Archive for the 'Dipshittery' Category

Walking away

Published at March 23, 2008 in Political theater, Female trouble and Dipshittery. 12 Comments

I posted this video over at Feministe, without comment, under the title “Just a wife.”

I made the mistake of thinking that the readers of a feminist blog might be interested in some pretty egregious sexism, because that’s the kind of thing that feminist blog readers are supposed to care about, right? I mean, dismissing a two-term U.S. Senator as “Mamie Eisenhower” and dismissing the trips she made as First Lady as no more than your travel agent does and then snickering about it with Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson is just the sort of thing that most feminists get upset about when they see it happening, right?

But I forgot. It’s not a big deal when the person being dismissed is Hillary Clinton.  It’s the Clinton Rules.

Silly me.  I thought these were things we were supposed to care about no matter who is the target.  God knows I’ve found myself defending Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham from sexist bullshit, so I think my bona fides might have been established.

I can’t do this anymore.

My head hurts

Published at January 16, 2008 in Food and Dipshittery. 3 Comments

And it’s my own fault.

See, I figured I’d switch from coffee to tea, in order to save myself the sugar that’s in the soymilk I put in my coffee (I take my tea straight up).  Since I ran out of coffee on Monday, I started with the tea yesterday.  And I felt fine.

But then, I got to today, and I had a headache even after finishing my tea.  So I decided to get another cup (I got the time right now, after all), and was idly reading the side of the tea box when I realized what the problem was: I’m drinking green and white tea.

Green tea and white tea don’t have a hell of a lot of caffeine (20-30 mg/cup for the green and 10-15 for the white).  Compare to black tea (100-120 mg/cup) and coffee (100-200 mg/cup).  For some reason, I had thought they had a lot more.

Jesus.  No wonder my head hurts.   OTOH, it’s not going to kill me to quit caffeine, and will probably be good for me, so we push on.

But the next couple of days are going to SUCK.

Welcome to the wonderful world of dating!

Published at December 22, 2007 in I will die alone eaten by my pets, Anxious masculinity, Vanity and Dipshittery. 20 Comments

Or, why Zuzu prefers to scratch the itch without getting emotionally involved at this point.

After reading some of the responses to this guest-post by Linnaeus over at Feministe, I decided that I’d give OK Cupid a try. It’s been a while since I’ve done any real online dating-dating, at least not since Nerve went from a buy-credits-to-send-emails model to a per-month-charge model, along with a really ugly site redesign. And since I don’t really get out all that much anymore, I’m not meeting a whole lot of men through activities (yes, I need to change that, for reasons apart from meeting men. I’m working on it). Mostly, I’ve been on, ahem, “alternative” personals sites for the aforementioned itch-scratching, but that’s been hit or miss, too. But at least there are no illusions, and few games, because everyone knows what you’re there for. Not that it keeps some guys from freaking out anyway, but that’s not my problem.

Anyway, for various reasons, I’m looking for a little something more. So in goes the toe.

I signed up Thursday, my profile got approved Friday, and I began filling it out and answering questions this morning. The first email I got was while I was still filling out the profile, and asked me why no picture. Had I known how that one would end up, I’d have ended it right there. But more about him later. Continue reading ‘Welcome to the wonderful world of dating!’

You know…

Published at December 13, 2007 in I will die alone eaten by my pets, Vanity and Dipshittery. 7 Comments

If you put up an ad on an online personals website, and you have an SO, the ethical thing to do is to disclose the fact that you have an SO, either in the ad or during the email exchange prior to the first meeting. 

Not to, you know, drop it casually during the first date and then get huffy about how it shouldn’t really matter because it isn’t really serious even though we live together, and anyway, you never asked.

Also not cool: the “Now that you mention it” disclosure about an SO when a potential date is telling you about the failure of another date to disclose an SO, coupled with the insistence that I said so in my ad! even though the only hint as to the existence of such a person is that ”Prefer not to say” is given as marital status.  Which is the default option. 

