Bonnie Erbe: Noted Viper Michelle Malkin Invited The Playboy Rape Fantasy

A first year creative writing student couldn’t have devised a more painfully obvious instance of foreshadowing than this September 2008 statement by journalist Bonnie Erbe.

Women can be sexist, too, you know, just like persons of color can be racist.

Yes, Bonnie, we know.

Fast forward to June 2009, and we find Erbe weighing in on Playboy’s list of conservative women deemed worthy of a good hate f***.  Erbe offered an obligatory condemnation of the Playboy article and six perfunctory words of support: “I am supporting these women herewith.”  But unable to contain her seething disdain for at least one of the targeted women, Erbe couldn’t resist pointing out that syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin had invited the Playboy rape fantasy with her viper-like tongue.

I also want to note that at least one woman on the list is so venom-spewing, she unfortunately invites venom to be shot back at her: Michelle Malkin.

That’s right, she was asking for it.

The other conservative women on the list were given a pass by Erbe.  Apparently, her lukewarm support is only available to mildly disagreeable women who hold their tongues and say nothing to offend Erbe’s sensibilities.

Erbe was prompted to address the Playboy piece by Smart Girl Politics co-founder Teri Christoph.

Knowing that Bonnie Erbe, a blogger at USNews, was a passionate defender of liberal women (such as Nancy Pelosi), I wrote to her in the hope that she would use her pulpit to rally to the defense of her right-leaning sisters. Instead of refuting the noxious ruminations of Cimbalo, Ms. Erbe piled on with more of her own.

Upon seeing Erbe’s response, Christoph asked, “This is feminism?!”

But lest we forget, Bonnie Erbe is the same woman who referred to the Alaskan governor as “Sex Kitten Feminist Sarah Palin.”  She once proposed setting up a new gender for women she doesn’t like so “normal women don’t have to share anything in common with them.”

A feminist role model Erbe is not.

Erbe is an opportunist with no qualms about excusing rape fantasies when she thinks it will generate hits to her blog.   She’s from the “controversy creates cash” school of entertainment journalism, and hopes to build her audience by being as outrageous as she can possibly be, principles be damned.

Bonnie Erbe is the sort of woman she once contemptuously described like this:

Anti-women women have existed since time immemorial. Another way of putting it is, women have been smart enough for decades to make their living by telling other women to stay home …

Pot, I see you and kettle have already met.  No introductions necessary.

June 4, 2009 · Filed Under Liberal Absurdity, Misogyny, Women

4 Comments 

Mandating Late-Term Abortion Training for OB/GYNs?

A few months ago, I wrote about the movement to apply a pro-choice litmus test to OB/GYN residency applicants.  The theory is that there aren’t enough doctors willing to perform abortions because Americans are too tolerant of conscientious objection in the medical field.  Conscience protections ought to be thrown out the window to make way for practitioners who are more accommodating of women seeking to terminate their pregnancies.

This week, following the assassination of late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, comes the disturbing suggestion from Hilzoy (via Megan McArdle) that we “[r]equire training in late-term abortion techniques for Ob/Gyn certification.” The idea is to mitigate the risk of violent action against late-term abortion doctors by increasing their numbers, “ensuring that no one person has to take on him- or herself the risks that militant anti-abortionists want to subject them to.”

Hey, while we’re at it, why not launch an Inquisition to purge pro-life doctors from the medical profession?

It’s essential that we continue to train doctors who identify as pro-life, as well as those who are passionately pro-choice.  Here’s what I wrote in my original piece on the subject:

A woman should be able to choose a doctor whose moral compass points in the same direction as hers. Families should know that their doctor shares their values and will remain faithful to them, especially in a life or death situation.  Revoking conscience protections would revoke patient choice, a violation that would offend more pro-choice liberals if they were, at the very least, concerned with being consistent.

Most liberal feminists would balk at receiving gynecological care from a dedicated pro-lifer.  Shouldn’t pro-life women be able to choose a doctor who doesn’t engage in professional practices they find morally objectionable?

