If you want to ruin your weekend, listen to the clip below from the talk show of G. Gordon Liddy, convicted Watergate perp and a prick extraordinaire, who gets to pollute the airwaves because...? If you want to skip the recording, here’s one quote that should suffice to turn your guts:
“Let's hope that the key conferences aren't when she's menstruating or something, or just before she's going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then.”
This posting could have been a long piece, inclusive of the various reactionary commentators competing for the gutter, like Tom Tancredo, anti-immigration fetishist, who accused Sotomayor on CNN of belonging to “a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses.”
But Liddy is fighting hard to maintain his high status among the Foul. He has had plenty more to say, not the least referring to speaking Spanish as speaking “illegal alien.” Liddy clearly drinks a big steaming cup of "I’m-An-Asshole" every morning.
One of the many reasons I resent the exclusion of lesbians and gays from the institution of marriage is that in order to redress this injustice, this issue is sucking up a lot of social justice air (and energy). Support or opposition to inclusion has become the kneejerk litmus test (I use it too) of who is progressive and who is an ass. I oppose marriage altogether – does that make me an ass? – but naturally, if there is going to be such a thing as civil marriage, accompanied as it is by hundreds of quite practical privileges, then everyone should be allowed access to it, no matter the object of their love.
However, as I have written so many times, I resent the focus of so many community resources on queer attempts to gain entrance into this most dubious of institutions – especially in these times of cut-backs to services to homeless gay kids, to local safer sex initiatives, to housing for lesbian and gay elders.
Why should the state have anything to say about private, intimate partnerships? Why is a couple who are madly in love for 6 months a more privileged pairing (in terms of governmental and corporate benefits) than life-long best friends or twin siblings? In other words, why can’t my best friend pick ME to share her health insurance or her retirement pension? Better yet, why aren’t American individuals automatically assured of healthcare and a reasonable retirement – whether they chose to couple or not – like people in so many other countries?
The entire history of the civil institution of marriage has been one of property contracts and exclusion. Another official exclusion in this country was around racial intermarriage, and its legacy has only been removed fully from the books in the last decade.
Religious marriage is another matter altogether. I believe in the absolute separation of church and state, so I have no problem with religious bodies performing their own blessings on their members – I just don’t think such an observation should be rewarded with tax breaks or translated into a special civil standing.
Marriage today is a failed arrangement – more than half of marriages end in divorce; many are stalemated in separation; and uncounted marriages are lonely, unhappy traps for the people who are in them. Those who participate in this legislated, regulated contract cannot pretend to be outside the institution. (“It’s only for our parents.” “We’re writing our own equality vows.”) It’s not just an individual matter: you can’t do it legally and “differently” at the same time. If you’re happy in your marriage, would you be less happy together if there were no such thing as a legal sanction? If there were no homophobia or sexism, would you feel the same need for official recognition of your love?
For many complex reasons, apparently, the gay community in California has really ramped up its creative efforts after Proposition 8 (ballot proposition changing the state constitution to say that a marriage is only valid when between a man and a woman) was passed. It ended that state’s gay marriage. This week the California Supreme Court upheld that vote, unfortunately. They’ve also reaffirmed the legitimacy of the unions of the 18,000 gay couples who married in that short interim period – leaving them in a rather bittersweet, anomalous situation.
There have been numerous video clips and PSAs (public service announcements) in response, some of them very powerful and moving. I like this one by Keith Hartman because of the way it contextualizes marriage as an historically property-based institution meant, in part, to control the sexual behavior of women.
I called it from the first show of this year’s season. The minute I saw Shawn Johnson, the gymnastics champion, on the dance floor, I knew that her transformation was going to be the most interesting of all the contestants. Johnson (17), the gold-medalist at the Beijing Olympics, had already devoted her young life to becoming the world’s top gymnast, so she brought focus, discipline and ambition to Dancing with the Stars.
Olympic achievement doesn’t come lightly to any world-class athlete. While she gains an extraordinary sense of her own capabilities, she gives up plenty. She fits in life around working out – and that life is probably limited to school and family. In short, Johnson had never before had time, I would suspect, to explore her sexuality.
Partner dancing is one hot activity. The connection between dance partners is – if things really work – incredibly intense. The body sensations that accompany the hip gyrations of Latin dances (hot down south; cool up north) and the floating formality of ballroom dances (like the waltz or fox trot) are downright arousing. Clearly Shawn Johnson was going to experience her body in a new way – as an instrument of sensuality.