Another 20-year-old who thinks he’s got it all figured out

Published at November 23, 2007 in Lousy hypocrites, Religious nuts, Pantysniffing, Woman-Hating and Dipshittery. 16 Comments

Time to create a “fuckwit college columnists” tag. Because, really, who deserves it more than Ryan Haecker, writing for the Daily Texan?

Ryan certainly starts with a bang:

Dresses epitomize womanhood in the Western world.

Grab the popcorn, kids! There’s gonna be a show!

Such has been the case since the western man adopted pants to replace the tunic in the sixth century (an aspect of the West’s Germanic barbarian heritage). Dresses allow us to differentiate between the silhouettes of men and women on restroom signs. Dresses are the indelible image of womanhood because of the symbolic nature of pants and dresses. If all fashions are symbolic, dresses in particular symbolize womanhood by more fully embodying the ideal of a true lady, the objective understanding of what men find attractive in the fairer sex: passivity, domesticity, childrearing, coital love, piety and fertility. These defining aspects of womanhood are immutable. We all tacitly reaffirm these attributes in our attempts to find a partner. Flirtation and courtship are reaffirmations of what it means to be masculine and feminine because it is only by fulfilling the obligation of our form that we can attract the opposite sex.

Wow. Just…wow.

Dresses are the epitome of womanhood because they allow us to differentiate between the silhouettes of men and women on restroom signs. That’s deep, man.

Really, you have to love a guy who switches from immutability to change back to immutability all within a couple of sentences. Dresses have been the epitome of womanhood, but only since the sixth century. Yet they’re an immutable sign of femininity, because pants — which have only been around since the sixth century — are an immutable sign of masculinity. Dresses symbolize fucking and piety all at the same time — maybe nun’s habits get this guy hot.

But that last sentence really amuses me. Let’s see it again:

Flirtation and courtship are reaffirmations of what it means to be masculine and feminine because it is only by fulfilling the obligation of our form that we can attract the opposite sex.

I dunno about you, but I can flirt just fine in pants. But this whole “obligations of our form” business makes me chuckle — because I can’t help thinking of that scene in The King and I where the children of the court keep trying to look up Anna’s dress because they think English women must be shaped like their dresses since they don’t wear pants like other women.

You might say these things were once true but times have changed. Not so. The nature of sexual attractiveness in women is objective, immutable and incontrovertible because it is directly related to the constant and unchanging physiology of men and women. What men find attractive in women is fixed because the physiology of humanity has been relatively unchanged. In this way, the ideal form of femininity is also unchangeable and without regard for cultural context or time period. What men find attractive in women - the form of a true lady - is objectively identifiable, just as it was in the time of Nebuchadnezzar. In short, femininity is sexy, and sexy is timeless and universal.

Um, Ryan? Women’s bodies may very well be the same as they’ve ever been, but it doesn’t follow that a) what men find attractive in women is immutable and unchanging; or b) that therefore dresses are the only thing that’s feminine and/or sexy. Because, as you’ve stated in paragraph 1, in the West, there’s only been a pants/dresses distinction since the sixth century, and even if you’re a Young Earth Creationist, that’s just a drop in the bucket, history-wise.
Like all opinion pieces, there must be someone whose opinion Ryan is implicitly if not outright refuting — the villain of the story, so to speak. And this is where he busts out the villain. Who could it be?

Wait for it…. wait for it….

What’s not sexy is feminism (not to be confused with femininity), which is directly responsible for the disappearance of our beloved dresses and the adoption of pants by the “new woman.”

