Explain *This*

Me flipping off many, many people

One of the favored lines of the self-appointed Conservative Christian Morality Police when it comes to censoring public behavior they disapprove of is "I don't want to have to explain this to my child."  They don't want same-sex partners showing affection in public - even a chaste kiss or holding hands, like any hetero couple could do without eliciting so much as a frown - because "I don't want to have to explain to my child why two men are kissing."  They don't want women breastfeeding in public, because "I don't want to have to explain to my child what that woman is doing with her baby."  The general public is not allowed to engage in any behavior the CCMP does not approve of, because the right of the CCMP to not have to explain the ways of other people to hir child is paramount, taking precedence over the right of other adults to conduct their affairs in any place other than their own home.

Anti-abortion billboard, with a cartoon of a scared-looking pregnant girl. Her thought bubble reads "My mom's going to kill me."  The thought-bubble coming from her uterus reads "My mom REALLY is going to KILL ME."

And yet they're quite happy to post this billboard.  In very public view, near a local school, with the deliberate intent of having as many people view it as possible.  And when someone OTHER than the CCMP says they don't think it's appropriate because they don't want to have to explain it to their child, the asshole who put it up is totally understanding of that, right?


LOLno.  

Some have expressed concern about explaining the billboard to children. LifeCore's president says if a child is old enough to understand reproduction, the child is also old enough to understand the issue.

They think breastfeeding mothers ought to hide in the bathroom or never leave the house, and that same-gender couples should pretend to just be friends anytime they walk out their door, to avoid offending the CCMP's sensibilities by forcing them to explain these mundane activities to their kids.  But a billboard with a cartoon fetus saying its mother is "REALLY going to KILL ME"?  Tough shit, everyone else.  Have fun explaining the nuances of the abortion debate to your young child.  


Fucking hypocrites.

National Coming Out Day: Because I Can

I have a hard time believing that someone could be reading this blog and not have yet noticed that I am Very Queer (And Talk About It A Lot).  But for those who haven't heard the formal announcement yet:


I am queer.  I am bisexual (mostly), although I've mostly dated men and mostly prefer women, which is kind of a weird combination.  I am polyamorous; although I am in a monogamous relationship right now, I still hope that someday we might find a third to join our relationship.  And I am very, very out about it.


Why?


Because I can be.  Because I live in a state that offers robust employment protections for LGBTs - I can't be fired for being openly queer, and if I suffer retaliations at work because of my outness, I have legal recourse.  Because I am the kind of person who is willing and able to handle intrusive questions and the curiosity of strangers, in service of normalizing non-hetero-monogamous sexuality to the wider public.  Because I believe that only with openness and talking about it will the wider culture ever come to be truly accepting of non-hetero-monogamous sexuality, to the point where we won't assume a married woman has a husband and not a wife, to the point where we ask people if they have a significant other, not a boyfriend (for women) or a girlfriend (for men).  I want nobody to bat an eyelash when a woman talks about her female ex, or when a man says he and his husband and their girlfriend are going away this weekend.  I have the kinds of privilege (stable employment in a state with good protections, supportive family to back me up, etc) that make it possible for me to be visible like that, and I'm damn well going to put that to good use.


So at work, I talk very matter-of-factly about my exes, male and female, as if there's nothing strange about that (because there isn't, and there shouldn't be).  So in my very personally-sharing psychology class last spring, I fielded questions from curious classmates about the difference between dating men and women, and how does that poly thing you talk about work, and where do you go to pick up women?  (It's hard to explain, it's *really* hard to explain briefly but here are some links, and I don't, respectively.)


This is something I can do for the community.  I can't donate much, and social anxiety makes it difficult to be part of meetings and organizations and direct actions...but I can be one more queer on the ground, so to speak, making a statement simply by openly and honestly being myself to other people.  


So I am out.  Because I can.

A Public Service Announcement

Service workers are still people.

And the world would be a much nicer, happier, friendlier place if everyone remembered that.  


