Dickerson, who once denied Barack Obama the right to describe himself as black, says, in her blog on MotherJones:

Today's feminists need to blog less and work more. If women want reproductive choice to remain more than rhetoric, they'd better stop assuming these clinics will be there when they need them.

Apparently, we should also stop appreciating irony, like when a blogger tells other bloggers to stop writing so much.

But wait: Debra has a plan.

But you young chicks maybe need to go the Northern Exposure route, sending folks to med school in exchange for a few years running an abortion clinic.

Question: Who exactly is she talking about? Perhaps this will clear up the confusion!

Pole-dancing, walking around half-naked, posting drunk photos on Facebook, and blogging about your sex lives ain't exactly what we previous generations thought feminism was. We thought it was about taking it to the streets.

Yes, critiquing the feminist "cred" of other women is exactly like taking it to the streets. (I'm sure Debra was the only feminist currently writing on the web today who was on the Mall in 2004, handing out tens of thousands of stickers for NARAL during the March for Women's Lives.)

She adds:

Tell me exactly what today's feminists are doing for the struggle. Besides posting disses against old chicks like me. You got that covered.

Okay, Debra: Shall we start here?

The Future Of Abortion Providers [MotherJones]
Passing The Repro Rights Torch [Feministing]

Related: Colorblind [Salon]

[Picture via MotherJones]

My sexual assaults (yes, it's now happened twice) are not a political peg for other women to hang their hats on, and I should not and will not apologize to anyone for making decisions that were best for me. My body is mine — it doesn't belong to Feminism anymore than it belongs to the men who sexually assaulted me — and what I choose to do with it, or about it, is supposed to be my choice. To be told, subtly or otherwise, that my choices are invalid or anti-feminist is demeaning and condescending and in violation of the whole concept that feminism is about giving women choices and letting them make them.

I was sexually assaulted when I was 17. Without getting into the gory details, I was out on a date with an older guy, I was in a foreign country, I was comfortable with what I was doing (making out) until I wasn't anymore, and then he decided that it was a little late for all of that. My mind and, to a degree, my body, clicked off in the minutes that followed, and I guess most of my memories of it now involve the humidity that night, the dark, hearing his roommate snoring in the next bed and both hoping and fearing that he would wake up, and the rapidity and ease with which I began to immediately deny and justify what had happened to me. He drove me home and kissed me goodbye, and I never saw him again.

It took a couple of years before I stopped saying that I'd just had sex when I didn't want to.

Could I have reported it? I guess. On the other hand, I was 17, in a conservative country where I didn't speak their language or the (completely different) language of the man involved. I had 2 more days in the country. And the thing that I needed to do was not to tell the friends with which I was staying, and try to go to the police and explain and/or be castigated for going to his place, or making out, or having some sangria (or telling him I was 18), I needed, desperately, to deny it. I needed for that night to not occupy the place in my mind that it would've occupied if I could have called it by its name. I needed time, and healing and knowledge and I wasn't going to get that from a foreign police station or the legal need to revisit it constantly.

The first time I really told someone, he said I was making it up, obviously, since I didn't report it. Of course, he didn't say it to me, not then, he said it to the girlfriend who came after me, who threw it in my face when she next saw me and told some other mutual friends that I was making it up for the sympathy. (Lisa, by the way? Fuck you. I'm glad he got so stoned he puked on you at that party.) In a Women's Studies class later that year, I didn't admit to it even as we went around a circle and talked about our experiences with sexual violence because the mood in the room was definitely of the tell-for-the-good-of-the-Sisterhood variety. Several years later, during a fight with a boyfriend in which I told him he had to stop speaking to me in a certain way or else, he said, "Or else what? You didn't report your rape, what are you going to have the backbone to do to me?" I hung up the phone.

Legally, I can't talk about the second assault yet. Suffice it to say, it was far from a date-rape scenario and it was reported and the legal processes were as emotionally traumatic as the assault itself. Had I known how the system really worked, despite the fact that it was a stranger, I don't know that I would've reported it, had the situation not obliged me to involve the police in the first place in a state where you don't get to "choose" to press charges. What I eventually chose to do after weeks of increasingly disappointing meetings with prosecutors that left me feeling judged, crying, frustrated and angry, was to get myself a lawyer to represent me to the prosecutors, whose salaries I pay with taxes...and who should be representing my interests. It was far from a pleasant experience, and it makes me even more certain that I made the correct decision for me the first time and solidifies my position that it is not for me to decide or judge the reporting decision for anyone else.