That’s right! You can blame ANYTHING on feminism! Continue reading ‘Another 20-year-old who thinks he’s got it all figured out’

Rejecting the frames

Published at November 18, 2007 in Misbegotten health care, I see fat people and Dipshittery. 10 Comments

Jill recently wrote a terrific post taking feminist fat-haters to task. She was responding to the comments at this post at Feministing, in which the point of Jessica’s post — that the fat-shaming and abusive behavior depicted in a commercial for a Denver gym is unacceptable and the kind of thing nobody would accept if it were directed at (almost) any other group — got lost very quickly as soon as someone calling herself “raginfem” showed up, and she WAS JUST CONCERNED about the HEALTH of all those UNHEALTHY FAT PEOPLE who MUST NOT KNOW THEY’RE FAT and therefore CAN’T KNOW that they’re UNHEALTHY, and they MUST BE ADVISED that they’re FAT and UNHEALTHY because FAT IS UNHEALTHY and raginfem is CONCERNED. Concerned, I say. IT’S JUST that she’s CONCERNED ABOUT THEIR HEALTH. Especially THE HEALTH OF THE CHILDREN. Who have NOBODY WHO WILL TELL THEM THE TRUTH, THAT THEY’RE FAT.

And, of course, it’s not like nobody’s ever heard that one before, and we were off to the races. Continue reading ‘Rejecting the frames’

Gosh, I’m sorry you don’t feel special anymore

Published at November 3, 2007 in Sports, I see fat people, Woman-Hating and Dipshittery. 10 Comments

From the “Everything can be blamed on a woman” files: Oprah Winfrey is single-handedly responsible for ruining the marathon.

The piece is an extended, and dishonest, whine about how they let just anybody run marathons nowadays, instead of special, dedicated men who did it for the thrill of competition and the frisson of self-denial — oh, and Americans aren’t winning marathons like they used to, which is Oprah’s fault.

The American runners of that era were propelled by a “double wave” of self-abnegating philosophies, theorizes Tom Derderian, who trained with Rodgers and Salazar at the Greater Boston Track Club. They were “heirs both to the warrior mentality of their World War II fathers and the new consciousness of the 60s and 70s,” he told author John Brant for the book “Duel in the Sun,” an account of the 1982 Boston Marathon, considered the last great American distance race.

And did I mention the generous helping of fat-shaming?

I had to give up marathoning just as everyone else was getting into it. Not just the rest of the running world. Everyone. The mid-1990s gave us two new long-distance heroes. The first was Oprah Winfrey. If Frank Shorter inspired the first running boom, Oprah inspired the second, by running the Marine Corps Marathon. And it was a much bigger boom. This was not a spindly 24-year-old Yalie gliding through Old World Munich. This was a middle-aged woman hauling her flab around the District of Columbia. If Oprah could run a marathon, shame on anyone who couldn’t. . . .

Once the supreme test for hardened runners, the marathon became a gateway into the sport. Soon, gravel paths were crowded with 5-mile-an-hour joggers out to check “26.2 miles” off their life lists. Team in Training, which raises money for leukemia research, promised to turn loafers into marathoners in 20 weeks. I met a lawyer who started running because, “They say if you can run a marathon, you can do anything!” The marathon was no longer a competition. It was a self-improvement exercise. . . .

Like Oprah, Bingham deserves praise for luring insecure, overweight novices off their couches and into running shoes.

God forbid those flabby, overweight loafers everybody’s always after to exercise might just do so, and do it in public. I mean, don’t they know that *real* runners are trying to get past their fat asses on those gravel paths in public parks?

In the last 15 years, the Chicago Marathon field has increased tenfold, to 45,000. But with this change in the running culture, the average finishing time for men has dropped from 3:32 to 4:15 — not far from the Oprah Line, or my own performance.

Note that he’s conflating a few things in the piece: the lack of American men winning marathons and the average time of American men running marathons. Yeah, if you get a bigger field, with more first-time runners, you’re going to get slower average times, for a couple of reasons: one, more first-time runners means more slower runners, which will bring down the average; and two, in a gigantic field, it’s very hard to run at any sort of pace until the field starts breaking up; it could take you half an hour just to reach the starting line. If you’re in the back of the pack, you’re not going to be setting any world records. However, that’s why they start the elite runners up front — and those elite runners continue to set world records, course records and personal records even as the average finish times of the overall field get slower. That more American men aren’t at the top of the heap of elite runners has a lot less to do with the democratization of the marathon in America and a lot more to do with the quality of international runners, particularly the Africans. Who, after all, weren’t running the Boston Marathon much in the 70s.

