right-wing beauty queens and the women who love them
By way of ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
ajollypyruvate:
We should feel sorry for Anita Bryant.
Anita Bryant was born in 1940 and started her anti-homosexuality crusade in 1977. I find it hard to buy a 37-year-old woman as a vulnerable girl-child — particularly when said woman was not plucked from obscurity but already had some experience with fame. I admit I haven't read extensively about Bryant, but I haven't seen any evidence that she was too stupid or sheltered to understand what she was doing or to know that being the public face of homophobia would make her a target. If there is actual evidence that she was coerced, misled, not in her right mind, etc., I'd be happy to see it.
Some people on the Internet (at YTD, and I think elsewhere, although I haven't followed too closely) have described the PUMA lot as "man-haters." I'm not sure "man-hating" is quite the term for what they're doing. This really is the return of maternal feminism and Victorian notions of gender -- women as childlike innocents and/or moral angels whose maternal love and care makes the world go round, and would do no wrong if it weren't for those brutish, nasty men (and who, in the Victorian version, must be kept from exercising brutish, nasty power in the brutish, nasty public sphere).
ajollypyruvate: We should feel sorry for Anita Bryant.
Unfortunately, Anita Bryant was just a clueless pawn, a young and naive woman who was conned by the Church Fathers to use her celebrity status for their bigoted cause.
Anita Bryant was born in 1940 and started her anti-homosexuality crusade in 1977. I find it hard to buy a 37-year-old woman as a vulnerable girl-child — particularly when said woman was not plucked from obscurity but already had some experience with fame. I admit I haven't read extensively about Bryant, but I haven't seen any evidence that she was too stupid or sheltered to understand what she was doing or to know that being the public face of homophobia would make her a target. If there is actual evidence that she was coerced, misled, not in her right mind, etc., I'd be happy to see it.
Some people on the Internet (at YTD, and I think elsewhere, although I haven't followed too closely) have described the PUMA lot as "man-haters." I'm not sure "man-hating" is quite the term for what they're doing. This really is the return of maternal feminism and Victorian notions of gender -- women as childlike innocents and/or moral angels whose maternal love and care makes the world go round, and would do no wrong if it weren't for those brutish, nasty men (and who, in the Victorian version, must be kept from exercising brutish, nasty power in the brutish, nasty public sphere).
Uh, yeah, I'm gonna do a post on that one later. I can't even...yeah. Right now. Just: okay, then EVERYONE is a frigging "pawn," because, just...o don't even get me started.
but anyway yeah, to the rest of it, that's exactly right. They're not "manhaters" at all, they lurrrrrrve men, as long as they're in their rightful place, i.e. supporting their dainty little pedestals and protecting them from the threatening savage hordes. Guess who gets to play the Savage Hordes.
but this is exactly why Bryant had a particular hate-on for gay men, as I recall it (as usual, lesbians just mostly got to go along for the ride to HELL): something or other personal, (I need to look it up) but the basic idea is the same one that all homophobic straight women tend to have: that gay men, specifically, are forsaking their God-and-culture-mandated role as keeper of the flame and of the l'il woman, i.e. Bryant. Running off to indulge their perversions and leaving the goodwives all alone and unprotected with the housework and the kids and the bills. Some damn thing.
last I heard she was strutting her stuff around Branson, MO, i.e. Vegas for the God-Family Values-and-Hummel Figurines set. Gary Indiana had a good, if nasty, piece on the whole phenomenon including her morning show.
Sort of like how women who worked were encouraging men to think they could just walk out on their wives and children?
I dated a closeted gay boy in high school. It was awful. I know other women have stories of just hanging out being best friends and doing each other's makeup and "he was so nice and gentle, he never pressured me for sex", but in my case it was more like being the wife of that rage-filled Mormon guy in Angels in America or Julianne Moore's husband in Far From Heaven. I thank heaven that there aren't more men like him inflicting their self-loathing, rage-filled, uptight, miserable selves on unsuspecting straight women.
I always thought that homophobia sprang (?) from the notion that sex roles were either/or: active/passive; doer/done to. For men that was deeply threatening because of what they know they do to women. For women of a certain stripe it's threatening because at least they get to claim the pedestal for themselves while denying it to others. When they fuck up, they get to go, "Oh, silly little me." They'd rather be stereotypes than human. It's The Rules, writ large.
