Monica Conyers and Hipsters on Food Stamps

Monica Conyers

This piece first appeared at NewsReal earlier this month.

Former Detroit Councilwoman Monica Conyers clutched a $1,000 Louis Vuitton handbag as she emerged from a chauffeured Lincoln Town Car to attend her sentencing for a bribery conviction.

Just days later, a federal judge declared her indigent and appointed a public defender to represent her. Now taxpayers will foot the bill for the “destitute” Mrs. Conyers’ to appeal her plea-bargained 37 month sentence.  Never mind that her husband, U.S. Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich), pulls down $174,000 a year.

Why should an elected official help his wife with her legal bills if they can get the government to pick up the tab? After all, John Conyers is part of the “most ethical Congress in history,” so it must be okay.

And don’t concern yourself with pesky details, like the fact that Mrs. Conyers earned an $80,000 annual salary until she resigned from the Detroit City Council last July.  She’s no freeloader, she’s indigent!

Gerry Mak, hipster douchebagAcross the country in Baltimore, some of Mrs. Conyers’ younger progressive kindred might not have her brazen sense of entitlement yet, but they’re working on it. “They’re young, they’re broke, and they pay for organic salmon with government subsidies.” They’re hipsters on food stamps.

One of them is Gerry Mak, a 31-year-old artist who “grew up in Westchester, graduated from the University of Chicago and toiled in publishing in New York during his 20s before moving to Baltimore last year with a meager part-time blogging job and prospects for little else.”  Like Monica Conyers, Mak was thrilled when he discovered how to turn the government into his personal Pez dispenser.

Please head over to NewsReal to read the rest, including details on how this hipster parasite refuses to do the “living off ramen thing.”

March 31, 2010 · Filed Under Liberal Absurdity

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The Moral Superiority of Chicks with Chicks

Respect Chicks

If carnivores eat meat, what exactly do femivores eat?

Fortunately, it’s not what you think.  Forget any mental images of Don Juan meets Leatherface and let me translate from New York Timesese to English. Femivores are highly educated, feminist stay-at-home moms who embrace outdoorsy domesticity like growing organic vegetables and raising chickens.

Basically, they’re chicks with chicks.

But a rural housewife who builds her own chicken coop and cans vegetables from her garden wouldn’t capture the attention of the New York Times, and she certainly wouldn’t qualify as a femivore.  According to writer Peggy Orenstein, the femivore’s natural habitat is Berkeley.  And she isn’t a housewife out of necessity, but by choice.

One of the reasons femivores keep chickens is to distinguish themselves from other housewives.  They legitimize their desire to be homemakers by politicizing the act. Every freshly hatched egg is a political and environmental statement.

Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place. Given how conscious (not to say obsessive) everyone has become about the source of their food — who these days can’t wax poetic about compost? — it also confers instant legitimacy. Rather than embodying the limits of one movement, femivores expand those of another: feeding their families clean, flavorful food; reducing their carbon footprints; producing sustainably instead of consuming rampantly. What could be more vital, more gratifying, more morally defensible?

For these women, it isn’t enough to make choices that suit your family and reflect your values; you have to agonize over the eco-feminist implications (and have the backyard chicken coop to prove it.) This movement, if it can even be called that, isn’t about true self-sufficiency. It’s about “progressive” women going just a little bit regressive to create the illusion of self-reliance.

[Continued at NewsReal – please click here to read the whole thing.]

March 28, 2010 · Filed Under Feminism, Liberal Absurdity, Women

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Defending The Right to Race-Based Abortions?

1921-white-negro-fetuses-cold-spring-harbor-laboratory

1921 diagram from the Eugenics Record Office

The virtue of hate crime legislation is a given on the Left. Criminals deserve stiffer punishments if they select victims based on race or sex, end of story.

But what if one of those criminals chose to abort a pregnancy based on the race or sex of the fetus?  Oh, that would be a sacred right.

This is not hyperbole. Consider the depravity of this recent headline on Salon’s Broadsheet blog:  Banning Race-Based Abortions is Wrong.

My body, my choice to abort based on race?

The Broadsheet piece by Tracy Clark-Flory is a reaction to the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, a proposed law that would outlaw abortion based on race, color, or sex in the state of Georgia.

