Once There Was A Time When Men Loved Cats

How in the hell did I miss this? Better late than never.

It's a New York Times story, dated October 3, 2008, entitled "More Men Are Unabashedly Embracing Their Love Of Cats." Or, because every New York Times trend story has to come in two flavors -- Original and Extra Cheesy -- "Sorry, Fido, It's Just A Guy Thing."

Did you know? Cats are for women so, so, so gay. Look here:

Mr. Fulrath is one of a growing number of single — and yes, heterosexual — men who seem to be coming out of the cat closet and unabashedly embracing their feline side. 

And also:

“Any single, straight man who has the slightest bit of insecurity about his own sexuality will probably find it difficult to admit to owning or even appreciating cats” he said, echoing Mr. Scalzi’s sentiments.

And:

“But then in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, Hollywood decided that we need to have the token gay man as the witty sidekick friend of the main female protagonist,” he said. “ ‘What kind of signature thing can we give him to convey that he is not an entirely masculine being? I know! We’ll give him a big fluffy cat!’ ”

I am just speechless at the existence of this story. Ten out of ten on the Women Do! Totally Objective Quantification Scale. Never mind that it's a Men Do. It has everything. 

1. Irrelevance: 3. Uh. It's about men with cats. Would that there were more than three points to give this thing for its total lack of bearing on the bonafide gender issues of our benighted age. Although there is this little stab at relevance to the question of the Role of Women (and Non-Women) In Society:

Stacy Mantle, the founder of Petsweekly.com, a magazine for pet lovers, said that men are becoming more “cat literate” because they themselves are evolving.

“It’s the unevolved members of the species who tend toward abuse of cats — and oftentimes, women and children,” said Ms. Mantle, who owns 18 cats.

Evolution: It's not like it's a word that means something in science or anything. By all means, sling it around in the service of your schlocky unexamined female exceptionalism, Stacy Mantle. The New York Times is totally gonna let you get away with that shit.

2. Perkiness: 3. Fido! Fluffy! This thing is a total hyukfest.

Indeed, it seems that man’s best friend is no longer a golden retriever, but a cuddly cat named Fluffy...

And there is this:

...The image of the crazy spinster cat lady persists, and plenty of people do wonder about a guy with a cat. As a writer on adventuresofacitygirl.blogspot.com put it: “Single men and cats are like a burger and broccoli. Separately they are okay, but together it just seems off.”

Look, I don't say this kind of thing often, because why use a curt little brick of a word when you've got an arsenal of baroque portmanteaux at your disposal? But:

Fuck you, New York Times. That graf is just so wrong.

3. Bullshit: 3. Nope, no science here:

Although there are no hard (or soft) statistics (it is rare to find an owner, man or woman, walking a cat in public), it seems that single, heterosexual male cat owners are on the rise.

Wait, I found a number:

Carole Wilbourn, a cat therapist (yes, really) in Manhattan, said that the number of her single, straight male clients has risen about 25 percent over the last five years. 

False precision: It's what's for dinner.

And the magical extra point, because it wasn't exactly a slow news week.

Apparently There Is Insufficient Evidence That Women Do Things

Jezebel notes that Molly Templeton, a former alt-weekly editor (w00t!) now cast into the cold sea of self-employment with the rest of us, was really annoyed at the latest NYT Book Review cover. Have a look at it and see if you can figure out why.

(There are several options here, I suppose. Why are they all about writing? Will Dave Eggers ever stop being a Thing? How have we stumbled into this precious little hall of mirrors, and why is it so yellow?)

Anyway, unlike the New York Times, Templeton is under the impression that women can do more things besides cook and breed, and has started a Tumblr of How To articles written by women to prove it. From her inaugural post:

I’m sure there’s something you know how to do. I’m sure there are things your many brilliant friends know how to do, or something you could write about that has to do with doing a thing (most of the NYTBR pieces were, of course, book reviews). 

Basically, if there is something you know how to do, and you're one of those women-people, Molly Templeton would like for you to write a how-to essay about it for her blog. Which shall stand as a glorious beacon in the night, shining with the deeply inspiring light of Women Doing Things.

So far, here are the things that the avowed women of Molly Templeton's blog can do: Read Infinite Jest, do public readings, write songs, dump their therapists, feel really really guilty about the heavy responsibility of speaking for other people (!), clean oil paintings with their own spit, love their mothers, light fires, look like they're working when they're doing fuckall, and be fisherwomen.

