Sam On Tucker

Samantha Bee:

Republicans don't get to drive the Democrats' bus.

Mess with someone's friends and they'll fuck you up.

Today's Today

International Women's Day

Here's a little something about Dr Mary Walker - the only woman ever to receive The Medal Of Honor.

Inspired By A Sign

She's someone's

daughter

wife

mom

sister

A MeToo Update

Harvey Weinstein gets no credit for helping us become a little more aware of the micro-shit we put on each other.

The credit goes to ballsy women.

hat tip FB bud H Weichselbaumer

Oh Those Youngsters

Cassandra Levesque (D-Strafford 04), a 19-year-old Girl Scout, won a seat in the New Hampshire House of Representatives last Tuesday - running on the strength of her successful push to raise the Minimum Age to Marry from 13 to 16.

The Concord Monitor:

Levesque said she hadn’t originally planned on running this year – she has a busy schedule with online political science courses from Southern New Hampshire University and her position as a girl scout leader in Barrington. She is also still in the process of getting her driver’s license, and was worried about the commute to Concord, she said.

- and -

In 2017, as a senior at Dover High School, Levesque began her push to raise the marriage age – 13 for girls and 14 for boys – as part of a Girl Scouts project that ultimately earned her the organization’s gold award. Both her grandmother and great-grandmother entered into child marriages in their teens to escape abuse at home.

Diversity, bitches. Without it, we get stagnant. 

We've allowed our governments to be practically nothing but older white men. To be clear, I'm an older white man, but this is not about ducking my responsibilities, and I'm not indulging in self-loathing - the point is that we have to stop pretending we can have a healthy equitable society when the power structure is so unfairly out of balance. 

That oughta seem simple and obvious, but if we know so much, then we should understand that  artificially slanting things in favor of that Old White Guy Status Quo, can only make it better for fewer and fewer people - which means things get worse for more and more people.

Anyway, congratulations to Ms Levesque for chipping away at the monolith, lowering the average age of the New Hampshire legislature and skewing the gender split - all of which btw, contribute to raising the standards for that body and for the rest of us too.

Way to go, Cassie. Stay after it.

Git Some

A Repub like Joni Ernst is touted as one of the boys when she talks about castrating hogs - kinda funny how that slips right by all the rubes (and more than a few Dems) as they shit on Hillary for being "such a bitchy little ball-busting cunt" 

Ed Note: sorry not sorry - I've seen that posted as a comment on this very blog

Anyway, while Ernst enjoys her status as a GOP Lady-Token-du-Jour, Dems are out finding women who don't need to back-slap with the guys to demonstrate their bona fides.

These are women who can bring it.

Abigail Spanberger VA-07

Elaine Luria - VA-02

Chrissy Houlahan - PA-06

Gina Ortiz Jones TX-23

MJ Hegar - TX-31

Amy McGrath - KY-06

Mikie Sherrill - NJ-11

Elissa Slotkin - MI-08  

Telling us about how their service inspired them to run for office this year.

Sportin' It Up

She plays like a girl. Yeah - in your wildest dreams you're not this good.

This Just In

The Mash Report - BBC Two

Critical Mass

At a certain point, it just has to go ka-boom.

Jay Newton-Small, Time:

If it seems like the structures that enable sexism are exploding, that’s because they scientifically are, according to the theory of critical mass. When women reached 20% in the Senate, they went after the Pentagon to reform the military’s sexual-assault protocol. When they reached 25% of Hollywood producers, they took down Harvey Weinstein and his casting-couch culture. And when they reached a third of the White House press corps, Fox’s Roger Ailes, NPR’s Michael Oreskes and other serial harassers in the media began to get called out. Somewhere in that zone, when women comprise 20% to 30% of an institution, things begin to change.

And from way back in June 2018, Ed Kilgore at The Daily Inetlligencer, NY Magazine:

In 2016, according to exit polls, women under the age of 30 voted for Hillary Clinton by a 63/31 margin. Men under 30 gave her a much more modest 46/42 edge. This 17-point gender gap in votes for Clinton was larger than the overall 13-point gender gap in the electorate as a whole.

A Pew survey in March showed a rapidly increasing gender gap in party identification among millennials (defined as those born between 1981 and 1996) as of the end of 2017, when men were Democrats or Democratic-leaners by a 49/41 margin, but women tended in that direction by an astonishing 70/23 margin.

And now in a new Pew generic congressional ballot question posed to a large sample of registered voters, women under the age of 35 tilt Democratic by a 68/24 margin, while men under the age of 35 prefer Republicans by a 50/47 margin. That’s a 21-point gender gap in the Democratic percentage, and a 26-point gender gap in the Republican percentage. Meanwhile, there’s a smaller gender gap among voters aged 35–49, and barely one at all among voters over 50.

