Awkwardly Social

Jezebel is one of my favorite sites, and after this headline “Meg Whitman is a Bad Mother,” I’m furious.  I don’t like Meg Whitman.  I don’t believe she is the right person to run California.   Let’s reinforce the patriarchy and attack a woman with grown children on her “mothering” skills.  Because if a woman is running for Governor of the State of California she better be a good mommy.  Maybe because she RAN eBay she’s a bad mom.  She should have stayed home with those kids!  Or, maybe it was when she was getting an advanced degree from HARVARD, maybe she should have forgotten about that silly MBA and raised her FAMILY.

Now, Jezebel is at fault here too.  They’re reprinting a sentiment - making a splashy headline - and while they’re questioning the motives behind the sentiment, they are still repeating the same  patriarchal bullshit their sibling sites publish.  It’s offensive.

She has two douchey sons running amok.  Let’s give those idiots no responsibility for their actions and blame it all on their mama.  Because she was too busy to raise them right.  Because she had the audacity to be a woman and have a career.  I am livid.

I don’t like her politics but she deserves a better headline than being a “Bad Mother.” Talk about her bad voting record.  Talk about her questionable antics while at Goldman Sachs.  Talk about her poorly run campaign.  But her being a bad mother?  What do you want America?  Do you need your mommy to tell you how to act when you’re in COLLEGE?

If you want to read where this “Bill of Goods” thing started.  Read my previous post.

My mom sent me an essay this morning that perfectly sums up my feelings on the media today. Please have a read.

Goodbye to All That (#2) by Robin Morgan

I support Hillary Clinton. I have heard all of the reasons why you don’t. Spare me your hope. Spare me your worries about her electability. Spare me your concerns about her being part of the political machine. Think about why you really don’t like her. And then wonder why you have to want to hang out with your President in order to vote for her.

I think I’ve mentioned that I’ve started to enjoy cooking. It’s not something I ever enjoyed as a kid, except for licking the beaters (which, now sounds incredibly dirty to my incredibly dirty mind), and as a young adult and college student I thought it was a symbol of the patriarchy to be a woman in the kitchen. Feminism and cooking did not mix, in my mind.* Now though? Now, I’m all about cooking. I hate that I can only really do anything extravagant on the weekends, and by extravagant I mean anything that has more than 3 ingredients and requires more than one burner to make.

Recently I’ve been trolling the web for easy recipes and I’ve found a lot that claim to be easy, and they look easy skill wise, but I’m always lacking some key ingredient. I don’t know how people keep their fridge stocked. I am always missing onion because they go bad so quickly. And I never have bell peppers on hand. It’s rare that I have carrots sitting around, but if I do, you can bet I don’t also have celery. Potatoes? Well, I just discovered the source of the mystery smell in the fridge room, and it wasn’t something that made me want to go out and buy more potatoes. (Lula was glad that she was no longer being blamed for the smell.)

If a recipe calls for fresh dill, parsley (two different varieties), rosemary or basil, I can just go to my herb garden on the balcony and snip it, but for some reason now I feel like every recipe I see calls for fresh sage and oregano, and those are the two I shunned in my last herb buying expedition.

I don’t know if I’m expecting this whole cooking thing to be easier or just more convenient. I abhor stopping at the grocery store for one item. It makes my skin crawl, in part because my grocery store options swing from the wildly expensive and doesn’t have everything you need, to the cheap but under construction and nothing is where it used to be, to the convenient to pull into and find everything but has almost resulted in a deadly car accident every time I try to exit that place. I think this weekend I’m going to try the farmer’s market. If nothing else I’ll feel less like I’m salting the earth with my carbon fueled buying spree of triple packed frozen dinners that taste kind of like the plastic with which they’re thrice wrapped.

I’m off to find a few recipes to try this weekend, hopefully they involve chicken breasts and carrots, onions and celery, because I don’t think I can deal with rotten celery.

*When I mentioned this to one of the women in my book club she couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t even cook for myself, and I told her that cooking was symbolic of the treatment of women in the last century. She still didn’t get it, so I took the easy way out and said I was a weirdo. I don’t know why I do that, instead of just letting it drop I feel the need to make everyone feel comfortable by calling myself a weirdo, and that behavior is even more abhorrent to the little feminist inside of me than cooking.

Nothing like have a blood boiling read first thing in the morning, right?

Deep breath.  Probably “NSFW Reading” as you’ll likely start burning your bra and spitting on men as they laugh about the fart joke they heard on Howard Stern.  Also because I say words like pussy, dick, and bloody vagina.

Christopher Hitchens wrote a puff piece for Vanity Fair with the (obviously flawed  and shittily researched) thesis that women aren’t as funny as men.  His reason? Because none of his male friends sit around and talk about their female girlfriends like this, “She’s hot, sucks a dick with pleasure, and she’s fucking hilarious.”  No, but his female friends do!  Oh, how they talk about their ugly, bumbling boyfriends with all their funny, funny jokes. I would say that the problem with this is not that his guy friends don’t find women funny, but that they’d rather talk about our tight little pussies than the way we tell a joke.

He goes on.  (and on and on) Part of his supporting material contends that women aren’t as funny as men because we give birth.  That’s right, we can’t be funny because we have baby chutes between our legs.  Oh, and he goes further, we’re so scared about pushing heads from our vaginas and the horrible death that is stalking us at every turn, that we just can’t find the time to be funny.  (God, he’s a douche bag.)  And I quote:

Humor, if we are to be serious about it, arises
from the ineluctable fact that we are all born into a losing struggle.
Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco
simply can’t afford to be too frivolous. (And there just aren’t that
many episiotomy jokes, even in the male repertoire.) I am certain that
this is also partly why, in all cultures, it is females who are the
rank-and-file mainstay of religion, which in turn is the official enemy
of all humor. One tiny snuffle that turns into a wheeze, one little cut
that goes septic, one pathetically small coffin, and the woman’s
universe is left in ashes and ruin. Try being funny about that, if you
like.