I found an excerpt from that last one, about the "wild and womanly"* fisherladies and how best to emulate them, particularly striking:

You have nothing to prove, and you have everything to prove. It is the paradox of being a woman, and of being part of a species that loves to categorize itself into small and confining subspecies. You are doing this for yourself, whether for your career or for the experience, not for anyone else. Yet you paradoxically have suddenly come to represent any woman wishing to do something seen as beyond her physical/mental/natural capacity.

There's a lot of adverbs in there, so I could be wrong, but I think this tortured passage might be some sort of cri de coeur about how vastly irritating it is to have to go around in life being a goddamned ambassador for three and a half billion other people all the time.** In a blog whose entire purpose for existing is to represent all thing-doing women everywhere. What?

Not gonna lie: Everything about this -- from the NYT's insufferable twee-ness, to Jezebel's vacant signal-boosting, to the earnest curation of Things Women Can (And Do) Do as an antidote to misogyny everywhere -- annoys me right down to the depths of my blighted ovaries.


*AUGH, MAKE IT STOP.

**I have to admit. It's pretty vastly fucking irritating.

Pre-Women Rock

In the New York Times today: Rocking Out, No Boys Allowed.

This was not a standard garage band. For one, the members had picked out instruments two days earlier. For another, the jam session ended when a supervisor called, “Ladies, it’s snack time.”

The band formed at Girls Rock Camp in Atlanta, which teaches 10- to 16-year-old musical beginners to bang drums and windmill guitars like their rock heroes. The five-day camp has a simple message: Girls rock too. In a genre long dominated by men, the founders want campers to feel as comfortable being loud and expressing themselves on stage as many boys do. 

Oh, to be a preteen in July. These kids are precious, no sarcasm intended. Here's 10-year-old Katherine Butler, whose band Think Fast has already been riven by artistic disputes:

“We’ve had some hard times,” she said. “It feels like we’ve been a band way more than two days.”

And another anonymous rockette:

“I don’t respect Justin Bieber, but I really, really like him.” 

Bless. Absolutely darling. But wait.

A similar rock camp for girls opened in Portland, Ore., in 2001, and the idea has quickly gained steam. It was founded by a women’s studies student who had worked in the music industry and wanted to encourage more women to start bands. 

Encouraging more women to start bands. Oh yes let's. As the article reminds us, this is all so empowering. By all means let us gather up our tender young offspring and deliver them into the loving, empowerfulizing embrace of the music industry.

Summary: be solo, or a duo, because a full band is financially untenable; work much, much harder, under much more stressful conditions, than bands of earlier generations had to. Be very young, or have the ability to take the broke-ness, the physical and emotional knock-around, that very young people can.

Whoops, Mike Doughty, you're such a downer. Let's try that again. Being in a band is so empowerfulmentatious! You go, girl!

On a personal level, I have witnessed the impoverishment of many critically acclaimed but marginally commercial artists. In particular, two dear friends: Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse) and Vic Chesnutt. Both of these artists, despite growing global popularity, saw their total  incomes fall in the last decade. There is no other explanation except for the fact that “fans” made the unethical choice to take their music without compensating these artists.

Shortly before Christmas 2009, Vic took his life. He was my neighbor, and I was there as they put him in the ambulance. On March 6th, 2010, Mark Linkous shot himself in the heart. Anybody who knew either of these musicians will tell you that the pair suffered depression. They will also tell you their situation was worsened by their financial situation. Vic was deeply in debt to hospitals and, at the time, was publicly complaining about losing his home. Mark was living in abject squalor in his remote studio in the Smokey Mountains without adequate access to the mental health care he so desperately needed.

Artists, comma, good news about. Anyone?

Women Die in Ignominy

Mary Daly died this week in a nursing home in Gardner.

If this is the first you've heard of Mary Daly, that's because they don't teach squat to the youth of today. And because the New York Times is run by stone-cold bitches.

Does it strike anyone else as odd that the last century's boldest, toughest, most ferociously crucified, most unapologetically singular feminist philosopher didn't get an obit in the Times yesterday? They can't really claim ignorance, seeing as how they still own the Boston Globe, which saw fit to inform us in an obit that, despite being a tad on the bland side, at least had the requisite heft for a Public Figure.

