Hello hello! It’s you again, as it is also me, and here we are! I’m embarking on an eight-hour road trip with my parents and children early this morning and the lead-up feels exactly the way you would think it would feel. Neat!
I hope your upcoming weekend is just dandy and that you get to eat the donuts you wanted to eat last weekend but couldn’t for some terrible reason!
Queer as in F*ck You
+ Rachel Maddow: The Rolling Stone Interview. Correct.
+ Roxane Gay Body Shamed by Podcast Host Who Revealed Her Team’s Private Accommodation Requests. Also: Mamamia’s Treatment of Roxane Gay Was Cruel, But Not Unusual.
+ Activists Say Capital Pride Overtaken By Corporations and Rich Gay Men. Also correct.
+ Undocumented and Transgender.
+ How This Fat Femme Yoga Instructor Is Reshaping the 3 Trillion Dollar Industry.
+ Virginia’s First Transgender Candidate Will Take On ‘Bathroom Bill’ Sponsor.
+ Faces of Healing: One Year After the Pulse Nightclub Massacre.
+ Trans Women DJ Jasmine Infiniti and London Jade Assaulted in Brooklyn.
+ The Long, Lonely Road of Chelsea Manning.
+ Web Series “The Feels” Portrays Bisexuality the Right Way.
+ Do you want to see the extended trailer for Life Is Strange 2? Yes you do.
+ Pulse Survivor Went From Being Declared Dead to Opening a Center for Black LGBTQ Youth
Welcome to the Hellmouth
+ Baseball and Gun Violence: Two of America’s National Pastimes Collide in Virginia.
Doll Parts
+ You’re Getting Hustled by Bustle and thennnnnn Part II: Wherein Bustle Tells Us to Take Our Post Down. See also: Underneath His Bustle: How Everyone’s Most Resented Feminist Website Actually Began, but wait there’s more! Bustle.com Conjures Every Terrible Feeling Women in Media Have About Women’s Media. Fun times!
+ Washington Post’s Millennial Women-Focused Spinoff The Lily Is Going the Distributed Route.
+ A Brief History of Steven Moffat Saying Why He Never Picked a Female Doctor Who.
+ Why Wonder Woman’s Second Weekend Sales Are So Extraordinary — And Important.
+ Deportation Panic Has Created a Town Full of Women Terrified to Go Outside.
Keep Up
+ Here’s the Real History Behind Arizona’s Confederate Monuments.
+ The Senate’s Secrecy Over Health Care Was Decades in the Making.
+ “I Have to Hold My Family Together”: The Hidden Cost of Prison Visits in New York.
Saw This, Thought of You
+ How to Hate Each Other Peacefully in a Democracy ??? Full disclosure I have not read this because I am on vacation.
+ Courtney Love Goes Full Lifetime in Mendez Brothers Movie.
+ White People Will Always Let You Down.
Oh hey I was just telling other people today “damn I miss the Toast”
(it’s like I’m saying this all the time. Broken record.)
SAME THO
I do not have enough fingers to count the ways I hate Bustle.
Also, while doing some quick research on polydactyly to try and flesh out this comment, I got briefly sucked into an internet mystery about whether Oprah has six toes, which improved my mood greatly after all that Bustle-shit.
Does Oprah have 6 toes? Inquiring minds…
TMZ says yes, a podiatrist from Toronto says no. IMHO I think the tabloid media is willfully misrepresenting a bunion.
Crystal Griner, one of the Capitol Police officers credited with stopping yesterday’s mass shooting in Alexandria, VA, is a black queer woman. She
and her wife were visited yesterday by 45 and today by the VP, as she recovers from a gunshot wound.
YES! Thank you for the confirmation. I saw her photo last night and immediately clocked her as family. But I hadn’t read anything to back up my gut reaction.
Both of the capital police officers who were shot yesterday were black.
Crystal Griner, say her name. We stay on the front lines protecting a government that is unwilling to protect us in so many ways.
And the GOP controlled congress will continue to fight to eliminate her civil rights …and ours
Dr Maddow, so dreamy
Well I just spent 20 minutes crying and reading that Mallory Ortberg story, in case anyone wondered how MY day was going.
