As Kay said below, today is Fair Pay Day, and so it seems appropriate to share my thoughts.

I can always count on Rush Limbaugh for a healthy dose of slut-shaming rhetoric, and his commentary on Hillary Clinton's candidacy is no exception.

Yesterday on his radio show, Limbaugh argued that "feminists and women" feel they're owed a Clinton II presidency. I'll let him speak for himself (emphasis mine):

These women have paid their dues. They've been married two or three times; they've had two or three abortions; they've done everything that feminism asked them to do. They have cut men out of their lives; they have devoted themselves to causes and careers. And this -- the candidacy of Hillary Clinton -- is the culmination of all of these women's efforts. And if it gets stolen from them, in their minds -- not actually stolen, but if the country or if the Democrat [sic] Party rejects this wonderfully great, lying woman in exchange for a rookie, radical black guy who can't tell the time of day, they are going to be so miffed. They are going to be so upset.

Right. Because feminism is all about having abortions, eschewing men and getting a bunch of divorces. Looks like I've been slacking.

Click here for more of Limbaugh's enlightened pontification.

A new study finds that women who describe themselves as feminists are more forgiving than other women when assessing the attractiveness of women who are either very underweight or very heavy.

Feminists and nonfeminists tended to agree on which woman was the most attractive. But that woman was described by the researchers as somewhat underweight, suggesting that even feminists cannot fully avoid societal pressures to be thin.

Users are given missions, including securing plastic surgery at the game's clinic to give their dolls bigger breasts, and they have to keep her at her target weight with diet pills, which cost 100 bimbo dollars.

Breast implants sell at 11,500 bimbo dollars and net the buyer 2,000 bimbo attitudes, making her more popular on the site.

And bagging a billionaire boyfriend is the most desirable way to earn the all important "mula" or bimbo dollars. ...

The site says: "Bimbo dollars is 'the cabbage,' 'bread,' the 'mula' you'll need to buy nice things and to get by in bimbo world. To earn some bimbo cash you will have to (gasp) work or find a boyfriend to be your sugar daddy and hook you up with a phat expense account!"

The advice on feeding the dolls is even more spurious, encouraging them to feed the dolls "every now and then" even though they want to keep their Bimbos "waif thin."

Thank you, Charlotte Allen, for elucidating precisely how and why women are so “dim-witted.”  As an addition to your worthy screed, I’d like to offer a treatise on the superior contributions and tendencies of men that have uplifted our world as a whole.

First, lynch mobs.  Common to societies throughout the world, but perhaps most visible in the U.S., lynch mobs are absolutely brilliant.  Conducting a trial where evidence is presented and deliberated in an unbiased manner?  How stupid.  It’s so much smarter to get a group of men together to murder another man, woman or child (extra points if he or she is Black, Chinese or Native American) based on an accusation!  Let’s hear it for the men!

My gender studies education has taught me, if nothing else, to do my best to approach things in a gender-blind way. Thinking in that way, is it possible for me and other feminists of my generation to reconcile casting votes for female politicians if part of our vote is based on their gender?

I guess we're supposed to feel better that they also have a "control a man" model. Thanks, Urban Outfitters.

Jessica Valenti has a great post today on Feministing taking down the notion that the current resurgence of Religious-Right-inspired modesty is "revolutionary:"

Pop culture tells women that their bodies are public property and that they have to be sexual in order to be desirable and loved. Purity balls and the like tell women that their bodies are private property (though not our own of course--our bodies belong to our fathers, husbands, and the men in our life) and that they have to be virginal in order to be desirable and loved. In either case women's sexuality belongs to everyone but women. There's nothing counter-cultural or cutting edge about that.

Amen. Read the whole post here. And catch up on Feministing's coverage of the incredibly creepy purity ball phenomenon here.

Sarah Michelle Gellar (all you Buffy fanatics out there should be swooning) gave her husband Freddie Prinze, Jr. (if you stretch your memory, he's the one that hasn't done anything since that lame movie She's All That from middle school) the lamest anniversiary gift ever: She changed her name and presented him with her new driver's license.

Wow. Geller Prinze is going to give up her really famous name to preserve a really antiquated tradition. In the entertainment industry, this just doesn't make any sense. What's more, it seems really dumb that she waited until the fifth anniversiary.

I've never been a fan of name changing because it has this rather uncomfortable history of harking back to ownership. But apparently I'm in the minority on this one. Us's highly scientific poll indicates: 

The most common argument I've heard is that changing your name doesn't change your identity, but to me this is total crap. After all, what do you say when someone asks, "Who are you?" The other argument I get is that somehow changing your name makes you more of a family unit. Really? I thought being a family required an emotional commitement, not a legal technicality.