The transformation can be symbolized in part by the change from barefooted work (gymnastics) to high heels, an essential accessory to the balance of a follower. Having achieved strength, flexibility and body awareness as an athlete, her job on Dancing with the Stars was to grow into her long-ignored hormones while collaborating with a partner. Week after week she learned the wonderful dances and figured out how to carry off the hyper-feminized clothing, hair and make-up the producers drenched her with. She accepted the shreds of beaded and spangled cloth over her boxy sporty little body without allowing it to demean her.
Shawn Johnson avoided becoming a gendered caricature, despite the fact that competitive Ballroom and Latin American dancers are too often forced by the judges to imitate a cartoonishly exaggerated femininity and masculinity. (It’s a long story why the ballroom establishment is so defensive about its overstated “heterosexuality”, a story I know in my bones as the first woman in Britain to gain her dance medals leading a man.)
That old closet-queen Len Goodman, Dancing with the Star’s head judge, finds a way in every season to dance as a giddy follower to whichever male contestant he finds most hunky – this time the Frenchman Gilles Marini (left), who lost to Shawn by less than 1% of the popular vote. Marini’s previous claim to fame was as a model and as sexy arm-candy in Sex and the City. Goodman’s producers often had this pretty boy strip to his nipples as he performed. But at the same time that Goodman dribbles all over himself for his chosen crush, he ridicules anyone whose persona is neither Barbie nor Ken.
The professional dancer who guided Shawn Johnson on her journey, Mark Ballas, had also partnered 2008 winner Kristi Yamaguchi, the Olympic figure skater. Ballas obviously knows how to work with powerful women and he kept his choreography for Johnson “age appropriate,” as one commentator said.
Below are two clips of Shawn and Mark dancing (followed by a clip to take you down gymnastic memory lane). The second clip is the cha-cha they chose for the final night and if you’re only going to watch one clip, watch that. The first is their breakthrough performance of rumba, the most romantic of all Latin dances. Based on a narrative of flirting and teasing, it is often performed with explicit sexual desire. As judge Len Goodman commented, correctly, after Shawn’s performance, “The rumba is a bit like a fire: it can warm or it can burn. Sometimes the rumba can be too hot, but you’ve got it just right.”
This is the couple’s wonderful, energetic cha-cha, performed with all the precision of champions.
And in case you want to remind yourself of what Shawn Johnson was doing last year, here’s a clip of her work on the balance beam at the Beijing Olympics.
Listen to these actors, directors, musicians, comedians and other stars. They’re all union members and the unions have saved their butts many times over. I belong to the National Writers Union, a local of the UAW (United Auto Workers), and I support the Employee Free Choice Act. (My first union affiliation, in 1968, was in the Wobblies – the Industrial Workers of the World.)
The whole process of bringing a union into an American workplace is totally out of whack – with the real power in the hands of the employers. This pending legislation is meant to establish an easier, more transparent system. Without the ability to organize, the people doing the real work of this economy are never going to get our rightful cut. There is so much union-busting going on under the cover of this economic crisis that support for this Act is more important than ever.
Unions: the people who brought you the weekend. And collective bargaining. And the end of child labor. And the eight-hour day. And paid vacation time…
The actress Amy Brenneman says: People associate actors with fame and glory. The truth is for a long time my union contract was the reason I could support my family. That's why I support the Employee Free Choice Act, because each worker, regardless of their field, deserves the freedom to bargain for a contract, for a better life.
Because of the annoying lack of identifying labels in the clip, you might wanna click here to see the performers and their bios.
I didn’t always have big breasts. Until menopause, my only features that regularly attracted the adjective “big” were my eyes and nose, unless you count “big mouth”. In the last decade, however, I’ve put on scores of pounds and have become quite stacked.
But luckily I don’t cross the bra line of DD – because if I did and I were still living in the UK, everyone’s favorite undergarment retailer Marks & Spencer would be charging me £2 extra. Or rather, they would be trying to charge me a “tit tax.”
Thanks to Beckie Williams, the young woman who founded a 14,246-strong Facebook group she named Busts 4 Justice, M&S have had to give up their chest size-ism. The UK’s Guardian newspaper reports that Marks & Spencer:
… has now backed down and today took out full-page adverts in the press to tell consumers that from tomorrow, all bras will cost the same. Under the headline "We boobed" the adverts say: "We were wrong, so as of Saturday 9th May the storm in a D cup is over."
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