Corporations are soulless, blood-sucking, evil entities worthy of every ounce of scorn, contempt, and outright hatred you choose to heap upon them.  This is undeniable fact.  However, the minimum-wage-earning drudge you are screaming at is not the corporation.  Zie is a person, who is working a job zie probably doesn't much care for, who has to put up with your bullshit or lose hir job.  Zie is a person who will go home at the end of hir shift, probably tired (because my gods, not even full-day rugby tourneys compare to regular 8-hr retail shifts), and go about hir life.  Zie may be a person of delicate emotional temperament, or with mental illnesses that result in emotional instability.  Your temper tantrum at the register, because you find the corporation who employs that individual's policies not to your liking, may result in the clerk needing to take a "mental health moment" and quietly freak out in the bathroom.  It may send hir plummeting into a downward mood spiral, affecting hir job performance the rest of the shift, and earning hir a reprimand, because despite hir best efforts, zie could barely muster the energy to cope with people after expending all hir mental/emotional spoons dealing with you.


These are things I have personally experienced, including the consequences I mentioned.*  Listen, people.  I am genuinely sorry that the company which is currently paying me to serve as their representative to the public has a policy that will not allow you to do what you want.  I wish I could shit rainbows and make your world a better place.  But no, getting angry at me will not do anything to change the return policy.  It will, however, make me feel like shit, start my mental chains that end with me thinking that I'm a horrible person not fit to live, and force me to use all my emotional energy to stop the horrible depression spiral, leaving me feeling like I just want to curl up in a corner of the stockroom and cry until my shift is over, but I can't.  So I drag together every last emotional spoon I have, plaster a fake smile on my face, go do the bare minimum of interacting with customers because that's all I can handle without completely breaking down, get a talking-to from my fellow managers for not being 100% "on" and being perky and bubbly with customers, and end up so demoralized and emotionally exhausted that I go home and spend my evening crying and hiding from everyone, with my very patient fiance making sure I also eat and go to bed at a reasonable hour.  


TL;DR version: The temper tantrum you feel entitled to throw in the face of a service employee because you're not happy with their employer, may very well be the pebble that starts the avalanche that buries their entire day in a haze of misery and trashed mental health.  You wouldn't feel entitled to abuse your average person on the street that way (and if you would/do, I suggest you seek psychiatric help and stay in your house until that changes).  You are not relieved of your good-manners obligation to treat your fellow human beings with respect and dignity and fairness, just because we're on the clock at the time.  We may be corporate employees, but we are first and foremost PEOPLE.  Please remember that and act accordingly.

This public service announcement brought to you by some first-class assholes at work, and also this post. 


*For new readers: I have depression and social anxiety.  This means that my mental and emotional coping resources are often severely limited, and become taxed much easier and more rapidly than a person without my mental illnesses would experience.  Yes, one nasty customer *can* throw me into a very bad spiral that ends with "Oh god I'm just going to run my car into an overpass on the drive home tonight, I can't take this anymore."  This is a result of my malfunctioning brain.  No, not all service employees struggle with my particular issues.  But you can't tell I have these problems just by looking at me, so it's not safe to assume they don't, either.

Halloween, or Teaching Girls Their True Value To Society Day

As an adult, I've become painfully aware that Halloween is not "dress up as something cool" day anymore.  It's "dress up as a pornified version of something cool to titillate your male friends" day.  Sexy cop, nurse, pirate, those are standard.  This year, I've seen some incredibly fucking weird "sexy ___" costumes.  Sexy Nemo.  Sexy crayon.  I'm not even fucking kidding.  Sexy Big Bird.  Also not kidding, dear gods I wish I was (and does it look to you like a tiny Big Bird is eating her brain? Or is that just me?).  This lead to an afternoon of my Twiends and I tossing around random "sexy ___" suggestions.  We had "sexy fluorescent bulb" and "sexy coffee cup" and "sexy stapler". 
This morning, though, I saw a whole new twist on the usual "sexy ___" costume thing.  Here: 

