MEGAN: Hey, how is Austin?
SPENCER: It's filled with liberals, positive reinforcement, beef products, Johnny Dash-themed dive bars, extremely cheap beer, and bloggers with pulverizing hangovers.
MEGAN: HuffPo has been Twittering it.
SPENCER: I have met a lot of FDL commenters, who rule; Brandon Friedman of VetVoice gave Wesley Clark a terrorist fist jab at the keynote; I was told to pipe down because I was telling off-color stories during Howard Dean's keynote.
MEGAN: I get told that a lot, too, but really? Howard Dean is that important to listen to?
SPENCER: yeah, Nico asked me if I'd be on the HuffPo twitter feed, but that would require unlocking my Twitter and inviting people I don't know to see it, and there's a lot of stuff that I really don't want to make public on there.
MEGAN: I know, because you never accepted even me as one of your Twitter friends. I'm trying not to be mad about it.
SPENCER: I didn't? I'll put you on. Anyway we should probably talk about the news and shit.
MEGAN: Yeah, probably. So, at an ad conference, someone asked Arianna to play Karl Rove and run plays against Obama. Arianna's not that creative, but hearing her say aloud what we all know is going on at RNC HQ is sort of freaky.

Barack Obama may be Muslim, we're not sure, but he is definitely a Muslim sympathizer. He is the candidate of Hamas. He wants to negotiate with terrorists. He does, basically, not really care for America.

Also, she said "Hawai'i barely counts" as growing up in America and Michelle is "angry and bitter."
SPENCER: The first piece of Obama literature I saw when I got here was a doorknob flyer that read COMMITTED CHRISTIAN.
MEGAN: Which is part of the current messaging that this committed agnostic (no, it's not an oxymoron) doesn't really love, but whatevs.
SPENCER: Arianna's probably right that the sotto voce campaign will move away from the statement "Obama is a Muslim" to "We can't be sure that Obama isn't a Muslim". At this point, it's a safer play to make that sort of epistemic claim — there's absolutely no way Obama could disprove it, it's not the sort of statement that admits of the facts, as they taught me in epistemology class.
MEGAN: Hasn't it already?
SPENCER: It has? My prediction has come true already? See, that's why I'm an A-list blogger.
MEGAN: Indeed! I mean, it's (not to bring up old wounds here) but totally where Clinton went, "I have no reason to doubt it" and "not that I know" and such.
SPENCER: Let's. Not. Talk. About. That.
SPENCER: There is sooooooo much relief-slash-jubilation that the primary is over here — at our FDL caucus yesterday, a review of the last year on the blog tread delicately on the subject of the Great Interfamilial Unpleasantness.
MEGAN: I'm glad at least some bitches are hugging it out after the whole Ricki Lieberman thing that left a bad taste in my mouth. So, moving on to something everyone can be pissed about, there's a new anti-Michelle ad.
SPENCER: YES LET'S. It actually ends with these women pledging allegiance, and what's up with that Reagan quote at the end? "Freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction?" is that like, a threat?
MEGAN: Yes, the Pledge of Allegiance, the vaguely martial music and the use of all women in the add is rather pointed. All in all, still shit but far better done than the North Carolina ad.
SPENCER: Did you see the NYT/CBS poll about Michelle Obama? Her negatives are stunning, or, rather, the racial discrepancy in views of Michelle is stunning

There was even racial dissension over Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle: She was viewed favorably by 58 percent of black voters, compared with 24 percent of white voters.

MEGAN: Yeah, that would be what freaks me out a little more, that and the whole "where are the feminists that are so opposed to sexism in the media" doing right now?
SPENCER: What accounts for this, Megan?
MEGAN: Oh, God, where to start? I mean, mean girls, the legitimacy of female anger, fear of strong women, envy... Did I ever tell you I have actually met people that have never met a black person until they were an adult. And I'm not talking until they were 18 and went off to college, I'm talking as a legitimate adult. They still exist. They aren't few in number. I mean, I think we've seen this reflected in Crappy Hour comments before:

Nearly 60 percent of black respondents said race relations were generally bad, compared with 34 percent of whites. Four in 10 blacks say that there has been no progress in recent years in eliminating racial discrimination; fewer than 2 in 10 whites say the same thing. And about one-quarter of white respondents said they thought that too much had been made of racial barriers facing black people, while one-half of black respondents said not enough had been made of racial impediments faced by blacks.