There is, without a doubt, a demand for abortion providers in America.  There is also a demand for doctors whose work is informed by a pro-life perspective on abortion, contraception, sterilization, and end-of-life decisions.  It is not the government’s role to decide that one of these categories of professionals should be phased out because it is less valuable than the other.

When did it become acceptable to ask the government to facilitate the subordination of a pro-life patient’s dignity to a pro-choice patient’s dignity?

Mandating that OB/GYNs be able to provide late-term abortions would be a frightening assault on patient choice and dignity.  It’s doubtful that it would save the lives of abortion doctors, but it would most certainly leave millions of pro-life women (and the many pro-choice women who find late-term abortions appalling) without access to medical care that meets their psychological and moral needs.

June 3, 2009 · Filed Under Abortion, Health care, Liberal Absurdity, Women

3 Comments 

Playboy: Now With More Misogyny!

What do these women have in common?

  • Michelle Malkin
  • Megyn Kelly
  • Mary Katharine Ham
  • Amanda Carpenter
  • Elisabeth Hasselbeck
  • Dana Perino
  • Laura Ingraham
  • Pamela Geller
  • Michele Bachmann
  • Peggy Noonan

They’re conservative women that Playboy writer Guy Cimbalo would like to hate f***.

“So Right It’s Wrong” is the title of the vile, foul-mouthed piece in which each of the women profiled is given a hate f*** rating.  Cimbalo manages to squeeze all four stages of conservative female abuse into his vile emesis – infantilization, sexualization, demonization, and dehumanization – and gets extra points for the sexual exoticization of a conservative woman with the audacity to be something other than white.

Michelle Malkin, for instance, is labeled a “highly f***able Filipina” and purveyor of “frothing idiocy.” Her hate f*** rating? “Worse than f***ing Eva Braun.” And “rancid shrew” Laura Ingraham’s hate f*** rating?  “Vagina dentata would be an improvement.

Of course, in Cimbalo’s serial rape fantasy, the women are, quite literally, asking for it.  There’s nothing they want more than for Guy Cimbalo to teach them a sexually degrading lesson.  Apparently “bilious simpleton” Elisabeth Hasselbeck “wouldn’t mind putting [her Catholic school uniform] on before taking it off for a session of sweaty, anti-American hate f***ing.  And Malkin’s “tight body and get-off-my-lawn stare just scream, ‘Do me!'”

Not all of them are begging for it though.  Cimbalo admits that he’d have to get Peggy Noonan liquored up before she’d be pliant enough for some “Cheever-esque hate f***ing.”

Today I should be writing about the First Amendment restrictions being called for by liberal writers in the wake of the heinous assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller.  I’m itching to weigh in on Sonia Sotomayor’s flawed “critical legal studies” approach to the law. And I have pieces in the works on atheism and sex education.

Instead, I’m sitting here replacing the letters u, c, and k with asterisks as if I can somehow make Guy Cimbalo’s euphemism for rape easier to stomach.

Hat tip: Cap’n Ed at Hot Air

Update: Less than a full day online and the article has already been pulled from Playboy.com.  They probably believed that line about no one reading the articles anyway, and were shocked to discover there were people paying attention.

Update 2: From Smart Girl Politics:

Smart Girl Politics calls on Playboy Magazine and Guy Cimbalo to issue apologies to all of the women mentioned in the article. Further, we call on all self-identified feminists to join with us in condemning attacks like this, which seek only to humiliate and degrade women.

Update 3: Not Tucker Carlson links as part of a roundup of posts on the Playboy nastiness.

And Murphy at Puma PAC links with a scathing post on the entrenched misogyny rampant on the left.  To Murphy’s commentary, I would add that liberal women have participated in this vile behavior too – remember Margaret Cho’s rape fantasy about Sarah Palin?  Diehard liberalism (or diehard conservatism for that matter) does not come with a Get Out Of Jail Free card for misogynists and a vote for Obama doesn’t insulate cads from being called out on their despicable anti-woman sentiments.