Conventional wisdom is that if your candidate is behind by a differential of more than 5 points with Women Voters (vs Men), your guy loses.

Trump lost women by 13 points, but had an 11-point edge with men. Differential = 2 points = Trump "wins" (even tho' the outcome will always be in doubt because of Russian interference via American Social Media, if not outright precinct rigging, etc).

 Anyway - per Five-ThirtyEight:

This week, we got a poll showing that same 24-point gender gap in the only “national” election of 2018: the national popular vote for the U.S. House. A YouGov survey found that male voters preferred the Republican candidate by 9 percentage points, while female voters preferred the Democratic candidate by 15 points. It was a bit of an outlier, but not egregiously so: A RealClearPolitics-style average1 of generic-ballot polls taken in the past two weeks reveals a gender gap of 16 points, and the two highest-quality polls from that period — Quinnipiac and Marist — each showed a gap even bigger than 24 points. If YouGov, Quinnipiac or Marist is correct, then just like 2016 broke a gender-gap record for presidential races, 2018 will have the widest gender gap in congressional elections since at least 1992.2

Gender Differential = 6 points.

Imagine the Ka-Boom if that 6 point spread turns into 20.

But -

Don't get happy

Get together

Get busy

Get shit done

Today's How-To

A political ad from MJ Hegar, running for US Rep in TX-31:

This is how ya do it, guys. Distinguished Flying Cross - with Valor.

Today's Tweet

And the message is clear.

There are no words for how much i rate this 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/Pyw5cNCdHh #IWD2018 #WomensDay #8march #8marzo

— Cinzia Pellegrino (@cnzpll) March 11, 2018

The clitterati. How great is that?

Missed One

It's a problem everywhere.

Today's Tweet

And some history:

Barbara Rose Johns Powell (March 6, 1935 – September 25, 1991) was a young, American civil rights leader-pioneer and the niece of one of the "fathers of the Civil Rights Movement," Vernon Johns.[1] On April 23, 1951, at the age of 16, Powell led a student strike for equal education at R.R. Moton High School in Farmville, Prince Edward County, Virginia. After securing NAACP legal support, the Moton students filed Davis v. Prince Edward County, the largest and only student initiated case consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring "separate but equal" public schools unconstitutional.

“IT SEEMED LIKE REACHING FOR THE MOON.” -Barbara Johns pic.twitter.com/TMYudewnYN

— John Schu (@MrSchuReads) March 8, 2018

 

Today's Today

Wanna make your economy hum? Take the shackles off of 50% of your talent pool, dummy.

Want your political system to work better? (see answer above)

Wanna fix what's wrong with the culture? (see answer above)

Get 'em, ladies. We need you.

The Guardian has a rundown on International Women's Day:

Kosovo

Turkey

Ukraine

Today's GIF

Honoring #MeToo and #TimesUp:

On Trying To Listen Better

Lili Loofbourow, The Week:

"Grace," the 23-year-old woman, was not an employee of Ansari's, meaning there were no workplace dynamics. Her repeated objections and pleas that they "slow down" were all well and good, but they did not square with the fact that she eventually gave Ansari oral sex. Finally, crucially, she was free to leave.

Why didn't she just get out of there as soon as she felt uncomfortable? many people explicitly or implicitly asked.

It's a rich question, and there are plenty of possible answers. But if you're asking in good faith, if you really want to think through why someone might have acted as she did, the most important one is this: Women are enculturated to be uncomfortable most of the time. And to ignore their discomfort.
- and -

The Aziz Ansari case hit a nerve because, as I've long feared, we're only comfortable with movements like #MeToo so long as the men in question are absolute monsters we can easily separate from the pack. Once we move past the "few bad apples" argument and start to suspect that this is more a trend than a blip, our instinct is to normalize. To insist that this is just how men are, and how sex is.
- and then -

This is what Andrew Sullivan basically proposed in his latest, startlingly unscientific column. #MeToo has gone too far, he argues, by refusing to confront the biological realities of maleness. Feminism, he says, has refused to give men their due and denied the role "nature" must play in these discussions. Ladies, he writes, if you keep denying biology, you'll watch men get defensive, react, and "fight back."

This is beyond vapid. Not only is Sullivan bafflingly confused about nature and its realities, as Colin Dickey notes in this instructive Twitter thread, he's being appallingly conventional. Sullivan claims he came to "understand the sheer and immense natural difference between being a man and being a woman" thanks to a testosterone injection he received. That is to say, he imagines maleness can be isolated to an injectable hormone and doesn't bother to imagine femaleness at all. If you want an encapsulation of the habits of mind that made #MeToo necessary, there it is. Sullivan, that would-be contrarian, is utterly representative.
Andrew Sullivan? Really?  I suspect he knows a thing or two about himself as a man, but his opinion on how men and women act and react in physically intimate encounters is not to be taken too seriously.  I could dismiss it just on the dubious merits of Man-Splaining, but throw in Gay-Splaining and you've kinda lost me altogether.