The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act would apply to abortion “the same standards of nondiscrimination” that govern employment, education, government and housing, said Georgia state Rep. Barry Loudermilk, a Republican who introduced the bill last month with bipartisan support.

If enacted, the bill would make it illegal to knowingly solicit, perform or accept funding for race- or sex-selected abortions.

So how does this translate into an assault on reproductive freedom?  Clark-Flory explains:

Roger Evans, Planned Parenthood’s senior director for litigation and law, told me over the phone that his main objection is to “the notion that the government has a role in deciding what are fair reasons and unfair reasons for a woman to have an abortion.” First it’s race and sex — but what next?

Ah, yes, the slippery slope argument.  First they come for our right to selectively abort female fetuses, and the next thing you know, it’ll be redheaded fetuses.  Pretty soon we’ll have no right to abort eight-month-old fetuses that kick too much in the middle of the night.

Please visit NewsReal to read the rest.

March 28, 2010 · Filed Under Abortion, Feminism, Racism

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Catching Up: Two Examples of Why the Left Fails at Feminism

Once again, I’m behind on posting the links to my articles at other sites. (What else is new?)  Here are two of the pieces I published at NewsReal this month:

I Now Pronounce You Wusband and Hife
The editor-in-chief of a women’s lifestyle site is so fearful of gender stereotypes in marriage that she’s decided to abolish the terms husband and wife. I’m not joking, and neither is she.

Obama is Not What a Feminist Looks Like
On International Women’s Day, the president had plenty of time for shout-outs to celebrities and Communist activists.  But when it came to voicing his support for the struggles of women outside the United States, President Obama had nothing to say.

More to follow.

March 27, 2010 · Filed Under Barack Obama, Feminism, Women

Comment 

Classy Comment of the Week

A male blogger commenting on one of my posts trotted out the “girls are icky” approach to debating a woman:

I don’t think that’s ever been the response when I’m arguing with a guy…if you know what I mean.

Of course, he refused to elaborate on what exactly he meant.

Maybe for an encore he can take me to task for missing a dose of Midol.  You know, if he’s not too busy enjoying some hot man-on-man debate action.

March 25, 2010 · Filed Under Distractions, The Blogosphere

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In Defense of Sexual Freedom

Dirrrty girl Christina Aguilera has given up half-naked floor humping and even the fictional Carrie Bradshaw recently traded in her Sex and the City escapades for marital bliss. Apparently, there’s something terribly wrong with these developments.  There’s a “new backlash against casual sex,” says Jessica Grose in her latest piece for Slate, a “new wave of anti-orgasmic sexual conservatism that makes you hate yourself for what you did last night.”

Grose blames cultural conservatism and neo-Victorian morality for the latest iteration of what she calls “the shame cycle,” an era of sexual regret among women who participate in casual flings. Internalized conservative values, it seems, are forcing women to end their delightfully liberating one-night stands with the dreaded walk of shame, causing many to consider more chaste lifestyles.

The five or six celebrities and authors Grose says have jumped on the chastity bandwagon are hardly evidence of a cyclical phenomenon. But even if we are entering a period in which women are rejecting their inner Girls Gone Wild, why the blame game?

Shouldn’t genuine feminists celebrate women seizing their sexual destinies? Or is embracing your inner hoochie the only path to sexual freedom?

Grose answers that question by linking approvingly to a quote from Feministing.com: it is a “feminist duty to 1) seek pleasure and feel entitled to it and 2) to make the world a more orgasmic place for other women.”

Got that, ladies? If you’re not out there hooking up with every passing fancy, you’re shirking your feminist responsibilities.  You owe it to your comrades!  Is it any wonder that Feministing founder Jessica Valenti made an abstinent college student cry during a lecture on the myth of purity?

The problem with viewing sex as a “feminist duty” is that it muddies the waters between the personal and political in a way that is ultimately damaging to men and women alike. When casual sex is a feminist act, it’s a political act, not a personal, sensual one. And having sex out of a sense of political duty is disturbingly antithetical to the notion of sexual freedom.

Please visit NewsReal Blog to read the rest.

March 13, 2010 · Filed Under Feminism, Liberal Absurdity, Women

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