another way of being - neither better nor worse. But using the phrase "birth defect" seems to reinforce the normativity that saturates our culture regarding gender. And this seems like something the medical experts in this field should be avoiding, given the fact that apparently they want to distance themselves from the historic secrecy and enforced surgical procedures and bullying of parents of intersexed children. This kind of treatment was based on the same normative framework that casts intersex conditions as birth defects. And moving away from that framework would benefit all of us, whether we realize it or not.

Land of giant mountains, and my loving, infuriating, compassionate, deeply religious, conservative, well-intentioned but often frustratingly narrow-minded extended family.

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Creepy hotel room art

Land of the giant ferns

From the land of the giant Hemlocks