I think this is also horrifying and telling:

Nearly 70 percent of blacks said they had encountered a specific instance of discrimination based on their race, compared with 62 percent in 2000; 26 percent of whites said they had been the victim of racial discrimination. (Over 50 percent of Hispanics said they had been the victim of racial discrimination.)

Seventy percent of blacks have encountered at least one incident of racial discrimination. And I'm one of the 26 percent, as once when I broke up a party as an RA in college, I was called a "racist Jewish bitch." And I still know that's nothing by comparison.
SPENCER: Can I tell a story here? I once had this girlfriend who grew up in a mostly-white area, and I took her to my mom's house in Flatbush for the first time. Flatbush is majority-black but rather internally diverse — lots of immigrants from West Africa, the Caribbean (Haiti esp) as well as African-American; and it also contains Russians and Jews. As we were driving down Foster Ave, my GF took a look at the people on the street and said, "So, does your mom's house have a blackyard?". True story
MEGAN: Whoa. Um, how long until you broke up with her?
SPENCER: You were called a Jew?
MEGAN: Yes. A racist Jew because as an RA, I was breaking up a loud frat party 4 doors down from my apartment during finals week and it happened to be the one African-American fraternity on campus. And, obviously, I was just doing it because I hated them and not because I had a 17 page paper to finish and a 25 page paper to finish by the next day and it was finals week and because they were heard by the head of housing. But, yes, Jewish.
SPENCER: So, seriously, where's the organized defense of Michelle Obama? She's an extremely accomplished woman and while she may not have been the professional powerhouse that HRC was by 1992, I don't understand why organized feminism doesn't evidently identify with her. that was badly expressed — I'm hungover — but you get what i'm saying i hope.
MEGAN: No, I think it was said pretty well, it's close to how I've said it. Where's Geraldine Ferraro decrying the attacks by the media on her working status? Where's Gloria Steinem's impassioned defense of righteous anger and women? Did we all just admit that sexism triumphed and go home? Is it only sexism if it's Hillary?
SPENCER: A couple months ago, my friend Ann Friedman of TAP and Feministing wrote a really prescient piece called "Solidarity Politics" about this sort of thing

Let's make this election about the issues, everyone says — and rightfully so. Our presidential nominee should be chosen primarily on the issues. But most of us don't separate issues from identity as cleanly as we'd like to believe. When it comes down to it, everyone is an "identity politics" voter. The problem is that phrase, as commonly used by right-wingers and some on the left who are tone-deaf on issues of race and gender, has the effect of cutting down the political choices and involvement of women, people of color, and gays and lesbians.

MEGAN: I have to say, please introduce me to Ann sometime and I promise not to fan girl out. I almost always really love her stuff — thoughtful, well-written, etc.
SPENCER: and Ann is right about this, but the character assassination of Michelle Obama demonstrates that the argument needs to be taken a step further — recognizing that cross-cutting identities within the context of identity politics is fucking up people's expectations too
MEGAN: I took the best class ever in college in Microsociology (mind-blowing topic) and one of the things that stuck with me was the professor's assertion that we are a collection of equally accurate but not equally relevant identities and roles.
SPENCER: You were saying in the car yesterday that there's a cohort within the feminist movement that's increasingly indistinguishable from an HRC machine and how bad that is for the movement as a whole — it was a really good point that you should tease out for the benefit of CH readers.
MEGAN: Like, because you're white, you'd never call me your white friend, or because we know a zillion bloggers, you'd never call me your blogger friend. I'd never introduce myself to your friends as Pam's sister or Butch's daughter or Greg's ex-girlfriend.
SPENCER: Or George Costanza's father's lawyer.
MEGAN: Yes, exactly. And so I feel like, for many people and sadly probably too many women, the identity that more people associate with Michelle Obama right now is that she's black. Not that she's a woman, or a lawyer, a wife, a mother or anything else. And that's why the Obama campaign is trying to play up the prominence of those roles.
SPENCER: It's depressing that a core mission of the Obama campaign is to teach white America that black people are, like, people.
MEGAN: Or like people, commas deliberately excluded.