See, the thing is, it's great to say that we should do this or we should do that for the sake of women everywhere. But no one — and especially not other women and supposed feminists — has the right to tell me or any other victim of sexual assault that being victimized and being traumatized leaves us responsible for making the world a better place (as though that's what's accomplished by reporting a rape, actually). We all have a responsibility to try to prevent them, to create a world where they are much more of an exception than the rule, where drunk girls or slutty girls or drunken slutty girls don't have to explain their behavior to anyone — regardless of whether they have been assaulted, or after having been assaulted — and where victims don't have to explain to non-victims the choices they made. My pursuing the prosecution of the one made no more difference in the world than not prosecuting the other. But maybe my talking about them both, maybe helping to ease the stigma of it for other people and create a space where I don't have to be ashamed of being a victim (or of how I chose to deal with that) will.
Assembly Survey Reveals Unreported Rapes [Independent]
Sleeping Around: Are Women Still Afraid To Report Rape? [IndyBlogs]

I hinted at this a bit in my post about that Roman Polanski documentary, but people really took it the wrong way, saying that I was a rape apologist or something, which is just silly. I think what it comes down to is maybe the divide between second and third wave feminism. Or actually, maybe it's that some people don't accept that feminism isn't monolithic, and that we can (and do) have different views about a number of things, from porno to age of consent, with the one basic truth being that "women are people too." Of course I'm not a rape apologist. But I'm a child influenced by riot grrrl and the sex-positivity movement, so maybe things I say can come off as harsh, and perhaps get misinterpreted by those who don't place as much importance on those things. (Or maybe people placed too much importance on an IM conversation, which is always a more casual form of communication.)

Anyway, this is kind of related to that, but only slightly: What I'm getting at is that yeah, duh, rape is bad and awful and horrible. But there's so much more to our shared culture as girls than just rape, domestic violence and menstrual cramps. We have unicorns, and Easy-Bake Ovens, and our favorite vibrators, and Maybelline Great Lash, and a female presidential candidate, and stories of losing things up our vaginas for days on end that make us laugh.

I like the girl parts of being a girl. I can enjoy cross-stitching and cock-sucking. And I can express my own opinions without being labeled a bad feminist. And I, nor anyone else, should ever have to apologize for any of it.

Related: Bikini Kill - I Like Fucking [YouTube]

[V]ery few people now actually remember what it was like during the period of the feminist movement. Everything was up for grabs. No one knew what to do or how to do it. Betty Friedan ruined a Super Bowl party in my very own home by wearing a black leather miniskirt and swinging her (not bad) legs clad in fishnet stockings back and forth in front of the TV screen so that nobody could see the plays. She radicalized a sizable bunch of neutral men into committed anti-feminists that day. Nobody knew what to do with these uppity, unpredictable women.

After that, See goes back to Abzug, whom she knocks for having a "terrible, lippy mouth," which, she intimates, turned people off from the feminist movement. Because, if only women like Bella Abzug could have been quieter and let men watch football, we'd be running the world by now!

Woman's Work [Washington Post]

With tenuous logic, Weldon explains her Spice-Girls-are-the-root-of-all-evil theory. She points to the Spice Girls lyrics as encouraging young'uns to get high and fornicate. "What chance did formal sex education have when faced with the catchy lyrics - written by men, of course - that told young girls to indulge in such things as 'weekend love' and encouraged 'playing games'? What it did of course was to separate love from sex. The Spice Girls killed romance," Weldon concludes. Wow. She is really giving Zig-a-zig-ah way too much credit.

But it gets even weirder! Weldon says that the Spice Girls are also destroying modern feminism. She explains that the Spices' fem-botty bodies are maintained so Posh and the lot can remain attractive to men, then, in the same breath, Weldon criticizes them for being working mothers. "According to the rumour mill, chickenpox has struck on the tour. It must be dreadful in that 747. Well, what did the feminists think would happen? That these girls wouldn't have messy relationships and have to drag their kids round the world so they could go to work? At the end of the day, a working mother's a working mother. In the cotton mills 150 years ago, toddlers crawled about the dusty factory floors. Now it's on the aircraft floor, up and down the aisle. What's the difference?"

