Standing in the way of control!

We’ve been known to disagree with the advice doled out by the New York Times’ Sunday Styles advice columnist before, and we’ll have to politely (since it is a column about social mores!) disagree again. This coming Sunday’s column is already up on the Times’ website, and N. G. from Arizona asks the following question:

“About a year ago, an acquaintance gave me a long, affectionate squeeze in front of my significant other. Since my friend is gay, I didn’t think it would create an issue. But my boyfriend, who is a little possessive, took offense. Recently, he ran into my acquaintance and threatened to beat him up if it ever happened again. When I told my boyfriend that threats weren’t the right approach, he called me ungrateful and refused to apologize. Should I apologize to my friend?”

Our answer: your boyfriend sounds like a hypercontrolling asshole with potential for abuse! If he’s not already psychologically or physically abusing you (and it sounds like he is!) he’s probably about to start. Columnist Philip Galanes’ answer?

Unless your boyfriend is a method actor preparing some Stanley Kowalski exercise, I’m afraid he’s really put his foot in it. An apology from you doesn’t work. Your behavior was blameless, and apologizing for your boyfriend would be pointless. He’s not sorry and you can’t prevent further outbursts. I’d address the underlying behavior. It’s odd that your boyfriend would object to a hug from a friend, gay or straight, especially if it didn’t bother you. And his response to you is a little strange, as well. ‘Ungrateful’ for what — being treated like a helpless possession? None of this is to say your boyfriend is a bad person. He may have a blind spot where other men are concerned. Still, you owe it to yourself (and the safety of half the world’s population) to straighten this out. Ask him why he became so upset, and let him know that you’re a big girl who can judge whether a touch is inappropriate. If that goes well, ask again about an apology. If not, how would you feel about hugging my diabolical editor?

Look, I know the column is meant to be lighthearted, but Galanes is taking this thing way too flippantly for my liking. There are numerous red flags in the original question, starting with the fact that she had to write into an advice columnist to ask it in the first place. YES you should apologize to your friend for your complete asshole of a boyfriend! How can you even have to ask that question? If my boyfriend ever EVER even yelled at one of my friends, much less threatened them with violence, I would be mortified and apologize profusely. You don’t yell at each other’s friends, just like you don’t yell at other people’s children. Lady, you need to get far, far away from this man as soon as humanly possible.

Social Q’s [New York Times]

[Jezebel]

Popularity: 27% [?]

ShareThis

(Sponsor Link: Rent on Golf Course)

Much has been said recently about the dearth of actual bitches these days (including by Moe), but there is always more to say. Fresh from the very pro-bitch Guardian, Victoria Coren’s column further expands on the much-stated need to increase the bitchiness of the world today. She notes that there’s an enormous difference between bitching and being a bitch, and bemoans the lack of women with superiority complexes in the world today. What she implies but never comes right out and says is that being a bitch is a job best suited to the intellectuals among us.Coren and Julie Birchill before her both note that, in a more sexually open society, sexual put-downs are a no-no and faux-sympathetic put-downs rule the day when we’re not too busy being self-deprecating. They long for a time when women (at least on film, and often from scripts written by men) could bring another woman to her knees with a good and well-timed insult. The thing about insults is, though, that good ones require a knowledge of your enemy and her weak spots.

Calling me fat isn’t going to make me cry because, frankly, I have a mirror in my bedroom, honey, I know what my ass looks like and I’ve made my peace with that — and it gives me a great piece of insight into your body-consciousness. Call me slutty and I’ll send you dozens of links to columns I’ve written about sex, but I’ll also know who’s going to be susceptible to a crack about her own sex life. Try to mock me (or fake-sympathize with me) for being single at 30 and I might not comment on all the scales under my clothes but I will find a way to slide in some snide comments about the state of your own possibly unhappy coupling. Being a bitch requires more than airing your insecurities, it requires finding out what mine are and exploiting them.

But in a society in which most people don’t take the time to pay attention to others to find out anything important (let alone their psychic weak spots), when we’re constantly playing oneups(wo)manship for who can win the most votes in a neverending popularity contest in which being a bitch will only take you so far, of course being The Bitch has fallen out of favor. Being a bitch requires time and effort and a certain utter lack of caring what people think about you or how to be the cool kid that simply isn’t done anymore. Too many of us look back at the school days and the girls (or boys) that were mean to us and vow not to win popularity in that way, so we fake sympathy and empathy and try to be Miss Congeniality while nonetheless plotting to gain advantage at the expense of others. God forbid life not be a popularity contest either way. Give me a bitch who will try to claw my eyes out any day over a priss who’ll stab me in the back, thanks; it’ll be more amusing for everyone involved.

Bring Back The Red-Blooded Bitch [The Guardian]
Britain Would Be A Better Place If We Had More Bitches [The Guardian]

[JEZEBEL]

Popularity: 16% [?]

ShareThis

(Sponsor Link: Rent on Golf Course)

Tomorrow is the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, where the world’s greatest athletes will gather to compete in contests of legendary skill and strength and compare the definition of their ab muscles. For sports fans—and fans of tight and toned bodies—it’s also a great opportunity for sight seeing. We recommend the swimming or beach volleyball venues, since they tend to have the fittest girls and the skimpiest outfits. However, there are beautiful babes in every sport and discipline so to celebrate the lighting of the torch we offer this gallery of smoking hot Summer Olympic athletes past and present. Let the Games begin!

Via Fleshbot

Popularity: 23% [?]

