Detachable Vagina

A friend sent me this clip and I laughed because I recall having a conversation with some friends about how great this would be--especially when we had our periods. I wonder if Hillary Clinton would've had an easier time as a Senator and presidential candidate. I can just imagine her opening remarks at each debate. Moderator: "Senator Clinton, how do you answer your critics who say that his country is not ready for a woman President?" Hillary: "Well,Ted, it doesn't matter because my pussy is in a safe deposit box for the duration of this campaign, and it will remain there as long as I am President!"

Not a Great News Week for Dallas

While driving to work earlier this last week, I heard a story on NPR about a "cheese" heroin epidemic among children in my old home town of Dallas. Drug treatment professionals must now ponder how to treat addicts as young as 9 years old (or even younger, probably). In Dallas anyway, known users are apparently predominantly Latino/Latina. However, I think the likely key word is "known". A police detective with Dallas Public Schools admitted that "this isn't a problem we can arrest ourselves out of." I wonder if he realizes that with that one sentence he acknowledged the futility of most state and federal illegal drug policy and enforcement.

In other news, I hear that results of the 2006 census showed that the Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area grew more than any other metropolitan area in the country--adding over 162,000 souls. One wonders where they all came from--and if they still think they made a good decision.

Equally and exceedingly more nauseating (but not too surprising) news is that a Dallas titty-bar will not be required to close its doors simply because underage girls as young as 12 perform there from time-to-time. Evidently the license of the Diamond Cabaret could potentially expire this November, but revocation at this point is only possible if "the club knowingly allows prostitution, the sale or use of drugs at the club, or if there are two convictions for sex-related crimes at the club within a 12-month period". Twisty says it better here.

In more local news for me--I recently started work on a committee at work charged with the task of writing an emergency-reponse plan for all of our clinical activities (read: everything). We are to "consider all hazards" including, but not limited to: a flu or SARS pandemic, a terrorist biological attack, other types of terrorist attacks (the Democratic National Convention is here in August, so thinking of worst-case scenarios for that is already underway), or contamination of the water supply (a legitimate concern considering the plight of our Alamosa neighbors to the south).

In more uplifting news, despite the fact that we could possibly still get a bit of snow and that it still gets down in the 30's at night, it looks like Spring has arrived here at last. Sophie found patches of green grass to pee on today and I could get away with wearing short-sleeves and sandals! Perhaps friends who anticipate onset of yet another Texas summer will consider the fabulousness that is a Colorado spring and summer--particularly those who may need time away from the prying eyes of the Ladies of Chador.

Tired

toothpastefordinner.com

I keep hearing (and feeling too sometimes) of the "you've come a long way, baby" argument when talking and thinking about the place and role of women in American life and culture. Of course, this affirmation originated from a print ad campaign for Virginia Slims cigarettes which always depicted examples of ideal American femininity: slender, smiling, athletic, and sophisticated, but not so smart to figure out that smoking would eventually wreck their looks and give them lung cancer. In 1902, Susan B. Anthony wrote to Elizabeth Cady Stanton:


"It is fifty-one years since first we met and we have been busy through every one of them, stirring up the world to recognize the rights of women. The older we grow, the more keenly we feel the humiliation of disfranchisement and the more vividly we realize its disadvantages in
every department of life and most of all in the labor market. We little dreamed that when we began this contest, optimistic with the hope and buoyancy of youth, that half a century later we would be compelled to leave the finish of the battle to another generation of women. But our
hearts are filled with joy to know that they enter upon this task equipped with a college education, with business experience, with the fully admitted right to speak in public--all of which were denied to women fifty years ago. These strong, courageous, capable young women will take our place and complete our work. Ancient prejudice has become so softened, public sentiment
so liberalized and women have so thoroughly demonstrated their ability as to leave not a
shadow of doubt that they will carry our case to victory. "

I laughed at the thought of two 19th century women feeling so optimistic as to think their "contest" would finish in their generation. There have been "strong, courageous, capable" women who have worked hard to further "soften" and liberalize public sentiment and while I'm usually grateful for "how far we've come" I have little hope that things will advance beyond my own "blessings of liberty" and be different for women of my niece's generation. Yes, I was able to vote for a woman in the recent primary, and may yet still have the chance to vote for her in the general election for President, but the contest between HIllary Clinton and Barak Obama has painfully shown that while public expression of racial prejudice and hatred must be unspoken or at least successfully masked, hatred of women may be expressed with impunity. I'm tired, heartbroken and discouraged by this. Last night ABC and 20/20 devoted TWO HOURS of airtime to the subject of prostitution in America. Let's talk about the sad, misbegotten lives of these whores (this word wasn't used but implied of course) but let us not talk about the overall patriarchial political and economic frame that really places ultimately all women as members of the sex class. We just don't all work on the Vegas Strip or at the Bunny Ranch.

Everyone is talking about Barak Obama's speech last week about race--when will Hillary talk about gender? Without doubt she is one of those next generation women that Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton envisoned, but she could also tell them from personal experience that hatred of women didn't go away when women got the vote, when more of us started going to college and/or postponing marriage and childrearing (or eschewing one or both altogether), when more of us became politicians, doctors, lawyers, astronauts, pilots, ministers, and officers in the military. All those advances just made them hate us more. She'll never speak of it as the only thing more unpalatable to many Americans than actually having a woman President is one that talks about how women are still an oppressed class in our culture. So what can I do now to try and help my now 9-year old niece prepare for the obstacles she will have to overcome?

How Much Do You Love America?

I'd meant to throw out some thoughts about Peggy Noonan's recent column (actually a couple of weeks ago now) in The Wall St. Journal in which she begrudgingly acknowledges Barak Obama's ability to draw and then wow a crowd, but dismisses others' attributions of eloquence. She states that "with Mr. Obama, the deep thought part is missing." "He doesn't unpack his thoughts" but rather "asserts and keeps on walking." Now, I find this humorous as her former and now dead boss could indeed turn a phrase (that someone else had written for him) but failed to impress a broad spectrum of people as to his ability to unpack anything, much less thought.

At any rate, Ms. Noonan's true point seems to be in suggesting that Barak and Michelle Obama are really just two highly educated, wealthy, connected, (and possibly snobbish) white people whose skin color happens to be black and who, from the "liberal cocoon" they were raised in are likely woefully out of touch with the daily realities of most Americans. Are they any different from Bill and Hillary, the ultimate "cosseted yuppies"? Quelle horreur! It would seem that perhaps the Obama's are "more inspired by abstractions like international justice than by old visions of American as the city on a hill." Peggy Noonan takes issues with Michelle Obama's recent comment that "for the first time" in her life she is proud of her country. See, Mrs. Obama has enjoyed such privilege that she doesn't have the proper appreciation or an "old-fashioned love for America" in the way that some "working-class Americans" who were "raised by a TV and a microwave and love our country anyway, every day, do.

However, I thought about this idea again yesterday, during a required "Let's Talk Diversity" class at work. I was a bit surprised when the facilitator began talking about white privilege and handed out the questionnaire that Peggy McIntosh developed--one could practically hear the sound of defensive white sphincters contracting. One of my coworkers was offended by the idea that different groups enjoy different aspects of privilege in this country. It is so negative to talk in these terms. After all, we have a woman AND a black man running for President. Isn't this evidence of how far we've come? Why can't we focus on the positive! Well, golly gee, Wally.

Perhaps Ms. Noonan feels that the Obama's haven't enough performed enough public patriotic genuflecting to those "old-fashioned" values and priorities of white Christian America. She asks, "if America's leaders don't love America tenderly, who will?" How do you love America, hum?