1. Sometimes I try to read Maureen Dowd’s column just to see how miserable she comes off as on that particular day or with regards to that particular topic, with the hopes that it will make me feel happy that no matter how frustrating grad school seems, at least I’m not *that* inexplicably bitter, but I can usually only get as far as a) the first paragraph or b) the first use of a nickname for a political figure, whichever comes first. Her use of extravagantly gendered language aside, there’s just something about both her style and lack of substance that just really gets to me. The other day, the Times’ Public Editor weighed in on the former issue with Dowd, but I think the Times would do well to consider other issues with Dowd’s writing, mainly that it’s vapid uninspired drivel masquerading as “opinion,” and designating it as “opinion” apparently gives it a free pass to suckitude. Kind of like the political pundits of Fox News, come to think of it.

Anyhow, trying to read today’s column really put me over the edge of Dowd-annoyance. Dowd’s got a game to play with language, and I am pretty sure that language is winning this one, because Dowd can’t seem to get it to say anything really at all in any parse-friendly way. It starts out:

Unity was spared the banality of unanimity.

This doesn’t bode well…

Carmella Lewis, with her Hillary T-shirt and Hillary placard, came all the way from Denver to make sure there would be plenty of ambiguity, duality and ferocity in Unity…..

Standing between the Sharks and the Jets, David Axelrod took pity on an older friend of Carmella’s who was suffering from aridity in the Unity humidity……

This amenity did not stop the disunity.

Ack. OK, I get that it’s a thing, but I don’t even know what you call it, this “-ity” repetition pattern…is it technically some kind of reduplication? I’m only familiar with alliteration, assonance, and consonance, and this doesn’t seem to neatly fit any of those definitions. It makes me dizzy.

The column could’ve just said “In Unity, some Clinton supporters showed that they were still behind their candidate and hadn’t yet bought into party unity.” That would’ve done it. But noooooo, we have to go on with the calamity of the insanity of the SeanHannity blah blah blah and the Hill and Bam and Bamary and Hill’s supporters are angry bitches who want Obama to die (no really, it’s in there) and Bill Clinton is a washed-up prima donna struggling with his masculinity (which is really how *every* Dowd column seems to end, isn’t it?). I can’t even find an opinion in this piece (like most of Dowd’s columns); the opinion lies latent in the fact that she’s chosen to write about the thing she’s writing about. So I can only guess from the fact that she’s written about Clinton supporters who aren’t yet Obama supporters that she has some seething dislike for Clinton supporters who aren’t yet Obama supporters. OK there’s one opinion at the end, which is that Obama should have nothing to do with Clinton’s debt repayment strategy (or something like that).

I just read her columns and immediately feel angry; it’s not just the too-cute rhyming and patronizing nicknaming. Why is this person insulting me?, I think. Why does she have so many grudges, and why doesn’t she channel them into something that’s at least useful for me to know? Why does she want to hurt the Democrats? I think the Times owes its readers better. That column is a waste of readers’ time and the papers’ money.

End. Rant.

2. I saw this ad yesterday and found it to be a delectable example of how internet domain names, what with their typical lack of orthographic word-separators (spaces, capital letters, periods…anything), are often a parser’s nightmare.

It might be because I had just been watching Little Britain, but when I saw this I thought it said “Plenty offish,” as in “Well she’s plenty offish, isn’t she?” meaning “She’s not very friendly.” It sounded like something that could work in British English, for whatever reason. Luckily when I looked for context, the dating site thing helped me figure out what it was really saying.

3. I find the practice of adopting a politician’s name, as reported in this Times story about people adopting “Hussein” as their middle name to show support for Obama, very strange. I get that it’s an attempt at reclaiming a word so as to disempower those who might use it for ill against you, but I feel like we might do better to have a more in-depth conversation: If you’re using “Hussein” to make the point that the name is not always an index of a Muslim, you’re ceding the point that to be a Muslim would indeed be a bad thing. Aren’t you? This has been bothering me since the whole start of the Obama-Muslim scare: And just what if he were a Muslim? Would that be such a terrible, terrible thing? Oh, sorry of course it would, because all Muslims are terrorists. Except they’re not. It strikes me that THIS is what people need to be understanding out of this whole confusion, not just that Obama is not Muslim and neither are his names. He made the whole racial unity speech; could he do the same for religion? How about if we got postreligious just like we’re (supposedly trying to get, by some misguided accounts) postracial and postfeminist?