Being feminist requires taking a step off a precipice and leaving the comfort of predetermined roles and steps behind. It's frightening, sure, and it will make you disliked--something these cheerleaders in perpetual search of a team fear like no other----but, boy, independence gets to feeling awfully good after awhile.
That's what I think. Certainly that's the tone. People should listen to me and give me what I want (even if what I want is something no one else gets) because I've "done everything asked of me" for however many years and, as Belle put it, where's my motherfucking rose garden?
But with a number of them there's this tone of "I've sacrificed for SO LONG and for WHAT". And it's like...you don't always get the election result you want, no matter how wonderful a person you are; them's the breaks, and sure, be mad and upset, but it's really not a personal insult, really.
http://pumapacdotorg/2008/11/30/how-mic
Interesting title choice for that video, I must say. Theme? Look, I'm not exactly a fan of Jackson himself, but...really, No.
but anyway the really special, once again:
http://pumapacdotorg/2008/11/30/how-mic
mountainsong 12.01.08 at 12:45 am
Sunday, Dec 7 @ 10:00 pm is a special on BET on the violence in South Chicago. I only say, because I think it might be insightful into a part of the mindset BO has emerged from. Flicking channels awhile ago I came up on BET and they had a special called Monster, about a violent gang member from south Central Los Angeles.
Watching them, it’s not to much of a stretch to understand black attitude and it’s influence on ACORN and it’s tactics. This is something that shouldn’t be denied or swept under the rug. It’s part of understanding the whole paradigm.
If most of us see the economy as bleak, just imagine where ‘they’ are coming from.
I think they're actually worse when they try to be all "understanding," like.
Are they trying to insult Jackson with Hepburn's embarrassing dancing, or claiming that his dancing wasn't totally original (nobody's is!) or...huh?
"Black attitude"? And oh noes, ACORN! (isn't it J4H going on about how there must have been gazillions of fake votes cast?)
why that particular connection, I've no idea. Not sure I want to. The white gloves, someone said. But...yeah, I got nothin'.
and I mean, nothing against Hepburn, I think she was ace, and Jackson is, well...we all know how Special he was (does -anyone- automatically think "dancing" first when his name comes up anymore?) but I am sorry: the groove, she not has it.
I don't much like Funny Face. The message is classic '50s anti-feminism, I don't really care for Hepburn as a singer or dancer, and we're just supposed to ignore the thirty-year age gap between her and Fred Astaire, whom she falls for despite his being a jerk who dismisses her intelligence (which seems to be a role he played many times post-1945 or so)? Bah.
I do like her in other stuff, though. I thought she was beautiful.
mind you "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is pretty fucking offensive" (hello racism) in its own right...
or Gwen Vernon, or Ann Reinking, as far as that goes...
http://wwwdotanitabmi.org/
And in case you were wondering if she's changed her message at all, here's one of her press clips as cited on her ministry webpage by a (woman! see! conservative feminism at its finest! one woman supporting another!!!) WorldNutDaily commentator, dated March 2008:
http://wwwdotanitabmi.org/wnd031108.h
Last weekend I met a true hero. A woman I have long admired for a stand that cost her everything. In fact, I dedicated my book, "The Criminalization of Christianity," to her. The inscription reads:
"To all those with courage to speak the truth in the face of ridicule, blame, assault, censorship, and the threat of being criminalized: Including Anita Bryant …"
At a meeting of national leaders in New Orleans this weekend, Anita Bryant received an award and a standing ovation that lasted nearly 10 minutes. I clapped until my hands hurt.
A friend of mine who heard about the highlight of my weekend asked, "Who is Anita Bryant?" He said he had only heard me talk about Phyllis Schlafly with "such superlatives."
This beauty queen and orange juice spokeswoman was known for saying "a day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine." She had her own television show at the age of 12. She had a successful singing career and entertained the troops with Bob Hope. And when a candidate she had endorsed took a stand for the homosexual agenda in the public schools in Miami-Dade County, Anita Bryant took a stand against it.
Enter the real "hate speech": pies in the face, kidnapping threats, death threats, threats to her children, acts of violence to her home. Like a scene out of Sodom, homosexual activists surrounded her home screaming at the top of their lungs. Her mother was afraid to open the front door. She lost her marriage. She lost her jobs and any means of supporting herself and her four children. She was a sacrificial lamb to wake a sleeping nation. She stood alone. And yet she stood..
It goes on. Oh, it does go on. Hate crime laws for the sodomites: terrible, terrible, poor martyred hero Bryant tried to stop them, but to no avail.
