I’m doing a little dinner party tonight so between trying to hide the filth under cushions and making yucatan style picked onions, I haven’t got much time to write.

But this post at Pandagon was just too good not to comment on.

I like boys who will argue legitimate (stress the legitimate part) points with me. I like them a lot actually. But this can present problems. I had one ex boyfriend (okay- cause I know you’re going to wonder- the bastard Russian) who could have long intricate discussions about tons of shit.I loved it. We could talk books or music or politics or art or history without my having to play down my brain. But, when ever it became obvious that I had just made mincemeat out of his long held ideas he liked to throw out complicated math questions at me. See, I’m not a math major. I’m not bad at math, but I’ve never needed to learn much more than the basics and math is an integral part of his career. It made him feel better to make me feel stupid. When I figured out that was what he was doing, I stopped taking the bait.

But he also had the most annoying habit when in the middle of a passionate argument. Have you ever seen those old movies where when a woman becomes to emotional or hysterical, the strong rational guy gives the girl a smack across the face to bring her to her senses? Well he didn’t smack me (cause I would have hit him right back) but he would grab me and kiss me to get me to shut up.

After spending a few weeks together on a trip (in small, confined hotel rooms) I called him on his behavior. I told him it was incredibly sexist to try and shut a girl up in the middle of an argument cause you think she is too passionate in her views. He stuttered, and stammered and finally asked what he should do instead. I told him he needed to grow a pair , suck it up, and deal with it. Expressing oneself passionately is not cause for alarm.

So I guess that my ideal feminist boyfriend isn’t afraid of a passionate girl, and likes housecleaning as much as I like cooking.

For some reason, some straight (or semi-straight, or closeted) men think that the appropriate reaction to unwanted sexual attention is violence. They think that it is the height of machismo to threaten to beat or kill an undesirable who has the temerity to insult their obvious manly virility by the mere suggestion that they might enjoy another penis instead of thrusting their manly cock into a submissive vagina.

If only we girls had the same excuse for violence when faced with unwanted attention. Though I would only use the violence on the opposite sex. I think.

Long long ago, when I was a wee naive 18 year old from a tiny, conservative mountain town I worked as the night cashier at a convenience store. I had just made my first gay boyfriend (Russell, a tiny, femmy boy in high heeled boots and daisy dukes) and made friends with my “married” (not legally of course, though for all intents and purposes) lesbian neighbors. I had always been a fairly liberal girl, so I didn’t have any major change of heart by being friends with these people, but instead it just reaffirmed my ideas about letting people live and love as they wish.

Misty and NeNe, my neighbors, had a friend who developed a bit of a crush on me. I had a serious boyfriend who I lived with and this was way before I had any inkling that I might sometimes be attracted to girls, so while her attentions were sweet, they were also unreturned. But she used to come into my store in the middle of the night and read a book while I dealt with drunks upset that I couldn’t sell liquor after midnight. I didn’t lead her on, I didn’t even flirt. But I was happy for the company. I never felt insulted by the fact that she had a crush on me, or in danger of losing all my womanly essence because this girl liked me.

On the other hand- I worked weekend nights at a convineince

on Anglachel.

Seriously brilliant thinking, especially the way she compares the current election to domestic violence.

But this particular post made me all squirmy in my seat (in a good way). She says the same thing that I said and that Black Agenda Report said, but so fucking eloquently (okay BAR is pretty eloquent too and all these people use way less cuss words than I do)

It may not be PC to say this, but there is a very rational basis for working class white racism that has nothing to do with believing minorities are lesser beings and everything to do with keeping that structural advantage in place. That’s why the cynical claims of the Obama campaign about Archie Bunkers – when the target is actually the guilty upper middle class – doesn’t ring true. Obama himself is no threat. He codes “white”. The threat he offers is not raising up minorities but turning his back on all the working class and failing to enact policies and programs that will help those who are struggling.

Go read her blog and learn something.

So I am in a mood. One of those moods where I need something big and chewy for my brain to work over for a bit. And when I’m in the big chewy brain moods, I tend to lose the snarky.

So instead I thought I would write about one of my favorite political theories- Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony or Gramscian Hegemony.

