Michelle Obama--too "ambitious"??

Sunday, March 29, 2009

During the presidential campaign, Michelle Obama was the subject of much scrutiny and criticism. Most of it was for really stupid reasons, like her wardrobe or her strong opinions. Well, why stop at the election, or the inauguration?? It seems that the news media is perfectly content to keep critiquing her choices. This time, it's not about sleeveless tops, but about her "platform" and whether it's too "ambitious."

The role and duties of the first lady is not super well defined. They get stuck with the traditionalist bullshit like hosting tea parties in the White House, of course, but also tend to pick a "platform" of issues that need more publicity and thought. Lady Bird Johnson threw herself into highway beautification and wildflowers, for instance. More recently, First Lady Hillary Clinton chaired the task force on universal health care (we know how THAT worked out....). It seems that First Ladies, since they have given up their own identities and all, have traditionally picked one or two things on which to focus and talk about.

Michelle Obama, however, has a platform with many issues, and that's worrying some people.
She's keen on promoting: Fitness, parenting, the environment, women's rights, self-esteem for young girls, volunteerism, improving life for military families and helping working women balance home and career life.

OMG, she's got varied interests!!!! ARHG!!!!

That list is taken directly from the article (Politico via Yahoo), and I think that in hopes of making it seem really long, they listed things as seperate when they are really sub-issues a larger topic. Self-esteem for young girls, for instance, should really fall under both parenting and women's rights (OMG intersections!!!). Helping working women balance the challenges of careers and home lives.....um, that's also women's rights, and, if I'm not mistaken, it's one of the original tennets of feminism....

Laura Bush's press secretary says that it's important to focus on two or three things with which you can make a difference. Let's see, for Laura Bush, those are....um....hang on....**crickets chirping**

Some marketing person says that if you do more than a couple of things, you will become fragmented. She wonders why Obama is wasting time "planting herbs." Besides the obvious answers (because gardens are cool, because you can teach your kids about plants and biology, because homegrown food is satisfying....), I was smacking my head over this marketing person's company. It specializes in strategic branding.

Yes, because that's what the First Lady should be doing. Strategically branding herself. Turning herself into a simplified, pretty-fied product that can churn out memorized speeches about how "our children should read." Or something.

Just now, Boyfriend had a really good perspective. His thought was that in a perfect egalitarian universe, in which true gender equality is acheived, it really wouldn't matter what the first spouse would do. She or he would keep their job in wherever, jet to DC for part of the week for family time, and otherwise go about his or her business. Since we don't have that yet, we must suffice with the First Lady being a symbolic throwback to the Ladies Auxilliary and stuff like that.

I also brought up the ridiculousness of Bush's press secretary being interviewed, given that I couldn't remember Laura Bush doing anything. He said: "Oh, yes. Wasn't she vociferous in making sure that people in Africa can't get birth control?? See, she did stuff, she was just on the side of Satan!"

So yes, in this weird world where the spouse of the president is unable to go about his or her life, and must sit in the White House looking for things to do, we've got Michelle Obama. We've got someone who is interesting, capable, driven and yes, probably very ambitious. Last I checked, none of these was negative.

(if you want to induce head/desk collisions, here's the article.)

oh! p.s. "she can't possibly talk about military families, because she's never been in one!" um.....she's never been a tomato either, but it's not gonna stop her!

Sigh...

Saturday, March 28, 2009

So, I'm totally dissatisfied with the look of Bitchcraft. Time for some spring cleaning, methinks.

I'm going to play around with colors and images, and in addition, I'm hunting for a template that will be inviting, interesting, and relate to the theme/content.....

What do you think of these options?
http://www.eblogtemplates.com/tastelessly-blogger/

or

http://www.eblogtemplates.com/dirtylicious/

What have you all done to make your blogs all pretty-fied and interesting??

Halp!!

Mo's My Homie

Friday, March 27, 2009

And now for some non-ranting. I know it's a strange thing on this blog, but I thought I'd surprise you....

I'm totally digging Mo Willems at the mo. Sorry....couldn't resist.

I first encountered his book Knuffle Bunny, a Cautionary Tale in about 2006, and have since been really enjoying reading his books to all the little beasties in my life.

A couple of weeks ago, the head teacher in my class was absent, so I got to lead circle time. It's always lots of fun, but particularly so when you get to read a book called Leonardo, the Terrible Monster (except that it was in French, so it was really Léonardo, le monstre épouvantable (in French you only capitalize the first letter of the first word of a title). I loved it even more than my class did, I think!

The plot is that Leonardo is a terrible monster. Terrible at BEING a monster. Cuteness ensues, and it's not entirely dissimilar to Lamont the Lonely Monster, which was a favorite of mine when I was a child.

It's also a wonderful little collision of monsters and children, which reminds me ever so slightly of THE.BEST.BOOK.EVER.WRITTEN.

His websites are lots of fun, too.

Laptop!!