If you'd like to get an idea of what Mary Daly is to contemporary feminist thought and theology, I recommend you go to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and pay a respectful visit to the prize of the fossil room, the sea-going Jabberwock, Kronosaurus queenslandicus. Take along a copy of the February 26, 1996 issue of the New Yorker, in which Daly recounts her epic battles with Boston College, God and the all-pervasive patriarcho-industrial complex. "Sin Big," she urges us. Look at those teeth.

One wonders just what a lady has to do to get obitularimazised in the New York Times these days. Run a strip joint for her ass of a husband, maybe. Yep. That'd do it.

**UPDATE!** Oh, look here! Somebody dredged up a teensy little AP item!

**UPDATE UPDATE!** Haw. The AP item linked above just tripled in size while I was linking to it. Somebody's playing catch-up.

The Ardipithecus Chronicles: Special Women Edition

The NYT had a nice package this weekend on Ardipithecus ramidus, an astounding new Ethiopian hominid discovery. (Ardipithewhatzis? If this is news to you, you live under a rock and should get out more.)

Like the last big human-ancestor fossil find, Lucy, Ardi is a woman sort of hominid. (A womanid?) And you just don't get to be a big deal newspaper editor person without acquiring a deep, deep need to sling gratuitous puns, wisecracks and perky asides at every single female-type thing that passes within reach of your grasping inky paws. They had to go there.

Forget the high heels; her feet had no arches (Lucy’s did).

Was that really necessary?

Women Exacerbate Dairy Crisis

As you all know, unless you have been living under the proverbial rock these last twelve months, we are in the End Times--or, if not the End Times, perhaps their darling Victorian antechamber, where we will have a glass of sherry and have a look at some etchings before the butler arrives to usher us into the Apocalypse Proper. Odds are you've got it pretty bad. But unless you're a dairy farmer, it could be worse.

(I'm guessing you're not a dairy farmer, because if you are, you're probably not reading blogs about newspapers writing about women doing things. You're probably at your bank begging for a loan so you can buy hay to feed your cows so they'll make milk which you can sell to a giant monopoly that is currently under investigation by the Justice Department so you can maybe make back half of the money you spent on hay. Or you're at your 40-hour-a-week day job that you have so you can get health insurance, popping Ritalin so you can make it through the day and still get up at 4am to milk 100 goddamn cows. Or maybe you're out shooting your cows in the head.)

Being a dairy farmer? Not so hot right now. And it's about to get a lot worse, thanks to women. Women cows, that is.

The New York Times tells the tale for us citified types that haven't heard it yet. Since approximately the dawn of time, cows, like most animals, have been giving birth to male and female calves in roughly equal numbers. But a male calf on a dairy farm is, as Rip Torn might say, about as useful as a poopy-flavored lollipop. So a few years ago, Science gave the beleaguered dairy farmer marvelous new sperm sorting technology, ensuring that most calves born would be female.

Now farmers have a different problem: too much milk. And the first generation of bionic bovine fembots are about to hit the milk parlor, with a vengeance.

“Just as the industry starts to recover from these difficult times, we’re going to see these heifers enter the marketplace,” said Ray Souza, president of Western United Dairymen, which represents farmers who produce about 60 percent of the milk in California. “At the very worst it could certainly stop the recovery altogether and send us into another price recession.”

It's like the Chinese one-child policy, only with cows. Thanks a lot, Science.

Useless Reveal On Steroids

You folks are familiar with the Useless Reveal, right? We've discussed this before. It's a kind of lede common in women-journalism. Sometimes invisible to the untrained eye, but rather like Euphorbia prostrata, the Prostrate Spurge, once you know what you're looking for, you'll see it everywhere. Here are its markings:

1. A headline and/or large photo that screams "THIS STORY IS ABOUT A WOMAN TYPE OF PERSON,"

2. A gormless presumption on the part of the reporter that the reader does not know this,

and 3. Faux shock and awe when some kind of wardrobe malfunction, usually involving a blond ponytail tumbling out of a helmet of some sort, betrays the subject's basic feminitude.

Today's NYT has a three-paragraph Useless Reveal. Three paragraphs. Wow. I think I need a new pair of disbelief-suspension cables.

NEW ORLEANS — Mike Henry could not get comfortable in his stance. He knew the line judge was watching him. This was only a scrimmage, but Henry, a 6-foot-5, 289-pound freshman lineman, was trying to move up thedepth chart for the Tulane Green Wave. The whistle blew and a blur of black and white stripes came running his way.