4. If you are in the DC area and appreciate the arts, come see me tap dance next month!

Well, sort of - for me the expression “X [heart] Y” seems gendered, so that it connotes femaleness, but in a way similar to how lots of “netspeak”-y things in general connote femaleness because standard US language ideologies link emotive language/text with femaleness (i.e. “omg i’m soooooo excited lol!!!!!!!” couldn’t possibly come from a [straight] male, right??). But I read the headline as somehow belittling women’s potential affection/allegiance toward McCain by using [heart] when any number of other verbs would do - “like,” “love,” “lean toward,” “look to,” “support,” “vote for,” etc. - that don’t have the gendered (or maybe just fickle?) tone that [heart] seems to be carrying off here. Suffice it to say, I don’t think you’d see a headline such as “Democratic men [heart] Obama” or even “Democrats [heart] Obama.” Not in the NYT, anyway. (And nevermind the whole “angry Clinton women” thing; that’s been covered elsewhere….And no, Rich never mentions [heart] in the column and there is no obvious non-gendered reason why it was chosen to sit in the verb spot there. If you can find an obvious reason that I’m missing, please leave a comment.)

WordPress is driving me f’ing batty right now - I can’t get it to register the heart symbol; just another of the font-based issues that I run into everytime I or WP upgrades. I am really beginning to hate this platform….

This mistake actually does create some cognitive slowdown (for me it did, anyway), making the sentence hard to parse: wait, maybe they were actually talking about Bill, but then why did it say “her husband,” but wait Bill wasn’t running against Obama….ack! I’m so confused! Clusterfuck of gendered pronouns and honorifics!!! (Does anyone know if the print version has this typo? And I am *sure* this isn’t the first time this typo has gone national…)

I am totally of the cohort that used Friendster obsessively for about 2 years while exploring what it meant to be on a social network site, then used Myspace obsessively for about 2 years while exploring how the internet could help you decide what rock shows to go to, then gradually found everyone joining Facebook and so gradually stopped logging in to either Friendster or Myspace. The characterization of Myspace as “garbled,” “flashy,” and “skanky”* as opposed to Facebook as “sophisticated” fits pretty well with popular notions of the differences between the two sites and plays into what has been noted as class-based differences between them. The voices used for the characters are pretty effective as well. And by the end, I can’t help but think of Get a First Life.

*I am not sure I am fully comfortable with calling everyone on Myspace or even just the camgirls “skanky” but in this mode of humor, it couldn’t be funnier to me.

See what media could be like? If the people who know their shit and are in positions to show it really did so, on a regular basis, to point out that lots of people who criticize liberals politicians don’t know their shit, like at all? (h/t to Shakesville, which is just blowing my mind with its awesomeness) 

Anyway, I’ve rediscovered the political blogosphere and leftie news sources because I’ve been seeking articulated understandings of how this sexism has played itself out in the race between Clinton and Obama. And I’ve been quite happy to find it articulated recently in several places, and I want to link to them here because they’re exciting: it’s exciting that people are talking about this, that people are pinpointing what it seems like are massive undercurrents of misogyny (often intersecting with racism) by pundits, journalists, bloggers, and plain-ole-people. It’s a relief to find this stuff, but it’s also disturbing, naturally. Also, let’s make a couple things clear right off the bat to fend off any ill-meaning meanie reactions to this post:

1. I have supported neither Obama nor Clinton in the primaries. I will support whoever gets the nomination when it comes time to vote against John McCain.

2. My acknowledgment here of sexist discourse throughout the campaign does not imply that I don’t acknowledge racist discourse throughout the campaign, or that I think sexism is somehow “worse” than racism. (An impossible belief, to be sure.)