A simple enough "sexy cop" costume, right?  (I'm not even going to start on the disrespect a costume like this shows for ACTUAL female police officers, who DO exist and do NOT dress like that.)  But.  It's on a child.  And the costume is a "child size medium 8-10".  It's carried on the fucking Toys R Us website.  The "recommended age" is 7-9.  Let that sink in for a moment.  Let the horror and rage percolate through your system for a minute or two.  Now consider:

They are recommending that you dress your 7-year-old daughter up in a "sexy cop" costume.  Oh, it's not called that.  On the Toys R Us website, it's just billed as "Cop Halloween Costume".  Which almost makes it worse.  The adult version at least acknowledges, hey, this is a perversion of something that actually exists, it's only make-believe, this is a "special" version.  You're dressing up as a "sexy cop" not a "cop".  But this is presented as just a "cop costume".  As if this is how female cops dress.  As if this is normal, not something special.  You want to be a police officer when you grow up, honey?  That's wonderful!  Let's dress you in this minidress and heels, because that's how you pretend to be a cop!  (Also, who the hell dresses a 7-yr-old girl in 3-inch heels like those?  Aside from pageant moms.  That's got to be detrimental to her physical development.) 

Maybe I'm just old, and I've reached the point of mourning for Teh Childrenz already at the ripe old age of 25.  But I do NOT remember it being this bad when I was a kid.  When I went as Princess Leia for Halloween one year, it was in the long white dress from Empire Strikes Back, not the gold bikini from Return of the Jedi.  If it's just that my parents were exceptionally good at sheltering me, then Mom, thank you.  But I am absolutely sickened to see evidence that at a mere 7 years old, we're supposed to be teaching her that while the boys her age can dress up as police officers, her only option is "sexy cop". 

"Pro-Life" Isn't.

One of the great coups of the anti-choice movement was getting their hands on such a generalized, warm-fuzzies, can't-argue-with-that name as "pro-life" and securing its usage in popular discourse.  According to that moniker, they are in favor of life!  Who could possibly say that's a bad thing without sounding like a total asshole?  Life is a good thing to be in favor of, right?  Who wants to be anti-life?  Yeah.  They kicked our ass on that one.  Pro-choice is an accurate statement of what we believe, but it doesn't have the ring or raw power of a phrase like "pro-life".


Thanks to our refusal to use their preferred title, though, it's falling out of use in favor of the more accurate "anti-abortion".  NPR, just a few months ago, issued a statement declaring they would no longer use the terms pro-choice and pro-life in their reporting, but would instead refer to "advocates/opponents of abortion rights."  


But why do we refuse to play along and call them pro-life?  Because they aren't.  Because their concern for life begins and ends in the womb.  Once you're on the other side of the birth canal, you're on your own. Pro-choicers have joked about that for years, in a lolsobby sort of way - I remember a bitterly funny political cartoon I saw once (have tried to find it several times since, and never can), depicting a pregnant Latina woman with a toddler holding her hand, standing in a rainstorm, and a white male politician-looking guy solicitiously holding an umbrella over himself and her pregnant belly, leaving her and her child in the rain* - and have prodded at so-called pro-lifers to support things like health care for pregnant women and contraceptive coverage, in order to actually reduce the abortion rate.  They refuse, repeatedly, to hew to their stated values.  They do not earn their title.  And so I refuse to give it to them.


Unconvinced?  Still willing to ascribe positive, if desperately misguided, motives to anti-choicers, and give them the benefit of doubt that they, at least, really believe they're saving babies?  Lolwhut.  A few days ago, when a Democrat-authored bill aimed at lowering the US's abysmally high infant mortality rate through the use of community-based health programs came up for a vote in the House, 64 Republicans voted against it.  The nays included such anti-abortion crusaders as Michele "WTF" Bachmann and Virginia "Dear Gods Who Let You Near The Laws?" Foxx.  I did some random googling of various names on the nay rolls, and turned up, without exception, Republicans with 100% ratings from National Right to Life Committee/0% ratings from NARAL.  These are heavy-duty "pro-lifers".  And when push came to shove, they voted AGAINST a bill that is about saving actual babies' lives.  Actual.  Living.  Babies.  You know, these are the people who are all "Think of the innocent baybeez!" when you're talking abortion.  And yet when you want to talk about infant health and infant mortality rates, it becomes "fuck those babies."  