“You need to get down, and stay down,” the official said in a voice that swiveled Henry’s head and widened his eyes. It was not the tone but the timbre of Sarah Thomas’s voice.

It was soft and lilting and grounded in the rhythms of her native Mississippi. Because Thomas’s long blond hair was tucked beneath a black hat swirled in stripes, Henry had had no idea the official was a woman.

Kudos to reporter Joe Drape for informing us that women are native to Mississippi. I did not know that.

I hesitate to offend the delicate sensibilities of our readers, but you should know that subject Sarah Thomas--who, you may have deduced, is a football referee--is occasionally subject to uncouth verbiage.

She understands intensity can give way to some salty language.

Shocking. I hope the NAIA covers the cost of the lead ovary-shields she obviously needs to perform her job safely.

Ethical Dilemma: Solved

New York Times columnist Randy Cohen, also known as The Ethicist, has produced some whoppers in his day. But this is the living end. I'm sure his proposal--to require all women to carry unconcealed weapons--is satirizing something. I'm just not sure what. Sexism? The ridiculousness of the pro-gun lobby? The ridiculousness of the anti-gun lobby? Hisself?

The best part is the little Gedankenexperiment where he imagines himself on the subway surrounded by Glock-toting females, and feels a snug, comforting sensation. (Clearly the subway around Lincoln Center does not have much in common with the Red Line.)

And then there's this:

Given women’s splendid record of seldom shooting at, for example, me, they’ve earned a provisional chance to serve the public good in this way. Even if some women prove imprudent with firearms — that is, act like men — feminizing gun ownership could ultimately reduce its appeal to men, making gun-toting as unmasculine as carrying a purse. There are occupations whose status (and pay) declined once they were taken up by women: secretaries, telephone operators, teachers. We already endure the mischief of such sexism; why not harness it for good?

Jonathan Swift you are not, sir.

Sarah Kershaw: Manning the It's-Not-1954-Anymore Beat

Intrigued by Sarah Kershaw's "idiot-ass stupid-dumbfuck-balls article" about teen hugging (which we featured earlier today), Women Do! reader Jenna Scherer hit the NYT vault to see what else Kershaw had perpetrated lately. Looks like she's an expert in the field of People Defying Garbage Gender Stereotypes In Irritating Ways.

Somehow I missed her April 23 feature, "Mr. Moms (by Way of Fortune 500)." Is it as bad as I think it is, you ask? No! It's worse!

Even for the Times, this is pretty rich stuff. Dads who used to make more money than you now have to go to PTA meetings! Where they are hailed as saviors, apparently. Because everybody knows women can't do math. And who do you turn to when you can't do math? The guys who just got laid off from their fantastically highly-paid Wall Street finance jobs for DESTROYING THE KNOWN UNIVERSE.

The new prevalence of fathers around town is bittersweet for mothers, teachers and others. On the one hand, the PTA can use all the help it can get from men with financial expertise at a time when the proposed school budget is under enormous pressure. And women are happy to see stay-at-home husbands building closer relationships with their children. But one little-spoken effect is an uneasy feeling that these highly successful men are facing the pain and potential shame of being out of work.

Oh, the shaaaaaaaaaaame! Who knew being a regular person was so dirty?

Sarah Kershaw, we're onto you.

The Youth Of Today: They Hug One Another With Abandon

Hot off the presses of our nation's paper of record: teenagers hug each other. Even the boy kind! No! It cannot beeeeeeeeee!

Our intrepid reporter Sarah Kershaw ventures boldly into the halls of Pascack Hills High in Montvale, New Jersey, where she is informed by junior Danny Schneider that gender as we know it has ceased to exist.

“We’re not afraid, we just get in and hug,” said Danny Schneider, a junior at the school, where hallway hugging began shortly after 7 a.m. on a recent morning as students arrived. “The guy friends, we don’t care. You just get right in there and jump in.”

And it's not just in New Jersey. All across the nation, the flower of manhood are bravely flinging their arms around one another, risking the ire of school administrators.

[S]chools from Hillsdale, N.J., to Bend, Ore., wary in a litigious era about sexual harassment or improper touching — or citing hallway clogging and late arrivals to class — have banned hugging or imposed a three-second rule.

Youth vs. authority! Shifting social norms! My God, it's a trend! We have here the elements of a newspaper story. But it's not really meaty enough for the New York Times. To make it worthy of the Grey Lady, we have to know: Will somebody make some sciencey noises for us? Is there a pop-culture buzzword? Can we make an incredibly awkward reference to hip-hop culture? And can we blame it on the Facebook?

