The Truffle

Sarah Palin's latest quest to find something to stand for has led her to call herself a feminist and talk about "mama grizzlies." Why feminists don't simply laugh their asses off is beyond me. Oh, I know why--it's because somehow Palin's new schtick has earned her a Newsweek cover story, which means that Very Serious Media People are supposed to take it seriously. Jezebel , at least, is having fun Photoshopping said Newsweek cover. Let's leave aside the part about Palin making Wasilla's rape victims pay for their rape kits. And her stand on abortion. (Here, I should emphasize that I believe it's possible to be a feminist and oppose abortion. It would be really cool, however, if Feminists for Life and their ilk would push contraception, work to make adoption easier, and promote responsible, realistic sex education. It would also be helpful if they'd admit that the days of botched abortions are not an era any woman would want to revisit....

When female Republicans are just as loopy and dubiously qualified as their male counterparts. More from Balloon Juice.

And that goes for all the whining PUMAs who are still sore that La Hill didn't get the nomination. Ever since she pulled out of the campaign, they've been doing their best imitation of petulant second-graders. As in: "WAAAAAAAAAH! No fair! I wanted Hillary to win! I'm voting for McCain! Waaaaaaaaaah!" Act your age, will you please? The really childish and offensive part is that these women are attempting to speak for American women (and, more specifically, American feminists) as a whole. From Politico : Pamela Sumners, who directs the Missouri chapter of the abortion-rights group NARAL, added that Clinton “is now seen as the reigning dean of the women’s movement. It’s sort of Moses gets all the way to the mountain and doesn’t get to the promised land — and I think there would be people really angry about that.” Excuse me. La Hill didn't reinvent herself as the avatar of American womanhood until rather late in her campaign, when she realized that The U...

Guess I'm not such an on-again, off-again feminist after all: You Are 94% Feminist You are a total feminist. This doesn't mean you're a man hater (in fact, you may be a man). You just think that men and women should be treated equally. It's a simple idea but somehow complicated for the world to put into action. Are You a Feminist? A quibble: can we get over the dumb idea that feminist = man hater? Wanting equal rights is not the same as hating the opposite sex. Quit pretending it is.

As I've noted before, I'm sort of on-again, off-again as far as feminism goes. Some days, I'm pretty enthusiastic about it; other times I don't think about it too much. Yes, I'm a typical Gen-Xer who was a wee tyke during the second wave of feminism. And no, my mom never took me to any ERA rallies. OTOH, my parents did take me to a Vietnam war demo when I was an infant. My mom says there's probably a photo of me as a baby in an FBI file. But I digress. Despite drifting in and out of feminism, I've always supported the concept behind it, even when you got the occasional nutcase. Katha Pollitt and Barbara Ehrenreich are, in my opinion, two of the smartest, most insightful writers today, and they don't just write about feminism, either. Also, I find anti-feminists, by and large, to be a noxious bunch. The men are often all-around woman-haters who think feminism made their lives miserable when, in fact, it was their own bad attitudes. Anti-feminist...

...And I'm probably one of three people who doesn't care about Michael Richards. I'd already heard rumors that the guy was an asshat, so I wasn't too surprised by this meltdown. Maybe he and Mel Gibson could collaborate on a comedy about two politically incorrect grumps. Sounds like box office gold, doesn't it? Remember Richard Adelman? The loyal Bush foot soldier who kept his mouth shut for so long out of, erm, "loyalty" (read: the desire not to look stupid)? USA Today quotes Mr. Adelman in a piece on embarassed neocons trying to distance themselves from the Iraq debacle. Okay, so the good guys don't always win. Jean Schmidt still has a job to go back to. You have to wonder what color the sky is in Ohio's district 2... The Happy Feminist weighs in on the best analysis of Girls Gone Wild and similar raunch culture I've read in a long time. No, disliking Girls Gone Wild does not make you a prude. No, feminists do not have a probl...

I am what you could call an on-again, off-again feminist. There have been times in my life when I've strongly identified myself as one as well as times when I just didn't think about it that much. Nevertheless, I've always objected strongly to right-wing attempts to demonize the movement. After all, what's feminism? The belief that women are equal to men. That they are entitled to the same rights and opportunities that men are. Of course, that's the way I've always seen it, but the truth seems to be more complex. There is not simply one version of feminism, but many. There are the radical feminists, the moderate feminists, the libertarian feminists, the eco-feminists, the egalitarian feminists, the womanists...heck, there's probably some newly emerging branch of feminism I don't know about. Just check out Wikipedia's entry and you'll see 'em all listed. That said, there are plenty of feminists who've mangaged to completely distort what f...