Am I alone in having found some of Maddow’s responses in that Rolling Stone interview problematic? This portion in particular…
…made me lose a little respect for her.
@pecola I’m curious, what about it specifically do you take issue with? Her comments about not being “that female” or the fact that she does not speak much about the Roger Ailes situation?
@ebook…yeah, I have no issue with how Dr. Maddow perceives or talks about her gender…and if I did, I’d be about 12 years too late because she’s described herself that way for as long as she’s been in the public sphere.
@Manderay, my issue is twofold: she uses her gender presentation and sexuality as a shield, as if to say her friendship with Ailes is alright because she’s not the type he’d sexually harass…which…I mean…that’s not how sexual harassment works and to imply otherwise is problematic. Also, her friendship with Ailes wasn’t okay…it’s not okay to normalize serial harassers.
I didn’t get from this, “Roger Ailes and I were besties, yeahhhh serial harassment!”
But rather that this was someone she *needed* to have some kind of working relationship with, and so she was outwardly sort of friendly but kept him at arm’s length. Sad but true, people (and especially women) often can’t treat people with their true feelings.
Also, I take some issue with your characterization of the interplay of her gender and sexual harassment. I can verify that sometimes, that IS how it works. As a butch women, I’m not usually harassed in the same way as more feminine women. I’m definitely harassed, and sometimes in the same gross overt-sexualization, catcall way, but often in other ways. I think it could be the same for Rachel Maddow, and I think it’s okay her to be the expert on her own sexual harassment experiences.
*This is NOT to imply that feminine women who get sexually harassed are “asking for it”, or that there’s a way they could avoid it, or that it doesn’t happen to butches, or any of that. Just that people often react to my different gender differently.
@ebook, I appreciate that you didn’t get “Roger Ailes and I were besties, yeahhhh serial harassment!” Neither did I. Nor did I say anything with respect to Maddow’s sexual harassment experiences.
My point is that sexual harassment in general, is about asserting power and control. Women aren’t protected from harassers by their gender presentation or sexual orientation, as your personal anecdote attests.
That it might happen to butch women less, as you suggest, is immaterial.
I think it’s okay for Rachel Maddow to perceive and talk about her gender as she wishes.
it’s definitely a weird answer, but it’s also a weird question that only allows for a weird and awkward answer. like, what is the reporter trying to get out of this? i felt like that whole line of questioning was bizarre and uncomfortable and just fishing for something more dishy and clickable than “here’s what a mildly dorky lesbian Ph.D. thinks about ethics in journalism.”
Rachel Maddow Show watchers: question for ya.
I liked her Rolling Stone interview (although the interviewer questions def tripped the sexism radar) and I really liked what she had to say about her process: drilling down important stories that matter to make them part of the national conversation. Unfortunately I’ve never seen her show since I don’t have cable.
BUTTTTT: I was shocked that on the heels of her statement on process, she still thinks journalists just need to keep doing what they’re doing, doesn’t care that Trump voters don’t pay attention or discard the journalism. Esp. as a queer woman, she seemed shockingly out of touch with the fact that the current white house catastrophies tie directly to the irrelevance of messages like hers to a large segment of white americans. Like, the big message for so many of us from the 2016 election was that wow we are really out of touch and these Trump voters are a huge group of people that absolutely need to be understood and worked with and taken seriously if we want to avoid having ppl like Trump running the country.
What do you all think?
The people who put Trump in office aren’t a huge group of people. They’re much smaller than Clinton’s popular vote majority, and were strategically targeted by Trump’s campaign to win the Electoral College. There are a lot of very important lessons to take from 2016, but “Rachel Maddow needs to try to pander to some bitter alienated people who wouldn’t listen to her under any circumstances” isn’t one of them.
I agree.
If anybody needs to look outside of their bubble it’s Trump voters who live in small homogeneous communities and not the people that live in huge diverse metropolis
I mean, they have no motivation to do so since their president is in the white house, right? They won. If we don’t want to have that repeated in 2020, then we need to do something about it, I would think.