But Amy L. Best, a sociologist at George Mason University, said

Yep.

The prevalence of boys’ nonromantic hugging (especially of other boys) is most striking to adults. Experts say that over the last generation, boys have become more comfortable expressing emotion, as embodied by the MTV show “Bromance,” which is now a widely used term for affection between straight male friends.

Check.

But some sociologists pointed out that African-American boys and men have been hugging as part of their greeting for decades, using the word “dap” to describe a ritual involving handshakes, slaps on the shoulders and, more recently, a hug, also sometimes called the gangsta hug among urban youth.

Er, check.

“Maybe it’s because all these kids do is text and go on Facebook so they don’t even have human contact anymore,” said Dona Eichner, the mother of freshman and junior girls at the high school in Montvale.

Okay, we're done here.

Women Occasionally Mean, Unsupportive Of One Another

Breaking news: Women in the workforce, despite being generally regarded as frail and timid, are in fact too aggressive. Especially to other women. Sometimes.

Just the mention of women treating other women badly on the job seemingly shakes the women’s movement to its core.

Oh, feminism, how frail thou (seemingly) art. A gentle spring breeze might blow you away. Only last week, I failed to give a pregnant lady my seat on the T, and God killed a radical lesbian-separatist kitten. So much for sisterhood being powerful.

According to a story in yesterday's New York Times, women are not as prone to bullying their subordinates as men, which fits nicely with received notions of women being altruistic. But when they do go rogue, they pick on other women, which is nasty, and hurts feminism. Also, they are stone cold bitches. (And here we thought putting women in charge was going to magically reform our corporate culture and fix the recession and stuff.)

It’s probably no surprise that most of these bullies are men, as a survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute, an advocacy group, makes clear. But a good 40 percent of bullies are women. And at least the male bullies take an egalitarian approach, mowing down men and women pretty much in equal measure. The women appear to prefer their own kind, choosing other women as targets more than 70 percent of the time.

What is this "nationally representative" study, you may well ask? Was it peer-reviewed? Did it appear in some fancy science journal thing? And where on earth did they get those lovely round numbers?

Actually, it's by a bunch of seminar-peddling consultants, who can be found here, here and here. Or if you like, you can help them make the world a nicer place by getting lawyers involved. And if you're really into this anti-bullying stuff, this June, you can spend three days with them in the glorious environs of Bellingham, Washington, learning to be an anti-bullying lobbyist just like Doctors Gary and Ruth Namie of the Workplace Bullying Institute. Only not as good.

No one else in North America can train you on this topic like Gary and Ruth Namie can! You will learn to customize the components for your personal needs and upon completion of this course you will be certified to deliver a presentation introducing Workplace Bullying to a variety of audiences — public or business groups.

See? You, too can be certified to give other people a PowerPoint presentation on Workplace Bullying! And, since the Workplace Bullying Institute is a nonprofit, Gary and Ruth Namie are doing this for the poor downtrodden American worker. Out of the goodness of their hearts.

Fee: $3,600 (USD) per person

Oh. Right then.

Don't Be Talkin' Down To Me, Math Lady

I cannot really argue with the benevolence of a nonprofit that helps math-challenged po' women learn to add. Math-dumbness is rampant (especially among journalists!), and any effort to raise the basic numeracy of the American people is good by me. Still, there's a stench of condescension about the whole thing.

What often holds girls back is self-confidence; it drops sharply in middle school and is considered a reason that so many women don’t choose math-related fields, she said. But “many girls and women have the potential to improve their spatial skills to the point of being very successful" in fields that require those abilities, she said.

Buh. Call me when somebody founds a really sappy institute for reaching out to engineer dudes who break out in a cold sweat when forced to compose a few sentences in basic English.

The P-Word

To be added to the list of banned words: "plucky." How much of Mesopotamia do you have to reign over before they quit calling you that?

Whores In The Newspaper

Recently, Universal Hub--where they care as hard about newspapers and their verbiage as we Women Do-ers do--got its knickers all in a twist over whether a Proper Newspaper would use the word "whore" in print. I am pleased to report that the answer is Yes. And in the New York Times, no less.

Quote of the year:

"“If I had my way, I’d destroy all the mosques and spread the whores around a little more,” the detective said. “At least they’re not sectarian.”

