Why does Maureen Dowd hate women so much?

Op-Ed Columnist: Torture Chicks Gone Wild

Bug me Not

As if the title of the article doesn't already speak volumes about Ms Dowd's point of view...

She pretends that she's writing from a liberal standpoint, and then all she does is denigrate women and hint that Bill Clinton's a pretty bad guy too.
She's making it sounds as though torturing the men was all the women's idea. She's making it sound as if those poor officers were somehow wrapped around the finger of the vicious women interrogators and that's why they couldn't manage to stop the "women gone wild." And she's claiming that Bush lost his integrity but there's no teeth behind what she's saying but at the end she threw in that Bill Clinton is an idiot because he was seduced by a thong in the Oval Office. Note that Ms Dowd never hints that Mr Bush is being duped or seduced by thongs or wicked women - in fact you pretty much get the impression that she thinks he's a pretty stand-up guy and would look great if it weren't for these rogue female interrogators who clearly went off on their own scary tactics without permission or knowledge of the (for sure male) officers.

moved.

so all of my stuff is at my new place, now. with the exception of stuff that was in the fridge or freezer.. that's still back at the old place. it was too damn hot yesterday and i didn't feel like moving that stuff yet. so this morning for breakfast i had a donut left over from yesterday.
today, i need to unpack like a madwoman. i've already done that a bit. i wonder if i will find places for all of my stuff. i've got a hell of a lot more stuff than i thought that i did. i completely filled a 15-foot truck, up to the ceiling. i've also got to go to the old place and clean the carpets. bleh. lots of pet stains...
using a dial-up connection here at the new place. really sucks. i can't get DSL here or even cable modem. how bizarre that i can't get high speed internet access at all and i am IN BOULDER. bleh.
it only took about three and a half hours to move yesterday. i had help from J, S&S, and D (who i work with) and all it cost me was pizza for lunch. =) i meant to make some toffee squares too, but i didn't have time to with all the hectic moving stuff. i promised them all a random dessert happening sometime within the next week.
so i moved, then in the afternoon i showered and rested a while, then went to see a movie (Rush Hour 2). i got home about 9:30 and stayed up til about 11 putting away the 6 or 8 boxes of kitchen stuff that were just piled on the floor. i didn't think it was fair to E for me to leave them lying around.
then i put away some stuff in the bathroom, and found my sheets and stuff and made my bed. i went to bed about 11.
this morning i've put away the entirety of stuff that goes in the bathroom, and i've lit some incense (it smells a lot like kitty on my level of the house). the one in my bedroom keeps going out and i have to relight it.
panda keeps whining. i am not sure she knows that we now live here. i think it was only like two weeks ago that she figured out that we lived at the other place. i am kidding about that, but seriously, it was within the last month or so that she stopped barking at my roommates coming home there. i wonder how long that will take here.
i taught her to jump over the gates here... there are small child-type blocking gates to keep the two mini dachsunds who live here from getting everywhere and eating up everything. i had to teach panda in steps... i first coaxed her to come to me (me on the other side of the gate) and told her, "up, up, yes, up!" because she knows "up" - it's what she does when she climbs stairs or hops in my car or onto my bed when rarely invited there.. =) then she'd put her paws on the gate but wouldn't go further. she kept looking for a way under it... then i asked her to give me her paw and her other paw and i held them both and pulled her towards the gate but that frightened her so i let go. then i had a brainstorm and i put a cardboard box on each side of the gate so it would kinda be like stairs. i got her UP on the box, then coaxed her again to come, and more up, and she hopped over! then i took the box on the far side away, and she still jumped it! so then i took both boxes and she jumped it. she seems unwilling to jump it alone now... she waits for me to tell her "UP" and then she'll do it but if she runs up to it and i am not around, she doesn't go over.
i think i'll take a shower and then maybe have some lunch and then go clean the carpets at the other place. and i think panda will come with me for company.

Free me from misogynism!

Can't I go anywhere, can't I do anything, without being exposed to images and descriptions of women being inferior to men, women being taken advantage of by men, women's purpose for men suggested to be sexual objects to be looked at and taken? I get so tired of it.

This morning on the way to work, I was listening to the radio, and I heard two commercials back to back that made me want to scream.

The first was for McDonald’s. A man was talking, saying that he was going to head to "Mickey D's" after work today, because anything they had was better than his wife's leftovers. Thanks, McDonald’s, for disparaging the unpaid work that women are just expected to do every day. It's unpaid, it's thankless, and now it's not even as tasty as fast food.

The second was for Molson beer. They've had a series of commercials that have pissed me off lately, and this latest one really got me steamed. (Previous commercials have involved a bunch of women being read a "bedtime story" by one man, and the women sound all sexual, frisky, and state innuendos about what they are going to do with each other and the man...) This commercial practically endorsed date rape. There was a male announcer, saying that there are "friends" and there are "friends" and he is going to explain the difference between these, because Molson beer helps create the latter kind. Of the former kind, these "friends" will play ping pong or have dinner together, and the woman of this pair of "friends" sounds extremely bored. Of the latter kind of "friends," the woman and her "friend" play "doctor" instead of ping pong, and the woman says in a very seductive voice, "doctor, i am feeling very hot, maybe you can take my temperature..." later, the woman and her "friend" have breakfast instead of dinner, and the woman, again in a seductive voice, says "oooooh, scrambled eggs," and her male "friend" replies, "and my famous sausage!" and the woman giggles and says, "ooooh..." in a very sexually interested tone of voice. Then the male announcer again stressed that Molson is intended to turn "friends" into "friends". I guess that just proves the old "truism"... Get a few beers into a woman, any woman, hey especially one who trusts you to just be her "friend," and she will turn into a sexual animal! Or at least someone who wants to have sex with the likes of you, you horny man....

