Christian Leftist

To be fair, I coudn’t not post about the racism Obama canvassers are experiencing without mentioning the rampant sexism going on in the media against the Clinton campaign. Granted, I think the racist behavior rampant in her campaign sapped a lot of the sympathy from those of us who don’t didn’t feel strongly for one candidate or the other in the beginning, but the number of people on the sidelines has dwindled to a scant few, so we or they don’t matter as much anymore, and that doesn’t mean we should just let the treatment of her slip by us because we’re mad about HER behavior.

So, with that being said, the Washington Post has an article out today, entitled “Clinton Puts Up a New Fight.”

Oh, and I was Googling “rust belt voters” and found some good linkage on both the Obama canvassers face racism subject and the topic of misogyny and Hillary:

What I wanted to say about white rust-belt voters but couldn’t

There aren’t many examples of the male variant of the human species more repugnant that Joe Francis, the eternal bachelor and frat-dropout wannabe who turned exploiting drunk female co-eds at wet t-shirt contests into an art form, went a step further and convinced them to flash him when they were only half-sloshed, packaged the results, marketed the hell out of them, and made a fortune doing it.

That would be the Girls Gone Wild video franchise to which I am referring. You know, the one that splashes ads all over Comedy Central during the Daily Show and the Colbert Report where the screen flashes an adult content caution disclaimer along with an audio warning, then bombards your eyeballs with images of scantily-clad, glassy-eyed, barely legal, stock pale-skinned women with animated sparkles covering up their genitalia.

Now he’s in jail, and he’s pissed that Access Hollywood reporter Maria Menounos didn’t paint a flattering enough portrait of him in his new pad(ded cell). In a GQ post-Menounos interview interview, Joe Francis calls her some choice sexist slurs, rants a bit more, then compares himself to Rosa Parks, MLK, Jr., and Jesus Christ.

My question is, will more time in the slammer calm his well-concealed inferiority complex, or will it simply lead to Girls Gone Wild: Jailhouse Jailbait Edition?

You’d think after the debacle that was The Open-Source Boob Project, mankind would be physically incapable of spewing more complete and utter idiocy in the direction of the blogosphere this week. But noooo, we have another reminder of how it’s okay to use words like slut, whore and bitch when women don’t behave in a way that men like or dare to have opinions that may spoil men’s fun.

Yes, I am using those words in this post because I have to look at them and hear them all of the time. There are no proper male antonyms for such words in the English language, mind you. Son-of-a-bitch is, after all, more of an insult to someone’s mother than the male someone himself. Joe Francis has been a lost case for some time now; he’s made his livelihood off the skin of young women who are too buzzed at the time to realize that they are signing their reputations away for a few dollars and a ‘free’ tank top.

The price they’ll pay when they discover that DVD videos last forever in the digital age will be immesurable. Society has taught us to think less of women who participate in stripping contests: NOT because they exercised poor judgement in a moment of exhilaration, flattery and peer pressure, but because they were half-dressed or not dressed at all while they were exercising it.

If and when I ever look thin enogh to consider strolling on the beach in a two-piece, will there ever be a time when I can expect to be treated like a human being and not a piece of meat, when I can have a conversation with a man and not wonder if he’s simply talking to me because he likes staring at my chest or wants to get into my pants?

Yeah. I didn’t think so.

Props to Racialicious, where I first saw this.

If you were watching ABC news on March 6th this year (I know, who can remember the news from yesterday, let alone two months ago?), then you caught wind of the new emerging phenomenon of ‘chastity balls.’ I realize the prominence of these balls isn’t hot news, but they irked me so much that I just had to share some thoughts about them. *shudder*

So, “chastity balls.” From Victorian times to the present, we’ve changed a couple of the letters in the last word and gone from metal belt-like devices that look like the sanitary napkin belts from hell to a figurative lock around the female groins of our progeny. Across the nation, faith-based groups (and in the Bush era, that means conservative ‘Christian’ groups) help these pseudo-Prom events sprout like daisies from local communities. The daughter takes a date to a high-school social event, all right – Dad. They share a first dance, sit around for a moral lecture or two and chow down on white wedding cakes, all in formal gown and tuxes. Then the couples exchanges vows – well, actually, only the daughter has to exchange a real vow – to stay a virgin until she marries. Does Dad make sure his daughter doesn’t eat more than one piece so that she can keep her size 4 figure, too?

Never mind that the idea of girls slow dancing with their fathers on any date other than their weddings is really, really creepy. Never mind that the sons aren’t expected to make similar vows to their mothers or attend chastity balls at all. The patently false idea hidden within the whole concept is much more chilling. As one father put it, if his daughter has premarital sex, giving away the bride is meaningless, “Because I wouldn’t have anything to give away.”

Hence the whole objectification of virginity as property that can be taken, stolen, sold, the act of which makes the girl ‘worth less’ than she was when she was a virgin. Or simply worthless.

I don’t need to go into the studies of how more than 50 percent of teens who take these chastity pledges end up having unprotected sex within three years, or how those teens end up practicing unsafe sex because they are taught that contraceptives mean they ‘planned in advance to sin,’ so it’s better to just let sex happen accidentally (and unsafely). These people buy into the concept that fathers own the sexual rights of their daughters: their bodies, their hearts, their souls.

Chattel, anyone?

 I bet the sponsors of chastity balls think that mothers promising to guard their sons’ bodies until marriage would reek of an Oedipal complex. But hey, the other way around is fine. Guess they didn’t read the story about Agamemnon’s kids.