By the way, did you happen to notice that there’s a sizable gap between 1982, when the “last great American distance race” happened, and the mid-90s, when Oprah supposedly ruined marathoning by making it accessible to middle-aged flabsters? Yeah, I thought you would. In a case of burying the lede, McClelland acknowledges that maybe Oprah and the Penguin Brigade aren’t actually primarily responsible for the decline in American (men’s) marathon times that began long before they got involved:

You can’t just blame the Penguin Brigade for messing up the curve. The last year an American-born man won a major marathon? 1983. (We have produced one first-class female marathoner — Deena Kastor has won in Chicago and London — although we’re still waiting for another Joan Benoit Samuelson, gold medalist at the first Olympic women’s marathon, in 1984.) The running bum — that post-collegiate dropout who works in a shoe store so he can train 100 miles a week — has almost disappeared. Despite the fact that marathon fields are the size of Sauron’s host, more guys broke two and a half hours in the 1980s.

It could just be that the running bum has moved onto other sports, or has figured out that if just anybody can run a marathon, why not up the ante and get into triathalons, particularly the Ironman, which has not just a marathon, but challenging swimming and biking components? Or it could be that, what with the professionalization of the sport, those running bums have sponsors. Plus, it ain’t as easy to live on a shop clerk’s salary anymore, what with the cost of proper equipment, travel and race fees.

Oh, and McClellan shows his ignorance in another way: his assumption that last month’s Chicago Marathon was stopped because of novice runners:

Last month’s Chicago Marathon had to be shut down mid-race, because undertrained five- and six-hour marathoners couldn’t handle that much time in the 85-degree heat.

Actually, that kind of heat is a danger to *any* runner, no matter how well-trained, as Frank Shorter discussed in this piece (and since McClelland mentioned the 1984 Olympic Women’s marathon, he can’t possibly have forgotten Gabriela Andersen-Schiess, who staggered into Olympic Stadium, dehydrated and suffering from heat exhaustion, and literally fell across the finish line. I’m still a little traumatized by that). The issue with Chicago was not that novice runners couldn’t handle the heat because they were untrained; it was that they were still on the course after the temperature began to climb. The elite runners finished well before it became 85 degrees.

Well, that was weird.

Published at October 9, 2007 in work work work, Vanity and Dipshittery. 15 Comments

I’ve grumbled here about my job before. To give you a fuller picture of what’s going on, I work at a tiny firm, three partners (T, D and J) and two associates (A and Z) (including me). They mostly bring in contract attorneys as associates, and hire them on after some unspecified time if they work out.

They often don’t work out. The last new contractor who came on board lasted a day. That’s right, one day.

A’s actually been there for 3 years, but she’s put in her notice and is looking for work. She’s had it. So have I. Plus, I know when she goes, I’ll be even more in the line of fire.

The problem is D. D’s what we in the law game call a screamer. They’re everywhere in the practice of law, and their screaming is not helped by the structure of private firms, which run on a partnership model (law firms can’t incorporate). What that means for the unfortunate associate is that because you are an income generator, and because any income you generate in excess of what it costs to pay your salary goes into the partner’s pocket, partners have an incentive to work you like a dog and treat you like shit. Many of them at least avoid the “treat you like shit” part of the equation. Then there are the screamers.

Another problem with the partnership model is that partners are also income generators, so they don’t like to spend a whole lot of time on learning how to actually be good managers (on the plus side, the emphasis on billing pretty much eliminates the kinds of useless departmental meetings that seem rampant in academia).

Now, in larger firms (or at least firms up to a certain size), there are people hired to do the managing, and even if there’s one screamer in a department, you often have the chance to work with another person. Why do screamers get to stick around? Simple: they generate clients. It’s often the ones who are most unpleasant who have the biggest book of business.

So, D’s the screamer at my firm. T is perfectly pleasant, but ineffectual at dealing with D. They’re both the named partners, and if one’s going to run roughshod over you and the other just doesn’t want to deal… J’s great to work with, but he mostly does his own work and rarely has any work for associates to do.