So if it really is about saving babies, not controlling and demeaning women, how do you explain that?  Why isn't the almighty baby coming first in the priorities here?  What kind of stultifying level of cognitive dissonance would you have to endure in order to simultaneously genuinely believe that the life of the unborn child is of paramount importance and overrides all other concerns like the incubator's health and life, and yet vote against a bill aimed at saving the lives of living infants?  It's not even fucking remotely imaginable.


Anti-choicers are truly the people to whom it's only a precious baby until it's born.

 *ETA: The comic, it has been found!  Fuiin Ekusu, in the comments, provided me with a link to a FB group which uses the comic as their image. 

Bryan Fischer, Yet Again: Hetero Anal Sex, Lesbians Do Not Exist

Bryan Fischer, the one-man 3-ring circus of bigotry and fuckbaggery, is at it yet a-fucking-gain.  He, like so many anti-gay bigots, has huge hangups about teh buttsecks, and so focuses his bigotry on ass-sex to an embarrassing degree, a la Porno Pete LaBarbera.  Honestly, if you're this obsessive over other people's sexual proclivities, you need therapy, not your own radio show.


Here's the prize quote, from Fischer's anti-DADT rant-turned-blog-post (via Bryan Fischer Right Wing Watch):

Homosexual conduct is deviant sexual conduct. Homosexuals are defined by one characteristic and one characteristic only: they want to use the anal cavity for sex. This kind of sexual conduct is aberrant and carries enormous health risks.

Attention Bryan Fischer: straight couples do it up the butt, too.  This public service announcement brought to you by the reality-based sexual facts community.  Where have you been while the media has freakouts about teens who have (straight) anal sex to preserve their technical virginity?  And articles show up about whether or not men have come to *expect* anal from women they date?  For the love of all the gods, man, go browse a mainstream porn store for ten minutes.  I doubt it would even take that long to find "Ass Titans #4"*.  Also?  Not all male-homosexual couples have anal sex.  Some do, some don't.  Just like not all hetero couples have vaginal-penetrative sex.  And aren't you forgetting something?  Or rather, someone?  Very many someones?  Who are also categorized under the general term "homosexual", but who are not men?  Yes, them.  Lesbians.  Some of whom *also* enjoy anal sex, and some of whom do not.  


At any rate, this is a ludicrous level of Othering based on sexuality.  Male homosexuality is defined solely by buttsex?  As well to say that "heterosexuals are defined by one characteristic and one characteristic only: they want to stick their penises in vaginas/they want to have penises stuck in their vaginas."  See how stupidly reductive that is?  No one rational would claim that hetero relationships are based solely on wanting to have PIV sex.  Heterosexuals are defined by being attracted to and forming loving relationships with members of a different gender from their own.  Likewise, homosexuals are defined by being attracted to and forming loving relationships with members of their own gender.  And bisexuals are defined by being attracted to and forming loving relationships with members of multiple genders, and asexuals are defined by not being attracted sexually to other people, but forming loving relationships nonetheless.  See how that works?  


Bonus points to the metric fucknugget for these snippets, too...

We would be left with a military comprised of nothing but sexual deviants and those who celebrate sexual deviancy. That is a guaranteed path to a permanently and irreversibly emasculated military

and

The impact on readiness, retention, and recruitment would have been utterly catastrophic. Character-driven officers, gone. Character-driven service members, gone. Character-driven chaplains, gone. Character-driven recruits, gone.

So, masculinity is what defines our military and protects us (from what?  Aside from 9/11, which, terrorism is not the kind of thing you can effectively use a military against, we haven't been attacked by anything or anyone we could reliably need the military to defend against), and if we allow it to be "emasculated" it will become worthless.  I'm sure that's news to the many women serving in the military currently.  Nice little dose of misogyny and patriarchal framing there.  And apparently, LGBs and our allies have no character, and are in fact antithetical to retaining people of character.