The “woman’s” universe is left in ashes and ruin?  Because we let our baaaaybeeeee DIEEEEEEE!  Where does this guy live?  The 15th Century?  I can guess (it would have to be a guess as my vagina remains a baby-free passageway currently only used for fucking and bleeding) that losing a child would be something that both parents would mourn. I don’t really see a mother or a father turning that into a stand-up routine.   And in the same short quote, he basically calls women un-funny because they believe in God.  Hmmm… Anne Lamott, anyone?  Oh, he probably hasn’t read anything by her because she’s of Jewish decent, has a child, might be considered a little ‘dykey’ looking and IS FUNNY.

I think Christopher Hitchens is not only not very funny himself, but a bit of a racist, sexist, homophobic twit.  “Most of [female comics], though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three.”  So, what he’s saying is, if you’re fat, gay or Jewish you aren’t going to be having kids anyway, so you are free to be hilarious.

Look, I’m not sure if you took a wide view of all the comedians in all the world and all the humorists in all the world and put the men on one side and women on the other it would be even.  But that isn’t because women aren’t funnier, it’s because we live in a patriarchal world where women continue struggle to be considered for positions of power.  And while this is clearly off the topic of women being funnier than men, it bears repeating, when we are finally hired (or elected as in the case of Nancy Pelosi), our leadership, power and success is attributed to being a mother who raised a litter children so, OF COURSE, we can run a Congress.

If his piece was meant to be funny, it failed.  And it’s not because I’m a woman that I fail to see the humor, it’s because I’m on my period.  (kidding)  I read parts of the article to Louie and he confirmed that no, it is not funny.  Then he said, “Sarah Silverman is the funniest person in America right now.”  And I agree, not because she’s Jewish, but because she tells a good rape joke.

I encourage you to read the article.  And to read Hitchens’ wikipedia entry.  And to punch a dude in the nuts and laugh with glee as you wonder why no man ever finds the image of a man doubled over in explosive pain funny, and why every woman does.

(via pamie)

I’m not sure where I’m going with this entry, but I’ve been mulling some things over the past few days as I think about my place as a woman who has opportunities and no real overt sexism to deal with. I was thinking as I looked at our dirty kitchen and the unused cookbooks, a refrigerator filled with pre-made food, a coffee maker that gets more action than the Cuisinart. I wondered what legacy our parents left us. I don’t have to cook. I’m not compelled to ‘keep house.’ My career can come first. But it begs the question, who is going to keep up the (albeit sometimes questionable) culinary tradition of my mom and her mom? If I have kids what will their comfort food be? Will it be sushi and coffee? Is that a bad thing?

When I think of the home I grew up in there are signature dishes that instantly make me feel like everything’s going to be alright. Chicken and Dumplings, Grandma’s Friend Chicken, Mom’s Spaghetti Sauce, Mom’s brownies, Swedish meatballs, dad’s fudge, Tortilla soup, Tuna noodle casserole, Chicken enchilada, bourbon balls, and even though I hate them, Pfeffernuesse cookies.

It’s so funny talking to Louie about his childhood, raised by a single mother who didn’t cook. At all. I wonder at the fact that he’s never had casserole. Let that sink in a little, the man has never had casserole. It’s amazing to me.

I’ve been thinking this weekend about the next steps to make this place feel like a real home. Aside from a few pieces of furniture, we really have everything we need, but for some reason I’m still trying to make the place feel homey and that makes the feminist that flies into a rage inside of me kind of pissy. My inner feminist wonders why I feel the need to learn how to cook casserole and bake cookies. But the inner girlfriend, loves the fact that I can get Louie to like blueberry muffins, even though he claims he can’t stand blueberries.

It’s a constant struggle. But these next few months are going to be spent cooking. Making my inner feminist shush a bit. If nothing else it’s bound to provide some comedy.

Listen. I know I overreact. A lot. Especially when it comes to the way women are portrayed in the media.

But this story has a link that made my blood boil. Scroll down just a bit and you’ll see a section with ’slideshows’. I am going to write those bitches a letter.

How do you call women who have made money in the billions Working Girls? Excuse me? I’m sorry. ‘Working girl’ is something you call a prostitute, not a billionaire woman who has made her fortune through, I don’t know, actually working. It’s intended to be a joke. I’m sure the billionaire boys club finds it a laugh riot that there are actually women who have to work to make their billions.

“Oh look at that working girl. What a whore!”

Fucktards.

Apparently the EMT isn’t one to pander to my indecisiveness. He asked me where I wanted to go to eat (since I was the only hungry one). I shrugged, sure he would drive off and land at someplace I really wanted to go but just didn’t know about, a mind reader of epic proportions. No. He sighed and looked at me, slightly shaking his head.

Me: “Where do you wanna go?”

EMT: “You’re the hungry one, Ms. Indecisive.”

Me: “But I don’t have any ideas!”

EMT: “I guess we’ll just sit here then.”

Me: “How about we, and when I say ‘we’ I mean ‘me’ ’cause you’ll surely just be drinking water, go get a cocktail, then come home and make out.”

EMT: “Where do you want to get a cocktail at?”

Me: Angry sigh.

EMT: Bemused smile.

This went on for quite some time. Finally I made up my mind.

Scorecard: (Category patience)
EMT 1
ME 0