I'm writing the post right now, you betcha.
I do find it sad that she divorced and the other fundies turned on her. That probably wouldn't happen now, since they've got comfortable(ish) with divorce.
I mean, look, I think Kirk Cameron and Tom Cruise are respectively dumb as various sized boxed of rocks and being used for their (relative in Cameron's case, but still) celebrity status, but that doesn't make me despise them any less; and they still have choices, there; and no, the agency that they have doesn't just well from their manly gonads, I'm sorry.
I mean, Larry Summers did a not-so-great job at Harvard and gave one incredibly stupid, offensive speech, and a lot of the PUMAs are mad that Obama will bring him on board for anything at all; in those circumstances, asking for sympathy for Anita Bryant seems a *bit* rich.
"...women as childlike innocents and/or moral angels..."
And, as in Victorian times, any woman who gives so much as a hint that she doesn't see herself or other women that way is derided as an O-bot or worse. The way some of the PUMAs, especially at PUMA PAC, are dehumanising Clinton is fucking bizarre. "Girl-child?" Ew.
Apropos of knitting and math: The highly educated knitters with whom I spoke all agreed that creating patterns requires arithmetic, basic geometry, and elementary algebra (though not always). A very skilled knitter creating a very complex pattern might have to delve into simple trig. Nothing that qualifies as "REALLY hard math", though.
Of course, being good at math doesn't mean you'll be a good knitter and a good knitter isn't necessarily all that good at math. Just certain aspects of it. And expecting someone who is good at math, but has no prior experience with needles outside a lab, to be able to create knitting pattern out of thin air is stupid.
Yes To Democracy has some great posts about how insulting this whole thing is to Clinton.
Hmm, knitting. Again, to me it really depends on what the commenter was trying to say. If the point is that women can learn math, well, of course we can, and I don't think even Summers meant to suggest that women are terrible at math -- just that women aren't as good at math as men are. Not that it wasn't a stupid, sexist thing for Summers to say, but "nuh uh I can do basic trig" isn't that great a response to "women can't do advanced calculus".
With knitting for me it's the bloody counting (kindergarten-level math!). I gather if you stick with it it becomes easier, but I have to concentrate and I get bored.
"...I don't think even Summers meant to suggest that women are terrible at math -- just that women aren't as good at math as men are."
Yes. And saying "women aren't as good at math" isn't saying "women are inherently inferior at everything." He might have meant that, of course. But insisting that "different from men = less than men" merely helps perpetuate the very sexism they claim to be against. Men and women in general do tend to think differently (hormonal surges during fetal development affect different parts of the developing brain) but that doesn't mean all men are crappy parents and all women are crappy physicists. It means they tend to think differently.
The goal should be to recognise that different != inferior and work to make sure that all children whose talents and inclination fit them for math & science careers are given plenty of opportunity. Not whine that knitting is just as hard as Abstract Algebra.
"I gather if you stick with it it becomes easier, but I have to concentrate and I get bored."
The Girl Scouts gave me my sewing/knitting/embroidery badges and hurried me out the door. I was good at the actual stitches and such but tended to stab myself and others with impunity and entirely by accident. I can set-to in the lab like a mad-woman, though, and my Quant Analysis lab professor loved my work. :D
I'd pay to see it.
Truthfully though I think she'd probably just laugh her ass off. I mean, what else can you do?
http://fetchmemyaxe.blogspot.com/2008/1
What really amazes me is that Bryant was successful, at the level of law. (What kind of discrimination was the Miami ordinance supposed to prohibit? Discrimination in housing, employment, all of that?) And...the Briggs Initiative? I mean, I know it didn't pass, but holy shit.
http://www.stonewall-library.org/an
In 1977, the Dade County ordinance that prohibited discrimination in housing, employment, loans and public accommodation based on race or religion was amended to include “affectional or sexual preference.” That extension of civil rights engendered a backlash among social conservatives.