And welcome to my new visitors from Puma PAC!

June 1, 2009 · Filed Under Liberal Absurdity, Misogyny, Women

40 Comments 

Using the Poor as a Scapegoat for Gun Violence

Like a lot of kids raised in liberal New York City, I was taught that anyone who wants a gun is probably the last person who should be allowed to own one.  I learned to consider the Second Amendment a quaint throwback to less civilized times and had it drilled into my head that only psychos, criminals, and men with small penises carry guns. Most gun violence could be blamed on economic inequalities created by Reaganomics, according to the elementary school teacher who made sure a Mondale/Ferraro sticker was affixed to each student’s binder.

Then I grew up, read the Bill of Rights, and married a gun nut.

Across the country in Phoenix, Meghan McCain was brought up with a more informed view on the right to bear arms.  Her brothers were avid hunters and she developed a deep respect for the Second Amendment.  Today she’s an NRA member with a lifetime of positive gun experiences under her belt.

I confess I have a soft spot for Meghan McCain.  I don’t agree with all of what she writes and I wish she’d add something new to the national political conversation instead of recycling a mishmash of talking points.  But I admire her practical decision to milk her campaign fame for all it’s worth, and I think she’s wise to go the contrarian Republican route.  Controversy sells, as evidenced by her six figure book deal.

McCain and I agree on the Second Amendment issue.  But while her devotion to gun rights confirms her bitter clinger bona fides, she appears to have absorbed a different kind of liberal humbuggery on the issue of gun violence.

The real solution to preventing gun violence is not taking away the tools, but tackling its causes: poverty, inadequate health care, mental illness, joblessness, inadequate housing, and poor education. Desperate people will make anything a weapon. We need to eliminate desperation, not guns.

Translation: guns don’t kill people, people with less money and education than Meghan McCain kill people.  (And sometimes the mentally ill do it too.)

Way to scapegoat the impoverished!

I was under the impression that identifying poverty as the root cause of violent crime was no longer in vogue – after all, that would let guns off the hook – but apparently President Obama feels otherwise.  Eight days after the 9/11 attacks, Barack Obama attributed the tragedy to the terrorists’ lack of empathy stemming from a “climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.”  And in a 2007 speech, Obama called poverty “a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence.”  Obama’s first pick for Commerce Secretary, Bill Richardson, shared similar thoughts during the 2007 NAACP Presidential Primary Forum when he said, “the key in eliminating gun violence is eliminating poverty, eliminating hate.”

Perhaps Meghan McCain is simply repeating liberal talking points, but it seems to me that even among the political left, violent crime is usually approached as a complex phenomenon caused by a multitude of sociological and psychological factors.  Many recognize that it reeks of classism to suggest that poverty creates desperation-fueled violence.  It’s also unsupported by evidence.  While a correlation exists between certain crimes and poverty, research has not proven a cause and effect relationship.  There are simply too many variables.

Even Marxist criminologists don’t attribute crime to poverty, but rather to relative deprivation like income inequality.  But both are silly assumptions: if all of the poverty-stricken or people who find life unfair engaged in violent criminal activities, the world would be in chaos.  But clearly most of the world’s have-nots eke out their years without erupting into violence.

Instead, couldn’t it be that violent crime perpetuates poverty?  We see this on an individual level among both victims and convicted criminals.  It is also evident on the community level.  Neighborhoods decimated by gun violence fail to attract entrepreneurs who might help the areas prosper.  Crime also keeps property values low and drives up insurance premiums.

It may well be that poverty has little to do with being deprived, and everything to do with being depraved.  And it isn’t economic poverty, but moral poverty that is to blame for gun violence.

May 19, 2009 · Filed Under Barack Obama, Crime, Liberal Absurdity

5 Comments 

Lies, Damned Lies, and Military Sexual Assault Statistics

Statistics inspire confidence and can lend an air of legitimacy to anecdotal evidence. But as the saying goes, torture the numbers and they’ll confess to anything.