Thanks to Joe for passing that on, in the hopes that it would galvanize me into blogging afresh. It did! And thanks to everybody else who sent me a virtual kick in the pants over the last couple of weeks. I am sorry I did not get around to that Metro story, in which it was revealed that, gasp, women are also affected by the economic recession. I regret not doing a full autopsy on the Biker Babes of Bellingham. I am kicking myself for passing up the opportunity to slice up Newsweek's take on Understanding Male Post-Partum Depression.

I hope you will forgive me. April is indeed the cruelest month. There were taxes. There were family medical emergencies. There were exploding water heaters in the basement. Oh, and I got engaged. Which you would already know, if you were a regular watcher of Jim Braude's news quiz show on NECN. Check it out and see if you can guess which of these three fine Stooges I'm going to marry this summer. (Hint: Not Jim Braude.)

Verflucht! More Fershlugginner Tattoos!

As you may remember if you've been a faithful reader of Women Do from day one, it was a Globe story about women and tattoos that awakened me from my dogmatic slumbers and got this blog going. That was a couple of months ago. The Globe must have thought we were in danger of forgetting that women were into this whole tattoo business, because they're at it again. This time, it's mom tattoos.

The most striking thing about this story--other than the fact that local tattoo master Fat Ram Hannan totally undercuts its whole premise, saying that he does way more kid tattoos on fathers than on mothers--is that it's already run in the New York Times. Two years ago. Sure, the exact words are a little different. But not much. Check out the parallels.

Tattoos not just for sailors/bikers/prisoners/rough trade:

“I’d always thought of tattoos as something biker chicks got, not something I would get,” said Ms. Scarborough, a neonatal nurse. (NYT)

Hardly a generation ago, tattoos and mothers coexisted in few places aside from a sailor’s biceps. (NYT)

The number doesn't reveal how many mothers get inked, but it points to the social acceptability of a practice that just a few decades ago was associated with sailors, prisoners, and punks. (Boston Globe)

Pew poll used as tenuous news hook:

Forty percent of women ages 26 to 40 have at least one tattoo, according to a report published this year by the Pew Research Center. (NYT)

Forty percent of American women ages 26 to 40 have a tattoo, according to a 2007 study by the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. (Boston Globe)

Angelina Jolie duly name-checked:

She said she first heard the term “mommy tattoo” two years ago, around the time Angelina Jolie began getting the longitude and latitude numbers of her children’s birthplaces tattooed onto her arm. (NYT)

That trend has surged as mega-star mothers like Angelina Jolie celebrate their children with prominent body art. In Jolie's case, she has a tattoo of the longitude and latitude coordinates from the places where her children entered her life. (Boston Globe)

Miami Ink duly name-checked:

Two reality shows may be part of the reason that mothers who always saw themselves as conservative are decorating their bodies. The Learning Channel series “Miami Ink” and its new sister show, “L.A. Ink,” appear on a network once better known for its how-to fashion and home-improvement programming. (NYT)

"It's not like 'Miami Ink,' " he said, referring to the Learning Channel reality show, "where they ask what does this tattoo mean to you?" (Boston Globe)

Pain of tattooing compared to pain of childbirth (You have got to be fucking kidding me. --Ed.):

Ms. Murray said that women often draw a connection between the pain of childbirth and the discomfort of feeling an ink-filled needle get under your skin. “It’s pretty common for women to say stuff like: ‘I can deal with this pain. I’ve given birth,’” said Mike Shea, a tattoo artist in Cambridge, Mass. (NYT)

As for the pain factor of getting tattooed, Ruch, who sat for three two-hour sessions getting "Devin" inked on her side, said it was excruciating, as her entire ribcage vibrated from the needle. "But it's like childbirth. You forget the pain when it's over and you're looking at it." (Boston Globe)

At least you're never gonna break up with your kid LOL hardy har har!

“A lot of the women watch the TV shows and they think, ‘Hey I could do that,’” said Mike Rubendall, the owner of Kings Avenue Tattoo in North Massapequa, N.Y. “They figure their kid will always be their kid. They won’t ever regret it.” (NYT)

Unlike names of lovers and sometimes even spouses, he sees no regret factor in getting a tattoo with your children's names. "Your kids are always going to be your kids." (Boston Globe)

Doesn't the New York Times own the Globe? Couldn't they just have reprinted the old story? It even had a Cambridge guy in it. Or they could have, you know, run some news.