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

I finally, finally, finally got my work laptop on Monday afternoon. I had to sign an agreement saying that it's for school-business related things only, not for anything personal.....

Of course I immediately went home and used the thing to type a paper for my child-development class and surf the web. Which I've been doing ever since.

So, yes, I'm back in the land of Tech, finally. I've been catching up on blogs, which has been a challenge, because ordinarily I just click "bookmarks" and work my way alphabetically through my list of sites. Since I'm on a new machine (which is really an old machine, but still), I've been trying to remember all of the blogs I read. It's a bit hard, really.

On Sunday, given my lack of net to surf, I spent all afternoon watching TV. Oy vey. I hadn't seen an episode of MTV's "The Real World" since maybe the 7th grade, and so I stopped in to see how it's doing. Well, the misogyny abounds. It was pretty appalling, actually, that the boys on the show (I won't even give them enough credit to call them "men") get away with the horrendously offensive sexist language and behavior. One charming example went something like this:
"Where are those dumb girls?"
"I dunno, probably shaving their vagina hair."

Wow. Um, leaving aside the crassness of the answer, which is not even worth commenting on, the child needs an anatomy lesson.

The interesting thing, though, is that this season's real world has a transgender character. Caitlin (I don't know how she spells it) is a 24 year-old trans woman. For the most part, the housemates seemed really respectful and supportive. Since the premise of the show is that it's a house full of people from all different backgrounds, I assumed that the conservative army kid would be a shithead to and about her. In fact, he really wasn't. He asked some questions that seemed awkward and poorly worded, but you could tell that it was coming from a sincere place. Even after coming out to everyone (which she did little by little), people seemed to use the right pronouns when referring to Caitlin and seemed to value her. Except one, who started by asking what seemed like sincere questions and ended up spending days tormenting her with the same lewd, inappropriate suggestion. It made me want to throw up a little....

I watched for as long as I did to see whether the women of the house would ever call out the boys on their sexist language and actions. The answer seems to be: nope. Not at all....

*sigh*

The other pop-culture horror that I saw a bit of was called "Tough Love" (I think). This one is straight-up barf inducing. I'm sick this week, though, and so maybe I thought that I only deserve things that will make me feel sicker.....I don't know. Anyway, this little gem involves a male "matchmaker" reforming a bunch of undateable wenches into charming, matched up ladies. Or something. I think that the basic message is "You should be looking for a man all the time and your goal should be to pair yourself up and if you don't make yourself look the way the menz want your useless and a bitch."

Yeah, charming, huh?

The women on the show (why on earth would they sign up for something like this???) all seem to have labels "the princess," "the bad girl," "the ball-buster" (she's Russian, of course, because ethnic stereotypes are even more fun than misogyny). In the first couple of minutes of the show, they were analysed by a group of "real men" and then told all of their flaws in gory detail. Bien sur, "doesn't take care of herself" and "could drop some weight" were used at least once.

I was really, really angry. Then I got to thinking: If you really buy into this idea that being paired up is the most important thing in the world, and you are "searching for love" all the time, why not do whatever it takes to get you some man-meat? If that means being degraded on national television, then, hey, that's millions of MTV watching boys who can see you and maybe want you as their very own Barbie inspired doll!

Or, you could work on being and interesting, independent person who gives the finger to the notion that if you're not paired up with a gel-and-Axe-body-spray-covered male of the species you're worthless.

The whole show included *one* decent piece of advice: "Work on yourself. If you don't know who you are and what you want, you'll never succeed." Of course, this girl was already thin and conventionally pretty.....

Status Update

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Hello all!

I wanted to check in and let you all know that I am, in fact, alive. And yes, I do intend to keep blogging, despite my nearly one month absence.

My computer died, and I'm still waiting to be given the work laptop that comes with the long-term sub replacement that I'm doing. You know, the one that started at the end of January??? Until then, my only computer time is snippets on Boyfriend's laptop (when he's not madly writing or researching, which is rarely) or even smaller snippets on the computer in the school library. I can't blog from the school network, because they forbid any sites with the word "bitch." A coworker, though was able to look up some European porn start guy from her laptop in the staff room, and even find pictures.......typical.......

So until the laptop materializes, I'm pretty stuck.
I hope you all are patient with me!!

Random Round Up

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Hey there,
I've had a lot of little ideas rattling around my head, but none has developed enough to take up a whole post on its own. This will have to be like one of those flashback episodes of a sit-com or something....

I was hired to take over for a coworker who's going on maternity leave. This means that I have guaranteed work until June (woot!). This also means that I have to finish up my Early Childhood Education credits, which I've been putting off for a couple of years. I'm taking two classes online, which is the least painful way to do the classes, even though it's tough to stay motivated.
The experience has been strange, actually. One of the classes is on how to teach the Anti-Bias Curriculum, which is a wonderful idea. The point is that society not only constructs complex roles for people to fill, but also teaches us (from birth) to have biases against those who don't embody those roles. The idea behind the curriculum is to dismantle racism, ableism, sexism in the youngest members of society, which will hopefully help to get rid of them in the rest of us.