Frankly, Fischer, given a choice between an all-rainbow-uniforms military composed entirely of buttsex-having gays and lesbians, and your "$MILITARY_TITLEs of character", I will happily welcome our new buttsexing overlords.  Now please, STFU.

*Why yes, I totally did go google "anal porn dvds" in order to give you an authentic anal sex porn DVD title.  See how dedicated I am to you? ;-)

The Definition of Family: I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

This weekend is the Values Voter Summit - yet another wearying conference where hateful conservative demagogues gather to preach at each other about how awesome they are and how horrible the rest of the world is.  This one features a veritable who's who of the hate movement, including the likes of Bryan "All Muslims are inbred and violent and should be deported from the U.S./Gay sex is domestic terrorism" Fischer, Christine "Masturbation is adultery" O'Donnell, and ex-Senator Rick "Man-on-dog/Frothy Mix*" Santorum.  You know, most of us who pay attention to this kind of thing were already aware that these are terrible, terrible people who should never be allowed any authority over other peoples' lives, but it's truly breathtaking the things they'll say in their "natural habitat", so to speak, surrounded by other like-minded haters.  Here's a clip of ex-Sen Frothy Mix, courtesy of Right Wing Watch, explaining how there are no families in poor neighborhoods:

The size and scope of government is directly related to the virtue of her people. Go into the neighborhoods in America where there is a lack of virtue, what will you find? Two things. You will find no families, no mothers and fathers together in marriage. And you will find government everywhere. Police, social service agencies, why? Because without faith, family and virtue, government takes over.

You know, we knew they wanted to redefine "family" to cut out all same-sex pairings, even those with children.  That's not news.  But now it seems Frothy Mix wants to go a step further and eliminate from the definition of family anyone except one woman, one man, married to each other, with children (probably only ones that are biologically theirs, but that's just an educated guess on my part).  Single parents and their children?  Are not families.  Grandparents raising their grandchildren because their children are single parents?  Are not families.  Hetero couples with children, who can't afford the $75 for a marriage license or who don't choose to partake in that social tradition?  Are not families.

I've got two big fuck-yous here.  The first is this:  You know what makes a fucking family, Mr. Frothy Mix?  Choices and love.  The choice to spend your life with someone.  The love you feel for a siblings of the heart, whether they are siblings in blood or not.  That makes a family.  There is a family-in-your-sense-of-the-word out in TN, two hetero parents, three charming daughters, living in one house with their cats and dog.  I have absolutely no blood relation to these people at all.  But for the year and a half that I lived in that part of the world, we called one another family.  My now-ex and I would go to family gatherings at their house.  When the husband graduated his military training and his parents couldn't make the drive up for graduation, my ex and I drove through the night to be there, because that's what family does.  I refer to them as my heart-brother and heart-sister, and their children are my nieces.  My fiance and I live together, with no children and no plans to, and we won't be married until Prop H8 is finally repealed.  We are still family, because we have chosen to be.  On the subject of single parents and single parenting: my parents divorced when I was 18, and my brother was 14.  For the years that my brother lived with my mom and my father lived elsewhere, were we no longer a family?  What about a man who has lost his wife and is parenting his children alone?  Because his wife died, are he and his children not a family?  That suggestion is sick, abhorrent, and morally wrong.  I cannot say it strongly enough, Mr. Frothy Mix.  Kindly remove your head from your rectal opening and look around you at the diversity of families that populate the world.  We are not all one-man-one-woman-2.5-kids.  That is not the only way of doing things.  And it is sickeningly disrespectful of millions of people and the families they have been born to or chosen, to claim that "there are no families" because you don't see enough married hetero couples with children.