MEGAN: So, do you love how you're the official go-to CH sub now? We keep thinking we ought to get a girl or something, but you're too easy.
SPENCER: it's true
you just pass me around
MEGAN: Does that make us really intellectually whore-y? Or just you?
SPENCER: wtf? i thought jezebel was against slut-shaming!
i'm gathering up my clothes and running out of this sorority house
my mascara all fucked up
i'm seeking the safe space of feministing
MEGAN:: Hey, you know, we all only fuck with other people about stuff we do ourselves and feel guilty about.
But I want my mascara back, even if it isn't waterproof.
Anyway, so, we could talk about everyone fucking on the campaign trail.
SPENCER: speaking of Feministing, can you believe that the New Yorker quoted a post Ann wrote and changed her name to "One Blogger"?
oh you want to talk to that about the NEWS
MEGAN: Oh, well, you know, it is supposed to sort of be like that. But, yeah, let's shame the New Yorker because that was a shit move.
(Says the girl who got quoted by them but not by name once already.)
SPENCER: yeah, what's next? the New Yorker hiring a snitch bitch as its Washington correspondent?
ok so: that WSJ story
MEGAN: Yeah, I just liked the story because it made us political DC types look like we actually manage to connect with one another on a human/physical level.
SPENCER: you didn't think it was ridiculous? do people not figure out that campaigns are staffed by 20-somethings, who work in a pressure cooker, for months on end, with limited contact with the outside world, and trained to think that anyone they don't work with is the enemy... and that in that environment... PEOPLE HAVE SEX WITH EACH OTHER
MEGAN: Yeah, I mean, I think you and I know that but most people see Howard Wolfson on TV in that motherfucking Norwegian sweater and think we're all nerdy and never get laid.
SPENCER: this, however, is inappropriate:

Sandra Sobieraj, Washington bureau chief for People magazine, married Frank Westfall, a Secret Service bomb technician who protected the vice president while she was covering the Gore campaign.

So, how has date rape become such everyday dudehavior? You can probably blame a religious fetishization of virginity for the fact that a lot of girls say "no" to sex they actually want. Perhaps this is a source of some disappointment to dudes who try to fuck Christian girls. (Dudes, come on, stop trying to fuck Christian girls.) So...they date rape them? So they can leave them filled with a nagging sense of lifelong shame? That will fuck up their sex lives, much worse than the religion ever did, for years and years to come? Jesus Christ. Okay, and then there is the chance that she just doesn't want to have sex with you. Maybe she's flirting with you for affirmation, maybe she's heard you're shitty in the sack, maybe she's hung up on someone else, maybe she heard about your folliculitis of the balls. Whatever. So you stick it in anyway and achieve the worst sex of your life and leave her wondering for years and years and years, "Why the fuck did he do that to me?"

One time when this happened to me, I actually asked, and he said, "You just didn't seem to be the kind of girl who thought sex was that big a deal." How perceptive! So why the fuck would you commit a felony to stick it in a girl so deeply uninterested in having sex with you she bothered to say "no" for once in her entire sex-positive life?

I still don't know. But hey! Apparently the shirt's been pulled. Go Feministing Bonerkiller Squad!

Hilarious Rape Shirt Pulled [Feministing]

Not only do reporters get into the business because they are generally willing to forego good money in order to do some service to the world — srsly! — a newsroom is ideally one of the most meritocratic workplaces possible. It's all about the bylines, baby! So I consulted my career history for clues.

The first newspaper I worked at was my college rag, the Daily Pennsylvanian. The "glass ceiling" there was the "crime" beat, and I think there was some uncertainty among the editors as to whether I'd have the same rapport with the cops as their manly English-majoring Radiohead-listening selves; needless to say, when I got the job I had much better rapport. Because cops are often sexist! And they say much stupider shit to women. Most real newspapers have women on their police beat for this reason!