Thus, you work either for D or for T. I’ve been pretty lucky, in that I’ve worked mostly with T. A? Not so lucky. And D’s getting really, really bad with her. What I think finally made things break for her was when her mother had to go into a nursing home in another state and D started complaining about how much time she was spending on the phone with her. And then he started attacking her on her voice and her personal appearance. Like, viciously.

Since I found out A was leaving, I stopped thinking that maybe I could tough it out if they hired me permanently and gave me benefits and more money. T asked me months ago to work only 35 hours a week, max, and that’s put a big dent in my ability to pay my bills. I thought that if they paid me what the agency was getting, I’d be fine.

But after what D started doing to A? There’s not enough money in the world. Because once she goes, I’m next.

I started putting my resume out there. I’ll do asbestos work if it comes to that, you know? Anything to not have to work with him, and at least they pay well because they can’t find people with the right skills and no conflicts. Nothing yet, but it’s a weird time of year, with the month of Jewish holidays and the new first-years starting. I kept things quiet, though.

And I’ve been swallowing the problems I’ve had with D. I’ve been trying to work around them. When he’s condescending to me (which is in just about every interaction), I keep my mouth shut. When he says he just wants a couple of cases and an oral report, I give him a memo, because he wants memo-level detail. When he refuses to give me the kind of detail I need to do the job, and then berates me for not researching the issues he refused to tell me about, I say clearly that I was not asked to research that, but if he will give me the time and necessary facts, I will be happy to do it. I haven’t gone to T with any of this, because what is he going to do?

Well, today it all sort of leaked out. As I mentioned above, T’s asked me to limit myself to 35 hours a week. Since he likes to pop into my office at 6 or 630 in the evening, I’ve adjusted my starting time to 1030 (trending toward 11 many days). In any event, nobody’s given me a time to start, and since a) I get paid only for the hours I work and don’t get paid when I’m not there; and b) nobody’s said a damn thing to me in seven months, I figured I was fine.

Today, when I got in, D called me into his office. I’d already been having some issues with him over some research I did for him (he tends to flip out when you either ask for more detail or to see the documents, or when you bring up issues that your research turns up that he doesn’t want to hear about. God forbid I cover all the bases, and all the ways our client could get screwed — certainly, I’ll be blamed for NOT bringing it to his attention should he file papers based on my research that don’t mention this issue). I figured he wanted to either have me do something different or move up the time he wanted the brief I was writing done (that’s another favorite tactic).

No, he wanted to yell at me for not getting in at a time he never asked me to arrive at in the first place. And threaten me with termination. And suggest that the firm had “carried” me when things were slow and I got paid anyway because they wanted me available.

Which, well, what the fuck ever. The “carrying” thing is bullshit, because they bill out my time at a multiple of four times what it actually costs to employ me (including agency fees), so unless we’re talking weeks at a time, I’m making them a profit. It’s a common theme with threatening partners, though (I suppose they think lawyers can’t do math).

But of course I didn’t say that. And I found out from the paralegals and office manager that he’d already reamed out that he was on the warpath that morning.

What set me off, though, was when T came in my office to say that I should be getting in at 930. And I kind of lost it with him. Told him that I was confused, because T had told me that he wanted me to work no more than 35 hours a week, and since he liked to come into my office to discuss stuff in the early evening, I adjusted my hours accordingly.  Besides, if they’d wanted me to come in at 930, they could have mentioned it once in 7 months instead of saying nothing and then screaming at and threatening me.

T backed off almost immediately, since he’s all about the smoothing ruffled feathers, and admitted that he didn’t really care, and he’d, yes, put me in the position of choosing to come in late and leave late.  But then he started making excuses for D, saying he was under stress because he had a couple of matters that were very active.  And I just laughed bitterly, and started unloading.  Didn’t know how much longer I could take being talked to like that, it was unprofessional the way D yelled at A right out in the hall where everyone could hear, he was arbitrary and condescending, he didn’t credit me with knowing anything even though I’ve been practicing law for 10 years.  There were tears, even, just from releasing frustration.