Less-known, but reminded by my trans friends: that level of hatefulness is still going on, with similar dynamics, all the time, with ordinances trying to extend basic civil rights to trans folk, even where sexual orientation is a done deal. i.e. the RR uses them even more bluntly than Teh Gay these days, because they can get away with it more.
http://www.stonewall-library.org/an
Bryant, who belonged to the conservative Northwest Baptist Church, a congregation that advertised itself as “Bible-believing and soul-winning” and had campaigned against school desegregation...
and
Bryant wrote to the Dade County Commission that passing the ordinance would mean “infringing upon my rights as a citizen and mother to teach my children and set examples of God’s moral code as stated in the Holy Scriptures.”
and then, again, yeah, the HRC, not exactly perfect itself, both wrt racial relations and especially hanging transfolk out to dry. and a lot of these same feminists who at least give lip service to their dear -friends- being gay and what a -duh- it is that we deserve basic civil rights going -crickets crickets- at -best- when it comes to trans folk, I mean look at fucking mAndrea running rampant all over the place there. If you -really- want to see where the dovetailing of hateful rightwing rhetoric/policy and "radical" (or whatever they're calling it) "feminism" come together, the remains of the toxic Janice Raymond/Sheila Jeffreys bullshit is where it's at. So far the PUMA's haven't gotten into it (for that, you need to go to the Margins and so on), but if they do, boy...
http://dailypuma.blogspot.com/
Someone's attempt at centralization: a collation of PUMA blogs and others that aren't PUMA but that someone thought "go" with the general PUMA-mentality. Kind of skips right past the "maternal feminism" and goes straight for Little Green Footballs and Michelle Malkin. Color me shocked. --Oo, look, Lyndon La Rouche! I think unironically! "The right wing liberal." Awesome.
The design of that thing makes my head spin. Four columns of links is TOO MANY.
speaking of fusterclucks of fail,
Re: speaking of fusterclucks of fail,
Is VDARE.COM “White Nationalist”?
[Peter Brimelow writes: This is the full version of the Op Ed reply (Speakout: VDare.com is no 'white nationalist Web site, July 23, 2006) that the Rocky Mountain News kindly allowed me to make to an attack published the previous weekend. It reflects my current thinking on this smear, made against us not merely by the left, but also by the “ Respectable Right”, which should—and does—know better]
By Peter Brimelow
Notoriously, the modern definition of "racist" is somebody who is winning an argument with a liberal…or with a country-club Republican battling servant problems. So, as a veteran of the immigration reform movement, I wasn’t surprised to see the anti-illegal immigration initiative Defend Colorado Now smeared in a recent RMN article (Funding questioned: Critics say some Defend Colorado money tainted, by Kevin Flynn, July 15 2006).
Actually, as smears go, I didn’t think Flynn’s article was so bad. (But I’m pretty brutalized!) It largely just recycled various guilt-by-association conspiracy theories spun by the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, which, despite that noble-sounding name, has been pretty thoroughly discredited as a left-wing shakedown scam preying on the elderly, Holocaust-haunted rich...
We are certainly politically incorrect—but the merest glance would show that we are not "white nationalist."
OK?
Now I will boldly go etc. We also publish on VDARE.COM a few writers, for example Jared Taylor, whom I would regard as “white nationalist,” in the sense that they aim to defend the interests of American whites. They are not white supremacists. They do not advocate violence. They are rational and civil. They brush their teeth. But they unashamedly work for their people—exactly as La Raza works for Latinos and the Anti-Defamation League works for Jews.
Get used to it. As immigration policy drives whites into a minority, this type of interest-group "white nationalism" will inexorably increase.
You read it first on VDARE.COM—and if you don’t like it, let’s have an immigration moratorium now.
Smears, boy, everywhere you go...
She is so special.
I liked this:
riverdaughter says:
Ok, I’m stumped. There’s a message here somewhere but I am not braining today. Is it that Americans are going to get saved anyway no matter how bad Obama is for them? Is it that we actually *want* them to suffer? Is it that you’ve had some harrowing experience that you can’t talk about yet? Is it that your relatives are as nutty as mine and insist that the bible is the infallible word of GAWD and you should repent before your are smited? Smitten? (This last one seems most likely if your Thanksgiving weekend was spent in the company of a fundy family)
BTW, have you ever
The meta amuses me. Explain the parable to us, O wise prophet! Bring us back to the One True Subject (i.e. the antiChrist is in office, and it's all down to us, the Remnant what's been given The Truth, to save all the damned and deluded and lost sheep; otherwise we're all DOOOOOOOOOOOMED. Which we're secretly kind of looking forward to). Not that -we're- fundies, hevvings no.
I wonder how Palin would take to the epithet "godbag," or Violet's explanation of Biblical lore.
In keeping with the symbolic etc., Violet's constant cracks about being "dead" or "swallowed by a whale" or whatever it is a) once would've struck me as charming and whimsical and now just irritates the shit out of me b) is perhaps, under all the kidding on the square, a cry for help?