Ummmm, next I worked for the Philadelphia Daily News. They loved ambitious girls there because they could boss them around and get them to do hard-hitting pieces such as the Playmate of the Year stories. No one there struck me as particularly sexist or racist until, for some reason, the boss who liked me (a dude) went on vacation and no one would give me assignments and a veteran lady reporter told me it was because they were all sexists. Determined to overcome adversity, I spent months digging around for scoops and learning everything I could about the city's total lack of funding for drug treatment. I even found out the new police chief had a junkie for a daughter! Which no one else knew at the time. The editor — I think he hailed from the Trentonian, the last American paper to still run pictures of naked ladies — did not want to run anything I found out about. He did not seem to "trust" me. Did he not trust me because I was 20 years old? Or because I was a 20-year-old girl? I think the latter, because who doesn't encourage an ambitious dude? He could turn out to be the next Bob Woodward, after all! The third newspaper I worked at was the Washington Times which did not seem like a sexist place mostly because what self-respecting woman would want to work there? The only place to eat that was remotely nearby was Checker's. I was a terrible Washington Times employee. I actually faked appendicitis to get out of work, for which I was paid $8 an hour.

The next places I worked — Asiaweek, Time and the Wall Street Journal — were all highbrow, and that's a totally different scene. The only type of sexism I encountered at those places was the sort of "oh you are poorly organized and bad with deadlines and quaintly obsessive and unafraid of saying "fuck" to your sources and your desk is a mess because you are a self-destructive female" psychoanalysis sort that you get when editors feel a Nikki Finke vibe coming off you. (Seriously, my desk was nothing compared to some male reporters with actually important beats, but whatev.) And I can't really argue: I was a self-destructive female — still am! But I don't think I'd be so bad if I hadn't been a reporter.

See, when you're a reporter you have to get information from people. You can do that by expecting them to understand the media's role in the world and hoping they respect your work sufficiently to tell you shit, or you can do that by making them like you. (Or feel sorry for you; same diff.) I mean, inevitably you mix up those things, but it varies by beat and it varies by reporter. And at the end of the day, the person you wind up actually being is some weird result of those choices, applied to different jobs. You become a reflection of your relationship with the people you befriend and manipulate into giving you information, with a side order of how badly you desire to please readers.

Weirder still, you become so attuned to the prejudices and the faults of people you interview that you find yourself parodying them with eerie precision in your off-hours. It starts out as a joke — "wetback!" "Feminazi bonerkiller squad!" — and is seeps into your identity. My most sexist boss ever, a veteran sports reporter and Philadelphia boy's-club fellater who came after all this, is still positive it's all a joke. And to him, it was! But this self-destructive crazy female couldn't take it anymore. Thank god for teh blogz! I don't have to interact with the sexist, bigoted, provincial people who hold power over stuff ever again! Just you fucking dykes.

Dorian Solot and Marshall Miller (imagine how explosive their sex must be!) are sex educators and Brown graduates

It was the night before I had the awesome opportunity to see Barack Obama in-studio on The Daily Show. I got my The Audacity of Hope and my Obama biography and curled into bed, thinking I would read some passages and get excited about seeing the man with the otherworldly charisma the next day....

Not Oprah's Book Club: I Love Female Orgasm [Feministing]
Marshall Miller and Dorian Solot [Sexuality Education]

Gray rape, if you think about it, is an ideal term to describe a topic about which I am so conflicted. it evokes the notion of "shades of gray," which is to say, the nuance without which empathy would not be possible. I forgave my gray rapist or date rapist or whatever a long time ago, much longer ago than I would have if I had felt myself that night to be in the presence of the OMG PURE EVIL that would be required to commit the sorts of things I'd been used to calling rape in the past. It is a loaded and powerful term, after all, and I derive no empowerment from using it to characterize his offense. On the other hand, I did derive empowerment — and sadness, and pain — from hearing you peoples' stories about how common this crap is. And it is only in recognizing, and accepting, those nuances — even as we hold ever tighter and faster to our beliefs and moral codes and whatever we hold dear — that we will ever come to peace with any of the horrible shit that happens in the world, although, to be quite honest, maybe alcohol will achieve the same effect. (And also: get me laid.)

