Pandagon

One of the things that I find constantly amusing about covering the right is how defensive most of them are about being racist/sexist/homophobic/etc. There's a unique kind of cowardice to it, both wanting to push the idea that some people are naturally better than others, but not having the courage to admit that's what you're doing. Instead, you always get hilariously inept assertions that the bigoted opinion is not bigoted because reasons.

It's no secret that Dr. Oz is a loathsome person, particularly with his tendency to push weight loss "miracles" he openly had to admit in a Senate hearing are pure bullshit. But now his specific brand of evil has been quantified by scientists, publishing in the British Medical Journal, who watched random episodes of The Dr. Oz Show and The Doctors and found them to be pushing all sorts of bullshit. From the study abstract:

It'll make them fussy to point this out, but it's true: Whenever a conservative Christian claims that "God" says something, he's speaking for himself. "God wants women to be housewives", for instance, means, "I, the conservative Christian douchebag, wants women to be housewives". This is so blatantly obvious that sometimes fundies take pains to hide this fact, trying to highlight the supposed sacrifices they make on their god's behalf, but you'll notice the sacrifices they make---giving to charity, trying not to look at porn where their wife can see them---are not nearly on the level with what they say their god wants from the rest of us. All in all, it's clear that "God" is actually just a fairy godmother, except one that is focused on granting you permission to hate gay people and demand that women do all the scut work, instead of a nice one that gives you dresses and glass slippers.

I've been following the increasing influence of "men's rights" rhetoric---once relegated to the fringes---on mainstream conservatism with some interest and not a small amount of dread. The more traditional conservative argument against women's equality has been what I'd call the "complementarian" argument, that women were put on earth by god to serve men and treat motherhood as their central life calling, and that feminism thwarts the natural order. It's not so much about hating women as demanding we know our place, though it is worth noting that it turns to hate pretty quickly should you refuse. But "men's rights activists" (MRAs) have a more overtly misogynist ideology to its core, painting women as a subversive force that needs to be subdued and controlled for the protection of men, which is a lot closer to how racists see black people than how sexists traditionally view women. The sense that women, particularly feminists, are out to get men pervades the MRA movement. The fights against sexual harassment and abuse are characterized not as authentic attempts to prevent violence, but as a secret war on male sexuality and fun itself. Educating people about domestic violence is seen as an attempt to steal from men through "false accusations". Indeed, in the paranoid house of mirrors that is the MRA movement, women are forever false accusing and the government throws you in jail without trial the second a woman looks at you funny. Feminism is generally seen as an attempt to set up women, viewed as inferior people, as the power brokers in society and to oppress men, who are seen as the only meaningful contributors to society. (Thus the name of the MRA watch blog We Hunted The Mammoth.) With "pick-up artists", women are characterized as malicious creatures who deliberately deprive worthy men of sex for the lulz. Everything women do that MRAs don't like, be it speaking out about rape or declining to date you, is viewed as done for hateful, malicious reasons. It's all a very adversarial view of men and women.

Paul Kendrick of Talking Points Memo has a great piece up begging people in the media to stop blaming President Obama for other people's choice to be racists. He phrases it more gently than that, but that's the general gist of it:

Is there anything funnier than a truly evil person whining that he's misunderstood? I don't usually consider people truly evil very often, but people who deliberately try to confuse the public about reality---climate change denialists, rape denialists, Holocaust denialists---for their own nefarious ends definitely cross the line into truly evil. And that includes the the Koch brothers, oil billionaires who spend boggling amounts of money trying to trick people into thinking that global warming isn't real. All to protect their own interests even though, as billionaires, they could literally give up ever making another dime and wouldn't even really notice because they are so rich there is no way to spend it all, even if they wanted to. But David Koch just wants our love:

Greta Christina has posted the rewrite of that rape-y Christmas classic "Baby It's Cold Outside"---particularly relevant after South Park used the song to mock Bill Cosby for the overwhelming rape accusations against him---that makes the lyrics about consent. At the bottom of her post, she addresses some of defenses of the song, which boils down to that dumb canard that sometimes women mean "yes" when they say "no".

Rape apologists generally claim their motive is not to excuse rape but to protect the innocent who are falsely accused. But what happens when they are forced to choose between protecting an innocent man and trying to shame and silence a woman out of telling her story? You will not be surprised, dear readers, to learn that even if it means making life hell for some random guy who didn't do anything wrong, rape apologists will choose to shame and silence rape victims, every single time.

Periodically, conservatives like to take a break from 'splaining to women that men are the greatest thing ever and if we don't get married right now our lives will be wasted to instruct women that men are vile, brutal beasts and if they violently assault us, it is our fault for being around them just as surely as it's your fault for getting mauled if you climb in the tiger's cage. This may seem like a contradiction, of course, but it is not, because the consistent thread here is that everything a woman could possibly do is wrong, because she was stupid enough to be female.

No doubt many of you have been following the idiotic kerfuffle over the Rolling Stone UVA campus rape story and the way that a lack of fact-checking has allowed rape apologists to go bananas in trying to push the long-discredited idea that women routinely make up rape accusations, a belief based on the bigoted stereotype that women are inherently vindictive/crazy. Rape apologists have been crowing about how some inconsistencies in one of the rape stories collected by Sabrina Rubin Erdely means this is a "hoax", even though the story was never even really about the veracity of the story told by a woman known as "Jackie". I address that issue on this week's RH Reality Check podcast, but the TLDR; version is this: Erdely was castigating UVA for not investigating rape claims. This criticism stands regardless of the veracity of any particular claim. Indeed, one reason to investigate rape claims is to suss out the very rare cases where they are false. The people who want to discourage investigating rape claims are so afraid that guilty people will get caught that they're actively discouraging a system that could exonerate the innocent.

As has becoming depressingly standard these days, Republicans understand implicitly that their role is to find any reason, any reason whatsoever, to justify the de facto legalization of senseless, random murder of black men at the hands of police. So it was in the aftermath of the non-indictment of Daniel Pantaleo for his vicious---and taped!---murder of Eric Garner, who Pantaleo was taped holding in a chokehold while Garner begged for his life. Garner was guilty of nothing more than selling loose cigarettes on the street, something to keep in mind for white people next time you bum a cigarette off someone. Bet you had no idea that being allowed to live while doing so is yet another white privilege, but now you know. Republicans aren't about to venture into the scary territory of suggesting the police should lose their apparent right to summarily execute random black men for the hell of it, and so the bullshit excuses are coming fast and furious. 

Alice Robb and Lauren Bans have both written on a fairly interesting phenomenon, though I must caution that it's surely one that's limited to politically aware, liberal, urban, youthful subcultures of America: A growing stigma against women dieting. Or even just watching what she eats, which is conflated with dieting in our culture.* From Lauren Bans: 

Glenn Reynolds, aka "Instapundit", is one of the biggest voices out there trying to integrate "men's rights activism" with mainstream conservatism. Not that mainstream conservatives have any love for feminism, of course, but the MRA hyper-focus on blaming all the world's ills on the fact that women won't meekly submit to male authority as MRAs want them to is a bit much even for some of the biggest anti-choice misogynists on the Republican side of the aisle. But Reynolds keeps pushing and his latest entry, for USA Today, is about accusing feminists, in collusion with Obama, of stealing good jobs from working class men.