Turkey: It's Just Like Here

Those women in Turkey just won't stop. Yesterday it was chess. Now they're playing soccer. (Thanks for the link, Neal!)

Alas, life is tough for soccer-playing women in this repressive, sexist, overly-religious, weird little backwater of the globe. It's not easy in Turkey, either.

Let us count the woes of these Turkish footballerettes. First off, they can't fill the stands:

But at this game, between host Kartalspor and Ankara’s Gazi Universitesispor, the 22 players on the field outnumbered the people shivering in the stands. The weather was probably not to blame for the poor attendance; it was more likely because of who was playing.

Poor turnout for the ladies? Yep, we've got that here too.

"We’ve had men come to watch our practices and yell at our players: ‘What are you doing here? You should be at home, cooking!’ ” said Ozbar, one of the few women accredited as a soccer coach in Turkey, and the only one in Istanbul.

Obnoxious commentary? Check.

An amateur league of about two dozen teams existed in Turkey for a decade until it was shut down in 2002 amid allegations of mismanagement and rumors of affairs between female players — particularly scandalous in this country.

Lavender Menace? Check.

"Some believe that playing football can harm a girl’s build and make her manly,” Or said.

Hand-wringing over the damage the brutal, Hobbesian world of sport might inflict on women's tender willowy limbs? Check.

Selling women’s soccer also requires dolling it up. One of the new logos for the league features a slender woman’s hand with long, red-painted fingernails cupping a soccer ball. The background on Or’s computer screen is a photograph of a soccer cleat with a stiletto heel.

Tarting it up for the almighty sponsorship dollar? Check.

London Times Hits NYT's Sloppy, Female Leftovers

What is this bloated battlestar of a story--which appeared in the NYT magazine on January 25--doing in yesterday's London Times? Jesus Christ. Once was bad enough. Do they not have the Intertubes in merry olde England?

They did change the title, from the prim "What Do Women Want?" to the much more Austin Powers-worthy "What Turns Women On." And they misspelled the author's name. Those cheeky Brits.

In all fairness, the best thing I've read today also comes from that other Times, and it is this essay by Caitlin Moran. A sample:

But then, as a gimlet-eyed, hatchet-faced, ball-breaking feminist with recurring cystitis, which makes me additionally tetchy, I'm genuinely surprised that strip clubs still exist in the first place. They seem absolutely incongruous in a modern society - whenever I see one, it shocks me as much as if I'd just seen a sign going up saying “Minstrel Show!” or “Jew-Beating, Sticks £1!”. There's a Spearmint Rhino on Tottenham Court Road. Tottenham Court Road. To all intents and purposes, that means there's a titty-bar on the Monopoly board.

Nice. In an armed columnist's duel between Caitlin Moran and Alex Beam, my money would obviously be on the lady.

Women Doth! The Westminster Follies

The Westminster Dog Show wraps up today, amid a flurry of pomaded fur and questionable news coverage. Westminster, the oldest continuously held sporting event in America with a 133-year history, is a splendid prism through which to refract widely-held ideas about sex, money, oppression and public micturition. To wit:

Women of Westminster, your shoes are duly noted.

The economy sucketh: Part 298,398,202.

I am not sure exactly who is supposed to be urinating where in this LA Times account:

"...right now the floor covered [sic] in wood shavings, red fire hydrants on the left for the boys, a pink settee and glitter saw dust on the right for the girls and 1,000 dogs seemingly always on the go here.

There are exceptions, of course, and available just off the lobby, pink panties are being sold with Poise inserts. "Pink is a little sexier," says sales lady Neena Pellegrini..."

The always-appropriate PETA showed up in full KKK regalia. Because you know what fancy dog shows are exactly like? This. Mmmmm-hmmmm.

(Aside: How can you tell a KKK protester from a PETA protester cheekily pretending to be one? That is a real question. I have no idea.)

Of course, all this Westminster blithering is just an excuse to drag out the amazing 1907 story (PDF alert!) Adam Gaffin found in the NYT vault a few weeks ago. It has everything, including a headline of the They Just Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To variety:

"WOMEN WITH BIG DOGS IN WEST MINSTER'S SHOW; Fair Owners Comprise Nearly a Fourth of the Exhibitors. -- GIANT CANINES THEIR FANCY -- Miss Whitney Will Have Excellent Display of Great Danes -- Show's Big Increase in Entries."