What's the difference??? Well first of all, the mothers working the cotton mills didn't have a choice. Secondly, the fact that the Spices are working mothers doesn't mean that they're inattentive or bad mothers. What's wrong with involving your kids in your work life? At least they're spending time with their children! We're tempted to say that this article was meant to be a satire, but reading reviews of Weldon's books makes us wonder if she's dead serious. Says the Guardian on Weldon's What Makes Women Happy: "The contents page lists the causes of women's happiness. They are the usual suspects - sex, chocolate, shopping, and the three Fs - friends, food, family." Well then! Weldon is clearly an expert on women and we should defer to her Spice Girl revelations.

How the Spice Girls Have Killed Feminism, Subverted Morality And Embarrassed Us All [Daily Mail]
Lie Back And Think Of Jesus: After Seven Decades As An Atheist, Fay Weldon Has Found God. But Has She Stopped Believing In Women? [The Guardian]

Earlier: British Women Prefer Buying to Boning
British Women Have Enormous Breasts

With the release of her new book The Vixen Diaries, she proves her own hypocrisy by writing about doing all the shit she said she'd evolved from. And in the interview she gives in September's Essence, she proves that she's a bigger asshole than ever, referring to herself as an "artist" (we assume the medium she works in is bullshit):

You never want to be a one-time Oprah guest or a one-time best seller. Every artist has that fear of the sophomore jinx and thinks, Can I do it again? Because Confessions did so well, my concern is simply whether or not I can outdo myself.

He's not my boyfriend, but I'm closer to Wayne and we've spoken every day for the last six months. I can't start or end my day without talking to him. And we don't necessarily talk on the phone, but we text each other all the time. It's a perfect relationship. He knows that no matter who he's with and vice versa, we love each other. We don't have any surprises. If I were to see him kissing a girl tomorrow, it would be okay because I already know about it.

She encourages young women to speak out against abuse, to halt the cycle of it and no longer abuse themselves. Karrine uses her past as an example of what not to do and instated The Karrine Steffans Girls Club to give women of all ages a safe place to go in order to express their anxieties and support each other.

The thing is, I love everyone and I don't mean in a romantic emotion, but just generally. Honestly, I've never been with a man I didn't love, and I'm the kind of person that no matter what you do to me, I'm going to always love you. I'd rather you sh— on me than me on you because that's where my blessings come from.

At the end of the day, it's business not personal. I can't afford to ruin my professional life simply to save face with my friends.

Bob is one of those friends you want to love but you can't because he's toxic. We all have friends like that where you have to make that decision like, I can't be your friend anymore because you're killing me. And that's how it goes with Bob.

The Video Vixen Returns [Essence]
Earlier: Supahead Also Uses Her Mouth To Talk Shit

Author Karrine "Supahead" Steffans Reverses Position On Usher's Cock

They are normal girls living this fantasy lifestyle. They're good friends dating the same guy, and maybe the viewers are thinking, 'That won't ever be me,' but they like to look into it as if it was them as sort of an ultimate fantasy.

Recently, I tried to convince a male who found himself searching my DVR log to give the show a try. "They are girls!," I whined. "And they are, like, always naked! At the Playboy Mansion! What part of this don't you want to watch?" I selected one of my favorite episodes, where lead girlfriend Holly convinces Hef that the girls should design and execute their own individual photo shoots for their second appearance in Playboy, rather than be photographed together in straight-forward settings. Within three minutes flat, my male friend had lost interest. He might've even been nodding off, if I'm not mistaken. Who knows, I was glued to the TV.

You see, as expressed by Daphne Merkin in her piece on the subject in the June 2007 issue of Elle, these are the girls we all could be. They are the anti-fantasy. Behind the fake boobs and the fake tans and the fake hair and, in Holly's case, the fake nose, these are girls that are (sorry Us Weekly) just like us. They're feisty. And have something to say. Could this be why men aren't interested?
Why Women Love 'Girls Next Door' [NYP]
Related: I Dream Of Holly (And Bridget, And Kendra) [Elle]

• UK-based feminists hate Jezebel. [TheFWord]
  
• Speaking of "bad feminists": Female defense lawyer representing alleged rapist tells jury that rape victim "may well have been glad of the attention".[Feministing]
  
• Female wins the National Geographic Bee — first to do so in 17 years. [NationalGeographic]