So here’s some good reading on the subject:

-Shakesville has been keeping track of sexism with its Hillary Sexism Watch - see Part 90, with links to all prior posts. It also has been doing an Obama Racism/Muslim/Unpatriotic/Scary Black /Dude Watch, which is now at Part 43.

-Jessica Wakeman from Huffington Post: On Sexist Media Coverage of Hillary Clinton. Key quote:

Surprise, surprise, feeling protective of Hillary Clinton when media coverage manhandles her as ball-busting, overemotional or Anne Boleyn-grade manipulative is regarded as really not cool. And I don’t say this because I think I am a martyr or I enjoy feeling like one — I say it because I’ve had some frustrating conversations, mostly with men, who think one of two things:

1) They don’t see the coverage as sexist or offensive altogether, or

2) They do think it’s “a little” sexist but Hillary’s such a uber-rich, out-of-touch, shady Republicrat, anyway, that it’s just a sexist tint to a legitimate criticism of her smarmy ways.

-Betsy Reed from The Nation: Race to the Bottom. An important article that talks about the importance of feminist perspectives on the campaign, but at the same trouble with Hillary Clinton as a representative of or catalyst for feminism (including because of how she seems to treat/talk about race).

-Rebecca Traister from Salon: Hey, Obama boys: Back off already! Includes interviews with women expressing palpable but often inarticulable feelings of misogynistic tendencies on the part of Obama supporters (and others). Key quote:

There are many unpleasant realities about Clinton: She voted for the war; she has taken hawkish stances in defense of Israel; she voted to declare Iran’s revolutionary guard “a terrorist organization”; she sponsored a flag-burning amendment; she has not run a great campaign, waiting until this week to fire Mark Penn; she is a Clinton. But while these are all qualities that might rightly inspire political dislike, or a withdrawal of support, they don’t often incite the kind of hissing fury with which her primary run has been met. Were it her husband -– a man who has exhibited many of these same flaws (and more!) -– in the same place, he might or might not be trailing Obama, but it is hard to picture the kind of seething, violent animosity being flung at him.

When sexism is acknowledged in this primary campaign, it has been attributed to either Chris Matthews or the conservative, Rush Limbaugh, Iron My Shirt brigade. Little open recognition has been given to the possibility that there might be some gender discomfort behind the army of liberally minded Obama enthusiasts. But progressive politics has not always been female-friendly politics; ’70s feminism was born partly in response to the inequities of the antiwar and civil rights movements. It’s certainly possible that the youthful Obama movement has its own brand of female trouble.

O’Brien said, “With straight white male progressive friends, I feel something that makes me viscerally angry and afraid — the viciousness of the rebuttals to the suggestion that [Obama's and Clinton's] policies are roughly equal or that Clinton’s have some benefits to them, the outright dismissal of any support of her, the impossibility of having a nuanced conversation … The whole ‘Hillary Clinton is a monster’ theme is so virulent.”

-Amanda Fortini from New York Magazine: Has Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Caused a Feminist Reawakening? I largely agree with the point that a lot of women who felt like we were in a “postfeminism” era probably now are realizing that we’re not, but see Betsy Reed’s column linked to above for troubling implications of such a “reawakening.”

This is especially interesting when you consider that definitions of “guys” are gender-neutral (MW):

3 a: man, fellow b: person —used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of sex

Is plural “guys” gaining gender? Did Guys and Dolls start this?

So perhaps an example of Nether-English is to be found in the Visitors’ Attraction guide book we were given upon arrival, which gives some hints about the Red Light District. My favorite is:

If you choose to visit one of the women, we would like to remind you, they are not always women.

Though not perhaps the most Nether- of the English in that particular book, it does have a certain alter-stylistic property to it that sounds very odd to my American English ears. It also reminds me of a discussion had between me and some Brits, in which I was asked:

Brit: Do Americans call muffins muffins?
Me: Um…if you are referring to what I call muffins, then yes, we call them muffins. If you are referring to something other than what I call muffins, I do not know what you are referring to, and so I do not know what I call it!

Women aren’t always women and muffins aren’t always muffins…let’s call the whole thing off!