Second, what the fuck is up with this way of referring to "poor neighborhoods" like it's another planet populated with a strange alien people called "the poor"?  The way you phrase this, it's *abundantly* clear you are not talking *to* poor people, but *about* them.  Are you poor?  From a poverty background?  No?  Then STFU on this moralizing-at-the-poor thing.  This is not the only place I've seen this attitude crop up recently, and it's also disgusting and wrong.  People living at or below poverty level are still, y'know, PEOPLE.  Not moral problems to be fixed, not some endangered species you need to discuss how to handle.  PEOPLE.  


Look for more to come from this Values Voter Summit, including a rant on the idiocy of the name.


*The "Frothy Mix" thing came from his offensive comments about gay marriage a few years ago, when gay sex-advice columnist Dan Savage decided to hold a reader contest to make up the most offensive/grossest definition of "santorum" they could.  The definition ended up being "The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter which is sometimes a byproduct of anal sex."  Savage put up a website touting that definition and readers and activists across the internet Google-bombed it to bring it to the top of the search rankings.  Go ahead.  Google "Rick Santorum".  I'll wait... Anyway, those of us who dislike his policies with great intensity will sometimes refer to him as Mr. (Senator, when he was) Frothy Mix because of it.

Quote of the Day (+Zombie Blogsplanation)

First, the quote of the day, from a Salon article about the Dems' "Ooga Booga Republicans!!" strategy for this year's elections...

The great irony of the Obama presidency is that a central promise of his candidacy was to reduce the corrosive cynicism pervading the citizenry regarding our political system, but dashing the hopes of huge numbers of first-time and young voters -- as the "enthusiasm gap" compellingly reveals is occurring -- will likely do more than any other single event to increase cynicism levels to all new heights.  It's easy to imagine large numbers of people who decided for the first time that politics can matter -- people who were enthused supporters who expected the fundamental change they were promised by electing Barack Obama -- giving up "hope" for a long time, if not forever, in the face of a Party which now has little to say to them other than:  But Look Over There at Sarah Palin!!

That pretty much sums it up.  I absolutely fall into this category, btw.  I voted in my first presidential election in 2004, when it was just a desperate "ohdeargodgetBushthefuckoutofofficeplz" attitude.  Nobody was *excited* for Kerry, but he was a democrat, and he was Not Bush.  And then Obama's campaign came.  I was one of the many young voters, although not a first-timer, who was swept up in the fervor.  I believed with all my naive little heart.  I hoped!  I changed!  I hoped for change!  I donated time, and for the first time donated money too!  And now I'm counting down until 2012 when we can see the end of the Third Term of GW Bush right alongside my Teabagger-Republican father, although for diametrically opposed reasons.


Let me tell you just how disillusioned with the Democratic Party I am: my family has always been a bit fanatical about doing one's civic duty by voting.  We vote.  We always vote.  Growing up, my parents would each put their ballot stub on the fridge when they got home with it, and I would look at it and imagine the day when I had one to put up there, too.  "If you don't vote, you can't complain" was a common refrain around our house.


This November?  If I vote at all - and I'm considering not - it won't be for Dems.  I might vote Green.  I might not vote at all, except for the propositions (CA's prop system is so fucking broken) and voting against Meg Whitman for governor because she scares me.  But even there, I'm not voting *for* Jerry Brown, I'm voting *against* Whitman.  And I really truly hate that it's come to this.  But there it is.  Thanks, Obama administration.  My bubble: you bursted it.


Now for the blognews:  I realize this blog is kind of coming back from the dead all zombified right now.  I have been gone a long time.  No, I'm not dead.  Clearly.  What I am, however, is employed.  Readers who follow me on Twitter know I have a job at Lane Bryant these days (a plus-sized women's clothing retailer), and may or may not have noticed that it is eating up all my time and also kind of devouring my soul.  Posting has ground to a halt under the weight of stress and work and I'm trying to figure out how to fit blogging in there along with some leisure time on WoW.  (How do people do it?  I know there are lots of people out there who manage to work and have hobbies and a social life all at once.  What am I doing wrong?)  Anyway.  I am sorry.  I've missed it, and you, all of you, whether you comment or not. 


So here it is:  I'm sorry for the absence.  I'm going to work on this time-management thing.  While I'm still figuring it out, posting will be a bit spare, probably only once or twice a week.  Hopefully that will get better with time and practice.  But as of now...I am back.

