no, you aren't missing anything. there wasn't another post last night. i had gone to the e-mail to write shirley and after i sent that, i found an e-mail from betty.
there was no entry at thomas friedman is a good man yesterday. betty's really upset.
for those of you who don't know, besides working full time, betty has 3 kids. so there are a lot of times when i wouldn't think twice of e-mailing c.i, or folding star, or jim or ty or dona or jess or ava, or kat but i know on my end i don't pick up the phone to call betty unless it's a friday night (and of course we talk on saturday).
so the end result was that this whole thing caught betty by surprise. she'd been in the circle this weekend but this started breaking on sunday. she knew most people's opinion of ron but c.i. was taking the high road and betty had no idea how bad it was.
she read about it on the common ills and here and she got some e-mails from community members. she is just disgusted that when 2 people (ron and tas) knew c.i. was ill they would conduct themselves in this way.
betty said if thomas friedman announced tomorrow that he was ill, she'd stop her site with a note for him to get well. she really wonders about the integrity and character of some people online because 'they claim to be left and yet they go out of their way to hurt and mock and bully some 1 who is ill.'
she had a post from herself that she kept almost posting. but she's not 'broken character' on the site and felt that it would throw a lot of people. 'but,' she said, 'i just don't feel like being light and funny right now because i am so angry.'
i don't blame betty for feeling the way she did. it is disgusting what those 2 did to c.i.
a part of me wants to ask 'how were they raised?' but another part of me realizes that a certain age, you're responsible for your own actions.
i'm not dismissing child abuse or rape or any thing like that. but in terms of what is just basic common decency, at a certain age, even if you weren't taught it as a child, you either teach yourself or you take the blame.
ron and tas are adults and it's really saying a lot about them that they pulled this nonsense.
i told betty that most people aren't like that. i get a lot of e-mails from really great people. some of them are regular readers. some of them are other bloggers. and i get a lot of support from female bloggers which i really apprecite.
there's a woman who is just so smart and so amazing and runs this really great site. it's not political but she'll make a comment every now and then and you'll know she's smart when it comes to politics as well.
and i've been telling her that if she wants to write about politics in detail she should because she's e-mailed to say 'way to go' and how she wanted to address some issues. she e-mailed today to say that this shit thrown at c.i. is exactly why she has focused on other topics.
she did a post on the patriot act 2 years ago and 2 bloggers who are on the left (i'd never heard of them but i don't jump blog to blog) started e-mailing her telling her 'nice but here is what you should have written.'
and she couldn't believe it because they had their own sites. she did a post that had a lot about the patriot act in it because she cared about it. when she replied, 1 ignored her reply and kept telling her what she needed to go back and write instead. now she wasn't wrong with what she said, i've read her post, but what she emphasized wasn't what this dick felt she should emphasize. so for 2 weeks she got daily e-mails from her telling her what she needed to write and that was from the 1 dick.
she replied to the other guy and he wrote back this nasty little thing about how 'if you can't take constructive criticism, you bitch, write about cats and the wb!'
i told her she should go public with it. or give me permission to. but she just didn't want to deal with it. i understand that.
i also understand that a lot of male bloggers (believe me, i understand this!) get off on arguing.
and they really have this 'last word' attitude.
i've heard from some very nice male bloggers in e-mails. not every male blogger is a dick.
but there's not a week that goes by where some male bloggers aren't strutting up to my inbox, pulling out their dicks and wanting to take a piss.
i wonder if they do that with other males?
i doubt it. i mean ron will go postal on a male and then real quick back down. he'll do that to atrios or some other guy and then back down real quick.
but there is something that makes some guys think they can do that.
they're usually little bloggers in a small pond, judging by my e-mails.
and it's so shocking to me that male bloggers on the right can write and disagree with me strongly but not tell me 'you wrote that wrong!'
like the social security post i did. i got 6 little bloggers screaming at me over that. 'you are stupid!' was the basic opening. then they'd tell me that i was an idiot for not explaining the numbers.
if you're a common ills member, you probably remember when former member frank in orlando went off on columnist ellen goodman saying 'how dare she write that!'
she was writing about social security and sticking up for the program but she didn't pull out the charts and statistics.
i don't know if it's the sports mentality or what, but the little boys really love their numbers. even though i often get the impression they don't understand them. but they've memorized them and they spit them out and if you don't do the same they think they can tear into you.
some man taking a piss of anger and rage thinks he's just letting it all hang out ('all' ain't that much from my experience with real life bullies). a woman who's using her blog to share and talk about what she's thinking and what matters to her, reads that hateful e-mail and may think, 'i'll just shut up.'