And then T did something completely unexpected: he very calmly suggested that I call up the agency and see if I could get a new assignment; he’d give me a good reference, and maybe I should tell off D on my way out the door.

How…odd.

I declined the offer to tell off D, since I know it won’t do anything except piss him off enough to take it out on the paralegals, who don’t need that kind of shit.  I did tell T that he has a problem on his hands, and that my leaving might be the best thing for me, but it wasn’t going to solve his turnover problem.

And after T left me (with a lot of admonitions to calm down), I saw him heading over to D’s office.  Later, when D came to see me about another matter (and once again, completely failed to give me credit for having the capability to do the simplest tasks), he was almost contrite.  Almost.

I won’t tell him off when I leave.

But maybe I’ll moon him.

Because I R SMRT

Published at September 24, 2007 in Sports, Vanity and Dipshittery. 17 Comments

It just occurred to me that if my knee feels fine when I wake up, then sort of irritable after a run, IT JUST MIGHT BE A GOOD IDEA to take an anti-inflammatory and perhaps make use of an icepack afterwards.

Possibly.

Durr.

Holy. Crap.

Published at September 5, 2007 in Race and Dipshittery. 66 Comments

I can’t believe I just read this. From a thread on Feministing responding to a cute video of Jessica’s puppy Monty, in which several people excoriated Jessica for getting Monty from a breeder, and demanded she justify her decision because she’s a feminist and dog breeding is somehow a core feminist issue:

There is absolutely no need to breed animals for profit, be them for pets or meat. It’s slavery and it’s wrong.

I just — that’s offensive to me on so many levels; I simply can’t imagine how that feels to someone whose ancestors survived the Middle Passage only to be sold at auction and kept in bondage for the rest of their lives; someone whose relatives in living memory were denied civil rights, equal access to education, and subject to lynching for nothing more than looking at a white person funny.

That’s just so willfully blindly privileged, and tin-eared, and utterly cruel, and racist all at the same time. But I suppose, given PETA’s history of racist and anti-Semitic ads, where images of black slaves and Jewish inmates at extermination camps were set alongside images of cattle going down a chute or chickens in battery cages, that this is not so uncommon an attitude among the animal-rights set. From Steve’s* post about Ingrid Newkirk’s dismissive response to the objection of James Cameron, the director of America’s Black Holocaust Museum to PETA’s “Slavery” campaign: (my emphasis)

Remember, [Dr.] Cameron almost died at the hands of a lynch mob. They were screaming “get the nigger” and had yanked him out of his cell. Only the lone voice of a woman saying “leave that boy alone” saved his life. But this harrowing experience means nothing to Newkirk, his pain is irrelevant to her. I thought I had seen cruel responses to Mrs. Sheehan. But this tops them. By a mile.

It’s the same kind of ignorant cruelty Cindy Sheehan is facing. Newkirk is simply incapable, like most fanatics, of seeing any side but her own. And she is blind to the outrage this will cause. She has no idea of how her response is not going to go over with black people. Even her explaination is as tone deaf as George Bush. That may go over well with her donors and allies when she makes a mistake, but it will fall on deaf ears with black people. I dare her to defend this on any black radio show, or even Air America.

Now, not only is PETA refusing to apologize, as they did with the Holocaust ad, they intend to continue the tour, well until they’re denounced on Tom Joyner and from church pulpits. To compare black people to animals is the gravest insult a white person can do, and no matter how “liberal” PETA says it is, this will dog it until their tour is cancelled. Because she is fucking with something she does not understand in any way, shape or form. Angry isn’t the word. I’d be surprised if Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton aren’t outside PETA HQ at the end of the week.

So, given that this is the mentality of PETA’s leadership, do you think it’s fair to call them racist, now?

Somehow, it’s even crueler when the animal in question is not a steer being led to the slaughterhouse, but a well-loved puppy from a responsible breeder.

I’m just gobsmacked.

* God, I miss Steve.