Clothing specifically marketed as “modest” is popular enough that Macy’s is starting to stock Shade, a modesty-driven clothing line created by two Mormon women in Utah. The clothes are fine, but the assumption that it’s a woman’s responsibility to dress modestly denigrates both genders.

Feministing.com editor Jessica Valenti points out that this "modesty vogue" is about more than dressing respectfully:

The notion of dressing modestly comes at least partly from the idea that men can't control themselves...By telling women that they have to dress a certain way to quell men's desires, modesty advocates are sending a clear message that the onus is on us to control men's sexual--and possibly violent--actions.

Standards like that reflect a larger "men are stupid/helpless" dialogue that's been popularized in contemporary culture. One of the modesty fans interviewed in the piece, a freshman at Brigham Young University, suggests that men aren’t capable of focusing on anything but boobs: "It's easier for boys to concentrate on your face and your personality when you are not revealing anything to them that is distracting to them.”

So men can run companies and countries, but they can’t concentrate on what a woman says if her ankles and shoulders are showing? I’m not buying it. Let’s give everyone a little more credit and stop pressuring women to use their wardrobes to control men.

Chris Hayes of The Nation has posted an elegant response to Katha Pollitt’s Learning to Drive. The “searingly, almost wince-inducingly, honest” passages are the source of some readers’ discomfort, he concludes—correctly, in my view.

Then he takes a look at the tensions surrounding any attempt to bring a feminist or left worldview into some semblance of harmony with American life today:

 

So you've got a trap. You can "live by your principles" and drop out and join a commune and thereby completely remove yourself from the levers of power that might alter all the unjust structures that rule society, or you can live in the world with the inevitable complications and compromises that entails and risk being called a hypocrite or a sellout. Though I'm a feminist, I'm lucky enough to be a male feminist, which means I'm off the hook from some of the more pernicious psychological mayhem this unavoidable contradiction often causes. But I still feel its weight. My ever-growing sports obsession, to name just one example, is a source of guilt, even shame. It feels like some secret endorsement of the patriarchy. Likewise my increasing desire for what my wife and I have taken to calling a Modicum of Bourgeois Comfort.

 

Because Katha Pollitt's book has generated a lot of discussion on the blog, it seems appropriate to post a link to her own defense of the NYTimes book review in which she says, "It is a strange experience, too, to have an obvious joke (the infamous "men are rats") quoted as my actual opinion." True, I haven't yet read Pollitt's book, but the degree of embarassment to which it was recieved was puzzling. It's as if some people didn't expect Katha Pollitt the Feminist to be Katha Pollitt the Human. Says Pollitt of the debate over her memoir:

Has feminism really become such a brittle, defensive, live-for-your-resume, never-let-them-see-you-cry kind of thing? If that's true, and I hope it isn't, the backlashers have truly won. They’ve gotten women to censor themselves to save society the trouble. Feminism, after all, was supposed to enlarge our sense of women's humanity, in all its messiness and contradiction and individual truth; it was supposed to connect women to each other, and to men, in more honest ways.

Re: Justin's post on reviews and reactions to Katha Pollitt's new book, Kay alerted me to a great piece up on Salon today that discusses our expectations and impressions of public figures' personal writing.

Rebecca Traister asks:

Is there ever a point at which it is a good idea for women, especially intellectual, politically engaged women, to strip off their clothes and caper naked as jaybirds in front of a line of would-be assassins?

It's a well-written, thoughtful look at what irks people when strong women write personal memoirs. Definitely worth reading, though the initial conversation is only loosely related.

Kaiser Family Foundation's Daily Women's Health Policy Report highlights a study conducted by the British Medical Journal that shows women who take oral contraceptives for less than 8 years are up to 12 percent less likely to get cancer. But taking oral contraceptives for more than 8 years can increase the risk by up to 22 percent.

There has been a lot of debate about the effect of hormonal birth control on women's overall health. Especially because when birth control was first introduced, the hormonal levels were too high and made many women sick. We've come a long way since 1960, though, and women have safely been using oral contraception for more than 40 years. In some cases, like the study above, it can actually be beneficial to women's health.

Samhita of Feministing asks, "Is smoking weed a feminist act?" She cites an article from Seattle's The Stranger about male-dominated mainstream pot culture in which, "Men are allowed to be lazy" but women are held to a more ambitious standard.

I have to agree, I never thought of pot as a male activity, probably because many of the women I knew in college were just as likely -- if not more likely -- to toke up as our male classmates. On the other hand, when pot is depicted in popular culture (Road Trip, Half Baked) it's depicted as a male activity. You almost never see women toking up on screen unless it's some kind of cheesy after-school special.

I think this may be one of many instances where popular culture inaccurately reflects real life. Thoughts?