It was just too much for me this morning to hear these two commercials in a row...

ice cream

i went to marble slab yesterday, and as i was grabbing my spoon, a little kid next to me dropped her ice cream, which was in a cup. it landed right side up amazingly on the floor, and on the way down it got on my shorts on my right side. the mom apologized profusely, handed me a napkin. i wiped my shorts, balancing my own ice cream and wallet and napkins and stuff, and turned to leave just as the little girl, who'd picked up her ice cream was was beginning to eat it, began to walk right where i was going. i got ice creamed on my left side on my shorts as well because the girl was short. everyone in the store laughed, and i did too, and cleaned *that* side of my shorts. someone told me i better get out of the store before anything else happened, so i did.
and ate my ice cream outside.
chocolate mint with oreos and snickers. mmmmm.

sorry, can't take it any more, likely to explode.

I read this comment in a blog entry that was completely unrelated; this comment was completely off-topic, and yet, there it was and it ignites a FURY in me:

Donna-
The Oprah I saw was just a few months ago, maybe it was a rerun. The point was that this chick freaked out over a stripper at a bachelor party. If she wanted to have a stripper at her bachelorette party that's her perogative, but just because she doesn't want one give her the right to dictate what her fiance's buddies do for him at his. And the fact that she would fall apart over it and then drag him to the Oprah makes her an insecure cunt who is only going to become less secure and controlling over time.

As for Oprah, one can only hope that her self-absorbtion reaches some critical level and she implodes.

Comments about Oprah aside. I'm even, for now, setting aside, the invocation of "C-U-Next-Tuesday" towards the woman. The part that infuriates me, that makes my blood BOIL, is the assumption that men deserve and have a GOD-GIVEN RIGHT to interact with naked women prior to their wedding without any input whatsoever from the woman they are about to marry. "Sorry, girlie. You can go have a man strip for you, if you like, but you have NO RIGHT TO ANY FEELINGS WHATSOEVER with regard to me having a naked woman gyrate over my body within a week of our wedding!"

In our culture, in general, men go to strip clubs and get lapdances because they want to be titillated, and they want to be stimulated, often literally and physically, by the women they are ogling. They desire to reach sexual fulfillment and indulge these urges. In our culture, in general, this is NOT why women go to strip clubs where men are stripping. Women go to share a laugh and a good time with other women. I know, you can give me a hundred examples of women you know personally who are "exceptions to the rule," who are having loud orgasms at the vision of a man in a thong gyrating in front of her. That doesn't tend to be the NORM, however, of women at bachelorette parties. The goal is not to bring the bride-to-be to orgasm, or to symbolically give her one last fling. The object might be to make her uncomfortable or to have a laugh or just emulate the experience that men are sharing in an attempt to "be equal." But it's not an equal experience. While men are primary stimulated visually, women tend primarily not to be. While women are, every day, everywhere, objectified sexually, and while men also are, men are not objectified and used sexually to the extent that women are. It's NOT an equal experience.

Even setting aside the fact that it's not an equal experience, it's ridiculous to contend that one person in a relationship gets a free pass at something the other person finds uncomfortable or even unacceptable simply because of peer pressure. That's what it amounts to: a bunch of guys would like to go to a strip club, and jump at the opportunity of a marriage as an excuse to go, because it's "tradition" for men to go to a strip club for bachelor parties, therefore they threaten the groom-to-be with terms such as "pussy-whipped" if he does not go along with the plan. A man who is interested in going to a strip club does not even need the potential threat; he is ready for the excuse to run off and doesn't care that his bride-to-be might feel uncomfortable or unhappy about it. Here is where the difference is again clear: "I don't care if you go to a strip club, my sweet bride-to-be; that doesn't threaten me at all. So you're just going to have to get over the fact that I am going to go." That's called emotional blackmail.

If I am uncomfortable with a behavior that my significant other is engaging in, I have a right to speak to him about it. Depending on the type of relationship he and I have, and depending on what behaviors are "deal-breakers" to me, I also have the right to threaten to end the relationship if a behavior is abhorrent enough to me. My right to an opinion on his behavior can range from my opinions on an annoying habit of his to my opinions on his financial behavior to my opinions on his activities when I am not around. Just because he does not feel threatened by my engaging in a particular behavior does not give him blanket right to perform that behavior himself: what is required is a negotiation, a compromise, a mutual understanding. I need to decide if it's worth me taking a stand, or if there are things that I do that bother him that can "make up for" something that he does that offends me, or whatever.

If he is going to do something that I find offensive to my values and threatening to our relationship, he does not get let off the hook by telling me I now have the right to perform that behavior. What do I gain by engaging in retaliatory behavior? Also, what interest do I have in engaging in a behavior I find threatening to our relationship and/or offensive to my values?

Relationships are about compromise. Love is about mutual understanding. Marriage is about working things out to both peoples' satisfaction. Nowhere in what I've just said is there room for, "well, I'm ok with you doing it, so you should just accept that I'm going to. Shut up about it already."