All of which is a long-winded way of saying: please, if it doesn't bring you to tears, talk more amongst yourselves, about your rapes: to dudes, especially. If the partial amnesty afforded by your comfort with yourself and your sexuality in spite of it all — or afforded by terms like "gray rape" — makes it easier for all those losers to come to grips with what they've done, well, even better. (Thankfully, they'll probably be horrified and treat you like a delicate flower for a few days until they realize you aren't.)

Call It What It Is [Feministing]
Earlier: 'Cosmo' Wonders: Is It Rape If You Had Too Many Jaeger Shots To Remember It Anyway?

But then in Israel I saw this other girl who used to hook up with him and she assured me he remains a douchebag, only now one that practices medicine in New York. Anyway, I sure hope he saves some lives, and I remember that sexual experience a little more vividly than most of the consensual sexual experiences I've undergone in a similar state of intoxication, but neither sentiment makes it RAPE, does it? It's something, "date rape" I guess, but it's not rape unless I say it was, right?

All of which is a poignant, personal way of alerting you to the fact that Cosmo has come up with a new name for this kind of nonviolent collegiate date-rape sort of happening: gray rape.

And some feminists are angry, and they've launched a letter-writing campaign about it, though if you're reading Cosmo for purposes other than to revel in its unique special brand of inanity you have bigger issues with your sexual identity than what to call that time you fucked that guy you didn't really want to fuck. I'm not sure what to think about any of this, because while Laura Session Stepp (the writer of the Cosmo story) is a tool, reading the individual stories of "gray rape" victims that so closely mirrored my own — they got too drunk! they said no, but then they passed out! when they realized they were having sex, they stopped! — I felt absolutely nothing. It was one drunken regrettable night. One of so, so many more to come. And I have found that when a guy demeans you in a drunken state, it is more likely to stick with you and haunt you if you give anything resembling a shit about his opinion.

And come to think about it, how gross do you have to be to fuck someone when it's, like, three Goldschlager body shots away from being necrophilia?

Battling The Myth Of "Gray Rape" [Talking Points Memo]
No Such Thing As Gray Rape [NYC Against Rape]

Another Feminist For Detachable Vaginas [Feministing, via YouTube]

• The women at Feministing wonder if Andy Samberg was being an "ironic hipster douche" when he wore a "National Organization For Women—Berkeley" tee to a Spike TV awards-show. Our verdict: Samberg may be a hipster but he's probably not being ironic; he grew up in Berkeley. [Feministing]
  
• The British women who think we're bad feminists pass along this report: Toddlers begin to understand and react to gender stereotypes from as young as 2 years of age. [TheFWord]
  
• Just a few days after the report about new guidelines for identifying symptoms of ovarian cancer comes word that doctors have proven that a "common breast cancer drug can significantly cut relapse rates." [Guardian]
  
• Two women in the NYTimes obit section today: R&B singer Nellie Lutcher, 94, and Ruth Bell Graham, 87, wife of Billy. [NYTimes]

Is it because girls who don't always insist on condoms have run some sort of risk assessment in those collegiate, Natty-Light-addled brains of theirs, and realize that sex is one of the few areas in which giving into one's more impulsive, lazier and more hedonistic propensities isn't always going to have super bad long-term consequences? No WAIT! It must be because semen has MAGICAL ADDICTIVE POWERS!

Alright, alright, we did this post after reading this on Feministing and before realizing that the study "Does Semen Have Antidepressant Properties?" — even though it remains the most-emailed article on the Psychology Today website — is five years old. But we looked up the study's author, Gordon G. Gallup and discovered that, well, not much appears to have happened with his career since he published the groundbreaking work. We can only assume it's way distracting having to service all those depressed young researchers suffering from "semen withdrawal."

Sperm: The New Crack [Feministing]
Crying Over Spilled Semen [Psychology Today]