Sounds great, right?

Well, being an online class, the professor wanted to maintain some medium for class discussion. She hit upon the online forum idea. We all have to answer certain questions on the forum and then respond to other people's posts. The first big topic of discussion went like this:

"In order to know about biases, you have to know yourself. What are your biases and where do you think they came from?"

That was it. No other instructions. Point final as they say in French. Nothing about being respectful, nothing about avoiding hate speech, just a big space to wallow in your hatred of other groups of people. Oh, yeah, and no moderation either.

Big fat balls of hate were thrown at gays and lesbians, immigrants (especially those who "refuse to learn English"), Middle Eastern people, the homeless, the poor, those on welfare....The list goes on.

A couple of us interpreted this as "we need to get over our biases," and so we set out to respectfully provide counter-points to people's assumptions. I have tried to phrase things in such a way that I seem sympathetic, but also thoughtful and critical......Like I said, I tried. If you know me or know how I write, try to imagine how hard that is.....
Those responses, though, have been met with "Well that's just how I feel, so you don't get to jump down my back."

um......right......

This is the future of America's (or, California's, anyway) early childhood educators????? Oy vey.

I've been so worked up by these discussions that it's making it very difficult for me to concentrate on other things. And sleep. And finish knitting the scarf for my best friend's birthday. These things all need finishing! Stop poisoning my brain, you stupid online class!!!!!

**********

Okay, I'm calmer now.

Next up is the Vatican, who has tallied up some essentialist assumptions, uh...I mean research, and decided which deadly sins are most often done by men and which are more perpetrated by women. Um, yeah. Women are prideful and envious. Men are gluttons and lustful. Big shock, eh? This research was done by a 95 year-old Jesuit monsignor, who obviously knows so much about women from his vast life experience avoiding them completely. The article I read (BBC) also told me that they have added some new deadly sins:
Genetic modification, experiments on the person, environmental pollution, taking or selling illegal drugs, social injustice, causing poverty and financial greed.

So, let's see.....Catholic church, you encourage giant families, which inevitably leads to environmental pollution. You deny the civil rights of vast swaths of the population (women, lgbt folks, etc) thereby perpetuating social injustic. You force priests and nuns to take vows of poverty. You amass money and art and keep it from the public, and have done for, oh, 1,000 years or so. You may or may not eat genetically modified food (if you're the American branch of the Church you do....European branch not so much).

Great. How many of those are most perpetuated by the very body who has deemed them sins??? Screw you, Catholic Church. And your little dog, too.

*********

In far more positive news (heh, sex positive...hehe...), Feministe recently linked to a site that provides real, accurate, non-judgmental, non-het-biased sex advice to teens and people in their 20's. This site, Scarleteen, provides advice, information (that kids don't seem to be getting in sex-ed classes anymore), and education. Some of it is totally basic (information about anatomy), some of the questions in the advice column are *head/desk* inducing, but I'm really glad that there is accurate information out there. I honestly can't wrap my head around the idea that "abstinence education" was ever a good plan, but nonetheless it stays around, which makes Scarleteen very necessary.

Speaking of "abstinence only education" does anyone know whether that kind of sex-ed actually includes things like basic anatomy and physiology?? Because some of the questions on the site lead me to believe that no, they don't.

I suspect that one's "lady bits" are not explained in the slightest. This leads me to my next link, which is "I almost wish my vagina were mysterious and powerful" It's from the blog "Tiny Cat Pants," and the author keeps referencing someone named Campfield (who, I gather, is some Tennessee republican) who is apparently terrified of vaginas. Or women. I'm not entirely sure, but the post is really, really funny.

Update: It helps if you read the previous post, "Campfield's Anti-Fatherhood campaign" for context.

*************

Crooked Timber posted a survey about gender justice. It's designed to be administered to (I think) college students, probably in a history/sociology/women's/gender studies department, but it's really interesting and thought provoking. Definitely worth checking out.

*************

So, there it is. A random mish-mash of things I've read and thought about this week. Not terribly coherent or cohesive, I know....Sorry.

It's a Tough Life Out There for a Marsupial

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

So, Australia is apparently having a crazy heat wave. I know, we think of Australia as just plain hot all the time, but apparently that's not the case. Or, it's more the case than usual....or something.

What's a poor koala to do when it's been over 40 degrees Celsius (104 F) for several weeks?
Apparently, if you're this little guy, you take refuge on someone's shady back porch. That person, in turn, takes pity and puts out a bowl of water.


As if that weren't lovely enough, you decide that while a quick drink is nice, you really would like a nice cool bath.

Ready for the cutest thing EVER IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE!?!






















Like I said: Tough life out there for a marsupial.

(via http://www.bestweekever.tv/2009/02/05/guess-what-australia-and-my-ovaries-have-in-common/)

(also, did you know that certain koala populations have been hit by chlamydia??? I'm telling you, it's a rough life!)