How can we say they are too small to matter if their president is in the white house? Not to mention having the house and senate majorities? Based on those results, we’re the political minority here, not them.
I appreciate y’all responding but confused heheh because it seems like a 180 degree change from general post-election consensus on this site, like friday open threads and articles about self-care and community activism, was that the work to be done esp by white hilary and bernie voters was not to turn away from trump supporters by for example blocking them on facebook but making an effort to engage with them and talk meaningfully about issues of shared importance (so, not pandering but talking about things like job opportunities, the military, education, etc).
Engaging with trump voters to try and overcome differences before the next election makes a lot of sense to me; saying they’re too small a group to matter and we can just ignore them makes no sense to me, heheh.
Hillary beat Trump by 2.9 million votes so there are more of us, we are the majority.
Gerrymandering and voter suppression won them the house
As a journalist and a concerned citizen, I firmly believe it’s the job of concerned citizens, not journalists, to reach out to Trump voters.
Journalists have to keep researching and reporting on what is true and important and not give a damn whether readers or viewers like it. The old saying of “It is a newspaper’s duty to print the news and raise hell” is still true. You print the truth, and if people don’t like the truth, too damn bad. As soon as journalists start tailoring their messages to reach Trump voters, or softening their conclusions so as not to scare the Trump voters away, or giving airtime to objective falsehoods to “show both sides” (see: NYT hiring a climate-change denier as a columnist), it’s no longer journalism. I’m not sure what to call it, but it’s not journalism. If Nancy Pelosi says Proposal X will cost Y dollars and Paul Ryan says Proposal X will cost Z dollars, you don’t give equal airtime to both assertions and let the viewers decide who’s right or invite surrogates on TV to fight about it. One is true and one is false and it’s the job of reporters to research it and fact-check it and then say “Nancy Pelosi is right and Paul Ryan is wrong and here’s all the research we did to prove it.” That’s not “biased” or “one-sided”; it’s just the truth. Journalists shouldn’t be “reaching out” to anyone except their sources.
You research the facts and you print the truth. Anything else, from convincing people to reaching across the aisle to turning Trump voters, is the job of people who read newspapers, not people who make them.
(This sounds very bitchy because it’s in my Serious Voice but i promise it’s not meant to be an attack on you. I think your question is good and most people are asking it, but i feel very strongly about this.)
thank you Emily!
I agree with all that’s said above about basically we got the power here. But I think journalists have a responsibility not to use snark. Trevor Noah had a great segment saying this so I’m not saying anything new, but yeah basically tone should be neutral when reporting facts. Maybe that’s too much to ask in the post-fairness-doctrine era: we now get our news filtered through op-eds and pundits. And not just for the sake of not offending those who don’t give a crap about progressive issues; for the sake of people like me who don’t think the crash-and-burn of democracy is anything to scoff at. I’ll do the sarcasm myself.
That one about how white people will always let you down. At what point do we get to hope that they maybe won’t? When are white people/straight cis people/etc going to stop expecting members of the minority group to “be the bigger person” and educate them? This might be the worst part for me, that the ones who are “trying” are sure that it’s our responsibility to change actual bigots’ minds and that if we don’t manage it, it’s on us. “work on your elevator talk” about how I am a human being? Really?
That NYT article on Chelsea Manning had me crying by the end. She’s survived & seen soo much. She truly deserves the status of hero & strong woman.
that rolling stone cover photo is dreamy as hell.
also, mallory ortberg! being interviewed and saying things! i love her so much and i miss the toast every day of my life. i met mallory once and she told me she liked my earrings and it was one of the better moments of my life.
and i take no joy in the situation, but as a person who loves a good scathing, in-cold-fury takedown of the powers that be, that Bitch/Bustle piece was a delight. talk about eviscerating.
Ugh at the Dr Who piece. I always thought it was amazing that he also managed to make a Sherlock episode that was less feminist than the original story written over 100 years earlier.
bless that rachel maddow interview bless that clean white button up she’s wearing (WITH THE TOP BUTTON BUTTONED) bless this quotation, “Do any of us know the extent of who we are?”