Torturing the numbers is something Columbia University journalism professor Helen Benedict knows a little something about.  She’s got the military sexual assault data on the rack and she’s ratcheting up the tension as high as she can to promote her new book on the abuse of female soldiers.

Consider these statistics published by Benedict in a recent Huffington Post piece:

Nearly a third of military women are raped, some 71 percent are sexually assaulted, and 90 percent are sexually harassed.

Benedict’s piece is entitled, “The Pentagon’s Annual Report on Sexual Assualt [sic] in the Military, or, How to Lie with Statistics,” and how to lie with statistics is exactly what she demonstrates.

The sexual assault figure is the most preposterous, and spelling assault wrong doesn’t get her off the hook.  It is an outright lie that some 71 percent of military women are sexually assaulted.

The statistic comes from a study of PTSD sufferers published in Military Medicine in May 2004.  The research sample was not, as Benedict would have you believe, culled from a general pool of female veterans or current servicewomen.  Instead, participants were selected from “an eligible pool of 4,918 representatively sampled veterans seeking VA disability benefits for PTSD.”

Helen Benedict is fully aware of the proper context for this statistic on sexual assault.  In a 2007 Salon essay she noted that the study was limited to veterans “who were seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder,” but since then she has repeatedly cited the statistic out of context.  She mentioned it in a Huffington Post interview this month, a recent BBC News piece called Women at War Face Sexual Violence, and a 2008 essay in which she suggests that soldiers rape because Bush lied to justify the illegal occupation of Iraq.

The data Benedict cites on military rape and sexual harassment are also misleading.

Nearly a third of military women are raped?  No.  While not as glaring as Benedict’s sexual assault deception, this is, at best, an inaccurate representation of military rape data published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine in 2003.  Researchers found that 30 percent of a self-selected sample of 558 female veterans reported experiencing one or more rapes or attempted rapes during their military service.  The study was limited to women who served between 1961 and 1997, and does not take into account the impact of numerous sexual assault awareness and prevention programs instituted in the last 12 years. And because the study relies on self-reporting of retrospective data, recall bias is of some concern.

I don’t expect Helen Benedict to dissect every flaw each time she cites the study, but how about something like this:

A 2003 survey of female veterans from Vietnam through the first Gulf War found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military.

That quote comes from The Private War of Women Soldiers, an article by none other than Helen Benedict.  Yet again, we see that she can indeed place numbers in their proper context when the mood strikes.

The 2003 article from which Benedict gleaned her military rape statistic also indicates that 79 percent of women surveyed recalled being sexually harassed in the military.  Benedict frequently cites the rape research in that article, but rejected the companion stat that places sexual harassment at 79 percent in favor of the 90 percent figure reported in a 1995 Archives of Family Medicine study.

Again, Benedict shows a reckless disregard for the truth.  In addition to obvious flaws such as the age of the study and recall bias of the participants, Benedict’s readers might find it relevant that the research included rape and attempted rape as types of sexual harassment.  But in her Salon article, for which she won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Benedict wrote that the 90 percent figure included “anything from being pressured for sex to being relentlessly teased and stared at.”  It should also be noted that the article significantly misquoted one of the subjects, and required several corrections.

What motive could Helen Benedict possibly have for inflating rape and sexual assault statistics at the expense of her reputation and credibility?  The more shocking the statistics, the more media coverage Benedict gets for her book.  And the more books she sells, the more attention she gets for her anti-war, anti-military agenda.  For Benedict, outrageous and dated statistics about military rape are an opportunity to smear American troops and criticize the war.

Do the reasons soldiers rape have anything to do with the nature of the wars we are waging today, particularly in Iraq?

Robert Jay Lifton, a professor of psychiatry who studies war crimes, theorizes that soldiers are particularly prone to commit atrocities in a war of brutal occupation, where the enemy is civilian resistance, the command sanctions torture, and the war is justified by distorted reasoning and obvious lies.