An Addendum To The "Depression Is A Crock" Debacle

I posted last week in response to some fauxpert on AOL news calling post-partum depression a "crock" and then further claiming in response to criticism that all depression is just "people who don't want to cope with life".  As a survivor of depression for more than half my life, and specifically a survivor who resisted antidepressant medication for far longer than was safe for me precisely *because* of attitudes like that, I was furious and jumped on her statements about depression as a whole.  But in my anti-ableist fervor and my anger over the generalized stigma against viewing mental illnesses as real illnesses, I missed a seriously huge (and very feministly-relevant) aspect that I'd like to go back and revisit now.


Because while I focused on the "depression as a whole is bullshit" part of her statement, that was actually only in her response to the controversy, when she "clarified" her position.  The original dustup was over her statements regarding post-partum depression specifically, and so in the grand scheme of responses to her, I am an odd childfree voice arguing about depression amidst a sea of mothers arguing about post-partum depression.  I am kind of feeling like I missed the forest for the trees, or the trees for the forest perhaps, and I just wanted to clarify, because I feel like I focused on my own experience and the ableism against that, to the exclusion of a discussion of the misogyny in Pat Brown's position.  .  


See, the thing is, when a person talks shit about survivors of depression, that's a feminist issue because of intersectionality, and because women suffer depression at higher rates than men, and because of the way women are portrayed as overemotional, blah blah blah...but it's also talking shit about male survivors of depression, so it's more than just a women's issue.  Post-partum depression, on the other hand, is a women's issue in a way general clinical depression is not, because PPD is a thing which happens to childbearing persons.  While not all women are childbearing persons, all childbearing persons (with the exception of a scant few rare transmen who chose to exercise their gestational capability post-transition) are women.  Thus, talking shit about PPD survivors is talking shit about an experience which happens specifically to women.


And in that context, the stigma against survivors of PPD is just another facet of Women Can't Win.  Be thin, because fat is ugly and you don't want to be ugly, after all, your primary value is your beauty...but eww, too skinny, you're all skin and bones, go eat a cheeseburger!  If you're a virgin (past a certain age), you're a pathetic prude, but have sex in any context other than your first time on your wedding night with the only husband you will ever have and you're a slut, a whore, dirty, used...  If you work, you'd better be totally devoted to your career because you'll have to be twice as good to get half as far as the men in your field, but if you're devoted to your career at the expense of dating or having children, you're a selfish bitch and probably also a lesbian (and remember, lesbians are Bad).  If you don't have or don't want children, you're sick and selfish and not a real woman, but if you have children, you are unequivocally NOT ALLOWED at any point to be anything other than happy and grateful for EVERY SINGLE MOMENT of your child-raising life, and if you fail that in ANY WAY AT ALL, including pregnancy-related mental illness like PPD, you are RUINING YOUR CHILDREN and you are a BAD MOTHER.


Stigma against depression is ableist and privileges a neurotypical experience of mood and happiness.  But stigma against post-partum depression is both ableist and uniquely misogynist.  It is deeply sexist to dismiss the experiences and suffering of thousands of women by telling them that their specific form of a debilitating mental illness is bullshit and doesn't exist.  It's a diagnosis of "hysteria" for the modern age, and it is. not. okay.

Sarah Palin Has Left The Building (In Which Reality Resides)

I normally don't read @SarahPalinUSA's tweetstream.  First of all, why the hell is it @SarahPalinUSA, not just @SarahPalin?  There can't be that many Sarah Palins in the world that she needs to differentiate herself from, and it strikes me as childish conservative posturing - "Real Amurricans" and all that.  All she needs now is an American flag and a bald eagle in the back window of her pickup truck...  And second, reading it gives me a headache, and I have yet to figure out if it's the bizarre use of txtspeak (yes, I realize 140 characters is short, but Roger Ebert and I manage to be grammatical within that constraint; why can't you, Sarah?), the breathtakingly unabashed conserva-bizarro-world "logic", or simply the repeated thudding of my head on the desk that's the cause.  But today, someone RT'd a genius satire account into my timeline, @SP_Translator.  SP_Translator's twitterstream consists of RT's of a Palin tweet, followed by a "translation".  For example, this morning:

SarahPalinUSA: Now headed to ANWR; 20,000,000 remote acres of US oil & gas;we'll show you what it really looks like,unlike extreme enviro's fundraiser pics 12:42 PM Aug 16th via Twitter for BlackBerry®

SP_Translator: I'm heading to the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve. I might kill something. And, if I'm really lucky, I'll kill everything! @SarahPalinUSA 12:48 PM Aug 16th via web 

It made me laugh, so I followed.  The "translations" dilute the stupid enough that it's not a toxic dose, so even seeing the original Palin tweets only makes me roll my eyes, because I know something funny will shortly follow.  With a couple of exceptions, of course...


...So you've been following the Dr. Laura thing, right?  She went off at a black woman on her radio show, who had called in asking for advice in dealing with her white husband and his white family and friends who were sometimes racist around her, including using the n-word (which I will not type out in full for any reason, period the end.  You know which word I'm talking about).  Dr. Laura yelled at her about hearing black people use the word themselves and by god if you people can use it, so can us white people!  Basically.  But it included Dr. Laura actually saying the n-word something like eleven times at the woman, to prove her point.  Many many people were very very angry about this, complained, Tweeted, blogged, called her advertisers, and she announced today that she's ending her show.  Good fucking riddance to her homophobic, transphobic, fauxminist, gender-essentialist bullshit.  


Of course, what controversy with a conservative woman at its center would be complete without the Palinator weighing in?  Sure enough, on Twitter this afternoon, she said...

Dr.Laura=even more powerful & effective w/out the shackles, so watch out Constitutional obstructionists. And b thankful 4 her voice,America!

Dr.Laura:don't retreat...reload! (Steps aside bc her 1st Amend.rights ceased 2exist thx 2activists trying 2silence"isn't American,not fair")

Head, meet desk.  Again.  Not least because of the odd use of quotes in the second tweet.  See what I mean about her fucking bizarre txtspeak?  Worse than a 12-yr-old on sugar, that woman is, with a phone's keyboard in her hands.


Anyway, eleventy-billionth verse, same as the first, a whole lot louder and a whole lot more fucking annoying because ye gods, do you people not get it yet?  What have you got in place of your brain pieces, spent brass and a copy of Atlas Shrugged?  Sing it with me, progressives:  The 1st Amendment guarantees that the government will not censor you for reasons of content suppression.  It has NOT ONE FUCKING THING to do with what OTHER PEOPLE think of you and how they express that opinion.  We are well within our rights to criticize an out-and-proud bigot for her bigotry.  If she weren't saying something that is completely unac-fucking-ceptable according to polite society (and her advertisers) there wouldn't be a damn thing we could do to her.  It's not us that's the problem, it's her racism that's gotten her in trouble.  


The other thing that gets me about that pair of tweets is the whole "unshackled=more powerful!" crap.  It strikes me as trying to turn a frown upside down, only it's totally bizarre (I use that word a lot when I'm talking about Palin, don't I?  Heh.) because, um, without her radio, sure, she's not "shackled" by the need to be marginally polite and not (too much of) a raging bigot...but she also has no platform.  Which was kinda where that power came from, yes?  How is a woman willing to yell the n-word at a black woman to make a point going to be "powerful and effective", cut off from the major platform for her message?  


Well, she might try getting a job at the AFA.  If they're willing to give Bryan Fischer a platform, Dr. Laura should fit right in.


PS: What's a "Constitutional Obstructionist" anyway?  The only way I can make that work out, semantically, is that she means people who obstruct her agenda by following/using the Constitution.  Which is hilariously, and probably unintentionally, accurate.  I think I'm taking that for my new title.  "[MyLegalName], retail wage slave by day, blogger and Constitutional Obstructionist by night!" ^_^