that's not the case for everyone. and i talked to betty about this on the phone last night. my advice is don't ever high road it. c.i. tried that and ron just bullied and bullied more and then his boy blunder (to use kat's phrase) joins him with some sort of 'see ron, i got balls too' attitude.
i've been asked by kenny from time to time why i touch on this topic so much? i do write about men who try to bully a lot.
it's an important topic.
but it needs to be talked about. will it change the way some men behave? no, it won't.
they'll go being dicks.
but it is an important topic to women bloggers judging by e-mails. and i know from the high school females who read my stuff that they appreciate it as well and take it out and apply it to their own lives.
maureen dowd offered that women didn't do as many op-eds and needed to be mentored by men. that's why maureen dowd can attack jane fonda like she did in the book review.
women love jane fonda. you've got some crazy right winging gals who don't. but if you're a woman and you're left or completely non political, you look at what jane fonda's been through in her life and what she's done with her life and you just think, 'way to go.'
if dowd had gotten some female mentoring or just some sound boarding from a female peer group (or even from men who aren't total dicks), she wouldn't have the need to trash jane fonda to please all those idiotic men. she'd have more self-respect. she'd also address issues like reproductive rights which she doesn't.
dowd's often funny. she usually does a good pop-cultural blend in her columns. but she's not a feminist and it shows in column after column.
she's the type of woman who will always try to win male approval.
now for most of us, that's probably a given and let's not kid. (i'm speaking to the women here, guys.) if you're a lesbian that may not effect you. (though there are 2 readers who've shared that even though they have no desire to sleep with men, they often find themselves seeking male approval.)
i don't buy into biology arguments. by that i'm saying that i don't believe for a moment that there's some genetic need for a woman to 'please daddy.' i do think that we're raised in a world where men were held in higher esteem. we grew up seeing that. it's cultural.
which means it's a pattern and we can address it. it may take a lifetime for some of us, for others, we may be able to deal with immediately.
but the answer isn't turning into maureen dowd and always trying to prove to the boys that you can think just like them. or get that 'you think like a man' bullshit.
i think women who fought battles when i was a child and before did so much to change the world.
and i think there's still a great deal to do.
i hear from some young girls that they don't get feminism because aren't we all equal now?
i don't mock them because they are asking serious questions and they are young. no, we aren't all equal. you can see that when you compare the pay of women. and you can see it on the op-ed pages, as susan estrich pointed out. you can see it on tv where you can be fat and overweight and not funny and get to be a star in a tv show. you can see it all around you.
are things better for me because an alice walker or jane fonda or gloria steinem or robin morgan or sandra cisneros exists and blazed trails? hell yes. but none of those women are saying the field is equal. things are damn better because of the women who have fought. but we're going to be in a lot of trouble if we don't continue to speak out and apply actions to our lives.
just because you can walk down the street with your ass hanging out of your jeans doesn't mean we reached equality. think about it, a second. women should be able to dress any way that you like. but in this country, most straight men aren't whining about it. they're happy to check out any skin you want to flash. don't mistake that for equality and the end of the struggle.
they'll let you display your body. they don't seem to want you to display your mind, but they'll let you display your body. they don't want you to control it.
that's why you get rape and date rape and attempts to tell you that you have no privacy rights.
the battle for choice and the battle for access to birth control is about them deciding on your bodies. don't forget that.
and don't forget that if you mimick them in your statements they'll love you. but if you write in your own voice, they'll rush on over to tell you that it was an attempt but what you should have said was ...
i'm really impressed with my young female readers because no matter where they are starting at when they 1st write me, they do start seeing connections once you give them some information.
betty was so disgusted by two men attacking c.i. that she just couldn't get unblocked enough to write in character. i told her, don't force it. take your time and then it will come. now if i was 1 of those men maureen dowd wants to assign all us gals as mentors, i might have told betty that but more likely i would have said, 'well they're right.'
we need mentors, all of us, male and female. we need role models. but we don't need bad 1s. and we don't need them to be a certain sex. in the review of jane fonda's my life so far, maureen dowd called jane fonda a broken doll. if she's broken, what is maureen?
maybe maureen doesn't give a damn about reproductive rights? she might not for all i know. but maybe she also doesn't seriously address this topic because of the fact that she knows she got into the boys club on a pass and that playing the reproductive rights card would lead to flack? if that's the case, it blows her 'we need men to mentor us!' plea right out of the water.
who's the broken doll? i don't think it's jane fonda who is a woman who never stops exploring and questioning. i think it's the woman who silences herself so that she can stay in the boys club.
i'm going to keep coming back to this topic because it's important.