Thus, many American troops in Iraq have deliberately shot children, raped civilian women and teenagers, tortured prisoners of war, and abused their own comrades because they see no moral justification for the war, and are reduced to nothing but self-loathing, anger, fear and hatred.

She follows with a list of recommended reforms that would presumably stop so “many” troops from committing atrocities.  Ending the war in Iraq is “last – but far from least.”

Let me make clear that I find rape an inexcusable atrocity; even one sexual assault is one too many.  I fully believe that sexual assault and rape are underreported in both civilian and military life, and understand that reliable data on sex crimes can be elusive.  But that doesn’t excuse Helen Benedict’s agenda-driven falsehoods and emotionally manipulative sophistry.

Benedict forces us to spend time disentangling fact from fiction instead of addressing how we can reduce sexual assault.  And each time she trots out methodologically questionable rape data and self-serving hyperbole, she undermines the credibility of the publications that carry her writing and the writers who trust her intellectual honesty enough to quote her rape prevalence statistics.  Helen Benedict has dragged valid scholarship into a twisted game of telephone, purposefully garbling data into an almost unrecognizable mutation of what the researchers intended.

When assault statistics are manipulated and exaggerated for use as a bludgeon against the American military, actual experiences of rape are trivialized. It sends the message that smearing the troops as rapists is more important than addressing the very real occurrence of rape.  At the same time, it creates what may be overblown fear among female soldiers and potential enlistees.  We know that there are too many rapes in the military – too many rapes, period – and torturing the numbers harms both women and men in uniform.

Feminists have been accused for years of lying about rape – perhaps it’s time to disown Helen Benedict before she cries wolf again.

___________________________________________

To read the studies referenced by Helen Benedict, see:

Archives of Family Medicine. 1995;4(5):411-418

American Journal of Industrial Medicine. 2003;43(3):262-273

Military Medicine. 2004;169(5):392-395

May 13, 2009 · Filed Under Liberal Absurdity, Media Bias, Misogyny, Women

8 Comments 

Lies, Misogyny, and the Carrie Prejean Nude Photo Scandal

Miss California pageant winner Carrie Prejean is gorgeous, opinionated, passionate, and conservative.

It’s that last quality that really sticks in the craws of her liberal detractors.

And so, they set out to destroy her.  Belittling her for her views on marriage didn’t work.  Calling her filthy names didn’t do the trick.  And mocking her decision to get breast implants, and gasp, have someone else foot the bill, seems to have fallen flat, so to speak.

It was only a matter of time before they tried to shame her into oblivion for her loose morals and unholy, sinful ways.  Enter the mildest nudie pic never to grace the pages of a men’s magazine.

The photo, which I won’t embed here as she may have been underage when it was taken, is of Carrie Prejean striking the ubiquitous lingerie model pose found throughout the Victoria’s Secret catalog.  She is wearing panties and her arms are strategically placed over her breasts as she bares her naked back and side to the camera.  This is the sort of innocuous cheesecake-lite shot found on bus shelter ads and Abercrombie shopping bags everywhere.

It’s also fodder for an all out assault on Carrie Prejean based on some manufactured inconsistency between her opposition to gay marriage and her participation in a questionably racy modeling shoot at age seventeen.  Here’s my distillation of this ever-so-feminist logic at work:

Homophobia is totally wrong. Let’s see how MissJugs4Jesus likes the taste of a little misogyny!

And yes, “MissJugs4Jesus” was a slur lifted from the blog of a feminist lesbian.

Pam Spaulding, proprietor of Pam’s House Blend and contributor to the liberal feminist blog Pandagon, is absolutely delighted that these photos have surfaced “and the devoted ‘Christian’ is forced to explain herself.”  Most of her commenters are equally giddy.

Gay activist John Aravosis also indulged in a bit of slut-baiting:

holier-than-thou religious fundamentalist Bible-thumpers don’t get to flash their breasts for profit and shrug it off as just another youthful indiscretion. You don’t get to lecture me about my morality when your morality is the equivalent of a Playboy centerfold.

