Note to Senators: Your Nepotees Nearly Outnumber Your Women

I’m not sure “nepotee” is a word, but if it’s not, I claim credit for coining it. The alternative was “beneficiaries of nepotistic largesse,” which was gonna overrun the bounds of my title box.
So anyway, this morning I was reading Glenn Greenwald’s latest column, “It’s Time to Embrace American Royalty,” occasioned by NBC hiring Dubya’s [...]

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How Do You Spell Wingnt?

Glenn Beck is trying hard to turn himself into a LOLwingnut. (The funny part ends at 1:00.)

(Via Andrew Sullivan)
I have to admit that this is the longest snippet I’ve ever watched of the Glenn Beck show. I’m amazed at how inarticulate the guy is. If he weren’t inspiring crackpots to carry [...]

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Remembering Katrina

I’m sitting on my front porch, surrounded by nature’s goodness: blue sky with wisps of clouds, birdsong and the whirr of cicadas, mid-70s temperatures, leaves rustling in a soft breeze. It’s almost impossible to imagine the violence of Katrina that was visited upon the Gulf Coast four years ago today.
A friend and neighbor of mine, [...]

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Separate Spheres … for Recess?

I’m grateful that officials at my kids’ elementary school have far more sense than this:
Boys and girls at Sedalia Elementary returned to school Monday with some unexpected changes: They had to play in separate areas during recess and eat at different tables during lunch.
The decision to divide the two groups did not stem from an [...]

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Feminism and Maternal Pleasure: Getting the History Right

Katie Roiphe isn’t wrong when she says feminist thought is underdeveloped when it comes to the pleasures of mothering an infant. I personally would extend this critique to the pleasures of parenting an infant, and the pleasures of parenting children at different ages, too. Of course it’s not just feminist writing that has failed to [...]

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Ohio to Nursing Mothers: Get Those Breasts on a Schedule!

If you’re a nursing mother in Ohio and your employer doesn’t allow you time to pump, you might as well quit before you’re fired. Here’s how the Columbus Dispatch reports a decision by the state’s highest court that, at least on its face, would appear to make breastfeeding incompatible with full-time employment if you’ve got [...]

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The Partisanship of Penile Politics

Why is it that the only two presidents to undergo public speculation about the shape of their genitalia have both been Democrats? Sure, there was a short flurry of attention to the bulge in Dubya’s flight suit after his “mission accomplished” landing, but as far as I could tell, the question was mainly: codpiece, yes [...]

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Hawt Girl-on-Girl Action … ‘Til the Boys Look Away

Last fall, the topic of girls kissing girls for boys’ jollies came up in one of my Intro to Women’s and Gender Studies sections. I’m still perplexed at how we landed there on the very first day of class, but hey, there we were. So I asked the group, which was about 90% freshmen, how [...]

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Women Are Soooo Mysterious!

Alternet has an extremely long piece exploring the mysteries of the female body. “Why do Women Orgasm?” by David Barash (mega-alpha-dog in evolutionary psychology) and Judith Eve Lipton asks a bunch of questions that are actually interesting, such as why evolution favored menstruation, menopause, and female sexual pleasure. Unfortunately, they don’t provide any answers that [...]

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Spectacular Ageism at the New York Times

Today’s most-emailed story at the New York Times tells the story of a medical student, Kristen Murphy, who voluntarily spent two weeks as a wheelchair-using “patient” in a nursing home in preparation for specializing in geriatrics. It’s an otherwise engrossing read, but I had to read the following passage a half dozen times to make [...]

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An Idea to Snip in the Bud: The CDC May Endorse Routine Circumcision

The New York Times reports that officials at the Centers for Disease Control are likely to recommend that infant boys be routinely circumcised, in an effort to lower HIV rates.
Public health officials are considering promoting routine circumcision for all baby boys born in the United States to reduce the spread of H.I.V., the virus that [...]

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Curse, Bless Me Now with Your Fierce Tears

Scenes from my front-porch idyll:
My mother calls me mid-afternoon from California, and her voice betrays that strained cheer I always hear when she’s about to deliver bad news. “It’s about your father. No, no – nothing terrible. It’s just that his forgetfulness is getting much worse.”
I said, “My sis already told me how he was [...]

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How the Current “Health System” Is Anti-Entrepreneurial

At Alas, Angry Black Woman describes a predicament that strikes many creative people sooner or later:
For most of my adult life, I’ve had to live without health insurance. Because I was a freelancer for many years, or because I did not have a fixed residence for a while, or because my skills and career interests [...]

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My Day Out As a Big Blogger

Most days, Kittywampus is fairly sleepy (as befits its patron cat), but yesterday traffic on my blog just exploded. You might have thunk it was my post on erotica for women that drew a crowd, but no … it was my half ranty, half wonky post on health care. WordPress put it on their front [...]

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Erotic Pictures for Women: Still Leaving Me Cold

A couple of weeks ago, Laura Woodhouse at the F-Word told the sad tale of a new women’s magazine in Great Britain that’s struggling to find a willing printer. The mag in question – Filament – is smart and sexy, she says, even if it’s not overtly feminist. Oh, and it intends to show naked [...]

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To All the Folks Equating Obama and Hitler

Stop scrambling German history.
It was Bismarck, not Hitler, who introduced universal health care in Germany. Bismarck established public, non-profit insurance agencies funded by worker and employer contributions. He didn’t do it because he was a bleeding-heart liberal; his intent was to co-opt an issue that drew support to socialism.
Please get your mustaches straight.

Photo from the [...]

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Why My “Good” Insurance Needs the Public Option

My family and I have “good” insurance. Oh, sure, I’ve spent dozens of hours fighting our insurer to reimburse us for life-saving cancer drugs that my husband had the temerity to need while he was in Germany, where those drugs cost somewhere between a tenth and half the price that they would have been in [...]

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Naw, ‘Wingers Aren’t Fascists

Over the past few days, a new commenter has been visiting my blog. He insists that it’s overblown to discuss any fascist tendencies among the American right wing and keeps talking about the stupidity of “you people,” though I’m still not sure who we might be. (I’m not going to do him the favor of [...]

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The Maternal Costs of Breastfeeding

The comments to my post on recent post on breast cancer and breastfeeding challenged the idea that breastfeeding advocates are overplaying their hand when it comes to maternal benefits. I’m not questioning its overall benefits to babies; as Sugarmag points out, it meets babies’ nutritional needs precisely. No formula can provide the immunities that breastmilk [...]

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News Flash: Teachers Are Overpaid!

Today’s Columbus Dispatch features an article entitled “Teacher Salaries Raising Eyebrows.” As the child of two public school teachers, I had to wonder what could cause such eyebrow twitching. According to the Dispatch, teachers in “some districts” (note the weasel word “some”) aren’t bearing their share of the state’s fiscal pain. They’re still getting pay [...]

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