Maybe that's partly why Ms Loofbourow includes his perspective - to illustrate the problem of disconnection(?) - but I'm not sure it doesn't just cloud the really solid points she's making.

It could also be that I've chosen that particular nit to pick; and that could be not much more than my imagining the world to be a better place without Mr Sullivan in it.

Anyway, getting at the gist of it:

..."Everyone who regularly encounters the complaint of dyspareunia knows that women are inclined to continue with coitus, if necessary, with their teeth tightly clenched."

If you asked yourself why "Grace" didn't leave Ansari's apartment as soon as she felt "uncomfortable," you should be asking the same question here. If sex hurt, why didn't she stop? Why is this happening? Why are women enduring excruciating pain to make sure men have orgasms?

The answer isn't separable from our current discussion about how women have been routinely harassed, abused, and dismissed because men wanted to have erections in the workplace. It boggles the mind that Sullivan thinks we don't sufficiently consider men's biological reality when our entire society has agreed to organize itself around the pursuit of the straight male orgasm. This quest has been granted total cultural centrality — with unfortunate consequences for our understanding of bodies, and pleasure, and pain.
If you asked yourself why "Grace" didn't leave Ansari's apartment as soon as she felt "uncomfortable," you should be asking the same question here. If sex hurt, why didn't she stop? Why is this happening? Why are women enduring excruciating pain to make sure men have orgasms?

The answer isn't separable from our current discussion about how women have been routinely harassed, abused, and dismissed because men wanted to have erections in the workplace. It boggles the mind that Sullivan thinks we don't sufficiently consider men's biological reality when our entire society has agreed to organize itself around the pursuit of the straight male orgasm. This quest has been granted total cultural centrality — with unfortunate consequences for our understanding of bodies, and pleasure, and pain.

- and -

I wish we lived in a world that encouraged women to attend to their bodies' pain signals instead of powering through like endurance champs. It would be grand if women (and men) were taught to consider a woman's pain abnormal; better still if we understood a woman's discomfort to be reason enough to cut a man's pleasure short.

But those aren't actually the lessons society teaches — no, not even to "entitled" millennials. Remember: Sex is always a step behind social progress in other areas because of its intimacy. Talking details is hard, and it's good we're finally starting to. But next time we're inclined to wonder why a woman didn't immediately register and fix her own discomfort, we might wonder why we spent the preceding decades instructing her to override the signals we now blame her for not recognizing.

Note to self: Be aware. See her for who she is. Appreciate it, and tell her about it.

Oprah

I don't watch these things live. It's like watching baseball for me. Watch an inning, take a nap.  Watch an inning, fix a nice lunch. Watch an inning, mow the lawn.

Just gimme the hi-lights, if there are any.

Oprah brung it last night, btw.

Now, I can largely do without the Social Justice Warriors.  I think I get what their saying most of the time, but it seems like too many of them are going too far outa their way looking for a fight.

But maybe that's what needs to happen for a while.

So instead of crouching into a defensive position, maybe we could just listen - try to hear the individual story, and see if any of it lines up with our own behavior. And keep that conversation going.

If they're not talking about something you've done (are doing), there's no need to get your boxers in bunch.

If they're talking about something that rings a bell from your past, address it.

And always remember it costs you nothing to say, "I'm sorry that's happened to you - I'd like that never to happen to anyone".

It goes back to a Tim Wise idea: I may not be guilty of doing those things to you, but that doesn't mean I'm not responsible for trying to do something now - something that might make a difference.

And also too: it didn't get all fucked yesterday, and we're not gonna get it all unfucked by tomorrow.

Today's Today

1975 - Reykjavik

Not to put it too terribly indelicately, ladies, but you own half of the wealth and all of the pussy, which puts you in a fairly powerful bargaining position.

Sometimes we push back really hard because whether we care to admit it or not, we're listening. And what many of us hear you saying sounds pretty scary.

But we're learning. Don't give up on us just yet.

1975 Icelandic women's strike:

On October 24, 1975, Icelandic women went on strike for the day to “demonstrate the indispensable work of women for Iceland’s economy and society”[1] and to “protest wage discrepancy and unfair employment practices.”[2] Ninety percent of Iceland’s female population, led by women’s organizations, did not go to their paid jobs and did not do any housework or child-rearing for the whole day.[1]

Today's Tweet

Original boss bitch. pic.twitter.com/iyxIUFzAiw

— Ghost of Mae West 🌻 (@Wyndgrove) April 8, 2017

Today's Tweet

HE
THREW
DIRT
ON
US

&

WE BLOOMED LIKE FLOWERS. #WomensMarch pic.twitter.com/H2PlJL8Bzw

— E✌i z a b e t h (@Lizbian21) January 22, 2017