Who are the real hypocrites, young Christian women who embrace their sexuality and fight for what they believe, or liberal feminists who brand Carrie Prejean as a slut while they pat themselves on the backs for their progressive stances and evolved views?

Maybe they could hold her down and sew a big ol’ scarlet letter to her scandalously naked back.  They could even invite Michael Musto, Keith Olbermann, and Perez Hilton to sling vitriol and vulgarity as they gleefully rub salt in her wounds.  That’ll show her!

Matt Lauer, always too enthralled with his own cunning in shaping the news to care about objectivity, attempted to secure the complicity of conservatives in demonizing Carrie Prejean.  He used his Today Show report to viciously smear Miss California in the apparent belief that her own supporters would step right up to bat her out of the public sphere.  A few excerpts from that report:

Racy photos of the runner up have surfaced, and some say they’ve gone too far.  Too far for NBC news to broadcast.

A lie.

I can assure you they were quite inappropriate and certainly not photos befitting a beauty queen.

An unsubstantiated accusation, assuming there really are photos that remain to be seen.

controversial pictures may not sit well with conservative groups

Another blatant attempt to shape the reaction of conservatives without actually interviewing any.

Los Angeles based KTLA went a step further with this fabrication:

The newly surfaced photos are not sitting well with her conservative Christian supporters.

Unsurprisingly, the reporter failed to quote any of these conservative Christians.

Christian social conservative Maggie Gallagher, President of the National Organziation for Marriage, has come to the defense of Carrie Prejean, who appeared in one of the group’s anti-gay marriage ads.  She strongly condemned the attacks:

The level of hatred directed at her is astonishing. Even more astonishing is her personal courage and strength of character in the midst of these attacks. Of course Carrie is not perfect. On a personal note, as a former unwed mother, I want to say to Americans: you don’t have to be a perfect person to have the right to stand up for marriage.

Carrie Prejean also defended herself, focusing on the attacks on her faith:

I am a Christian and I am a model.  Models pose for pictures, including lingerie and swimwear photos. The photos of me taken as a teenager have been released surreptitiously to a tabloid website that openly mocks me for me for my Christian faith. I am not perfect and I will never claim to be perfect.  But the attacks on me and others who speak in defense of marriage are precisely the kind of intolerant, offensive attacks that I hear some in the gay community say are hurled at them for their opinions.  No one should have their opinion silenced through vicious and mean-spirited attacks on one’s character and integrity.

I will continue to support and defend marriage as the honorable institution it is. I will continue to stand with the overwhelming majority of the American people.  If this whole experience has taught me anything it is how precious our right to speak freely is, and how we as Americans can never allow anyone or any group to intimidate or threaten us to keep silent.

I happen to disagree with Carrie Prejean on the issue of marriage.  I support gay marriage, am against federal marriage amendments, and would like to see the Defense of Marriage Act repealed as long as there are unimpeachable protections in place for religious Americans.

But even though she is my ideological opponent, I won’t lend my implicit support to the idea that Carrie Prejean is a paper doll the angry left can crumple up and discard if they don’t like the way she’s decorated.  I can believe that she’s wrong without vomiting forth misogynist insults.  I can find her opinions in total disagreement with my own without pretending that a little semi-nude modeling invalidates her moral standing.

Carrie Prejean is being savaged by the left in an effort to discredit her before conservatives.  Those disparaging her can’t rattle her on the strength of her convictions, so they hope to undermine her credibility with conservative supporters.  But attempts to shame women for flashing a bit of skin are really over the top these days.  Most conservatives won’t abandon a professional model who shares their beliefs just because she was caught baring less side boob than I see at the beach.  I expect they’ll stick by her even if racier pictures exist.

In other news, with the liberal smear machine targeting another conservative woman, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is enjoying a much needed break this week.

And in breaking news: topless photos of another gay marriage opponent leaked!

May 6, 2009 · Filed Under Gay Issues, Liberal Absurdity, Media Bias, Misogyny, Religion, Women

3 Comments 

← Previous Page — Next Page →