ShareThis

(Sponsor Link: Rent on Golf Course)

From Jezebel:

Michael Grove, the shadow education secretary and a prominent Conservative in England, gave a speech today at a meeting organized by the think tank IPPR condemning lad mags (like Nuts, Zoo, and Maxim) for promoting “instant-hit hedonism” and presenting women as “permanently, lasciviously, uncomplicatedly available.” The result, according to Grove, is that the magazines promote a deterioration of responsibility in young men towards women, leaving British communities with apparently the worst social situation that could ever occur: single-parent families. Yes, lad mags may present a sexist image of women, but is focusing on the importance of “male responsibility” towards women reinforcing sexist and misogynist attitudes towards women or destroying them? (A poll on the website of the Guardian reveals that, as of this morning, 54% of respondents think that lad mags do not “make men feckless”.)Probably the former. Yes, families where both parents are present in the children’s lives are more stable and ultimately create a better environment for children, but Grove is implying that parents need to not only be married for children to thrive, but the man needs to be working and providing (”responsibility”) for his young while the woman stays home and cares for them. Why not promote a society where single mothers can provide for their children on their own? Grove says that the Conservative government will provide a maternity nurse service for families who need help during the first days after childbirth, but there is no mention of this service being available to single mothers (or fathers) who have a newborn. An emphasis is placed on the relationship between the father and mother, implying that they are together.

And what does Grove think of women’s magazines? While he condemns lad mags’ presentation of a “narrow conception of beauty and a shallow approach towards women,” he praises women’s magazines (and their publishers) for addressing their readers “in a mature and responsible fashion.” So, being obsessed with materialism, being fearful of any beauty “imperfection,” and constantly being reminded that the attention of men is necessary to live a happy lifestyle is “mature”? Has this dude ever looked at a women’s magazine?

Lad Mags Linked To ‘Social Ills’ [BBC]
‘Lads Mags’ Condemned Over Images Of Women [Telegraph]
Poll” Do Lad Mags Make Men Feckless? [Guardian]

Popularity: 20% [?]

ShareThis

(Sponsor Link: Rent on Golf Course)

The Telegraph reports:

A Russian advertising executive who sued her boss for sexual harassment lost her case after a judge ruled that employers were obliged to make passes at female staff to ensure the survival of the human race.

The unnamed executive, a 22-year-old from St Petersburg, had been hoping to become only the third woman in Russia’s history to bring a successful sexual harassment action against a male employer.

She alleged she had been locked out of her office after she refused to have intimate relations with her 47-year-old boss.

“He always demanded that female workers signalled to him with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word,” she earlier told the court. “I didn’t realise at first that he wasn’t speaking metaphorically.”

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

“If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children,” the judge ruled.

Since Soviet times, sexual harassment in Russia has become an accepted part of life in the office, work place and university lecture room.

According to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 per cent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped.

Eighty per cent of those who participated in the survey said they did not believe it possible to win promotion without engaging in sexual relations with their male superiors.

Women also report that it is common to be browbeaten into sex during job interviews, while female students regularly complain that university professors trade high marks for sexual favours.

Only two women have won sexual harassment cases since the collapse of the Soviet Union, one in 1993 and the other in 1997.

Human rights activists say that Russian women remain second-class citizens and are subjected to some of the highest levels of domestic abuse in the world.

Popularity: 16% [?]

ShareThis

(Sponsor Link: Rent on Golf Course)

From Jezebel:

 If there was one American cultural meme we didn’t need to export, it would be the recent surge in reported cases of women sexually abusing children. While, as a feminist, I am all for equality in almost every circumstance, I don’t feel that it’s necessary to extend the hypersexualization of girls to boys, or for women to catch up to men in terms of engaging in pedophilia or statutory rape. Be that as it may, while some on this side of the Atlantic are tittering over the relative hotness of the latest rape-y schoolteacher and papers all over the world have been covering the abusive dormitory monitor at Oprah’s school for girls in South Africa, 40 percent of school-age boys in the country report being forced to have sex before the age of 18, mostly by female perpetrators. Ugh.

Unsurprisingly, rapes were more common in poorer communities than richer and committed by people known to the victims more often than not. Nearly thirty percent of victims were assaulted by their fellow students, while 20 percent were assaulted by teachers and another 20 percent were assaulted by family members. The remaining 30 percent were assaulted by non-family members who weren’t teachers.

Neil Andersson and Ari Ho-Foster, who co-authored the study, rightly point out that the sheer volume of sexual abuse is likely to multiply given that children who are abused are more likely to become abusers — and, in fact, 10% of the victims in the study admit to also being perpetrators. They also suggest that the actual rate of abuse might be much higher given the continuing stigma associated with rape. One thing they don’t delve into is how much the rate of assaults today has to do with the rate of assaults in previous generations — is this a multi-generational problem now multiplied by the sheer number of adult victims? Is the onset of widespread abuse associated with a specific period of time or has this been acceptable behavior for generations of schoolboys? It’s hard to say.

Until 2007, raping a boy was not classified as a rape but as an “indecent assault,” a legal change that the authors applaud. They additionally note that decreasing the rape of young boys could pay serious dividends in reducing the rate of HIV infection in South Africa, which then makes one consider the possibility that older people are preying on too-young children in order to satisfy sexual urges without fear of disease. How is is even possible that using a condom has less of a stigma than raping a child?

South African Epidemic Of Schoolboy Sexual Abuse [Science Daily]
Oprah School Abuse Trial Starts [BBC]

Popularity: 20% [?]

ShareThis

(Sponsor Link: Rent on Golf Course)