Though the story exhibits some of the perkiness characteristic to the genre--even at a 100-year remove--a mysterious pall hangs over its protagonists, human and canine:

"...It will occasion no surprise if the catalogue of the coming show discloses the fact that of the probable 850 exhibitors close upon 200 are women. Many might suppose that they confine their fancies to the house pets or toy dogs, but that is far from being the case. The giants of the show ring are among their fancies, indeed, it may almost be said that in the slump of the St. Bernards they were saved from the fate of the mastiffs mainly by Miss Marks and Mrs. Lee. The former would undoubtedly have been an exhibitor at the coming show had she lived to enter the well-known Willowmere dogs."

Gulp.

And now, a supplication. Please, please, please send me your ancient Women Do stories. Send them on PDFs. Send them on crumbling microfiche. Send them on yellowed parchment and calfskin vellum tanned with its own brains. I want to know what the ladies were up to in what passed for newspapers in ancient Sumeria. I want incredulous accounts of motor-car-driving amongst the Fairer Sex from the era of Henry Ford. Oh yes. All your Women Doth are belong to me.

The Gals At Feministing Are Smoking The NYT's Crack Again

The most popular story on the NYT's website today is a business piece about how women are getting ready to overtake men in the workforce--not by salary or prestige, but by sheer numbers. The reason: They're not getting laid off as much. The reason they're not getting laid off as much: They do crap jobs for no money.

Although Times reporter Catherine Rampell opines that this shift may "challenge long-standing gender roles," this story is not at all about women getting ahead. It's about class--or it would be, if the Times had just a little more huevos. It's about the fact that the only jobs surviving this wretched econocaust are low-paying, have no health insurance and can barely keep a family of four in dry beans, let alone afford the mortgage. Insofar as this story is about women, it's about the fact that women do a disproportionate share of this great nation's shitty jobs.

Somebody over at Feministing drank the You Go, Girl Kool-Aid, though.

Aside: Why are all the economic-hardship stories in the NYT about people a couple of tax brackets up from me? I'm very sorry you lost your $150K/year job, my friend, but I will not weep too hard into my Pot Noodle about it. Ryan Weaver agrees: "The NYT apparently cannot locate one person who falls between the extremes of Latina babymamas in Harlem and hateful, repugnant, rich Manhattanites. To read this paper you would have to assume that all of the predictions about the middle class disappearing are correct -- because not one reporter from either the NYT or the Globe can seem to fucking find it."

Aside aside: My household consists of two female reporters. God help us. I may have to start renting out the baby.

Women Do! Hero of the Month: Diane Mapes

I refuse to make fun of this story, because it's sort of heartbreaking. Being a female separatist in America would be sort of like being a vegan trapped in a churrascaria for all eternity, constantly fending off pushy waiters armed with giant sabres full of greasy chicken hearts and trying desperately not to vomit. You can't blame them for wanting to hide behind the salad bar.

Besides, there are worse brands of manophobia. I find the kind practiced by aging lesbians in Alabama communes far, far less irritating than the sort of empty, Hallmark-card female exceptionalism touted by your average Lola reader. The script goes kind of like this: "Women are so much smarter/neater/more hygienic/more psychic/saner/saintlier than those awful smelly clods who think they're Jesus Christ because they pick up the tab at Radius. Smirk! Giggle!" It's not really a kind of feminism, but it plays one on TV.

Which brings me to our Ms. January, Diane Mapes.* Mapes recently walked into a seminar purporting to teach her how to speak "Menglish" to those dim apes, emerged un-converted, and got paid to say so. It is fluff, but by God, it is honest fluff.

I learned that men were bound by duty, obligation and honor (weren't women bound by these things, too?) and that they all went through four basic stages of development, including something called The Tunnel, which either was a midlife crisis or a really bad commute between one stage and another.

Or maybe both.

By that time, I was starting to get a little confused about all the things that men were and weren't. Silly me, I thought they were just people like everybody else.

She ends up sneaking furtively out the side door:

Leaving early meant I would miss the top four ways I could gain a man's affection (i.e., charm and enchant him) thus compelling him to "take care of me, contribute to me, protect me and make me happy."

"Contribute to me"? Is that what those things are for?

I had plenty of respect for Alison's research (even more for her well-oiled marketing machine), but I really didn't care about becoming a queen in my own realm. Nor was I interested in learning Menglish or Portuegeezer or Guywanese.

Cheers to you, Mapes. While you're at it, can you put a stop to brocabulary?

*Tip of the hat to Jezebel.