Gramsci was an Italian socialist (I have a thing for Italian socialists, I also love Pasolini films). He had some awesome ideas about how everyone is an intellectual in that we all use intellect and reason to survive, but not all of us work as intellectuals. For a brilliant man, he was way more of the people than your average high minded intellectual revolutionary.

But back to cultural hegemony, which is the idea that the working class will adopt beliefs that benefit the upper class as “common sense”. We see this all the time here in the way that poor white southerners will vote against their own best interest by voting for the Republican party. We see it in the way that people bitch over paying taxes and refuse to acknowledge the good that taxes actually provide. We see it in the way people who wait months for a check up with their primary care doc in an HMO freak out that universal health care will mean long waits for doctors appointments. We see it in the way that people complain about funding schools in their neighborhoods when they don’t have school aged children (even though better schools directly effect their property value whether they have children or not).

And with this new election, we will see it in the supporters of McCain. We all ready know what a McCain economy will look like. We will see hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homeowners blamed for their misfortunes (when failures that large are ones of the system and not the individual) and the homeowners will believe that it was their own fault they they lost their homes. We will see medical costs skyrocket to the point where health care is 20 percent of GDP, while the number of people who actually have insurance continues to decline. Layoffs will be standard while unemployment will run out (but we don’t count people who have been unemployed so long that they’ve used all their benefits up as unemployed. Officially they are no longer looking for work). The rich will become much richer and the poor will join the military because the only job they can get is as fodder for the 100 year Iraq war. Gas and food and heating costs will continue to skyrocket and oil companies will drill in Alaska and North Dakota and anywhere else they want because we will be so desperate for some kind of relief form high prices. And we will think all these things make sense. And the things that create cognitive dissonance we will dismiss because it doesn’t fit with the “common sense” narrative.

So when you hear things that are supposed to be common sense you need to ask yourself who benefits from this bit of common sense. And it doesn’t just apply to economics. Common sense says that women shouldn’t walk alone at night or they will get raped (less than 30 percent of all rapes are committed by strangers, btw). The only people that benefit by this logic are rapists, because they have an excuse for raping women who don’t use common sense. How about- it’s common sense that women are more nurturing than men. Who benefits from that? Men mostly, it means they don’t have to do as much care work as women because common sense says that women are better at it.

Common sense is rarely common or sensible.

A friend mentioned a radical French philosopher who wrote between the first and second world wars that without the nuclear family ideal of stay at home wives, the military industrial complex could not survive. You need to keep the women out of the work force as a kind of back-up force for when you send all the men off to die.

Which makes sense. Think of Rosie the Riveter. Think of who it is that most wants the nuclear ideal to be an iron clad law of how families should be constructed. These are the same people who think we should be in Iraq for 100 years.

But I have no freakin idea what the name of the philosopher was and googling is not helping. Anyone wanna help a girl out?

UPDATE: So it’s actually a novel called La Garconne by Victor Margueritte, and so far I have not been able to find an English translation. BAHHHHHHHHHHHHH

took advil, took migraine meds, took valium. Still can’t see straight. The light is too bright and movement makes me want to puke.

Talk amongst yourselves.

How come it’s okay to ask Chelsea Clinton about Monica Lewinsky, but no one asks Meghan McCain about her home wrecker mother or philandering father?

Anyone? Anyone?

(Not that I actually care, but if questions about parents sexual misdeeds can be fairly asked of children then why does everyone get a pass but Hillary’s daughter?)

there has never been a presidential candidate so willing to walk through fire for us. Everyday she does it, I don’t know how. Everyday she takes the full serving of the hate and misogyny that we get doled out to us in teaspoon portions (just enough to let us know we well never be good enough without a penis). Neither Obama or McCain has the same kind of toughness or courage that she has (and i type that in full knowledge of McCain being a former POW).

Paulina Porizkova is awesome, and not just because she had the good sense to be all smoochy over Rick Ocasek, lead singer of the cars and not exactly Brad Pitt.

I think it’s so sad when women say, ‘Oh, I’ve been spending my last few years being a mom.’ It’s like, you were someone before you had children, and you aer sure as hell going to need to be someone afterward. Being a mother is something I do daily, like showering or eating. It’s not my career.

Besides, her face- it moves! She’s not all botoxed up and unable to emote.